Ricky’s week started normally enough.

On Monday morning at breakfast time, while he was trying to read his computer game magazine, he had to listen to his sisters’ talk about boys.

“Steve is really good-looking,” said Jade.

“Good-looking? No, Hassa is good-looking...” said Sonia.

“No way!”

“And Ryan,” said Sonia, “and Tyler and Sam.”

“Sam has lovely hair,” agreed Jade. “And Tyler wears cool clothes.”

“Yeah, and Ryan is a good dancer,” added Sonia.

“You should learn to dance, Ricky,” said Jade. “Then you might get a girlfriend.”

Ricky blushed（脸红）.

On Tuesday, Ricky spent the whole evening in his room working at his computer. He had his own website. On Tuesday his class always had maths homework and Ricky always helped out his schoolmates with their problems.

Ricky was always a bit of a hero on Wednesday. His friends went up to him and thanked him for his help with their homework.

“Hey, Ricky, you are brilliant.” said Josh.

“You are another Einstein!” said Alex.

Teachers liked Ricky, too, especially the maths and science ones. Whenever they asked questions, Ricky always seemed to know the answers.

Friday was a cold day. But everyone was happy as the weekend started.

Ricky turned up the collar（衣橱）of his jacket. It was only five o’clock, but it was already getting dark. He was walking home alone. It was strange. Ricky was popular with the boys in his class, but he wasn’t close friends with any of them.                                          

—Adapted from Ricky and the American Girl

【推荐2】Why are dogs our best friends? Maybe because they can understand our words much better than we thought, according to a study in Hungary. It found that dogs understand not only what we say, but also how we say it.

“The results were very exciting and very surprising,” said researcher Attila Andics, from Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest.

For the study, the researchers first trained 13 dogs for months. The dogs had to sit quietly inside machines, so that the researchers could check their brain activity.

Then the researchers put headphones on dogs and played people’s voices to them. There were four different voices. Some were positive(积极的)words, such as “well done”, or neutral(不带感情色彩的)words like “however”. The words were also in different tones(音调). Some were positive and some were neutral.

Brain scans(扫描)showed that the dogs could recognize words, as well as the tone of words, much like people do. The positive words with a positive tone brought the stronger activity in their brain’s reward centers(反应中枢).

“It shows that for dogs, a nice phrase can work very well as a prize, but it works best if both words and tones match,” said Andics.

They also found that dogs deal with meaningful words with the left side of the brain and the tones with the right. Human brains work in the same way.

“It gave us a new understanding of language,” said Andics. “That is, not only do humans understand the meaning in words, other species(物种)do too.”

【推荐3】Has anyone ever told you that eating carrots will help you see in the dark? This is just one of many incorrect beliefs you may have heard. Below, TEENS has picked out scientific explanations for three mistakes that people make about their eyes. Let’s take a look.

Can eating carrots improve your eyesight?

Carrots are rich in vitamin A, which helps the eyes to turn light into information for your brain. This allows people to see in darker places. However, eating more carrots won’t help you see better. A certain minimum amount will help, but a large number of carrots will not give you superhuman eyesight.

If your parents have bad eyesight, will you have bad eyesight, too?

Myopia(近视)can be passed from parents to children. A study by the American Optometric Association found that if both parents are myopic, there’s a 33 to 60 percent chance that their child will be. For children who have one parent with myopia, the chance is 23 to 40 percent, and it’s down to 6 to 15 percent for kids with non-myopic parents. So if your eyesight is bad, your children might still have good vision.

Do color blind people see the world in black and white?

Color blindness doesn’t usually mean that people see the world like an old movie. They usually can’t tell certain colors apart, especially green and red. Another commonly confused pair of colors is yellow and blue. Our eyes have cone cells (视锥细胞) that sense different wavelengths (波长) of light. If these cells don’t work properly, color blindness occurs.

There are different levels of color blindness. Some people are only color blind in low light.

However, in the most serious form of color blindness, everything is shades of gray.

【推荐2】It’s said that China uses 45 billion pairs of chopsticks a year. Here’s some information about chopsticks.

History of chopsticks

Chopsticks have a long history of more than 3, 000 years in China. The recorded history of chopsticks is as early as the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046BC). According to an article about Chinese history, the emperor of the Shang Dynasty used chopsticks made of ivory.

Legends about how chopsticks were invented

★One is about Jiang Ziya. He was told by a bird to use bamboo sticks to pick up meat. When smoke came from bamboo sticks, he found out that his wife wanted to use poisonous food to kill him.

★Another is about Da Ji. She used to please Emperor Zhou by picking up hot meat with hair sticks.

★The third one is about Da Yu. He invented wooden chopsticks to pick up hot food to save time over the meal while preparing for flood control work.

Materials of chopsticks

●Bamboo has been the most popular material used for chopsticks because it is inexpensive, easy-to-get, resistant（抵抗的）to heat, and has no terrible odor or taste.

●Wood: Cedar, sandalwood, teak and pine have also been used.

●Jade（翡翠）and metal: In the past, the wealthy people had chopsticks made of jade. People also used some metals such as gold and silver to make chopsticks.

●Porcelain（瓷器）and plastic: These two materials are used in modern times because of the development of technology.