The main cause of death and disability in the US

    Stroke (中风) is the main cause of death and disability in the United States. Every 45 seconds, someone in America has a stroke. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} It is the nation's third leading cause of death, ranking behind diseases of the heart and all forms of cancer. The following is something more about stroke.

Definition and description of a stroke

    Stroke is a type of cardiovascular disease. It affects the arteries(动脉) leading to and within the brain. A stroke occurs when a blood vessel（血管） that carries oxygen and nutrients to the brain is either blocked by a clot or bursts. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} So stroke forms.

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    The American Stroke Association has identified several factors (因素) that increase the risk of stroke. The more risk factors a person has, the greater the chance that he or she will have a stroke. Some of these you can't control, such as increasing age, family health history, race, and previous stroke. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} Factors resulting from lifestyle or environment can be improved with a healthcare provider's help.

Breakthroughs in treatment

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} In fact, about 600,000 people have strokes every year. For many years, there was no hope for those suffering a stroke. However, recent breakthroughs have led to new treatments. For the treatments to work, the person must get to a hospital immediately.

    20 years ago, a couple of ecologists, Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, convinced Del Oro, a large orange juice producer, to donate part of their forestland to a national park in exchange for the right to dump (倾倒) massive amounts of orange peels on a 3-hectare piece of land within the national park, at no cost. Dealing with tons of waste peels usually involved burning them or paying to have them dumped at a landfill, so the proposal was very attractive.

    A year after the contract was signed, Del Oro dumped around 12,000 tons of sticky orange waste in the land. However, another juice company and rival of Del Oro challenged the deal in court, arguing that their competitor was “polluting the national park”. They ended up winning, and the deal between Del Oro and the national park fell through. The 3-hectare piece of land virtually covered with fruit waste was completely forgotten.

    Then, in 2013, Timothy Treuer, a scientist at Princeton University visited that piece of land 15 years earlier. What he found shocked him. “It was completely overgrown with trees and vines,” Timothy Treuer recently said, “the difference between fertilized and unfertilized areas was visually surprised us a lot! We needed to come up with some really good standards to evaluate exactly what was happening there.”

    To confirm that the fruit waste was responsible for the revival of plant life, Treuer and his team spent months picking up samples, analyzing and comparing them. They found “dramatic differences between the areas covered in orange peels and those that were not. The area fertilized by orange waste had richer soil, greater tree-species richness and greater forest coverage. In a sense, it's not just a win-win between the company and the local park—it's a win for everyone.”

    The effect the orange peels had on the land is probably not that surprising to people familiar with composting (堆肥), but what is shocking is that a judge actually called this particular example polluting the national park and stopped it from going forward. Now that Timothy Treuer's study has received worldwide attention, this type of polluting is being seriously considered as a way of bringing tropical forests back to life.

How to Be Good at Sports

    If sports are something that interests you, it stands to reason that you would want to be good at them. Here are some tips that can help you become a good player.

    Set ambitious but realistic goals. If you want to be great at sports, you need to set your aims high.

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Instead, you should take a look at what you are, and figure out where you think you would like to be. Give yourself a suitable amount of time to achieve that goal.

    Be patient. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} Impatient athletes tend to make poor ones. If you're not patient, you'll try to jump into advanced techniques long before you're ready. You'll feel discouraged when you don't see immediate improvement.

    Join a sports team. Most of the sports teams are free to join. If you go to school, you should go for team tryouts when they're happening. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    Accept criticism. When you play sports, you will unavoidably receive criticism, whether from a coach or other players. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} Are they angry because you missed a pass, or do they sincerely want to help you improve? In a lot of cases, you can use criticism as motivation to get better.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} A skill become mastered when you're able to do it without thinking. Given enough time and practice, a skill will eventually fall under this category. When in a game, you won't have time to think everything through, so practice until it's all automatic.

A. Skills are often slow to build.

B. This does not mean being unrealistic.

C. You need to take most of it with a grain of salt.

D. Practice until your skills become second nature.

E. You also need to be clear about what you are good at.

F. If you're not in school, you can find a sports club online.

G. An important reason people join sports teams is to make friends.

    Vinegar makes salad, fries and dumplings taste better, and you can even use it to clean your windows. And now, according to scientists, it may even the planet's population survive climate change.

    Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science （CSRS） in Japan found that growing plants in vinegar makes them more resistant to droughts. This could mean that in the future, worries about climate change affecting the world's supply of food will be much lower. The discovery was made after the researchers studied the Arabidopsis, a plant known for its ability to survive in dry weather. It was found that when the plant was placed in drought﹣like conditions, it produced a chemical called acetate（醋酸盐）﹣the main component of vinegar.

    After discovering this, the scientists experimented further by adding acetate to the soil of other plants, before they stopped giving them water completely. After leaving the plants for 14days, they found that the ones treated with acetate had survived, while the untreated plants had dried up and died.

    It's hoped that this simple method of survival could soon be used to help farmers in dry countries keep their crops alive. "In the experiment, we targeted the staple foods of the world﹣rice, wheat and maize﹣and the basic plant of breeding species, rapeseed（油菜籽）," Jong Myong Kim, co﹣author of the study, told Popular Science magazine.

    Kim also told the magazine he's already been in touch with people all over the world who are interested in trying this simple and cost﹣effective method out for themselves from flower growing companies to amateur gardeners. Although at this point keeping thirsty plants alive isn't as easy as just pouring vinegar over them, Kim said he and his team are working on making the process as simple as possible. "Now we are trying to cooperate with some farmers, and also some companies, to make a method to apply this system, "he said. And for those of us who always forget to ask our neighbors to water our plants when we go away, hopefully this means the end of returning home from a trip to find our favorite flowers have died.

Reading is a unique human experience. Just by skimming our eyes over some words, we can {#blank#}1{#/blank#} (mental) travel across time and space. But reading can also be hard, especially when we're faced with a difficult text. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} (make) it an easier, more rewarding experience you'd read in print when possible. One reason for doing so is that our eyes are less likely to skim past printed words than those {#blank#}3{#/blank#} screen. Plus, consuming content on a physical page helps the brain make a mental map of the information, {#blank#}4{#/blank#} in turn makes it easier to remember details in future.

The Mona Lisa is one of the most famous paintings in the world. Painted by Leonardo da Vinci in the early 16th century, it has captivated audiences for centuries with its mysterious smile and masterful technique. 

The painting is housed in the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, and attracts millions of visitors each year. However, the Mona Lisa's history is not without controversy. There have been numerous attempts to steal or deface the painting, and its conservation has been a subject of great concern.

Leonardo da Vinci's use of sfumato, a technique that blends colors and tones seamlessly, gives the painting a soft and hazy appearance. The sitter's expression, which seems to change depending on the viewer's angle and mood, adds to the intrigue of the work.