【推荐1】This is the 24-hour information line for the Solway Fitness club. Our opening hours are from 6:30 in the morning until 11:15 at night, seven days a week. If you love exercising, you’ll love our club! We have a large gym with all the latest equipment. There are two pools at the club. We have a ten-metre pool just for diving and a 25-metre swimming pool. Why not try relaxing in our steam room before you swim? It’s fantastic.

If you’d like to become a member of Solway Fitness Club, please phone us at 1453-88679 during working hours.

We also give guided tours of the club once a week. These tours are at 2:15 every Tuesday afternoon. You don’t have to book a place, but don’t be late. We hope you enjoy getting fit at Solway Fitness Club.

【推荐3】Swimming is an excellent form of exercise for beginners because it is gentle on the body. It does not shake your bones or damage your joints, but swimming is still effective for weight loss. Swimming improves your cardiovascular (心血管的) fitness and flexibility.     1    .

If you do not know how to swim, adult lessons are often available at gyms.     2    . You can learn how to more effectively work out in the pool with just a few lessons. Swimming styles include freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke and butterfly.

    3    . It is important that you stick to the posted guidelines, which are meant to keep the swimming pools running properly. There are different rules for different pools. But the majority request that you shower before you enter the pool.     4    .

You will find that there are also posted rules about using the lanes (泳道) of the pool. This simply means that the pool is divided up so multiple people can use it at the same time. At times, you may share a lane with one or more other swimmers.     5    . You need to stay in the appropriate lane. Find a lane in the pool where the other swimmers are similar to you. When several swimmers are using the same lane, all swimmers swim in a counterclockwise (逆时针方向的) direction.

【推荐1】With prices rocketing nationwide for heating oil, natural gas and other fuels, the U.S. government said on Wednesday it expects households(一家人;家庭) to see their heating bills jump as much as 54%.

Nearly half the homes in the U.S. use natural gas for heat, and they could pay an average $746 this winter, 30% more than 2020. The second-most used heating source for homes is electricity, making up 41% of the country, and those households could see a more modest 6% increase to $1,268. Homes using heating oil, which make up 4% of the country, could see a 43% increase to $1,734. The sharpest increases are likely for homes that use propane(丙烷), which account for 5% of U.S. households.

Inflation(通货膨胀)is now running high across the USA. Earlier Wednesday, the government released a report showing prices were 5.4% higher for U.S. consumers in October than a year ago. The higher prices hit everyone, with pay raises for most workers so far failing to keep up with inflation. They have to face more expensive housing, higher medical bills and sometimes reduced working hours. But they hurt low-income households in particular.

To make ends meet, families are cutting consumption deeply. Nearly 22% of Americans had to reduce or avoid expenses for basic necessities to pay an energy bill.

“This is going to create significant hardship for people in the bottom third of the country,” said Mark Wolfe, director of the National Energy Assistance Association. “You can tell them to cut back and try to turn down the heat at night, but many low-income families already do that.”

The biggest reason for this winter’s higher heating bills is the recent increase in prices for energy commodities(商品). Demand has simply grown faster than production as the economy is recovering.

【推荐2】U.S. health officials say Americans who are fully vaccinated (接种疫苗) against COVID-19 do not need to wear face coverings in most places. The United States can begin to re-open society and the nation after the year-long coronavirus (冠状病毒) health emergency.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky is the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, known as the CDC. She said Thursday, “Anyone who is fully vaccinated can take part in indoor and outdoor activities - large or small — without wearing a mask (口罩) or physically distancing. People can start doing the things that they had stopped doing because of the pandemic.”

The U.S. and Israel have shown that the approved vaccines are strongly protective in real situations. The vaccines continue to work although new versions, or variants, of the virus are spreading. However, wearing masks in settings like buses, airplanes and hospitals are still suggested. People with weak immune systems, such as those undergoing cancer treatment, should talk to their doctors about giving up their masks.

The CDC reported this week that about 154 million people in the United States have received at least one shot of vaccine. The agency noted that more than 117 million have been fully vaccinated. This week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also permitted the use of the Pfizer/ BioNTech vaccine for children as young as 12, which can stop the pandemic from continuing to spread.

The new guidance (指南) comes as the U.S. is starting an aggressive campaign to vaccinate those who have not yet received the shots. It had immediate effect at the White House.

President Biden appeared in public for the first time without a mask since the start of the pandemic. He cheered the CDC’s guidance and told Americans, “So for those who haven’t gotten their vaccination yet, especially if you’re younger, or think you don’t need it, this is another great reason to go get vaccinated now.”

And White House employees were told that masks are no longer required for those who are fully vaccinated.

【推荐1】An expert from the Jiangsu Center for Disease Control and Prevention has offered suggestions over self-protection onboard the aircraft amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

A passenger faces the risk of infection by a confirmed COVID-19 patient or an asymptomatic patient. But only passengers in the immediate vicinity, those within same row, and two rows in front and two rows behind, face the risk,     1    .

According to Zhu Tao, deputy director of the Flight Standards Department under the Civil Aviation Administration of China, air in cabin is replaced every 2-3 minutes and cabin ventilation systems are designed for vertical, not horizontal, air flow,     2    . The aircraft cabin ventilation system involves the cooling of air flow at 200 degrees, a process that can disinfect the air with such a high temperature. Meanwhile, most large aircraft are equipped with the high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters, which can facilitate the removal of a high percentage (97%-99%) of airborne particles, including microbe and virus.

Take off and put the mask and glove in a plastic bag when dinning, clean the hands first, finish the food quickly, and then put on the new mask at the end.

Masks should not be used for longer than eight hours in total. It’s suggested to have more masks during the flight.

Avoid touching the high-contact public surface such as door handle and handrail, or if you have to, please wash your hands timely and practice hand hygiene. Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed or unclean hands.

The expert also reminds passengers to comply with health checks when taking the public transport.    5     People who have had a close contact with a confirmed COVID-19 case need to self-isolate for 14 days first before travelling.

【推荐2】Eighty-eight-year-old Robert Seaman has been drawing since he was a boy. At the age of 60, he left his job, selling houses to take up his hobby professionally. But it took COVID-19 to fully return him to what he loved to do.

Seaman said, “I would love to go up to my room where I had a drawing table and I’d spend hours up there drawing pictures. That’s what I’m doing now.”

Seaman recently has marked one year since he started drawing what he calls his daily doodles(涂鸦). He spends about six hours a day working on his doodles. “After a long life, I’m back doing what I did when I was 11 years old,” he said. “And it’s great, I love it. I’m so lucky that I can do this.”

Seaman moved into the town Maplewood just two weeks before the pandemic(流行病) restraint cut people off from the outside world. For many months, they could not leave their rooms. It was only recently that they were permitted to interact in common areas.

“The first thought I had was to just do some kind of ‘dark stuff’ that reflected the restriction that we were experiencing and the difficulties that were caused by this pandemic,” he said. “Then it just started to grow, and I thought it would be interesting to do one a day.” As the days passed, Seaman’s art got brighter in both subject matter and appearance.

He sent the doodles to his daughter, Robin Hayes, and other friends and family. Hayes then shared them on Facebook. As interest grew, she began offering the drawings for sale on-line. And all the money earned was donated to causes, including a COVID-19 aid program, a homeless shelter and an organization that helps refugees.

“It keeps me occupied, and I love doing it, but it also does help some other people, which is kind of nice,” Seaman said.

【推荐3】If you have a high temperature or are recovering from heart surgery, it is difficult to be fully focused at work. Sick days are meant to prevent people from hurting themselves, their co-workers, or customers on the job. However, working from home has changed this logic.

The work-from-home revolution has raised the bar for what counts as being sick. At the height of the pandemic people worked from home even with serious symptoms such as fever, shortness of breath or nausea. Many still do. Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University has been tracking work- from-home habits since before the Covid-19 popularized them. In a recent working paper, he presents the results of a randomized controlled trial at a large multinational company, where sick days fell by 12% for employees working from home two days a week relative to those coming in full time.

To be in bed not doing anything means discomfort both physically and mentally. Salaried workers, who are often evaluated on the basis of their attendance, find it hard to call in sick for a few days now that they don’t need to worry about spreading germs in the office. For high-achievers, putting in the hours is not a chore but a way of life. As the economic recession (萧条) puts future job security into question, showing yourself to be useful becomes even more important.

Though all this is understandable, it is also troubling. Being even mildly sick can impair brain function. It is difficult to exercise proper judgment if one cannot focus on the task at hand. It is why people with lower oxygen concentration sometimes remove protective clothes atop Mount Everest; some freeze to death. Firing off emails while feeling dizzy will put the body under further stress. Soldiering on (硬挺) may make the employee both sicker and less productive for longer. Digital presenteeism (超时工作), for that is what such persisting amounts to, is in no one’s interest.