【推荐2】If you’re looking to lose weight or maintain healthy weight levels, it is important to include oatmeal (燕麦片) in your diet. It is highly nutritious, contains the best kind of complex carbs (碳水化合物), and is high in fiber. Let’s learn something about it.

●First and foremost, oatmeal is a perfect source of fiber, which is essential if you’re looking to lose weight. Simply put, including more fiber into your daily diet is the easiest way to drop those pounds. Why? Fiber makes you feel full in addition to digesting slowly, and so you eat less.

●Another factor is that oatmeal has a zero sugar index, meaning your body won’t need to produce the extra insulin (胰岛素) that transfers sugar into stored fat. It goes without saying that if you have less stored fat to begin with, you are going to weigh less.

If your goal is to lose weight, you should be aware that not all oatmeal is the same. The four most common types are steel-cut oatmeal, rolled oatmeal, quick oatmeal and instant oatmeal.

●Steel-cut oatmeal: It contains the most fiber and has the lowest blood sugar index. It is unprocessed and has a nuttier flavor than the other two whereas quick oatmeal has the mildest flavor.

●Rolled and quick oatmeal: They are nearly as good, so ultimately the decision is mostly about taste preference.

●Instant oatmeal: It contains added sugar and is highly processed, so you end up with none of the health benefits but with all of the things you shouldn’t be eating if you want to lose weight.

Although reducing your calorie intake and eating the right foods is important, any weight loss program should also include exercise so that you don’t lose muscle mass.

【推荐3】Chinese mooncake is the representative food of the Mid-Autumn Festival. It is a kind of round cookie with various fillings and different artistic patterns on the surface.

In Chinese culture, roundness symbolizes completeness and togetherness. The mooncake is not just a food. It’s a profound cultural tradition deep in Chinese people’s hearts, symbolizing a spiritual feeling. At Mid-Autumn Festival, people eat mooncakes together with family, and present mooncakes to relatives or friends to express love and best wishes.

As early as the Shang and Zhou dynasties in what today are Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces in east China, there was a kind of “Taishi cake” thick at the center and thin at the edge, which was the origin of the mooncake. In the Han Dynasty, sesame (芝麻) and walnuts were introduced into China, and round cookies filled with these foods appeared. In the Tang Dynasty, the name “mooncake” was used for the first time. In the Northern Song Dynasty, mooncakes got popular in the royal palace. It was not until the Ming Dynasty that the custom of eating these cookies during the Mid-Autumn Festival became popular.

Mooncakes vary according to different regional styles and tastes. Cantonese-style mooncakes are known for their sweetness. Suzhou-style mooncakes have existed for more than a thousand years. They have soft layers of dough (面团) and lots of sugar and lard, making them available in sweet or salty tastes. Beijing-style mooncakes feature the delicate use of sweetness and fine decoration. Chaoshan-style mooncakes are usually larger than other mooncakes with common fillings of red bean paste and potato paste.

Most mooncakes contain high amounts of sugar and oil, which are not healthy. To decrease the harmfulness that high fat and calories bring to our body, some foods are recommended to eat together with mooncakes, including tea, sour fruit like grapes, and wine. They help digest, and take away fat in our body. Also, do not eat too much at one time.

【推荐1】We watch our salt and fat intake to protect our hearts. We exercise and take calcium to protect our bones. We use sunscreen to protect our skin. But what can we do to protect our eyes, all year round? A lot.     1     .

Invest in quality sunglasses

To shield your eyes, wear sunglasses certified to block out 99 to 100 per cent of UVA and UVB light.     2     . “In fact, if the lenses are dark but not UV-protected, that’s worse for your eyes, because when you’re looking through dark lenses your pupils dilate, which lets more UV light inside to do damage,” says Dr Esen Akpek, a professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Wear safety glasses when needed

You don’t have to be doing construction work or factory work to need protective eyewear.     3     . It’s estimated that up to 90 per cent of sports-related eye injuries are actually preventable with proper eye protection. “I see people who’ve been gardening, leaned forward and got poked in the eye by a branch,” says Dr Davinder Grover, an ophthalmologist at Glaucoma Associates of Texas.

Invest in an air purifier

    4     . Outdoor cold and wind can be drying, too, while pollution and allergens can cause irritation. In addition to lubricating eye drops, “air purifiers and humidifiers are our friends,” says Akpek.

See an eye specialist regularly

Routine checkup helps maintain good eye health, so please don’t forget to see an eye specialist for a checkup regularly, if possible.     5     .

【推荐2】Fear is one of our strongest emotions. However, people with phobias(恐惧)have an extreme fear response that causes both physical and psychological pain. In everyday life, some phobia triggers(诱因)are much easier to avoid than others. For instance, people who suffer from a fear of bats are highly unlikely to be troubled by these creatures every day.     1    

The good news is that there are a variety of different methods used to treat phobias. Among the most popular are cognitive behavioral therapy(疗法), exposure therapy, and virtual reality therapy.

    2     It is thought that unreasonable anxiety is caused by a patient’s negative interpretation of events, rather than the events themselves. CBT is a talking therapy that helps patients assess their reactions to situations, replacing the worry cycle with more useful or realistic thoughts.

The aim of exposure therapy is to gradually desensitize(使脱敏)the patients to the source of their phobia.     3     A person who fears spiders might place thinking about a spider at the bottom of the list, and having a spider move along his arm at the top. With the help of a psychologist, the patient systematically works their way through the list, using relaxation techniques until they are comfortable with each stage.

Exposure therapy isn’t a usable option for all phobias.     4     Advancements in virtual reality systems mean that patients can now face their fears through a headset rather than in the real world.     5     In the case of people with a phobia of flying, they can take a course of sessions in which they board a virtual plane and experience announcements, take-off and landing without having to buy a plane ticket each week.

【推荐2】Are you spending your holidays sitting around bored with nothing to do? You can find many ways to fill your days.     1    

Spend time with your friends. If you can't think of things to do, one of your friends probably can.     2    

Help others. If you have nothing you need to do for yourself, you may want to volunteer to help someone else. Ask friends and relatives if they have any projects they need help on, and, if so, offer your services!

    3     The holidays are a great opportunity to have conversations with family members you haven't seen for a long time. For instance, you might want to visit your grandparents and have a quality talk with them. You might be surprised how funny some of your relatives have become without your noticing.

Spend time with your pet if you have one. You might be happy to stay with an animal friend, especially if it's with one you haven't seen for a while.     4     So spend a little time walking with them, playing with them. etc.

Hold a party. Having a party is a great way to have fun. You can invite your friends and have a party together.     5     If it's cold, you and your friends can stay inside and have a nice cup of coffee.

【推荐3】In 1954, computer scientists from Georgetown University and IBM invented a machine that could translate sentences from Russian into English. The machine translator became known as Georgetown-IBM experiment and it was the first electronic translator in the world.

The scientists believed that a universal translator was just around the corner. Leon Dostert, who led the experiment, even suggested that people might be able to use electronic translators to bridge several languages within five years, or even less. However, the process proved far slower and more than 60 years later, a true universal translator is still the stuff of science fiction.

Then how far are we from inventing a real one? Experts’ opinions vary. “We’re very close to turning science fiction into a reality,” says Vikram Dendi, the technical adviser to Microsoft. “Microsoft has produced apps that can translate voice to voice and voice to text in addition to the familiar text to text in different languages.”

Microsoft, of course, is far from alone. Google, in addition to its familiar text translations, has just introduced a feature in its Translate app that uses the phone camera to scan an image of foreign text and display the translation.

“All these apps are based on the so-called neural networks which can learn similarly to the way humans learn,” adds Vikram Dendi.

However, early on, scientists had to teach computers to translate by typing in every rule for every language pair they wanted them to translate. In the face of the large number of rules and exceptions in every language pair, the approach quickly became impractical. In the 1980s, scientists began moving toward a statistical-based model. Neural networks, which became a popular tool for machine translation researchers in the 21st century, greatly improved the quality of translations.

“But neural networks still face some limits,” says Yoshua Bengio, a computer science professor at the University of Montreal. “One of them is the amount of data required. Children need far less to learn the basics of a language than these machines do. But the more you use these machine translators, the better they become.”