Fitting in fitness

    Do you find excuses not to exercise? {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Here are a few ways to get you going.

Do what you love.

    The easiest way to fall into the habit of doing exercise is to choose an activity you enjoy — one that doesn't feel like exercise, even though it is. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} If you play to your strengths, you'll find fitness activities you can enjoy for years.

Choose your hour.

    Studies have shown that people who work out in the morning are most likely to stick with a routine. By doing exercise before the day starts, they can avoid the last-minute scheduling conflicts. But if you' re not a morning person, choose whatever time works best for you. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}

Call it by another name.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#} If it's something you have to do anyway — like washing the car or planting some bushes in the yard — you'll achieve two goals at once.

Partner up.

    Exercise is more fun when you do it with others. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} On days when your motivation is low, you' re more likely to stick with the programme to avoid disappointing your exercise partners. You can also train with an expert. A personal trainer will help you set goals, design a personalized fitness programme, and vary your routine to keep it challenging.

    A European Union program is letting blind people experience famous paintings for the first time. It uses three dimensional(3-D) printing to re-create famous paintings so they can be touched.

    One painting printed with the new technology is Gustav Klimt's “The Kiss.” It is a popular attraction at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, Austria. The painting shows a man and a woman standing in a field filled with flowers. They are wearing gold robes and have their arms around each other. The man leans down to kiss the woman.

    Klimt finished the painting in 1908. Until now, people who had trouble seeing could not appreciate the artwork. But thanks to the reproduction they can touch the piece and feel the ridges and depressions. Andreas Reichinger started making 3-D versions of artwork in 2010. He said this reproduction was his most difficult project because the couple's robes are so detailed.

    Dominika Raditsch is a blind museum visitor. She touched the reproduction. As she moved her hands around it she said, “Exactly, can you see these? There are so many details.” Raditsch said she can imagine what the original painting looks like when she touches the reproduction. “It's somehow round. You can feel it. You can feel it. It comes with it. And in many places it's so smooth. And then I think to myself: it probably shines too!” Raditsch said.

    The Belvedere is not the only museum to have 3-D versions of its artwork. Some of the pieces at the Prado, in Madrid, Spain, have reproductions that can be touched. But the piece in Vienna has one special part: It is made with widely available 3-D printing technology. That means one day, blind art fans anywhere in the world could download the source files and print the reproductions themselves.

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    Christmastime in the city brings forests of trees already cut and waiting to be sold. But some people like to drive to tree farms. Others wait for their trees to come to them. They order one from the pages of a catalog or on the Internet. Some say the easiest thing of all is to buy a man­made tree with Christmas lights already on it. No falling needles to have to clean up.

    The National Christmas Tree Association says 33,000,000 real trees were sold last year, compared to 9,000,000 man­made ones. Man­made trees generally cost more, but they can be reused. Most natural trees are cut up and recycled, but some people buy trees that can be planted.

    Most Christmas trees are now grown on farms instead of in forests. Twenty-one thousand tree farmers in the United States grow Christmas trees on more than 180,000 hectares. Oregon was the leading producer last year.

    Twenty-two percent of people who bought real trees last year chose them at a farm. Two percent of those people cut the trees themselves. The next most popular places were big stores like Walmart and Home Depot. Groups like the Boy Scouts also sell Christmas trees. But some people pay nothing for theirs. They steal it.

    Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has many pretty evergreens. Some years ago, a university worker found a way to keep them there. A month before Christmas, workers treated them with “pink ugly mix”. It contains water and red food colour. The bright colour starts to disappear after about a month. It can take longer, however. Cornell decided not to use the mix this year, but the idea has spread.

    American high school students are terrible writers, and one education reform group thinks it has an answer: robots. Or, more accurately, robot-readers—computers programmed to scan students' essays and spit out a grade.

    Mark Shermis, professor of the College of Education at the University of Akron, is helping to hold a contest, set up by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (WFHF), which promises $ 100,000 in prize money to programmers who write the best automated grading software. "If you're a high school teacher and you give a writing task, you're walking home with 150 essays," Shermis said. "You're going to need some help."

    Automated essay grading was first proposed in the 1960s, but computers back then were not up to the task. In the late 1990s, as technology improved, several textbooks and testing companies jumped into the field. Today, computers are used to grade essays on South Dakota's student writing assessments and a handful of other exams, including the TOEFL test of English fluency, taken by foreign students.

    The Hewlett contest aims to show that computers can grade as well as English teachers—only much more quickly and without all that depressing red ink. "Automated essay scoring is objective," Shermis said. "And it can be done immediately. If students finish an essay at 10 pm, they will get a result at 10: 01 pm."

    Take, for instance, the Intelligent Essay Assessor, a web-based tool marketed by Pearson Education, Inc. Within seconds, it can analyze an essay for spelling, grammar, organization, and help students to make revisions. The program scans for key words and analyzes semantic (语义的) patterns, and Pearson claims that it can understand the meaning of text much the same as a human reader.

    To have a successful job interview, you need to make good preparations beforehand. Here are some suggestions on what you should do before the interview.

    ⑴Find out as much as you can about the company. What goods or services do they provide? How long has it been founded? Read articles about it. Talk with people who work there. Perhaps you can look at the company website, or find some information on the Internet.

    ⑵Be sure of the time of the interview, the place and the person you'll see.

    ⑶Think about the kind of questions that the employer might ask. Write out questions and possible answers.

    ⑷Rehearse the interview with family members or friends. They can ask you questions from the list you've prepared and you can try to answer.

    ⑸Dress properly. Don't be too formal or too informal. Choose your clothes, shoes.

    ⑹Wash. Make sure that you are clean, and that your teeth have been freshly brushed.

    In the western Los Angeles sits the famous city of Hollywood, known as the global center of movie studios and film stars.

    The Selig Film Manufacturing Company was the first major film company to come to Hollywood, shooting its first film entitled The Heart of A Race Tout in 1908. The next year the film company built the first permanent film studio.

    Although electric lights existed at that time, none were powerful enough to adequately expose film. The best source of illumination for movie production was nature sunlight. Besides the sunny weather, film producers were also drawn to Hollywood because of its open spaces and wide variety of natural scenery.

    Another reason was the distance of Southern California from New Jersey, which made it more difficult for Thomas Edison to enforce his film patents. At that time, Edison owned almost all the patents relevant to film production. As a result, in the East, movie producers acting independently out of Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company were often accused by Edison. But in Los Angeles, things were different. If he sent his men to California, word would usually reach Los Angeles before they did and the movie makers could escape to nearby Mexico.

    In 1911, a second movie studio—Nestor Studios, was founded. At about the same time, many film production companies from New York and New Jersey started moving to sunny California because of the good weather.

    The first Academy Awards presentation ceremony took place in 1929 in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Tickets were $10 and there were 250 people attending the ceremony.

    From about 1930, five major "Hollywood" movie studios in Hollywood, Paramount, RKO, 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Bros, owned almost all large theatres throughout the country for the exhibition of their movies. The period between the years 1927 to 1984 was considered the "Golden Age of Hollywood".