It is easy to miss amid the day-to-day headlines of global economic recession, but there is a less obvious kind of social upheaval（剧变）underway that is fast changing both the face of the planet and the way human beings live. That change is the rapid growth in urbanization. In 2008, for the first time in human history, more than half the world's population was living in towns and cities. And as a recently published paper shows, the process of urbanization will only accelerate in the decades to come—with an enormous impact on biodiversity and potentially on climate change.

    As Karen Seto, the lead author of the paper, points out, the wave of urbanization isn't just about the migration of people into urban environments, but about the environments themselves becoming bigger to provide enough room for all those people. The rapid expansion of urban areas will have a huge impact on biodiversity hotspots and on carbon emissions in those urban areas.

    Humans are the ultimate invasive species-when they move into new territory, they often displace the wildlife that was already living there. And as land is cleared for those new cities—especially in the dense tropical forests-carbon will be released into the atmosphere as well. It's true that as people in developing nations move from the countryside to the city, the shift may reduce the pressure on land, which could in turn be good for the environment. This is especially so in desperately poor countries, where residents in the countryside slash and burn forests each growing season to clear space for farming. But the real difference is that in developing nations, the move from rural areas to cities often leads to an accompanying increase in income—and that increase leads to an increase in the consumption of food and energy, which in turn causes a rise in carbon emissions. Getting enough to eat and enjoying the safety and comfort of living fully on the grid is certainly a good thing-but it does carry an environmental price.

    The urbanization wave can't be stopped—and it shouldn't be. But Seto's paper does underscore the importance of managing that transition. If we do it the right way, we can reduce urbanization's impacts on the environment “There's an enormous opportunity here, and a lot of pressure and responsibility to think about how we urbanize,” says Seto. “One thing that's clear is that we can't build cities the way we have over the last couple of hundred years. The scale of this transition won't allow that.” We're headed towards an urban planet no matter what, but whether it becomes heaven or hell is up to us.

You may rely on his coming to meet you.

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As they reach school age, about 90 percent of children will have experienced a condition in which fluid (液体) fills the middle ear, muffling (使模糊) sound and sometimes causing infection. The fluid usually clears on its own, but if not, it can lead to a painful ear infection called acute otitis (中耳炎) media. In some cases the fluid can persist for more than a year, causing hearing loss during this period, and slowing down their development of language and social skills.

Diagnosis usually requires a visit to a specialist—but researchers have now developed an app that detects this fluid just as accurately, with only a smartphone and a paper funnel (漏斗).

Doctors typically detect the problem by peering into the ear for a visual assessment. Yet, this method has only a 50 percent accuracy rate. "Right now, if you bring your child to a pediatrician, or to any urgent care family doctor, the way they look at whether or not there's fluid in the middle ear is by looking at the eardrum," says Sharat Raju, a surgeon in the department of head and neck surgery at the University of Washington.

For a cheaper and more accessible alternative, researchers at the University of Washington turned to smartphones. First the user follows a template to cut and tape a piece of paper into a funnel, which can be placed between a smartphone and the patient's ear. Next the app plays a chirping sound through the phone's speaker; the sound waves bounce off the eardrum and hit the phone's microphone, where they register and are analyzed by the app. An eardrum with fluid behind it will vibrate (振动) differently than if the middle ear is full of air, as it normally is.

To develop the app, the researchers first played chirps for patients with and without fluid in their ears. They recorded the echoes (回音), which indicate the eardrum's mobility. Then they used a machine learning model to classify the returning sound waves, determining which audio characteristics indicated a normal ear and which suggested the presence of fluid. Once they tested the app on 98 children, ranging from 18 months to 17 years old, at Seattle Children's Hospital. It correctly detected fluid in 85 percent of cases, and correctly identified fluid-free ears in 82 percent.

The researchers are currently trying to get FDA approval for the app, and have founded a company to commercialize it. They hope to make it available by the end of the year, to help parents track children's ear health at home.

Both honeybees and ants are social insects that live in groups called colonies. They survive by means of their collective intelligence. Their decision-making power is distributed throughout the group; that is, no one ant or bee makes decisions for the group. Instead, they work together. As Deborah M. Gordon, a biologist of Stanford University, says, "Ants aren't smart. Ant colonies are." The same is true for bee colonies. Although bees and ants are quite different physically, they have a lot in common in terms of their behavior. Specifically, honeybees and ants have similar roles within the colony, both have communication systems, and both have the capacity of learning.

Ants communicate by using chemicals called pheromones, which can alert others to danger or to a food source. For example, when worker ants find a promising source, they let the rest of colony know how to find it by leaving a trail of pheromones on the way back to the colony. The other ants pick up the message using their sense of smell. Bees, on the other hand, use movement to communicate with each other. Worker bees send message to each other by means of a "dance". Different speeds and movements send different messages. For example, when worker bees called scouts go out to find a new hoe for the colony, they return and do a dance for the other worker bees that indicates the location of the new home and how suitable it is. The faster the scouts dance the better the new location is.

Honeybees and ants are both capable of learning. One Chinese study found that bees can be trained to learn and remember a route to a food source. The researchers also found that bees can be taught to recognize hidden objects and use the concepts of "sameness" and "difference" to accomplish certain tasks. Ants take this one step further. Recent America research has shown that ants not only have the ability to learn, but also can teach their foraging skills to other younger ants. They observed that older ants accompany young ants in search of food and teach them the route and how to avoid obstacles.

As we can see, the social behavior of honeybees and ants is quite similar. Both coordinate complex actions and accomplish crucial survival tasks by cooperating in groups consisting of many individuals. Unintelligent as they may be as individuals, as groups they often show amazing brilliance as they go about their everyday activities.

Let me explain a bit by telling you where the challenge came from. I have many things in common with my dad, like music taste and sense of humour, but sadly reading isn't one of them. I can happily spend a whole day curled up with a book but my dad can't read a book for longer than about 5 minutes. He reads emails, websites and documents for work, but not books. I think that sitting down to read for just 15 minutes a day is a good way to relax. Giving yourself a goal or a challenge is a good way to change a habit or achieve something, so why not try to create a new habit of reading?

I know lots of people would rather relax on their computers or in front of the TV. Everyone is different and has their own interests, but I think there are lots of benefits from reading, which screen-based activities (games, films, TV) don't have.

One thing I personally love about reading is being transported to another world. I often forget the time or things that are going on around me! Reading is a great way to switch off before you go to bed, so you can truly relax. I know you can be transported to a different world in a film or a TV show, but I think books do it better. While watching a film, I often talk to my flatmates, send texts, or paint my nails. A book, on the other hand, commands your full attention.

Reading gives you the chance to get to know hundreds of new people! It also teaches you to see things from other people's point of view, and understand other people's decisions or opinions, With a book, you can hear everything a character is thinking or feeling—you really can be inside someone else's head!

So give it a go! Take 15 minutes when you're waking up, going to bed, eating lunch, or having a coffee. If you read a lot, why not try 15 minutes of an English book, or pass the challenge on to someone else? Good luck, and happy reading.

    Do you know what may make you seem to be not confident enough?.

    Giving reasons for your actions. Suppose you are having lunch with a group of people, and suddenly you drop your glass of coke on the floor. What will you do? Well, some people will just start to explain why it has happened. If you drop a glass or make a mistake, it won't change who you are. It's your right to make a mistake because you are a human being.

     You may have experienced a situation where you told a friend his performance wasn't that good and then he replied back immediately by saying, “No, no, no, it's just because I was tired” or “I was just thinking of something else”. Confident people listen to criticism and see whether it's true or not. However, if they know it's not true, they don't care much about it.

    Becoming a perfectionist. A perfectionist thinks that he lives in a perfect world so he tries to do everything perfectly. Confident people are not perfectionists. If they get a “B”, they may try to get an “A” next time, but if they get 99/100, they won't be unhappy about not getting a full mark because they know they're not perfect.

A. Confident people don't give reasons for their actions.

B. Read the following information and you'll know the answer.

C. Accepting criticism immediately.

D. Replying back immediately to criticism.

E. If the criticism is true and can help them, they accept it.

F. He may become very unhappy if he gets 99/100 in an exam.

G. He may become very unhappy if he can't pass the exam.

    If you have ever taken a handwritten prescription from a doctor or looked at the notes from your visit, it seems like no amount of squinting(眯眼) could help the letters get clearer. Bad handwriting almost seems like a(require) for graduating from medical school. But it's not the factonly people with bad handwriting(attract) to the medical field. If so, why does it happen to doctors?

“In the medical field, if it's not documented, it(actual) didn't happen," says Celine Thum, MD, medical director at ParaDoes Worldwide. Anything you talk about behind closed doors needs written evidence for your medical history. Doctors have to write more than any other employee, for they can hardly write letters clearly.

    Long days plus tons of writing leadsa very tired hand. If doctors could spend an hour(deal) with every patient, they might be able to slow down and give their(hand)a rest. But the truth is that most physicians are rushing around to the next patient. With so many patients to see in a(limit) time, doctors are(concerned) about getting the information down than perfecting their handwriting.

    Some of the world's most famous musicians recently gathered in Paris and New Orleans to celebrate the first annual International Jazz Day. UNESCO( United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) recently set April 30 as a day to raise awareness of jazz music, its significance, and its potential as a unifying(联合) voice across cultures.

    Despite the celebrations, though, in the U.S. the jazz audience continues to shrink and grow older, and the music has failed to connect with younger generations.

    It's Jason Moran's job to help change that. As the Kennedy Center's artistic adviser for jazz, Moran hopes to widen the audience for jazz, make the music more accessible, and preserve its history and culture.

    ＂Jazz seems like it's not really a part of the American appetite,＂ Moran tells National Public Radio's reporter Neal Conan. ＂What I'm hoping to accomplish is that my generation and younger start to reconsider and understand that jazz is not black and write anymore. It's actually color, and it's actually digital.＂

    Moran says one of the problems with jazz today is that the entertainment aspect of the music has been lost. ＂The music can't be presented today the way it was in 1908 or 1958. It has to continue to move, because the way the world works is not the same,＂ says Moran.

    Last year, Moran worked on a project that arranged Fats Waller's music for a dance party, ＂just to kind of put it back in the mind that Waller is dance music as much as it is concert music,＂ says Moran. ＂For me, it's the recontextualization. In music, where does the emotion(情感) lie? Are we, as humans, gaining any insight(感悟) on how talk about ourselves and how something as abstract as a Charlie Parker record gets us into a dialogue about our emotions and our thoughts? Sometimes we lose sight that the music has a wider context,＂ says Moran, ＂so I want to continue those dialogues. Those are the things I want to foster.＂