In the sea there are many islands. In its warm waters there are some little ones. We call them “Coral Islands”.

    A coral island is very nice to look at. It looks like a ring of land with tress, grass, and flowers on it. One part of the ring is open to the water. There is a little round lake inside the island.

    If you look into this lake, you will see beautiful coral. You may think they are flowers.

    If you look at a piece of coral, you will see many little holes in it. In each of these holes a very small sea animal has lived . These sea animals make the coral.

    They began to build under the water. Year after year, the coral grew higher and higher.

    At last it grew out of the water.

    Then the sea brought to it small trees and something else. After some years, these things changed into earth. Sometimes the wind brought seeds to this earth. Sometimes birds flew over it and brought seeds to the island.

    The little seeds grew. In a few years there were plants all over the island. In a few more years there were trees growing there.

    So you see, these islands were built little by little. The workers were very small. Do they not teach us a lesson? Can you think what the lesson is?

    We do not know when man first began to use salt, but we do know that it has been used in many different ways throughout history. Historical evidence shows, for example, that people who lived over 3,000 years ago ate salted fish. Thousands of years ago in Egypt, salt was used to preserve (保存) the dead.

    Stealing salt was considered a major crime (罪行) during some periods of history. In the eighteenth century, for example, if a person was caught stealing salt, he could be put in prison and his ears could be cut off.

    In the Roman Empire, one of the most important roads was the one that carried salt from the salt mines to Rome. Guards were stationed(安置) along the route to protect against salt thieves, and they received their pay in salt, thus bringing the English word, salary. Any guard who fell asleep while on duty was thought to be “not worth his salt”, and as a result he would get a little less salt on his next payday. The expression, “not worth his salt”, is still used today in English.

    In the modern world salt has many uses beyond the dining table. It is used in making glass and airplane parts, in the growing of crops, and in the killing of weeds (杂草). It is also used to make water soft, to melt (融化) ice on roads and highways, to make soap, and to fix colors in cloth.

    Salt can be got in various ways besides being taken from mines underground. Salt water from the ocean, salt water lakes or small seas can be used to make salt. Yet, no matter where it comes from, salt will continue to play an important role in the lives of people everywhere.

    Imagine putting a seed in a freezer, waiting 30,000 years, and then taking the seed out and planting it. Do you think a flower would grow?

    Amazingly, scientists have just managed to do something very similar. They found the fruit of an ancient plant that had been frozen underground in Siberia—a region covering central and eastern Russia—for about 31,800 years. Using pieces of the fruit, the scientists grew plants in a lab. The new blooms have delicate white petals. They are also the oldest flowering plants that researchers have ever revived from a deep freeze.

    “This is like regenerating a dinosaur from tissues of an ancient egg,'' said Jane Shen-Miller, a biologist of University of California, Los Angeles.

    The plant has a long history. Back when mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses walked on the land, an Arctic ground squirrel buried seeds and fruits in an underground chamber near the Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia. The ground became pennafrost, a layer of soil that stays frozen for a long time.

    Recently, Russian scientists dug out the old squirrel hole and found the plant remains 38 meters below the surface. Back at the lab, the team fed nutrients to tissue from three of the fruits to grow shoots. Then the scientists transferred the shoots to pots filled with soil. The plants produced seeds that could be used to grow even more of them.

    It's important for scientists to know that plant tissues can still be revived after being frozen for a long time. That's because many researchers are trying to preserve the seeds of modem plants by freezing them and then storing them in giant lockers at various spots around the globe. One such endeavor, an underground facility in Norway, is called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It stores hundreds of thousands of frozen seeds. If a plant ever goes extinct, scientists could bring it back by taking its seeds from the Svalbard or other storage lockers.

    "No one knows how long they are able to live for, but freezing is basically the format for many plant conservation attempts nowadays," Jane Shen-Miller said. It's a good thing that at least some plants are tough enough to survive in the experience.

    Spotify can tell if you're sad. Here's why that should scare you. Want to figure out if someone is a patient with a mental disability: Ask them what their favorite song is. A New York University study last year found that people who loved Eminem's Lose Yourself and Justin Bieber's What Do You Mean? were more likely to have trouble with mental disabilities than people who were into Dire Straits.

    Over the past few years, Spotify has been improving the ability to analyze information to help businessmen target consumers with advertisements made specially for their needs. They conclude this from the sort of music you're listening to, combined with where and when you're listening to it, along with third-party data that might be available.

    Now, to be clear, there's nothing significantly illegal about what Spotify is doing with your information. I certainly don't think that they are working with shadowy consulting firms to serve you ads selling a culture struggle while you're listening to music that suggests you might be in a terrible situation. However, I find it disappointing that our personal, private moments with music are increasingly being turned into information points and offered to advertisers.

    You can see where this could go, can't you? As ad targeting gets ever more accurate, businessmen will have the ability to target our feelings in potentially improper ways. According to one study, you are more likely to spend more on a product if you're feeling sad. You can imagine some companies might take advantage of that. And on that note, I'm feeling a little down about all this. Head off to treat myself to something expensive.

    It was December 25, 1914, only 5 months into World War I. German, British, and French soldiers, already sick and tired of the senseless killing, disobeyed their superiors and started socializing with "the enemy" along two-thirds of the Western Front.

    German troops held up Christmas trees with signs, "Merry Christmas". Thousands of troops ran across the battlefields covered with dead bodies. They sang Christmas songs, exchanged photographs of loved ones back home, shared food and even played football. Soldiers hugged men they had been trying to kill a few short hours before. They agreed to warn each other if their officers forced them to fire their weapons, and to aim high.

    Fear ran through the military leaders on both sides. They felt that their power was being challenged: soldiers declaring their brotherhood with each other and refusing to fight. Generals declared this unexpected peacemaking illegal and said that participating soldiers would face a military court. Those found guilty would be imprisoned or even shot. By March 1915 the socializing movement had been destroyed and the killing machine was back in full operation. Over the next three years more than fifteen million people died in the war.

    Not many people have heard the story of the Christmas Truce (休战). On Christmas Day, 1988, a local radio host in Boston played "Christmas in the Trenches", a song about the Christmas Truce several times and was stunned by his listeners' response. Thousands of people called in, praising the song, with many moved to tears by the amazing events it described.

    You can probably guess why the callers were in tears. The Christmas Truce story goes against most of what we have been taught about people. It lets us see the world as it can be and says, "This really happened once." It shows us the potential we have as humans contradicts all of those TV and newspaper stories that tell us how mean and heartless people are. It is like hearing that our deepest wishes really are true: the world really can be different.

    As Internet users become more dependent on the Internet to store information, are people remember less？If you know your computer will save information, why store it in your own personal memory, your brain？Experts are wondering if the Internet is changing what we remember and how.

    In a recent study, Professor Betsy Sparrow conducted some experiments. She and her research team wanted to know the Internet is changing memory. In the first experiment, they gave people 40 unimportant facts to type into a computer. The first group of people understood that the computer would save the information. The second group understood that the computer would not save it. Later, the second group remembered the information better. People in the first group knew they could find the information again, so they did not try to remember it.

    In another experiment, the researchers gave people facts to remember, and told them where to find the information on the Internet. The information was in a specific computer folder(文件夹). Surprisingly, people later remember the folder location better than the facts. When people use the Internet, they do not remember the information. Rather, they remember how to find it. This is called "transactive memory (交互记忆)".

    According to Sparrow, we are not becoming people with poor memories as a result of the Internet. Instead, computer users are developing stronger transactive memories; that is, people are learning how to organize huge quantities of information so that they are able to access it at a later date. This doesn't mean we are becoming either more or less intelligent, but there is no doubt that the way we use memory is changing.