Is pricing a plane ticket based on the passenger's weight fair? If you're taking an international flight on Samoa Air today, your fare will be based on your weight, along with that of your luggage. The cost is 93 cents to $1.06 for each kilogram.

    The average American woman weighs 75.5 kilograms, far from the ideal weight for her average height. Her ticket on Samoa Air, at the $1 a kilogram rate, would cost $75.50. But let's be honest here. Since the average American woman is overweight, the ticket will cost her more.

    Samoa Air Chief Executive Chris Langton said, “Planes are run by weight and not by seat. The plane can only carry a certain amount of weight and that weight needs to be paid.”He believes other airlines should adopt the policy.

    It' s not a new idea. I remember a newspaper columnist years ago who put forth the idea that the heavier among us should pay more for their seats on planes, trains and buses. Who hasn' t been squeezed into a middle seat between two plus-sized folks on a flight? It's happened to me; one time my married seatmates had purposefully chosen their seats to have more space until a sold-out flight put me between them. Not one of my better flying experiences.

What if such a policy is adopted by some airlines in the United States? Could such pricing provide a much-needed motivation for Americans to reduce body weight? I hope so. But, as we know, more than one-third of us are obese and another third are overweight. The high probability is that the heavy customers will not suddenly lose weight or stop flying, but will instead choose a different airline, simply moving the supposed problem elsewhere.

    There's no doubt that the heavier will suffer more discrimination (歧视). Discrimination against the overweight in the United States has increased by 66 percent over the last decade —“and is comparable to rates of racial discrimination, especially among women,”wrote Yale University researcher Rebecca M. Puhl. Your weight can affect your salary, your chances for employment, how others view you and even, now, your air fares.

     “If the policy succeeds it may encourage the spread of body discrimination across different industries and the wider culture,” said one British editorial writer. He holds that it is companies' duty to provide equipment that meet the needs of their customers.

And we'll see how effective it is as a business model.

    Our spiritual intelligence quotient(精神智商), or SQ, helps us understand ourselves, and live fuller, happier lives.

    Though we're all born with SQ, most of us don't even realize that we have it. Fortunately, you don't have to sign up for classes to learn how to improve your SQ. Here are some simple steps that can lead you to this new level of understanding.

    Sit Quietly. The process of developing spiritual intelligence begins with solitude(独处) and silence. To tune in to your spirit, you have to turn down the volume(强度) in your busy, noisy, complicated life and force yourself to do nothing at all. Start small by creating islands for silence in your day. In the car, instead of listening to the music, use the time to think. At work, shut the door to your office between meetings, take a few breaths and let them out very, very slowly. Enjoy the stillness in your home after the kids are finally in bed.

    Step Outside. For many people, nature sets their spirit free. Go outside to watch a beautiful sunset. If you are walking with the dog, take the time to admire flowers in bloom; follow the flight of a bird and watch clouds float overhead.

    Ask Questions of Yourself. Ask open-ended questions, such as ‘What am I Feeling? What are my choices? Where am I heading?'

    But don't expect an answer to arrive through some supernatural forms of e-mail. ‘Rarely do I get an immediate answer to my question,' says Reverend Joan Carter, a Presbyterian minister in Sausalito, California. ‘But later that day I suddenly find myself thinking about a problem in a perspective(角度) I never considered before.'

    Trust Your Spirit. While most of us rely on gut(本能的) feeling to realize danger, spiritual intelligence pushes us, not away from, but towards some action that will lead to a greater good.

阅读理解

    A Kickstarter launched Friday will allow interested parties to set up a camera and pet toys in their home for anyone to play with their pets remotely. It's called the ipet Companion, an Internet-connected camera and device that streams video online and allows basic commands from people watching. They can move the camera, look at their pet and press a button to swing a toy around.

    Obviously, demand is strong. The Kickstarter proved so popular that Scott Harris, iPet Companion's founder, said that thousands of people started asking for it.

    The reason why people keep talking about this is the emotional(情感的) connection they have from a thousand miles away. If you want, you can enter a queue to move the camera and play with the pets. Each room has toys that are hooked(钩住) into Internet-connected devices, and you can move them by pressing a button.

    But there's sort of a problem: Pets get bored easily. Young pets will stay more interested than adult pets, but finally even a baby pet will get bored, too. To stop that from happening, you'd better limit the pets' access(接近) to the boys and change the place where they're located in the room.

Harris understands this and said you can plug anything into that adapter(适配器) —toys that you can get on your own. And that's where the iPet Companion really gets interesting. Harris explained that the device is actually sort of a Trojan horse to bring the “Internet of things” to more homes. You don't really have to use it for pets. The adapter could be used for any device with an electrical plug—a sprinkler, say, that you'd be able to activate to water your grass.

    “Our whole goal, our whole purpose is to let anyone control any physical object that they want to while they travel anywhere in the woorld,” Harris said.

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    Last year I ruined (毁) my summer vacation by bringing along a modem convenience that was too convenient for my own good: the iPad. Instead of looking at nature, I checked my email. Instead of paddling a small boat, I followed my Twitter feed (推特简讯). Instead of reading great novels, I stuck to reading four newspapers each morning. I was behaving as if I were still in the office. My body was on vacation but my head wasn't.

    So this year I made up my mind to try something different: withdrawal (退出) from the Internet. I knew it wouldn't be easy, since Fm bad at self-control. But I was determined. I started by giving the iPad to my wife.

    The cellphone signal (信号) at our house was worse than in the past, making my attempts at cheating an experience in frustration (沮丧). I was trapped, forced to go through with my plan. Largely cut off from email, Twitter and my favorite newspaper websites, I had few ways to connect to the world except for radio and how much radio can one listen to, really? I had to do what I had planned to all along: read books.

    This experience has had a happy ending. With determination and the strong support of my wife, I won in my vacation struggle against the Internet, realizing finally that it was I, not the iPad, that was the problem. I knew I had won when we passed a Starbucks and my wife asked if I wanted to stop to use the Wi-Fi. “I don't need it,” I said.

    However, as we return to post-vacation life, a harder test begins: Can I continue when Fm back at work? There are times when the need to know what's being said right now is great. And I have no intention (愿望) of giving up my convenience completely. But I hope to resist (抵抗) the temptation (诱惑) to check my email every five minutes, which leads to checking my Twitter feed and a website or two.

    I think a vacation is supposed to help you reset your brain to become more productive. Here I hope this one worked.

    Children start out as natural scientists, eager to look into the world around them. Helping them enjoy science can be easy; there's no need for a lot of scientific terms or expensive lab equipment. You only have to share your children's curiosity. Firstly, listen to their questions. I once visited a classroom of seven-year-olds to talk about science as a job. The children asked me “textbook questions” about schooling, salary and whether I liked my job. When I finished answering, we sat facing one another in silence. Finally I said, “Now that we're finished with your lists, do you have questions of your own about science?”

    After a long pause, a boy raised his hand, “Have you ever seen a grasshopper （蚱蜢）eat? When I try eating leaves like that, I get a stomachache. Why?”

    This began a set of questions that lasted nearly two hours.

    Secondly, give them time to think. Studies over the past 30 years have shown that, after asking a question, adults typically wait only one second or less for an answer, no time for a child to think. When adults increase their “wait time” to three seconds or more, children give more logical, complete and creative answers.

    Thirdly, watch your language. Once you have a child involved in a science discussion, don't jump in with “That's right” or “Very good”. These words work well when it comes to encouraging good behavior. But in talking about science, quick praise can signal that discussion is over. Instead, keep things going by saying “That's interesting” or “I'd never thought of it that way before”, or coming up with more questions or ideas.

    Never push a child to “Think”. It doesn't make sense, children are always thinking, without your telling them to. What's more, this can turn a conversation into a performance. The child will try to find the answer you want, in as few words as possible, so that he will be a smaller target for your disagreement.

    Lastly, show; don't tell. Real-life impressions of nature are far more impressive than any lesson children can learn from a book or a television program. Let children look at their fingertips through a magnifying glass（放大镜）, and they'll understand why you want them to wash before dinner. Rather than saying that water evaporates（蒸发）, set a pot of water to boil and let them watch the water level drop.

    Reading may be fundamental, but how the brain gives meaning to letters on a page has been a mystery. Two new studies fill in some details on how the brains of efficient readers handle words. One of the studies, published in the April 30 Neuron, suggests that a visual-processing area of the brain recognizes common words as whole units. Another study, published online April 27 in PLOSONE, makes it known that the brain operates two fast parallel systems for reading, linking visual recognition of words to speech.

    Maximilian Riesenhuber, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., wanted to know whether the brain reads words letter by letter or recognizes words as whole objects. He and his colleagues showed sets of real words or nonsense(无意义的词语)words to volunteers undergoing fMRI scans. The words differed in only one letter, such as “farm” and “form” or “soat” and “poat”, or were completely different, such as “farm” and “coat” or “poat” and “hime”. The researchers were particularly interested in what happens in the visual word form area, or VWFA, an area on the left side of the brain just behind the ear that is involved in recognizing words.

    Riesenhuber and his colleagues found that neurons(神经元)in the VWFA respond strongly to changes in real words. Changing “farm” to “form”, for example, produced as great a change in activity as changing “farm” to” coat”, the team reports in Neuron. The area responded slowly to single-letter changes in made-up words.

    The data suggests that readers grasp real words as whole objects, rather than focusing on letters or letter combinations. And as a reader's exposure to a word increases, the brain comes to recognize the shape of the word. Meaning is passed on after recognition in the brain, Riesenhuber says.

    The researchers don't yet know how longer and less familiar words are recognized, or if the brain can be trained to recognize nonsense words as a unit.