Ways to save time

    We all wish we had just a bit more time. Just think what you could do with an extra hour or two each day: you could finally stick to an exercise routine, or spring­clean the house, or write your novel, or learn the guitar and so on.

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#}But I can help you find more hours in your day for the things that really matter.

    Get Out of Bed Earlier

    If you normally get up at 7：30 am, try getting up at 7：00 am. That half­hour might not sound like much, but it could be time that you use to exercise, to read that book you've been meaning to finish.{#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    Do the Important Tasks First

    Once you get to work, get the important ones done first (not the easy ones, or even the urgent ones). You can afford to spend at least an hour working on big, important tasks rather than on all those little urgent ones.{#blank#}3{#/blank#}The urgent tasks will still get done, and you won't miss the important ones.

    Reduce Interruptions

    If colleagues have a habit of hanging around your desk to chat, or if the phone is constantly ringing, you might find that it takes you half the day to finish a simple task like writing a letter. Constant interruptions don't just eat up time, they also break your concentration.When you've got a big task to focus on, let your calls go to voicemail.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}  Wearing headphones makes it less likely that people will try to strike up a conversation.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

    A few minutes chatting, browsing the web, and so on, can easily turn into hours of wasted time over the course of a day.

    When you're working, work. If your concentration is slipping, take a proper break, go and get a glass of water, or stretch your legs a bit. And if you're facing a difficult task, try breaking it into small steps or stages so that it's easier to deal with.

A. Or simply to get your day off to a calm and organized start.

B. I can't magically make all your days 25 hours long.

C. Would you want me to make your day longer?

D. Take Breaks When Necessary

E. If you have an office door, close it.

F. If you work like this, you'll usually save time.

G. Stay Focused on Your Work

Can zoos ever be animal-friendly?

    The topic of our last class discussion was “How can zoos provide animals with a good life?” Everyone believed it was impossible for zoos to give animals a caring environment. Our teacher suggested that visiting a modern zoo might give us a new point of view.

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#} In our discussion, many people said that zoos were full of smelly cages with unhappy animals living in. Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, however, was set in an attractive, open environment. Trees and flowers had been planted around the park. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    At school, some people accused（指责）zoos of exploiting（剥削）animals for money but at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, as I see it, nothing could be further from the truth. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    Before I visited Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, I wasn't sure about the rights and wrongs of zoos. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} I feel that, although zoos can't provide the freedom of the wild, they can be animal-friendly by giving animals a safe and caring environment. As long as they do this well, to my mind they make a good contribution（贡献）to animal health. They also play an important part in educating us about wildlife. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

    On the bus back to school, we all agreed that what we liked most was the zoo's environment and we would recommend（推荐）it for next year's group.

A. It is difficult for the zoo to raise animals.

B. More and more animals enjoy their wild homes.

C. I think lots of my friends changed their minds, too.

D. Most of the money is used to improve conditions at the zoo.

E. I went to the zoo and was pleasantly surprised by what I found.

F. In my opinion, the animals, rather than seeming upset, were pleased.

G. It was difficult to say how a zoo could really make up for animals' loss of freedom.

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.

    A daughter complained to her father about her life and how things have been so hard for her. She did not know how she was going to make it and she wanted to give up. She was tired of fighting and struggling. It seemed that just as one problem was solved another arose.

    Her father, a chef, took her to the kitchen, filled three pots with water and placed the fire on high Soon the three pots came to a boil. In one he placed carrots, in the other he placed eggs, and the last he placed ground coffee beans. He let them sit and boil, without saying a word.

    The daughter impatiently wondered what he was trying to do. In half an hour he walked over to the stove and turned down the fire. He pulled the carrots out and placed them in the bowl. He pulled the eggs out and placed them in the bowl. Then he ladled (盛) the coffee out and placed it in a cup. Turning to her he asked. "Darling what do you see?"

    "Carrots, eggs, and coffee." she replied.

    He brought her closer and asked her to feel the carrots. She did and noted that they were soft. He then asked her to take an egg and break it. After pulling off the shell, she observed the hard-boiled ege. Finally, he asked her to sip the coffee. She smiled, as she tasted its rich aroma (芳香).

    Humbly, she asked. "What does it mean Father?"

    He explained. "Each of them faced the same adversity, however each reacted differently. The carrot went in strong, hard. But after going through boiling water, it softened and became weak. The egg was fragile. A thin outer shell protected a liquid center. But after sitting through the boiling water, its inside became hardened. The coffee beans are unique however. After they were in the boiling water, they had changed the water"

    "Which are you," he asked his daughter, "When adversity knocks on your door, how do yourespond? Are you a carrot, an egg, or a coffee bean?"

Is Cash Becoming Outdated?

    When he rolls into a gas station to fill his tank, Barkhad Dahir doesn't get out of his car. He pushes a few buttons on his cellphone and within seconds he has paid for the fuel. With the same quick pushes on his phone, he pays for virtually everything he needs: groceries at the supermarket, a few oranges from a market stall, or a cup of sweet milky tea from a café. Mr. Dahir boasts, "Even lying in bed, you can be paying your bills."

    Electronic payments offer consumers convenience, provide revenue for banks, credit card companies and payment processors, and offer merchants improved cash flow and convenience. "I don't even carry money any more," says Adan Abokor, a democracy activist. "I haven't seen cash for a long time. Almost every merchant, even hawker (小贩) on the street, accepts payment by cellphone. There's no waiting for it and no counting of cash."

    The system is impressively simple and secure. Purchases are made by dialing a three-digit number, entering a four-digit PIN, and then entering the retailer's payment number and the amount of money. Both customers and merchants receive text messages to confirm the payment.

    Clearing up cash payments has several advantages as well. The printing and handling of money is expensive. Cash payments can be anonymous and hard to track criminal activities to be conducted in secret. Many governments favor reducing cash dealings in order to better monitor and understand the activities of their citizens. The Swedish government has been discussing the removing of cash since 2010.

    However, some people doubt what members of a cashless society do when the power goes off. Do they choose to barter (物物交换) and rob? Do they sit at home and wait? What happens to people who rely on their cellphones to process money dealings when cell service and the Internet are interrupted? A world affected by terrorism and increasingly violent weather may not yet be ready to abandon currency. "Ironically, the day after the largest bank in Norway, DNB, proposed ending all cash dealings, I went to my local grocery store and when I tried to pay by phone, I was told that I needed to go to the ATM to get cash because the system was broken." said an interviewee.

    Other people fear that electronic payments may create security and fraud risks and enable dealings to be tracked and reported. Privacy, security and convenience are all important factors in the adoption of electronic payment technology. New technologies which balance and address these factors may enable people to remove cash.

China's Entering a New Era of AI

They have beaten us at chess and co-written a Europop album with human beings. Now computers are taking a step into a very human territory: the reading comprehension test, a headache of schoolchildren everywhere. Alibaba on Monday said its artificial outperformed mortals (凡人) in a global reading comprehension.

Luo Si, chef scientist of natural language processing at Alibaba's research department, the Institute of Data Science of Technologies, called the machines' victory "a milestone".{#blank#}1{#/blank#}Some of these uses are already being handled by chatbots globally.

In the test administered last week, companies subjected their artificial intelligence systems to questions from the Stanford Question Answering Dataset, which assessed reading comprehension. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}In top place were

Microsoft, the US software giant, and Alibaba, the Chinese tech group that began with e-commerce and is - like its peers at home and abroad investing more funds into AI.

{#blank#}3{#/blank#}Baidu made an early bet on AI. and is leading its rivals in autonomous driving, some of which was on show at Customer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Tencent, which boasts of I billion monthly active users on its social media WeChat app, and Alibaba have adopted AI in operations such as customizing news and ads, and are investing in new fields.

China aims to make use of its vast treasures of data, collected from its 1.4 billion population including 730 million who are online, and deep pockets to overtake the US in creating a SI50 billion industry that is seen as the next industrial revolution. Excitedly, AI is already being applied in many fields from driverless cars to text analysis. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}The most asked ones include "Where's my package?" especially on Alibaba's Single Day shopping festival.

A. Though China s drive is led by government, it is cultivating homegrown tech giants to leap ahead of the US.

B. Private investment in the AI sector has been expanding 62 percent a year on average for the past four years.

C. The technology has many applications, from customer service to museum tutorials to medical inquiries.

D. The computers' answers to the questions were compared against average human responses and ranked.

E. For example, this technology has already been used to answer general questions on e-commerce platforms.

F. Like all utilities, AI will be boring, even as it transforms the Internet, the global economy, and civilization.