【推荐2】Once upon a time there was no tea at all in England. People there used to drink a light beer. No coffee or milk but large glasses of beer stood on the breakfast table.

When tea was first brought to England, an old couple got some as a special treat. But they did not know how it should be used. They cooked the leaves in hot water, and spread them on a piece of bacon which they were going to have for dinner. They ate the leaves and threw the tea away!

However, tea is becoming as popular as coffee and milk in England. Tea is the leaves of a plant which grows widely in China, Japan and some other countries. Tea farmers usually grow a great many tea plants on a large piece of land. When the tea leaves are ready to be picked, it is the busiest time for tea farmers in a year. They pull off the leaves and dry them. In their spare time, they pick out the best leaves and get them ready for markets. In China, whenever a visitor comes into a house, he is served with a cup of tea.

【推荐1】Have you ever seen people building houses? To build a house, you need workers. They use their hands, tools (工具) and machines to put things together. In fact, building the ISS (国际太空站) is the same. The difference is that the workers are all astronauts. They walk in space and use robots’ arms and hands to do their work.

In the space station, astronauts always feel easy, because the temperature there is always about 21℃. But outside the station, it can be too hot or cold for people. In the sunlight, it’s about 120℃; in the shadow of the station, its about -85℃. So when astronauts walk in space, they have to wear heavy clothes—spacesuits. These special clothes can make the astronauts feel as comfortable as in the space station.

Spacesuits also keep astronauts safe from flying rubbish (垃圾) in space. Each time people go into space they leave rubbish there. So astronauts should be careful because there’s a lot of rubbish—some rubbish goes many times as fast as a plane!

Space walking is not easy, and it can be dangerous. So getting ready for it takes a lot of time. Astronauts will need to do 160 space walks to finish their work in the ISS. That will take about 1, 900 man-hour of work.

【推荐2】Are people less happy or happier when they get older? If your answer is “happier”, then you are right. Study found that people generally become happier and experience less worry after age fifty. In fact, it found that by the age of eighty-five, people are happier with their life than they were at eighteen.

The findings came from a Gallup Survey of more than three hundred and forty thousand adults in the United States in 2008. Arthur Stone in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Stony Brook University In New York led the study. His team found that levels of stress (压力) were the highest among adults between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-five. Stress levels dropped greatly after people arrived at their fifties.

Levels of happiness were the highest among the kids and those in their early seventies.

The study also found that men and women have similar emotional patterns (情感模式) as they grow older. However, women at all ages were reported more sadness, stress and worry than men did.

So why would happiness increase (增长) with age? One theory (推测) is that, as people get older, they become more thankful for what they have and have better control of their emotions. They also spend less time thinking about bad experiences.