Country music is very old. It came from the United States, Canada, Ireland and Great Britain.    1    .

In the west of America, cowboys had to take care of the cattle. They had to watch them all day and all night because the cattle were nervous and sometimes ran away.    2    When they were alone in the desert with the cattle, they drank strong coffee to keep awake at night. They sang about the stars and the moon, about their family and their friends.    3    They would not run away if cowboys sang beautiful and peaceful songs.

In the south of America, many people came from Ireland, Scotland and England. Other people came from France and Canada. They enjoyed their own kind of music.    4    They also added instruments from their homes, like bottles and plates. When they visited their friends and families on holidays, they usually sang and played country music.

    5    It takes about love, jobs, home and money. It talked about friends and enemies, trucks and highways, farms and crops. People in many parts of the world like country music because everyone knows something about these ideas. Also, many country music fans wear Western clothes and dance together to country music.

【推荐1】Earthquakes are a natural disaster—except when they're man-made. The oil and gas industry has forcefully used the technique known as hydraulic fracturing (水力压裂法) to destroy sub-surface rock and liberate the oil and gas hiding there. But the process results in large amounts of chemical-filled waste water. Horizontal drilling (水平钻孔) for oil can also produce large amount of natural, unwanted salt water. The industry deals with this waste water by pumping it into deep wells.

On Monday, the US Geological Survey published for the first time an earthquake disaster map covering both natural and “induced” quakes. The map and a report show that parts of the central United States now face a ground-shaking disaster equal to the famously unstable terrain (不稳定地形) of California.

“Some 7 million people live in places easily attacked by these man-made quakes, ”the USGS said. The list of places at highest risk of man-made earthquakes includes Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio and Alabama. Most of these earthquakes are relatively small, in the range of magnitude (震级) 3, but some have been more powerful, including a magnitude 5.6 earthquake in 2011 in Oklahoma that was connected to waste water filling.

Scientists said they do not know if there is an upper limit on the magnitude of man-made earthquakes; this is an area of active research. Oklahoma has had prehistoric earthquakes as powerful as magnitude 7.

It's not immediately clear whether this new research will change industry practices, or even whether it will surprise anyone in the areas of newly supposed danger. In Oklahoma, for example, the natural rate of earthquakes is only one or two a year, but there have been hundreds since hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, with the waste water filling, became common in the last ten years.

【推荐2】Speaking to The Guardian at the Third International Conference on Human genetic editing, Prof Jennifer Doudna, a 2020 Nobel chemistry prize winner, said, “We’ll definitely be seeing genetic therapies (治疗；疗法) for heart diseases, brain diseases, and eye conditions.” But she warned, “One of the riskiest and most realistic potentials is that trials of gene editing in embryos (胚胎) will probably follow.”

The technology can and will smooth the way for therapies for enhancing healthy humans, to make them faster, smarter, stronger, or more resistant to diseases, though enhancement would be more difficult than mending single faulty genes. According to the experts at the conference, including geneticists, public health researchers and philosophers, a wave of gene editing therapies were expected to reach clinics in the next five years or so. The therapies will correct disease-causing disorders in tissues and organs and become mature as researchers work out how to make multiple edits at once and reach difficult areas such as parts of the brain.

However, Doudna and the other experts also expressed their concern that the next generation of advanced genetic therapies raises serious issues that must be tackled to ensure the technology benefits patients and society. Prof Françoise Baylis, a philosopher at Dalhousie University in Canada, was worried that in addition to the sure sign of genetic enhancement coming, the cost of the new therapies would be too high for much of the global population. Prof Mayana Zatz, at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, said she was against editing genes for improvement but added, “There will always be people ready to pay for it in private clinics and it will be difficult to stop.”

One conclusion almost all experts shared was that while all these potential problems and risks did exist, a future full of promise would definitely be witnessed. After all, it is not technology itself but ways in which people employ it that decide the result.

【推荐3】For thousands of years, salting was a common way to preserve food. Corned beef (咸牛肉）, bacon, green beans, and hundreds of other foods were preserved with salt.    1     Then, in the 1800s, a Frenchman named Louis Pasteur discovered the secret: bacteria.

What does salt have to do with bacteria? Two things: First, bacteria need moisture (水分）to grow and multiply. Salt pulls moisture out of food, so the bacteria die.     2     If you cover food with salt or very salty liquid, bacteria outside the food die before they get in, and bacteria already in the food are poisoned by the salt that goes inside.

    3     For meat or fish,you pour on a layer of salt, then rub it in well, leaving a salt crust (盾）all over the outside. Hams are often made this way. Another way is to put food into very salty water, called brine (卤水）.    4     The salt will draw the moisture out of the food, creating a kind of brine that the food sits in.

Today, in most parts of the world, salting, is no longer necessary.     5     But even though we no longer rely on salt to keep our food fresh, we haven’t lost our taste for salt. We don’t want to give up our bacon, corned beef or salted beans.

【推荐1】Meeting people from another culture can be difficult. From the beginning, people may send the wrong signal. Or they may pay no attention to signals from another person who is trying to develop a relationship.

Different cultures emphasise(强调) the importance of relationship building to a greater or lesser degree. For example, business in some countries is not possible until there is a relationship of trust. Even with people at work, it is necessary to spend a lot of time in “small talk”, usually over a glass of tea, before they do any job. In many European countries—like the UK or France—people find it easier to build up a lasting working relationship at restaurants or cafés rather than at the office.

Talk and silence may also be different in some cultures. I once made a speech in Thailand. I had expected my speech to be a success and start a lively discussion; instead, there was an uncomfortable silence. The people present just stared at me and smiled. After getting to know their ways better, I realised that they thought I was talking too much. In my own culture, we express meaning mainly through words, but people there sometimes feel too many words are unnecessary.

Even within Northern Europe, cultural differences can cause serious problems. Certainly, English and German cultures share similar values; however, Germans prefer to get down to business more quickly. We think that they are rude. In fact, this is just because the culture starts discussions and makes decisions more quickly.

People from different parts of the world have different values, and sometimes these values are quite against each other. However, if we can understand them better, a multicultural environment will offer a wonderful chance for us to learn from each other.

【推荐2】For students, college is a series of disconnected experiences: the classroom, the dorm, the athletic field, and the internship（实习岗位）. Yet the employers tell me what gets college students hired is the ability to translate what they learned in one place (the classroom, for example) to another that is far different from where they originally learned a concept (a project on an internship).

Educators call this “ transfer learning”—the ability to summarize key principles and apply them in many different places, which becomes more important as the skills needed to keep up in any job and occupation continue to change in the future. Our ability to drive almost any car on the market without reading its manual（手册）is an example of knowledge transfer.

The concept sounds simple enough. But today’s students, faced with the constant pressure to prepare for standardized tests, rarely have the chance to learn through problem-solving or to be involved in projects that improve skills that can be used in various settings.

In response to demands from students, parents and employers, colleges and universities are adding hands-on experiences to the undergraduate curriculum.

Arizona State University, where I’ m a professor of practice, is testing a curriculum across a dozen majors in which students learn nearly half of the subject matter through group projects. Engineering students might build a robot and learn the key principles of mechanics and electronics during the project. The hope is that students will be more involved if theories from the classroom are immediately applied in the outside world instead of years after students graduate.

What’s the problem with the hands-on learning experiences being added by colleges to the undergraduate curriculum? They’re often not accompanied by the guidance that students need to help them transfer what they learn. So students become adept skilled in job interviews at describing what they did during a project, but they have difficulty talking about what they learned and how they can apply that to where they want to work.