【推荐1】The accent is the way you pronounce the words of a language. Everyone has an accent, and no one is accent-free. And for every accent, there are groups of people who react badly to it. These reactions are the result of prejudice. No accent is free from such prejudices.

I have held and expressed prejudices about other people’s accents. Over the decades, my experience of working with people from a wide range of backgrounds has led me to give up these prejudices. However, I still have prejudices that I find difficult to control in relation to some particular accents.

Language experts tell us that no accent is better than any other. But the reality is that the wider world likes the idea of simple rules which tell us what is right and wrong. We like to judge others on the basis of these rules. If you break these rules, you are somehow to blame. Jacob Rees Mogg recalls when he first stood unsuccessfully for election (选举) in Fife, Scotland: “I gradually realized that whatever I happened to be speaking about, the number of voters in my favor dropped as soon as I opened my mouth.”

And some people make their accents sound gentler when talking to people outside their circle of family and friends. However, Sky News ran a report recently in which a British woman Jemima was trying to sound less posh (上等人的), because she didn’t like random people telling her that she must be rich and from an upper-class background.

Lastly, it’s worth being reminded that people can be accented — even highly accented — and still be easily understood.

【推荐2】Recently, a group of scientists decided to find out what the funniest joke in the world was. This was obviously a difficult task, as no two people really agree about what is funny and what is not-especially when they are from different countries.

Here is the joke which the experts decided was the funniest joke in the world:

Two hunters were out in the woods. One of them fell to the ground. He didn’t seem to be breathing; his eyes were closed. The other hunter took out his mobile phone and called the emergency services.

“My friend is dead!” he cried to the operator. “What can I do?” The operator said, “Don’t worry. First, make sure he’s dead.” There was a silence, and then a shot was heard. Bang! The hunter’s voice came back on the line. He said, “OK, now what?”

This is perhaps amusing. Culturally, it depends on us knowing that often hunters are not considered to be very intelligent people, and that often they are quite violent. But perhaps this is not so all over the world. It’s also quite a “black” joke—a joke about something which isn’t really a funny subject. The experts also found the second funniest joke in the world. Here it is:

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson went on a camping trip. After dinner, they went to sleep. Some hours later, Holmes woke up. “Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see.”

“I see millions of stars, Holmes,” replied Watson.

“And what do you infer from that?”

“Well, there are billions of stars... we are a small part of the universe...”

“Watson, you idiot (白痴)!” he said. “Someone has stolen our tent!”

I personally think this is better.

Can scientists in the end decide what is funny? Some things are much too complicated, even for scientists.

【推荐3】You're at dinner with your friends on Sunday and the waiter comes up to you and says, “Is this going to be on one check or?”

“Separate!” you all said, barely taking a breath to pause from your conversation.

And why would you? It's pretty usual to pay for your own meal, or to go Dutch.

But it wasn't always the custom to split the check when going out with friends. In fact, in early English society, it was seen as selfish to invite someone out to eat and not pay for their meal. The origins of the phrase "going Dutch" are a little complicated, but Steven Pincus, a historian from the University of Chicago who focuses on early modern Europe, helped us track the complex history of this idiom.

We have to take it back all the way to the 1600s. During the Anglo-Dutch Wars, there were multiple conflicts between the English and the Dutch over trade and naval power. That led to a rise in idioms from the English regarding their enemy, the Dutch: phrases like "Dutch courage," the false courage brought on by alcohol; or "Dutch reckoning," which is a ridiculously high bill on which you've likely been cheated. This was because the English saw the Dutch not only as a trading enemy,but also as a people with questionable morals. The English "claimed that the Dutch had been completely corrupted by their commitment to capitalism." (Funny how tides change, isn't it?)of course, as time changes, so does our sense of self. After all, who wants to pay for their friends' meals all the time? Maybe sometimes it's all right to do like the Dutch do.

【推荐2】In the recently opened Our Broken Planet exhibition in London’s Natural History Museum, a small piece of dark material covered with faint holes is on show in a display container. The nodule(小块)could easily be mistaken for coal, but its true nature is much more interesting.

The nodule is a combination of metals and oceanographers have discovered trillions of them on Earth’s ocean floors. Each is rich in some of the most important elements for making the electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels that we need to replace the carbon-emitting motors, power plants and factories now damaging our climate.

These nodules could therefore help humanity save itself from the ill effects of global warming, argue mining companies who say their exploitation should be rated an international priority. By mining up chunks(块)from the deep we can slow the burning of our planet’s surface.

“We desperately need substantial amounts of metals contained by these nodules to build electric cars and power plants,” says Hans Smit, chief executive of Florida’s Oceans Minerals, which has announced plans to mine for nodules. “We cannot increase land supplies of these metals without having a significant environmental impact. It’s our only alternative.”

Other researchers disagree, however. They say mining deep-sea nodules would be disastrous for our already stressed, plastic-ridden, overheated oceans. Delicate, long-living residents of the deep—shells, fish, corals and squids—would be erased by mining. At the same time, mud with poisonous metals would be sent upwards to disturb marine food-chains.

“It is hard to imagine how seabed mines could workably operate without destroying the ocean species,” says UK marine biologist Helen Scales, a view shared by David Attenborough, who has called for a pause on all deep-sea mining plans. “In this case it means the destruction of an ecosystem, an issue worth the best attention from every entity(实体)involved.” he says.

For better or worse, these mineral nodules are going to play a critical role in determining our future—either by releasing us from our current ecological headaches or by stimulating even more fatal outcomes.

【推荐3】A team of engineers at Harvard University has been inspired by Nature to create the first robotic fly. The mechanical fly has become a platform for a series of new high-tech integrated systems. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny machine is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.

“It’s extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just the sum of a bunch of individual components,” said Robert Wood, the Harvard engineering professor who has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. A few years ago, his team got the go-ahead to start piecing together the components. “The added difficulty with a project like this is that actually none of those components are off the shelf and so we have to develop them all on our own,” he said.

They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. “The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of interdependencies on the individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, but then has to be matched well to everything it’s connected to,” said Wood. The flight device was built into a set of power, computation, sensing and control systems. Wood says the success of the project proves that the flying robot with these tiny components can be built and manufactured.

While this first robotic fly is linked to a small, off-board power source, the goal is eventually to equip it with a built-in power source, so that it might someday perform data-gathering work at rescue sites, in farmers’ fields or on the battlefield. “Basically, it should be able to take off, land and fly around,” he said.

Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications. “You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead,” he said. “So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day to day basis.”

【推荐1】“The climate crisis may lead the human race to shrink (缩小) in size, as mamnals with smaller frames appear better able to deal with rising global temperatures,” a leading fossil expert has said.

Prof Steve Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, suggested that the way in which other mammals have previously responded to periods of climate change could offer an insight into humans’ future.

He described the potential plight (困境) of people as similar to that of early horses, which became smaller in body size as temperatures rose around 55 million years ago, a period called the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum.

Writing in The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, Brusatte notes that animals in warmer parts of the world today are often smaller than those in colder areas, an ecological principle known as Bergmann’s rule.

“The reasons are not entirely understood, but it is probably, in part, because smaller animals have a higher surface area relative to their volume (体积) than big animals and can thus better give out excess heat,” he writes.

Brusatte said that becoming smaller was “a common way that mammals deal with climate change”. He added, “That’s not to say every species of mammal would get smaller, but it seems to be a common survival trick of mammals when temperatures spike pretty quickly, which does raise the question: if temperatures do spike really quickly, might humans dwarf, or might humans get smaller? And I think that’s certainly reasonable.”

In a recent study, researchers studying human remains over the past million years have also suggested that temperature is a major predictor of body size variation, while scientists studying red deer have said that warmer winters in northern Europe and Scandinavia may lead to the body size of these animals becoming smaller.

However, not all experts agree that rising temperature causes mammals to shrink. Prof Adrian Lister, of the Natural History Museum in London, said the relationship shown by the recent human remains study is weak, while the strong connections between temperature and mammal body size may often be down to the availability of food and resources.

Lister is also skeptical that humans will shrink as the climate heats. “We are not really controlled by natural selection,” he said. “If that was going to happen, you’d need to find large people dying before they could reproduce (生育) because of climate warming. This is not happening in today’s world. We wear clothes, and we have got heating, just as we have got air conditioning if it is too hot.”

【推荐2】There is nothing in the US quite like Black Friday. Before midnight on Thursday, in malls across the US, people start queuing up outside the locked entrances of stores, making longer and longer lines, holding coupons (优惠券), sipping coffee and hot chocolate, rubbing their hands and stamping (跺脚) their feet for warmth, excitedly chatting, and waiting for the clerks to open the door when the time arrives.

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, which fell on Nov 28，2014, “has become in recent decades a special American holiday”, said the International Business Times. Indeed, up to 147 million Black Friday shoppers were expected to put up with the dark of night and the elbows(手肘)of other shoppers so that they could bring home some bargains, according to the US National Retail Federation.

But why does the shopping festival have such a name?

The name was first used in Philadelphia in the 1970s. The streets and sidewalks of the city became so packed with traffic and crowds on the day after Thanksgiving Day that the local police did not look forward to it. Because of this, they called the day “Black Friday”, said The Huffington Post. However, others believe that Black Friday takes its name from the fact that because of the increase in sales on the day, shops are able for the first time in the year to move out of the “red” – that is, debt – and into the “black”, or profit. Businesses, of course, try to take advantage of this day. A decade ago, retailers (零售商) opened at 5 or 6 am. Now, many of the big stores open at midnight.

People really seem to like the whole experience of queuing up before midnight, “for it isn’t just about the bargains”, noted CNN. “For many shoppers, it’s just fun to be part of a large crowd. Those who go to the malls at midnight are driven by the same thing that makes a million people get together in Times Square each New Year’s Eve.”

【推荐3】Elements of Latin have made their way into many western countries. Data varies, but as much as 70% of words in English have a Latin or Greek root. By learning more about these roots and how they combine (结合) to create words, you will have an advantage in understanding new words, even if you’ve never seen them before.

The great thing is that you’re not learning the whole language with its grammar. You just need to memorize some parts of the vocabulary that you often see in English. So how do word roots work?

Every word has a root. This part contains the key to a word’s meaning. Take the word “happy”, for example. This word only contains the root, which means full of joy. Some words, however, have extra parts. We call these affixes (词缀), including prefixes, the part attached before the root, and suffixes, the part attached behind the root. Based on the additional meaning of the prefixes and suffixes, the meaning of the final word will be shaped to mean something new.

Take the word “autobiography” for example. The root is “bio”, meaning life. You may have noticed that many words with “bio” have something to do with life or living beings—biology, biography, and so on. When the suffixes “graph”, meaning to write, is added to it, it means a story about someone’s or something’s life. “Auto” means by oneself. Altogether, an “autobiography” is a story about a person’s life, written by the person himself or herself.

In a word, a better grasp of word roots can make you understand the English language better, and will help you with your vocabulary recognition and memory skills.