When we can see well, we do not think about our eyes very often. It is only when we cannot see perfectly that we come to see how important our eyes are.

    People who are nearsighted can only see things that are very close to their eyes. Many people who do a lot of close work, such as writing, reading and sewing（缝纫）, become nearsighted. Then they have to wear glasses in order to see distant things clearly.

    People who are farsighted（远视的）suffer from just the opposite problem. They can see things that are far away, but they have difficulty reading a book unless they hold it at arm's length. If they want to do much reading, they must get glasses too.

    Other people do not see clearly because their eyes are not exactly the right shape. This, too, can be corrected by glasses. Some people's eyes become cloudy because of cataracts（白内障）. Long ago these people often became blind. Now, however, it is possible to operate on the cataracts and remove them.

    When night falls, colors become fainter to the eye and finally disappear. After your eyes have grown used to the dark, you can see better if you use the sides of your eyes rather than the centers. Sometimes, after dark, you see a small thing to one side of you, which seems to disappear if you turn you head in its direction. This is because when you turn your head, you are looking at the thing too directly. Men on guard duty sometimes think they see something moving to one side of them. When they turn to look straight at it, they cannot see it any more, and they believe they were mistaken. However, this mistake happens because the center of the eye, which is very sensitive(敏感的) in daylight, is not as sensitive as the sides of the eyes after dark.

    In every British town, large and small, you will find shops that sell second-hand goods. Sometimes such shops deal mostly in furniture, sometimes in books, sometimes in ornaments（装饰） and household goods, sometimes even in clothes.

    The furniture may often be “antique”, and it may well have changed hands many times. It may also be very valuable, although the most valuable piece will usually go to the London salerooms, where one piece might well be sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds. As you look around these shops and see the polished wood of chests and tables, you cannot help thinking of those long-dead hands which polished that wood, of those now-closed eyes which once looked at these pieces with love.

    The books, too, may be antique and very precious; some may be rare first printings. Often when someone dies or has to move house, his books may all be sold, so that sometimes you may find whole libraries in one shop. One the border between England and Wales, there is a town which has become a huge bookshop as well. Even the cinema and castle have been taken over, and now books have replaced sheep as the town's main trade.

    There are also much more humble shops, sometimes simply called “junk shops”, where you can buy small household pieces very cheaply. Sometimes the profits（利润）from these shops go to charity（慈善事业）. Even these pieces, though, can make you feel sad; you think of those people who once treasured them, but who have moved on to another country or to death.

    Although the British do not worship（崇拜）their ancestors, they do treasure the past and the things of the past. This is true of houses as well. These days no one knocks them down; they are rebuilt until they are often better than new. In Britain, people do not buy something just because it is new. Old things are treasured for their proven worth; new things have to prove themselves before they are accepted.

    Are you sometimes a little tired and sleepy in the early afternoon? Many people feel this way after lunch. They may think that eating lunch is the cause of the sleepiness. Or, in summer, they may think it is the heat. However, the real reason lies inside their bodies. At that time – about eight hours after you wake up – your body temperature goes down. This is what makes you slow down and feel sleepy. Scientists have tested sleep habits in experiments where there was no night or day. The people in these experiments almost always followed a similar sleeping pattern. They slept for one long period and then for one short period about eight hours later.

    In many parts of the world, people take naps in the middle of the day. This is especially true in warmer climates where the heat makes work difficult in the early afternoon. Researchers are now saying that naps are good for everyone in any climate. A daily nap gives one a more rested body and mind and therefore is good for health in general. In countries where naps are traditional, people often suffer less from problem such as heart disease.

    Many working people, unfortunately, have no time to take naps. Though doctors may advise taking naps, employers do not allow it! If you do have the chance, however, here are a few tips about making the most of your nap. Remember that the best time to take a nap is about eight hours after you get up. A short sleep too late in the day may only make you feel more tired and sleepy afterward. This can also happen if you sleep for too long. If you do not have enough time, try a short nap – even ten minutes of sleep can be helpful.

    In a career that lasted more than half a century, Tom Wolfe wrote fiction and nonfiction best-sellers including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Along the way, he created a new type of journalism and coined phrases that became part of the American vocabulary.

    Wolfe began working as a newspaper reporter, first for The Washington Post, then the New York Herald Tribune. He developed a literary style in nonfiction that became known as the "New Journalism." "I've always agreed on a theoretical level that the techniques for fiction and nonfiction are interchangeable," he said. "The things that work in nonfiction would work in fiction, and vice versa."

    "When Tom Wolfe's voice broke into the world of nonfiction, it was a time when a lot of writers, and a lot of artists in general, were turning inwards," says Lev Grossman, book critic for Time magazine. "Wolfe didn't do that. Wolfe turned outwards. He was a guy who was interested in other people." Wolfe was interested in how they thought, how they did things and how the things they did affected the world around them.

    In 1979, Wolfe published The Right Stuff, an account of the military test pilots who became America's first astronauts. Four years later, the book was adapted as a feature film. "The Right Stuff was the book for me," says Grossman. "It reminded me, in case I'd forgotten, that the world is an incredible place."

    In The Right Stuff, Wolfe popularized the phrase "pushing the envelope." In a New York magazine article, Wolfe described the 1970s as "The 'Me' Decade." Grossman says these phrases became part of the American idiom because they were accurate.

    "He was an enormously forceful observer, and he was not afraid of making strong claims about what was happening in reality," Grossman says. "He did it well and people heard him. And they repeated what he said because he was right." All those words started a revolution in nonfiction that is still going on.

    After decades of cat-and-mouse between athletes and the word anti-doping agency (WADA), athletes found what they must have believed to be the ultimate (终极的) doping agent: their own blood. To enhance athletic performance with your own blood, you draw your blood and store it in a freezer. Your body compensates by creating more blood. Then, months later, just before a competition, you can re-inject (注射) the old blood for a boost. As the red-blood-cell count goes up, so does an athlete's ability to absorb oxygen. The more oxygen you get with each breath, the more energy your body is able to bum and the better you are able to perform.

    Although the enhancement is small compared to actual drugs, it can be the difference between a gold medal and a silver medal. Best of all, "extra blood" was never something WADA tested for.

    But WADA wasn't going to sit by and be fooled. What it came up with in response might be a solution to stop doping once and for all: an athlete biological passport (ABP). The idea is to record some biological features of an athlete through testing done at regular intervals. The biological passport's partial implementation (实施)—recording blood and steroid levels—began in January 2014.

    When all necessary biological features are finally combined, WADA will no longer need to worry about finding new methods to detect a drug. It will only have to detect (检测) resulting changes in the body. In the case of blood doping, if the athlete's normal red-blood-cell count is, say, 47%, but then is found to be 51% after a competition, cheating may have been involved.

    WADA is confident that the biological passport could even prevent genetic changes—the ultimate, ever-lasting enhancement—which are surely coming next. If an athlete inserts a performance enhancing gene, it will probably leave detectable changes in the body, that would differ from the athlete's feature in the biological passport.

    Are you interested in country music? I like it very much! It will take me away for a while after I am tired. The guitars and songs will take me to mountains and fields. Country music usually talks of everyday life and feelings. It's the spirit of America, easy to understand, slow and simple. Country music developed in the Southern United States. It was the folk music of American countryside. Many of songs tell about the lives of farmers. They talk about love, crops or death.

    The life of the countryside can be hard, so the words in country music are often sad. At first, people played the music only at family parties. But it became more popular later. In the 1920s, people played country songs on the radio, and they made them into records. When people in the countryside moved to towns and cities to look for work, they took their music with them. Country music continued to change and became popular across America. John Denver was one of America's most famous country singers in the 1970s. His song "Take Me home, Country Roads" is well-known and people still play it today.