How to Protect Your Ears

    You and your friends are leaving a concert on a Friday night. When you get outside, your ears are ringing. You have to shout to be heard. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} So no harm done…right?

    Not quite. Temporary buzzing may be easy to ignore, but repeated exposure to loud noise will eventually cause serious— and irreversible(无法治愈的)—hearing loss. A new study conducted by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston shows that one in five people between the ages of 12 and 19 are experiencing slight hearing loss, and one in 20 have mild hearing loss. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    But the good news is that there plenty of ways you can protect your ears from further damage — and still listen to the music you love:

    Ask around. Put your earbuds in or your headphones on, and then ask a friend next to you whether or not he or she can hear what you're listening to. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Turn it down.

    Buy noise-canceling headphones. A pair of earbuds or headphones that fits comfortably will limit outside noise so that you can hear your music better at lower volumes.

    Take breaks. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} So when listening to music, take your headphones off for 15 or 20 minutes and let your ears enjoy the quiet.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} You can buy a cheap pair at any drugstore as an easy way to lower volume at concerts — or while playing or practicing your own music — without changing the quality of the sound.

A. Use earplugs.

B. Keep the volume below 70 percent.

C. If the answer is yes, your music is too loud.

D. Like every other part of your body, your ears need rest.

E. But by morning, your hearing is totally back to normal.

F. Unfortunately, there's no way to get back hearing you've already lost.

G. The exposure to noise is louder and longer than in any previous generation.

How to Be Healthy and Happy

    We all want to be healthy, happy, free of stress and more productive in life.

    ⒈Get enough sleep. It not only keeps you healthy but also you will be happier. It is said that “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”{#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    ⒉Drink plenty of water. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} The benefits of water are amazing. Water helps keep your skin clear, leaving you feeling happier and better about your body. Water is just simply an amazing source in itself for your overall health. Try to drink 8 glasses a day.

    ⒊Smile and laugh. Don't get sad over small problems or take any joke seriously which hurt you. Instead, if you feel so hurt, you prefer to stay away from that friend. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Respect your friend from a good perspective. Smile and laugh all the time and you will be happy.

    ⒋{#blank#}4{#/blank#}Help your mom do the dishes, help out your dad in the kitchen, clean your room, or do anything that could help your family. It will not only make them love you more, but you will feel happy knowing you have done good even if you moved out twenty years ago and are a father yourself.

    ⒌Have goals. Always believe you can achieve. If you can dream it, you can achieve it, no matter what. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} Organization plays a very important role in achieving goals, so organize yourself.

    The Wife-carrying World Championship has been celebrated in a small town in central Finland since 1992. In 1992, people of the town decided to restart some long-forgotten traditions. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} He was said to only accept men as members of his gang (团伙) who proved their worth in challenges. At that time, it was also a common practice to steal women from neighboring villages.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#} A large number of competitors, people, and journalist from Finland to Canada attend the Wife-carrying World Championship every year.

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#} The Wife-carrying world Championship is held on a 253.3 meters long official track. The track has two dry obstacles and a water obstacle, about a meter deep. The wife to be carried may be your own, or your neighbor's. The minimum weight of the wife to be carried is 49kg. If she is less than 49kg, the wife will be given a heavy bag to carry. Each time a competitor drops his wife, that couple will be fined 15 seconds. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}

    Alongside with the Wife-carrying World Championship, there is also a team competition. The distance is the same but three men in the team carry the wife in turns. At the exchange point the carrier has to drink official “wife-carrying drink.” Then he may continue the race. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} While the Wife-carrying World Championship is being held, there are bands playing music, a wife-carrying dance and other forms of entertainment.

A. There are a few basic rules.

B. People everywhere hold the event.

C. A special prize is awarded to the winner team.

D. Do you know how these traditions restarted?

E. This event is becoming increasingly popular.

F. The winner is the couple who complete the course in the shortest time.

G. Back in the late 1800s, there was a robber called Rosvo-ronkainen in that area.

    Parents often say that they don't mind what their children do in life just as long as they are happy. Happiness and pleasure are almost universally seen as among the most precious human goods.{#blank#}1{#/blank#}Philosopher Jeremy Bentham believed that all sources of pleasure are of equal quality, but John Stuart Mill disagreed. Mill argued for a difference between higher and lower pleasure.{#blank#}2{#/blank#}Lower pleasure, in contrast, requires mere (仅仅的；纯粹的) senses.

    The entire debate assumes a clear divide between the physical and the mental.{#blank#}3{#/blank#}What will it mean for our ideas about pleasure?

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#}Food is usually considered to be the lower pleasure. All animals eat, using the senses of smell and taste. It doesn't require any complex cognition (认知) to conclude that something is delicious. However, these people failed to appreciate something that the French food writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin captured. That is, "Animals feed; man eats; only the man of intellect(才智) knows how to eat."

    Eating shows that the difference between higher pleasure and lower pleasure is not what you enjoy but how you enjoy it.{#blank#}5{#/blank#}Preparing it using the powers of reflection and attention turns it into a higher pleasure.

A. The dining table is a good place to start.

B. Wolfing down your food is a lower kind of pleasure.

C. What's the real difference between high and low pleasure?

D. What happens if the physical and the mental cannot be separated?

E. All philosophers believed that cookery could never be a form of art.

F. Higher pleasure depends on human abilities such as self-awareness or language use.

G. However, disagreements will be caused about whether some forms of pleasure are better than others.

    Is our planet heating up? Are human beings to blame for climate change? {#blank#}1{#/blank#} The discussion on this subject has been heated, but what are scientists actually saying? At Reader's Digest, we decided to find it out.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    Yes, it has, and even warmer. Greenland was forested between 450,000 and 800,000 years ago, so temperatures were considerably warmer then. There have also been other times of relatively high temperatures.

    So why does the concern exist?

    It's all about the speed at which temperatures are changing. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} But in the 20th and 21^st centuries, especially since 1976, temperatures have probably risen more quickly than during any century in the past 1 ,000 years. Warming may bring improved crop production and other benefits to northern countries such as Canada or Russia. However, many species may not adapt to these conditions, and the one that is able to may cause a problem. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} The West Nile virus, first seen in North America nine years ago, infected about 4,000 people in the US in 2006. The mountain pine beetle, which is active during warmer winters, has already destroyed about 13 million hectares of Canada's forests, worth an estimated $6. 4 billion.

    What is causing the warming?

    IPCC has concluded that human activity is very likely responsible, by increasing the concentrations of greenhouse gases and thus the greenhouse effect. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} They argue the human contribution is nothing.

A. Some scientists, however, still disagree.

B. Has the planet ever been this warm before?

C. Has human behavior made the planet warm?

D. Temperatures have been changing all the time.

E. In the past, temperatures moved up or down gradually.

F. Mosquitoes have been moving northwards to higher places.

G. These questions have burst into newspapers, films and popular books.

    It's the water that makes our daily lives possible. That's why protecting source water is one of the primary missions at the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. We provide safe, clean drinking water to 1.8 million residents in Prince George's and Montgomery counties.{#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    One way we protect the water is through the watershed. The watershed reduces the pollutants reaching the reservoirs. They hold the source water that provides 30 percent of our customers with drinking water. That's over 600,000 people. For many years, we have issued permits to allow limited recreational use of the watershed. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} It's a quiet, beautiful area away from urban stress and traffic. And we use it ourselves and other activities to promote water and environmental awareness.

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Last year, the WSSC issued new regulations with new restrictions impacting all users, including, closing the watershed a month earlier in the fall and opening it a month later in the spring. We also limited horseback riding to the access roads. Our goal was and is to protect the watershed.

    A very small but vocal group felt we should have consulted them first. Perhaps afterward we should have. But I do want to make one thing very clear. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} But we cannot allow the interests of a tiny group to override (不理会) the well­being of the WSSC customers who drink the water from those reservoirs. There must be a balance.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} So we hired a consultant to gather data, gather input from watershed users, and assess the condition of the watershed. We also asked them to look at our operations and management practices and provide the WSSC with findings and recommendations on how to make improvements.

    It's time to work together to protect the water and provide appropriate access to the rare jewel we call the watershed.

A. We certainly understand the attraction.

B. At no time did we consider closing the watershed entirely.

C. However, only a few people like saving water.

D. But most importantly it's about protecting the water.

E. The government has taken some strong measures.

F. We take that responsibility very seriously.

G. A review of our watershed policies and regulations was overdue.