Reality TV (真人秀电视节目 ) is very popular in the UK. These programmes give us a good look into the lives of different people in Britain. Also they are a very cheap way to make programmes. Here are some of them.

Strictly Come Dancing

In the show some famous people learn to dance with a professional dancer. Four professional dance experts give them scores and comments (评论) about their dances. After that, the public vote(投票) for their favourite couple. The two least favourite have to dance again and the judges decide who stays in the competition and who leaves. This show is very popular with people of all ages in the UK.

Come Dine with Me

      Each week four people prepare dinner in their home for the other players. Each player then gives the cook a grade out of 10 for the food. The winner gets￡1,000. Sometimes the food is terrible and the players are very rude to each other.

World's Strictest Parents

      Badly behaved British teens are sent abroad to live with a super strict family for a week. The teenagers have to follow the rules of their host family and go to the local school. After seven days the teenagers return home and their parents tell us whether their behaviour is better or not. There is often a lot of cries and shouts in this show but it can be worth watching too.

    Studying different languages increases our understanding of how humans communicate and their different cultures. However, almost 80% of the people in the world speak only 1% of its languages.  Every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, half of the more than 7, 000 languages spoken on Earth today may disappear.

    Throughout history, the languages of dominant(统治的)groups have spread while the languages of native cultures have become extinct. This happens because of government language policies, or because the dominant language becomes more useful in everyday life. Furthermore, many endangered languages aren't written down. When the last speakers of a language die and their language becomes extinct, their stories, songs, and other important information are lost, too.

    Central South America has some of the world's most endangered languages. The Kallawaya people speak a secret language that has details of thousands of medical plants. Today, fewer than 100 people speak it. In Central and Eastern Siberia, many Siberian languages now have only a few elderly speakers. Yuchi, which may be unrelated to any other language in the world, is one of the many native languages used in Oklahoma, the U.S.A. It is disappearing rapidly. In 2010, only five elderly people could speak this language.

    Luckily, native cultures around the world are using modern technology to help keep their endangered languages and cultures alive. Communities are creating dictionaries and libraries by using pictures, video, and audio to record the traditions of the last speakers of their language. If the young people don't speak and understand the words and stories of their ancestors(祖先), the language will die.

    And when the language dies, part of the culture dies, too.

    When you write a text message or an email, you might put a smiling face or other pictures at the end to make the message more fun. These pictures are emojis. The first emojis were on Japanese mobile phones in the 1990s. Later, they were used on Apple's iPhone and Android phones. Now they are everywhere!

Before emojis, there were emoticons. The word is a mixture(混合) of emotion(感情) and icon(图标). Emoticons are made of the signs you can find on your keyboard, for example:) for a smiley or @};—for a rose. The first use of :-)was in 1982 and it was called "joke marker". Emoji is a Japanese word which means pictograph: e(picture) +moji (character). Emojis are real pictures, for example ，or . There are 1851emojis that can be used on mobile phones and other devices. There are all kinds of emojis, from faces and weather to things in the kitchen and animal.

    In England, we have a saying: A picture paints a thousand words. For many people, an emoji is like a punctuation mark(标点). It's like the tone of voice when we speak on the phone, or hand movements(gestures) used in conversation. Emojis are also changing the way we write. The more we use emojis, the less we use slang(俚语), such as LOL or OMG.

    When someone speaks and looks serious, we try to look serious, too, and when someone smiles, we smile as well. This is how we show empathy(同感) and make friends(and enemies!). But when we're online, we can't see the person's face and there's no emotion. The invention of emojis changed that! Scientists in Australia have discovered that when we look at a smiley face online, the same parts of the brain start working as when we look at a real smiley face. Our mood changes, and we try to change our face to match the emoji. This is something we learn as we get older. Our brains have developed this ability over the last two or three years. This means that emojis have created a new brain pattern(模式)in us!

    Sports are important in English life. The people of England are sports lovers. Some of the world's famous sports began here such as football and cricket.

    Football is a game played in winter and early spring. Lots of people play football in parks or playgrounds just for fun. With hundreds of year's history, it is one of the most important sports in England. The English love football very much and they turned most of their main players into famous persons. David Beckham and Bobby Charlton became heroes for many children. The most interesting part of the English football year is the FA(Football Association) Cup Final each May.