Last Saturday, Lai Chi-wai used a rope system to pull himself up 250 meters along the side of a skyscraper in Hong Kong. Mr. Lai, who can't move his legs, was strapped into his wheelchair as he climbed.

Before 2011, Mr. Lai was a world-famous rock climber. He also taught others how to climb. That ended 10 years ago, when Mr. Lai was involved in a car crash. The accident left him paralyzed (瘫痪) from the waist down, unable to move his legs. Since then, he's needed to use a wheelchair to get around.

But Mr. Lai couldn't get over his love of climbing. He figured out a way to attach his wheelchair to a roping system that allowed him to climb again. In 2016, Mr. Lai climbed Lion Rock in Kowloon, Hong Kong. It's a 495-meter climb that he had done many times before. Climbing Lion Rock again made him realize that he could still climb successfully, even if he couldn't do it in the same way he had in the past.

Last Saturday, Mr Lai started to climb Hong Kong's Nina Tower. The morning started off well enough. But by early afternoon, strong winds had come up. They blew Mr. Lai around and tangled (使缠结) his ropes. Finally, after he climbed for 10 hours and reached a height of 250 meters, the winds became too rough, and Mr. Lai had to give up his goal of reaching the top. But along the way, he set a new record. He also raised over $700, 000 for a charity that is working to help others who have been paralyzed.

Mr. Lai said that often, disabled people are viewed as weak. He hoped his climb would send a different message. “If a disabled person can shine,” he said, they can at the same time bring about opportunity, hope and light; they don't have to be viewed as weak.”

When kids sit down to eat lunch at school, fruits and vegetables may not be their first choice. But with more time at the lunch table, they are more likely to pick up those healthy foods. If we want to improve children's nutrition and health, ensuring longer school lunch breaks can help achieve those goals, according to research from the University of Illinois.

“Ten minutes of seated lunch time or less is quite common. Scheduled lunch time may be longer, but students have to wait in line to get their food. This means the amount of time children actually have to eat their meals is much less than the scheduled time,” says Melissa Pflugh Prescott, assistant professor in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition. “During shorter lunch periods, children ate significantly less of the fruit and vegetable parts of their meal, while there was no significant difference in the amount of entrees (主食) they consumed. It makes sense that you might eat the part of the meal you look forward to first, and if there's enough time left you might go towards the other parts. But if there's not enough time, fruit and vegetables are likely to suffer,” Prescott explains.

“Our findings support policies that require at least 20 minutes of seated lunch time at school,” she states. School lunch time policies can be decided at the district level, with some room for individual schools to set their own standards; for example, schools can institute a longer lunch time than the district mandates (授权).

Prescott notes that longer lunch time can also have beneficial effects for children beyond healthy eating. “The amount of seated time children have is also a really valuable time for them to connect with their friends; they might have limited opportunities to do so throughout the school day. We found significantly fewer social interactions during the 10-minute lunch time. That indicates other positive outcomes may come from longer lunch breaks as well,” she concludes.

"If you don't have time to read, you won't have time or tools to write," writes Stephen King in his memoir. He goes on to explain writers must read widely and frequently to develop their own voice and to learn how to write sentences and structure stories in ways that make readers want to pick up their work and read it.

This idea that we must be readers first in order to be writers is echoed throughout books on writing and is often the first piece of advice that authors offer to aspiring novelists. " The more we read, the faster we can perform that magic trick of seeing how the letters have been combined into words that have meaning," writes best-selling author Francine Prose in Reading Like a Writer.

According to a recent University of Florida study of 48 MBA students, what students read in college directly affects the level of writing they achieve. In the study, researchers surveyed students about their reading materials and habits, and they also took a writing sample from their cover letters. Researchers then ran those samples—as well as samples from news stories the participants had read—through programs to assess the writings' complexity.

Upon analyzing their findings, researchers concluded that students who read academic journals and literary fiction scored higher in measures of writing complexity than those who primarily read popular fiction or web contents published on sites like BuzzFeed, Reddit and The Huffington Post.

Research has found that deep reading is distinctive from other types of reading in which we merely read text superficially. The language found in literary fiction, for example, is complex and rich in detail and metaphor. And the brain handles this language by creating a mental representation that draws on the same brain regions that would be active if you were experiencing the event in real life.

Regardless of what science may say about how reading affects writing though, writers themselves tend to agree that you can't be a successful writer unless you are first a voracious（求知欲强的）reader. By reading, writers not only accumulate knowledge, but they also gain a better understanding of language, learn their genre（风格），grow their vocabulary and most importantly, find inspiration.

Perhaps that's why when the late writer and Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago was asked about his daily writing routine, he said," I write two pages. And then I read and read and read."