Sports can help you keep fit and get in touch with nature. However, whether you are on the mountains, in the waves, or on the grassland, you should be aware that your sport of choice might have great influence on the environment.

    Some sports are resource-hungry. Golf, as you may know, eats up not only large areas of countryside, but also tons of water. Besides, all sorts of chemicals and huge amounts of energy are used to keep its courses（球场） in good condition. This causes major environmental effects. For example, in the dry regions of Portugal and Spain, golf is often held responsible for serious water shortage in some local areas.

    There are many environment-friendly sports. Power walking is one of them that you could take up today. You don't need any special equipment except a good pair of shoes; and you don't have to worry about resources and your purse. Simple and free, power walking can also keep you fit. If you walk regularly, it will be good for your heart and bones. Experts say that 20 minutes of power walking daily can make you feel less anxious, sleep well and have better weight control.

    Whatever sport you take up, you can make it greener by using environment-friendly equipment and buying products made from recycled materials. But the final goal should be "green gyms". They are better replacements（代替物）for traditional health clubs and modern sports centers. Members of green gyms play sports outdoors, in the countryside or other open spaces. There is no special requirement for you to start your membership. And best of all, it's free.

    When her five daughters were young, Helene An always told them that there was strength in unity (团结). To show this, she held up one chopstick, representing oneperson. Then she easily broke it into two pieces. Next, she tied several chopsticks together, representing a family. She showed the girls it was hard to break the tied chopsticks. This lesson about family unity stayed with the daughters as they grew up.

    Helene An and her family own a large restaurant business in California. However, when Helene and her husband Danny left their home in Vietnam in 1975, they didn't have much money. They moved their family to San Francisco. There they joined Danny's mother, Diana, who owned a small Italian sandwich shop. Soon afterwards, Helene and Diana changed the sandwich shop into a small Vietnamese restaurant. The five daughters helped in the restaurant when they were young. However, Helene did not want her daughters to always work in the family business because she thought it was too hard.

    Eventually the girls all graduated from college and went away to work for themselves, but one by one, the daughters returned to work in the family business. They opened new restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Even though family members sometimes disagreed with each other, they worked together to make the business successful. Daughter Elisabeth explains, "Our mother taught us that to succeed we must have unity, and to have unity we must have peace. Without the strength of the family, there is no business."

    Their expanding business became a large corporation in 1996, with three generations of Ans working together. Now the Ans' corporation makes more than $20 million each year. Although they began with a small restaurant, they had big dreams, and they worked together. Now they are a big success.

    You may laugh it off if someone told you that extreme weather disasters were actually a child's tricks. But El Nino, meaning “little boy” in Spanish, could be about to cause trouble

    A recent statement from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned ofa strong El Nino event that may be similar to the strongest in modern times. Scientists believe that evidence shows a more than 90 percent chance that it is coming — and it's going to be big. “If this lives up to its potential, this thing can bring a lot of floods, mudslides（泥石流）, and trouble,” said Bill Patzert, a NASA scientist.

    El Nino is a climate event occurring in the Pacific Ocean. The wind usually blows strongly from east to west due to the rotation（旋转）of the Earth. This causes water to pile up in the Western Pacific and pulls up colder water from the boom in the eastern part. However, in El Nino years, the winds pushing the water get weaker and cause the warmer water to shift back toward the east. This warms the ocean as it travels before finally reaching the shores of North and South America. In an El Nino event, the waters of the eastern Pacific can be up to 4 degrees Celsius warmer than usual.

    Most El Ninos last from 9 to 12 months and their effects are felt around December. They don't happen every year though, usually between every two to seven years.

    Last seen in 1997-98, El Nino caused severe droughts in Australia, the Philippines and Indonesia, as well as deadly floods in Peru and Ecuador. The world also heats up during an ElNino-1998 became the warmest year on record at the time. If the current trend continues, 2015 is almost certainly to become the hottest year yet again.

    A strong El Nino also affects hurricane seasons around the planet. The warmer the Eastern Pacific is, the more hurricanes it gets. The Western Pacific, on the other hand, tends to see more and stronger typhoons.

    The weather isn't the only thing that's affected. Warmer surface waters in the Eastern Pacific make the cold-water fish swim away and damage the fishing industry in much of Latin America.

    In recent years, a growing body of research has shown that our appetite and food intake are influenced by a large number of factors besides our biological need for energy, including our eating environment and our perception（感知）of the food in front of us.

    Studies have shown, for instance, that eating in front of the TV (or a similar distraction) can increase both hunger and the amount of food consumed. Even simple visual clues, like plate size and lighting, have been shown to affect portion size and consumption.

    A new study suggested that our short-term memory also may play a role in appetite. Several hours after a meal, people's hunger levels were predicted not by how much they'd eaten but rather by how much food they'd seen in front of them—in other words, how much they remembered eating.

    This disparity (新旧研究的差异）suggests the memory of our previous meal may have a bigger influence on our appetite than the actual size of the meal, says Jeffrey M. Brunstrom, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Bristol.

    "Hunger isn't controlled individually by the physical characteristics of a recent meal. We have identified an independent role for memory for that meal," Brunstrom says. "This shows that the relationship between hunger and food intake is more complex than we thought."

    These findings echo earlier research that suggests our perception of food can sometimes trick our body's response to the food itself. In a 2011 study, for instance, people who drank the same 380-calorie milkshake on two separate occasions produced different levels of hunger-related hormones （荷尔蒙），depending on whether the shake's label said it contained 620 or 140 calories. Moreover, the participants reported feeling more full when they thought they'd consumed a higher-calorie shake.

    What does this mean for our eating habits? Although it hardly seems practical to trick ourselves into eating less, the new findings do highlight the benefits of focusing on our food and avoiding TV and multitasking while eating.

    The so-called mindful-eating strategies can fight distractions and help us control our appetite, Brunstrom says.

    FaceApp has taken the world by storm, giving users the chance to see themselves age through its algorithm. 12.7 million people—some three million more than the population of New York City—reportedly downloaded it in one seven-day period last month.

    Although the Russian app has become known for its privacy issues, the more interesting lesson of our FaceApp fling (尽情玩乐)is what it tells us about our society—and our future lives. It turns out we are more interested in aging than we realized. I'm surprised by this. Most younger people are in denial (否认)about old age, doing almost nothing to prepare for it. We rarely have a chance to plan for the future, with increasing time and financial pressures. Those pressures bring sacrifices that we may not always want to make: we can no longer afford to spend the time or the money needed to look after our elderly parents.

    As a family doctor, I can see the loneliness epidemic developing. Elderly patients come to see me with no particular illness, no clear medical issue. After a few minutes of the consultation, I understand why: they're not sick, and often they don't feel sick. They just need someone—anyone-to talk to.

    Although loneliness has no medical classification, the health effects are real: the result of loneliness and isolation can be as harmful to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and is more damaging than obesity. But loneliness does not come with nearly enough health warnings.

    So what next? Since 1980, we are living on average 10 years longer. At the same time, people are having fewer and fewer children, and they are having them much later in life. The snake of a world class health service is eating its own tail; its care is prolonging (延长) people's lives, but as the ratio of pensioners(退休人员)to working -age people increases, there are fewer taxpayers to fund that very health service.

    Into this void have stepped NGOs, charities and volunteers. But in the long term, the only way to truly help the oldest meters of our society is to go back to the traditional values of intergenerational(两代间的) cooperation—often under same roof. Ultimately, we will need to evolve towards a culture where elderly care is treated the same as childcare, where employers recognize the duty of someone with an elderly parent the same way they recognize those of someone with a newborn child.

Confucius was a government official in the state of Lu, in what is now Shandong, China. His real name was Kong Qiu, but within China he is most often called Kongzi, which {#blank#}1{#/blank#} (mean). Master Kong. 

During Confucius's lifetime, China was ruled by the Zhou Dynasty (1046-256 BCE). {#blank#}2{#/blank#}, by the time Confucius was born, this dynasty was in a slow decline. The emperor's power was weakening and many small states were fighting {#blank#}3{#/blank#} (gain) control. Confucius's own city, Qufu, was capital of the state of Lu, and power in this state {#blank#}4{#/blank#} (divide) between several families which could not get along. 

As a government official of the state of Lu, Confucius wanted to end {#blank#}5{#/blank#} conflict between these families, and to help do this, he developed a philosophy {#blank#}6{#/blank#} he believed would bring peace and harmony. Confucius was perhaps a {#blank#}7{#/blank#} (good) philosopher than he was a government official, and he ended up having to leave the state of Lu. He spent thirteen years traveling around the other states, {#blank#}8{#/blank#} (spread) his philosophy, before returning to Qufu where he spent his later life teaching his disciples (门徒). The collective body of Confucius's teachings came to be known {#blank#}9{#/blank#} Confucianism. This enduring philosophical tradition has had a profound and lasting impact on Chinese culture and {#blank#}10{#/blank#} (civilize), shaping values and attitudes for over two millennia.