The young dolphin swam in the waters off Brisbane, Australia, and found his seafood dinner. Suddenly he realized that he was not the only hungry predator(捕食者)in the area. A ten-foot tiger shark aimed at the same fish. The dolphin refused to give up the meal and dashed to the shark. The shark attacked him, biting down hard into his back. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    Later, on the sandy beach nearby, staff at the Tangalooma Resort were shocked to see the severely wounded male. He was a regular visitor, a playful 12-year-old dolphin called Nari. “We've known him all his life, since he was a baby,” says resort director Trevor Hassard. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}The wound measure about a foot long and more than an inch deep. He took photos of Nari and sent them to vets at Sea World, a local marine mammal park. They agreed that Nari needed emergency care.

    The next day, Sea World staff traveled to the beach to catch Nari.{#blank#}3{#/blank#}Nor did he appear the next evening. Everyone was depressed and worried about him.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#}“I had started thinking the worst,” Hassard says. “Words can't describe how excited we were.” Six rescuers surrounded Nari and carried him to Sea World. The vets performed an operation to remove the dead flesh from around the bite. Nari was then moved to a special pool where his wound was cleaned and treated regularly.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#}Sea World decided to tansort Nair back to his home beach. Hassard had worried that the other dolphins might reject Nari after such a long absence. That concern disappeared when Nari's friend Echo instantly recognized him and moved close to his side.

A. But Nari didn't show up

B. Three days later, Nari finally turned up.

C. He felt quite worried when he took a close look at Nari's injury

D. After seven weeks, Nari was fully recovered but growing restless.

E. Shark researchers are trying to warn people to escape without being eaten

F. The five-meter-long dolphin simply swam away, disappearing into the water below.

G. Luckily, the wounded dolphin managed to escape from the shark's biting with violent struggle.

    On Sept. 15, TripAdvisor, one of the world's largest travel review websites, named the world's top 25 museums in its Travelers' Choice Award according to the reviews and opinions of travelers worldwide. Now let's take a look at the top four museums which are ranked as follows by the popularity around the world.

    Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

    It is the largest museum in the Western Hemisphere, with a collection of 2 million items from more than 5,000 years of world culture. The iconic museum includes important collections from ancient Egypt and medieval Europe as well as ancient Greece and Rome. Here, visitors can get lost in different centuries: They can see the Temple of Dendur from early Egypt, Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh's Wheatfield With Cypresses an US pop Andy Warhol's Souper Dress, all in one place.

    Muse d'Orsay, Paris

    Located in the center of Paris on the bank of the River Seine, the Musee d'Orsay houses the world's most amazing collections of impressionist and post-impressionist art. It offers the chance to view major works from greats like Van Gogh and Claude Monet. The museum is famous for being home to Starry Night over the Rhone, an oil painting by Van Gogh that is often praised along with his masterpiece Starry Night.

    Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois

    It was named the world's best museum in 2014. The world-famous Windy City museum houses nearly 300,000 works, including one of the largest collections of modern art, including pieces such as Spanish painter Pablo Picasso's The Old Guitarist, US artist Georgia O'Keeffe's Black Cross and French artist Henri Matisse's Bathers by a River. A TripAdvisor reviewer commented, “No matter how many times I visit, it never gets old. Paintings from every era, works from every great artist.”

    Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

    Nowhere is able to present the entire history of Spanish art like the Museo Nacional del Prado.

    Here, visitors can enjoy a detailed view of the Spanish school of the Modem Age. Outstanding masterpieces by artists such as Diego Velazquez, Francisco Goya and Joaquiin Sorolla make up an internationally-famous collection. The Italian school is another highlight of the museum's collection, as it includes the 15^th century masterpieces such as The Annunciation by Fra Angelico, The Death of the Virgin by Andrea Mantegna and The Dead Christ Supported by Angels by Antonello da Messina.

    Blind people usually possess one advantage over other people who can see. Their sense of hearing is far more acute. Bats, whose sight is poor, use a sound location system to help them avoid blocks in the dark. They send out pulses of sound waves, pitched at 50,000 cycles per second, far above the limits of the human ear, which can hear sounds up to frequencies of about 20,000 cycles per second. As the echoes bounce back off obstacles such as trees and walls, the bats are able to take proper action.

    The first steps to help blind people to see with sound are based on exactly the same principle. The sound is given off by an ultrasonic (超声的) torch, whose shape is different from a normal electric torch. It is double-barreled. It works in a similar way to a sonar (声呐) unit on a warship or submarine. The unit's transmitter sends out pulses of ultrasonic waves at the same frequency as the bat and the receiver picks up the returning echoes. Because these are still above the frequency at which the human ear can pick them up. The echoes are filtered (过滤) through circuits that turn them into “bleeps” which can be clearly heard before passing them into headphones.

    This means that a person holding the torch can point it ahead of him and scan the area for obstacles over a range of about 25 feet. If there are no return echoes coming through the headphones, then there is nothing in the way. If echoes do come back, then the closer the obstruction the faster the succession of bleeps and the deeper the pitch of each bleep. With practice, the torch could help a blind person to lead a more normal life.

    At present, the experimental ultrasonic torch requires a shoulder bag to carry the batteries, cables for the power supplies and earphones, as well as the torch itself. Fortunately, reducing the size of the electronic equipment is progressing and it should not be long before the whole set-up can be reproduced in a form small enough to fit into a pair of glasses. The wearer would face in the direction he wanted to check, and lift or lower his head just as a sighted person would.

                                                                                      The Lifecycle of a T-shirt

    We all probably have a lot of T-shirts, but do you ever stop and think about the influence of a T-shirt on the planet? You'd probably be surprised to learn what's involved in the lifecycle of just one T-shirt.

    There are 5 major stages: material, production, shipping, use and disposal. The material stage involves farming, irrigating, fertilizing, harvesting and ginning. While cotton is a natural fiber (纤维) and not as harmful to the environment as manmade fibers, it still takes a toll in the material and production stages. Commercial cotton farming uses a large amount of water, and the use of pesticides (杀虫剂) is widespread across the globe, especially in cotton farming. Studies have shown that farmers spend around $4.1 billion on pesticides annually, of which 25% was spent on cotton crops in the US.

    Once the cotton is grown and harvested, so begins the production stage: spinning, knitting, bleaching, dyeing, cutting, sewing, etc.——these processes also use a great deal of water and energy. Commercial dyes and bleaches are harmful pollutants and can eventually pollute groundwater.

    After the T-shirt is produced, it enters the transportation stage. This often involves overseas shipping. Take a look in your closet. Chances are that most of your cotton garments (衣服) are made in China or India. Garments can be shipped via plane, ship or truck…, all of which spill CO₂ into the atmosphere. Calculations show that CO₂ emissions from light trucks alone amount to 1.15 pounds per mile.

    Once the T-shirt reaches the retail market, it is purchased. This stage may seem like the leastenvironmentally damaging part. But consider the number of times you've washed and dried your favorite T-shirt. Washing machines are certainly becoming more efficient. However, the average American household does 400 loads of laundry per year, using about 40 gallons of water per load. Such excessive water use is combined with the large amount of energy used by dryers.

    The final stage of life is disposal. This releases harmful emissions, or involves a landfill where cotton takes years to break down. Current US records show that an estimated 15% of clothes and shoes are recycled, which means that consumers send a shocking 85% of these materials to landfills.

    We all need new clothes every once in a while, but let's all try to keep in mind what goes into the production of clothing... It has a real impact on the planet.

    There are a lot of things you can do to help reduce your impact. Reuse and recycle clothes. If they're too worn out to wear, cut them up and use them as cleaning rags. Donate them to charity or another organization that recycles textiles. When possible, make an effort to buy organic cotton. Turn down the thermostat on your washer, and line dry your clothes when the weather will allow it.

Even though they're not the most exciting things in the world, plants have fascinated us ever since the days of early humans. They may not do any tricks or greet us when we come home at night like a dog would, but that doesn't mean they're any less interesting than animals.

However, just when we thought we knew everything we could about them, a recent study found that plants may possess a secret ability that's gone unnoticed all this time. According to the study by Australian biologist Monica Gagliano, published in the journal Oecologia, plants may be able to hear sounds.

To come to this conclusion, Gagliano and her team planted pea seedlings in a pair of different Y-shaped pots with two arms. The first pot's arms led to fresh water, while the other's led to either dry soil or a sealed plastic tube containing flowing water.

Naturally, the first pot's seedlings grew toward the water. What's surprising, however, is that the second pot's seedlings grew toward the sealed water supply and not the soil.

They just knew the water was there, even if the only thing to detect was the sound of it flowing inside the pipe, Gagliano told Scientific American. Gagliano believes that plants are able to use their leaves to detect sound waves, which make tiny vibrations (振动) as they're produced.

This could explain why so many people believe that singing or playing music to their plants helps them grow.

I had a plant that I used to wash the leaves once a week and sing to it, plant lover Heather Goodall told BBC News. It grew from being about 2 feet tall to 7 feet tall in just a couple of years.

So, does this mean we should start treating our plants like pets? Not necessarily, although perhaps it does mean we should give them more respect. I would like to see plants acknowledged more as the amazing, interesting, exotic living beings they are, and less as a mere source of human nutrition, Fatima Cvrckova, a scientist at Charles University in the Czech Republic, told BBC News.

Need a good adventure?

You don't have to climb a mountain or go on safari. Any adventure where you stretch yourself and learn something new counts. For some, it may be jumping out of a plane. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}Ready for your adventure? Here's some advice.

{#blank#}2{#/blank#}

Pick a manageable activity you can do soon－this weekend!－close to home. This will break your inertia (惰性), build your confidence and help you ramp up to bigger adventures.

Shift how you view anxiety.

Research shows that people who interpreted their nervousness about activities such as karaoke singing and public speaking as excitement enjoyed the experiences more and performed better than those who tried to press down their anxiety.

{#blank#}3{#/blank#} says Samantha Boardman, a New York psychiatrist: Turning Stress into Strength. Try talking to yourself out loud, saying "I am excited" or "Let's get excited."

Use your imagination.

Envision the worst-case scenario. Say you want to go on a hike but are worried you'll become lost, hurt or too exhausted to get home. Try to picture this. Next, visualize the best-case scenario: the beautiful view, the fun you'll have, your sense of accomplishment afterward.

Ask yourself what will probably happen. Are you more likely to feel happy after your hike, or to be carried off the mountain in a sedan chair (轿子) ? {#blank#}4{#/blank#} says Boardman.

Make full use ofregret.

It can be very motivating. Think about whether you'll feel disappointed if you miss out on this interesting, expansive experience or glad you stayed home. 

We tend to regret actions we don't take rather than ones we do. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

A. Start small.

B. Be confident.

C. For some, it may be climbing Mount Qomolangma.

D. So the fear of missing out can help you. 

E. This exercise helps put fear in perspective.

F. For others, trying a different workout may do the trick.

G. This changed their threat mindset into an opportunity mindset.