【推荐1】Perhaps you think you could easily add to your happiness with more money. Strange as it may seem, if you're unsatisfied, the issue is not a lack of means to meet your desires but a lack of desires — not that you cannot satisfy your tastes but that you don't have enough tastes.

Real riches consist of well-developed and hearty capacities (能力) to enjoy life. Most people are already swamped (淹没) with things. They eat, wear, go and talk too much. They live in too big a house with too many rooms, yet their house of life is a hut.

Your house of life ought to be a mansion (豪宅) , a royal palace. Every new taste, every additional interest, every fresh enthusiasm adds a room. Here are several rooms your house of life should have.

Art should be a desire for you to develop simply because the world is full of beautiful things. If you only understood how to enjoy them and feed your spirit on them, they would make you as happy as to find plenty of hamburgers and eggs when you're hungry.

Literature, classic literature, is a beautiful, richly furnished room where you might find many an hour of rest and refreshment. To gain that love would go toward making you a rich person, for a rich person is not someone who has a library but who likes a library.

Music like Mozart's and Bach's shouldn't be absent. Real riches are of the spirit. And when you've brought that spirit up to where classical music feeds it and makes you a little drunk, you have increased your thrills and bettered them. And life is a matter of thrills.

Sports, without which you remain poor, mean a lot in life. No matter who you are, you would be more human, and your house of life would be better supported against the bad days, if you could, and did, played a bit.

Whatever rooms you might add to your house of life, the secret of enjoying life is to keep adding.

【推荐2】In previous recessions (经济衰退), billionaires were hit along with the rest of us; it took almost three years for Forbes’s 400 richest people to recover from losses caused in 2008’s Great Recession. But in the coronavirus recession of 2020, most billionaires have gotten richer than ever before.

Billionaires increased their new billions just as millions of other Americans ran into terrible financial problems. More than 20 million people lost their jobs at the start of the pandemic. Food banks across the country are preparing for another great increase in demand. Why are American billionaires doing so well while so many other Americans suffer? People may find part of the reasons from the following fact. Stocks (股票) are overwhelmingly owned by the wealthy, and the stock market has recovered from its early-pandemic depths much more quickly than other parts of the economy.

But some billionaires are also benefiting from economic and technological trends that were accelerated by the pandemic. Among these are the owners and investors of retail giants like Amazon, Walmart, Target, Dollar Tree and Dollar General, which have reported huge profits this year while many of their smaller competitors were defeated completely as the coronavirus spread.

Then there are companies that have bet on the rapid digitization of everything Eric Yuan, the chief executive of Zoom, became a billionaire in 2019. Now he is worth almost $20 billion. Dan Gilbert, the chairman of Quicken Loans, was worth less than $7 billion in March, now he commands more than $43 billion. But there is a great deal of stratification (层化) even among billionaires—richer billionaires got even richer in 2020 than the poorer ones did. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s funder, was worth about $113 billion at the start of the pandemic. Now he is worth $182 billion. Two years ago, Bezos was the only “centibillionaire” on earth—the trendy neologism (a new word) for people whose wealth exceeds (超过) ￥100 billion.

【推荐1】Human speech contains more than 2,000 different sounds, from the common “m” and “a” to the rare clicks of some southern African languages. But why are certain sounds more common than others? A ground-breaking, five-year study shows that diet-related changes in human bite led to new speech sounds that are now found in half the world’s languages.

More than 30 years ago, the scholar Charles Hockett noted that speech sounds called labiodentals, such as “f” and “v”, were more common in the languages of societies that ate softer foods. Now a team of researchers led by Damián Blasi at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, has found how and why this trend arose.

They discovered that the upper and lower front teeth of ancient human adults were aligned (对齐), making it hard to produce labiodentals, which are formed by touching the lower lip to the upper teeth. Later, our jaws changed to an overbite structure (结构), making it easier to produce such sounds.

The team showed that this change in bite was connected with the development of agriculture in the Neolithic period. Food became easier to chew at this point. The jawbone didn’t have to do as much work and so didn’t grow to be so large.

Analyses of a language database also confirmed that there was a global change in the sound of world languages after the Neolithic age, with the use of “f” and “v” increasing remarkably during the last few thousand years. These sounds are still not found in the languages of many hunter-gatherer people today.

This research overturns the popular view that all human speech sounds were present when human beings evolved around 300,000 years ago. “The set of speech sounds we use has not necessarily remained stable since the appearance of human beings, but rather the huge variety of speech sounds that we find today is the product of a complex interplay of things like biological change and cultural evolution,” said Steven Moran, a member of the research team.

【推荐2】Some parents said that they had difficulty in getting along with their children. I heard many parents complaining that their teenage children are rebelling. I wish it were so. At your age you ought to be growing away from your parents. You should be learning to stand on your own two feet. But take a good look at the present rebellion. It seems that teenagers are taking the same way of showing that they disagree with their parents. Instead of striking out boldly on their own, most of them are holding firmly at one another’s hands for reassurance.

They claim they want to dress as they please. But they all wear the same clothes. They set off in new directions in music. But somehow they all end up crowded round listening to the same record. Their reason for thinking or actin g in thus-and-such a way is that the crowd is doing it. They have come out of their cocoon (蚕茧) into a larger cocoon.

It has become harder and harder for a teenager to stand up against the popularity wave and to go his or her own way. Industry has firmly carved out a teenage market. These days every teenager can learn from the advertisements what a teenager should have and be. And many of today’s parents have come to award high marks for the popularity of their children. All this adds up to a great barrier for the teenager who wants to find his or her own path.

But the barrier is worth climbing over. The path is worth following. You may want to listen to classical music instead of going to a party. You may want to collect rocks when everyone else is collecting records. You may have some thoughts that you don’t care to share at once with your classmates. Well, go to it. Find yourself. Be yourself. Popularity will come — with the people who respect you for who you are. That is the only kind of popularity that really counts.

【推荐3】The United States rose to global power on the strength of its technology, and the lifeblood of that technology has long been electricity. By providing long-distance communication and energy, electricity created the modern world. Yet properly understood, the age of electricity is merely the second stage in the age of steam, which began a century earlier.

“It is curious that no one has put together a history of both the steam and electric revolutions.”writes Maury Klein in his book The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America. Klein, a noted historian of technology, spins a narrative (叙述) so lively that at times it reads like a novel.

The story begins in the last years of the 18th century in Scotland, where Watt perfected “the machine that changed the world”. Klein writes,“America did not invent the steam engine, but once they grasped its possibility they put it to more uses than anyone else.”                                

Meanwhile, over the course of 19th century, electricity went from mere curiosity to a basic necessity. Morse invented a code for sending messages over an electromagnetic circuit. Bell then gave the telegraph a voice. Edison perfected an incandescent bulb (白炽灯泡) that brought electric light into the American home.

Most importantly, Edison realized that success depended on mass electrification,which he showed in New York City. With help from Tesla,Westinghouse’s firm developed a system using alternating current (交流电), which soon became the major form of power delivery.

To frame his story, Klein creates the character of Ned, a fictional witness to the progress brought about by the steam and electric revolutions in America during one man’s lifetime. It’s a technique that helps turn a long narrative into an interesting one.

【推荐1】Goffin’s cockatoos, a kind of small parrot native to Australasia, have been shown to have similar shape-recognition abilities to a human two-year-old. Though not known to use tools in the wild, the birds have proved skilful at tool use while kept in the cage. In a recent experiment, cockatoos were presented with a box with a nut inside it. The clear front of the box had a “keyhole” in a geometric shape, and the birds were given five differently shaped “keys” to choose from. Inserting the correct “key” would let out the nut.

In humans, babies can put a round shape in a round hole from around one year of age, but it will be another year before they are able to do the same with less symmetrical (对称的) shapes. This ability to recognize that a shape will need to be turned in a specific direction before it will fit is called an “allocentric frame of reference”. In the experiment, Goffin’s cockatoos were able to select the right tool for the job, in most cases, by visual recognition alone. Where trial-and-error was used, the cockatoos did better than monkeys in similar tests. This indicates that Goffin’s cockatoos do indeed possess an allocentric frame of reference when moving objects in space, similar to two-year-old babies.

The next step, according to the researchers, is to try and work out whether the cockatoos rely entirely on visual clues (线索), or also use a sense of touch in making their shape selections.

【推荐3】As cultural symbols go, the American car is quite young. The Model T Ford was built at the Piquette Plant in Michigan a century ago, with the first rolling off the assembly line(装配线) on September 27, 1908. Only eleven cars were produced the next month. But eventually Henry Ford would build fifteen million of them.

Modern America was born on the road, behind a wheel. The car shaped some of the most lasting aspects of American culture: the roadside diner, the billboard, the motel, even the hamburger. For most of the last century, the car represented what it meant to be American—going forward at high speed to find new worlds. The road novel, the road movie, these are the most typical American ideas, born of abundant petrol, cheap cars and a never-ending interstate highway system, the largest public works project in history.

In 1928 Herbert Hoover imagined an America with “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” Since then, this society has moved onward, never looking back, as the car transformed America from a farm-based society into an industrial

The cars that drove the American Dream have helped to create a global ecological disaster. In America the demand for oil has grown by 22 percent since 1990.

The problems of excessive(过度的)energy consumption, climate change and population growth have been described in a book by the American writer Thomas L. Friedman. He fears the worst, but hopes for the best.

Friedman points out that the green economy(经济)is a chance to keep American strength. “The ability to design, build and export green technologies for producing clean water, clean air and healthy and abundant food is going to be the currency of power in the new century.”