"Life is speeding up. Everyone is getting unwell." This may sound like something someone would say today. But in fact, an unknown person who lived in Rome in AD 53 wrote it. 

We all love new inventions. They are exciting, amazing and can even change our lives. But have all these developments really improved the quality of our lives?

    Picture this, you're rushing to finish your homework on the computer. Your mobile phone rings, a QQ message from your friend appears on the screen, the noise from the television is getting louder and louder. Suddenly the computer goes blank and you lose all your work. Now you have to stay up all night to get it done. How happy do you feel?

Inventions have speeded up our lives so much that they often leave up feeling stressed and tired. Why do you think people who live far away from noisy cities, who have no telephones, no car, not even any electricity often seem to be happier? Perhaps because they live a simpler live.

     One family in the UK went "back in time" to see what life was like without all the inventions we have today. The grandparents, with their daughter, and grandsons Benjamin, 10 and Thomas, 7, spent nine weeks in a 1940s house. They had no washing machine, microwave, computer or mobile phones. The grandmother, Lyn, said, "The more things you have, the more difficult life becomes." The boys said they fought less. Probably, they said, because there was less to fight over, such as their computer. Benjamin also noticed that his grandmother had changed from being a "trendy, beer-drinking granny, to one who cooked things"   

We've talked about snails (蜗牛) and their slow move . But much of the time snails don't move at all. They're in their shells (壳)—sleeping .

    Hot sun will dry out a snail's body. So at the least sign of hot sun, a snail draws its body into its shell and closes the opening with a thin cover .Then it goes to sleep. A snail will die in a heavy rain. So whenever it rains, it goes inside its shell house and goes to sleep. A snail can sleep for as long as it needs to. It can take a short sleep. Or it can sleep for days at a time .And it spends all the winter months in its shell, asleep.

    In spring the snail wakes up .Its body, about three inches long, comes out of from the shell. When hungry, the snail looks for food. It can't see very well. Its eyes ,at the ends of the top feelers (触角)are very weak . But its sense of smell is very strong. It helps the snail to the new greens. Then the snail's little mouth goes to work.

    A snail's mouth is no longer than the point of a pin(针) . Yet it has 256,000 teeth! The teeth are so small that you can't see them. But they do their work. If you put a snail in a hard paper box, it will eat its way out. And if a snail wears out its teeth, it will grow new ones.

    Mostly, a snail looks for food at night .But on cloudy days it eats in the daytime. It eats all day long. A snail can go on eating for hours and never feel full.

The opening ceremony of the Hangzhou Asian Games marked the richest and most skillful use of AR (增强现实技术) in history. 

"Technologies such as AR have allowed us to express more, " said Sha Xiaolan, director of the opening ceremony. "We've fully put AR into the opening ceremony. It offers people special experience to feel Chinese culture in Hangzhou. "

At 8 p. m. on Saturday at the Hangzhou Olympic Sports Centre Stadium, the opening ceremony started with an amazing performance. It showed the culture, history and natural beauty of Hangzhou and Zhejiang. 

The technologies were fully used into each of the programs from beginning to end. It started with Kongming Lanterns and ended up with digital (数字的) fireworks and a digital torchbearer（火

炬手）. All of these meant Hangzhou's promise to be an environmentally friendly Asian Games.

"You saw a little AR during the closing ceremony at the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games. But it was fully a part of the performance and brought things like water to life at this ceremony. " Sha Xiaolan said. "Because of it, the opening ceremony was beyond expectations（超出预期）. "

Don't let your kids drag their feet (拖拖拉拉) over doing chores. Help them to make the boring chores enjoyable.

    ▲    A simple and great way to make cleaning great fun is to do some of it together. Play some beautiful music while you are doing chores. Then you won't feel bored.

Get lucky. If your kids like surprises, write chores on ice-cream and have each kid pick one. Tell them they can change their picks if each of them agrees. In this way, they will have a feeling that they're making a choice (选择).

Make it playtime. Turn "kitchen time" into a party. Let one child be a cook and another be a DJ. The cook chooses what he or she would like to help make for dinner. The DJ chooses the music he or she would like to play. Everyone can dance around the kitchen while preparing dinner or cleaning up the kitchen later.

Find more difficult chores. One of my friends was trying to get her kids to help out around the house, and someone advised her to give the kids some things like candies or toys as rewards. The plan worked like magic. However, rewards usually don't work for long because kids will be bored with doing the same chores all the time. At this time, give them some difficult chores. If they're already used to helping clean the cage of the pet, make it harder by having them clean it all by themselves. Then, ask them to clean it faster.

Children love spring for different reasons. Let's have a look.

Hi, Friends! I'm Peter from Hungary. 1 is my favourite season? Well, I like spring best 2 after the long cold and wet days, it is warm again. The weather changes quite a lot. It is cloudy sometimes but the sun shines 3 most of the time. When I go out, I 4 see lovely spring flowers everywhere.

Hi, I'm Li Hua from China. Spring is my favourite. It's the best time for family activities. And Spring Equinox(春分) is in this season. It was 5 March 20 last year and there was great fun in my house. I 6 the eggs in many colors with my family. 7 also tried to help the eggs stand on their ends. It was really funny!

A visit to the old city of Petra in Jordan is an amazing experience (奇妙的经历). Around the city, there are mountains with many pink rocks (岩石). To get to the mountains, tourists walk for over a kilometre through a narrow hole (狭窄的洞) in the rock. Then they come to a large building in the side of a cliff (悬崖). Petra has many of these beautiful rock- cut buildings, and they make the city famous. 

Two thousand years ago, Petra was a busy and noisy place. People came from far away to buy and sell in the market places. Later, the city became rich. At one time, more than 30, 000 people lived there. But the pink rocks were not as safe as they looked. Earthquakes (地震) made many of the buildings fall down. As the year went by, people couldn't come and live there any more. Finally, the world forgot the city of Petra. 

In 1812, a Swiss traveller called Johann Burckhardt heard about the lost city. Local people told him that it was in the mountains, and someone took him there. When Burckhardt went back to Europe, he wrote about Petra and people started visiting the city. 

▲  More than a million tourists go there every year. People sell postcards and cold drinks there. There are museums, shops and restaurants, but nobody lives there. At night, the old city is quiet again.