6 . For ten years, Hingorani and I have shared a wall. In all these years, we shared nothing more than that wall.

Hingorani lost her husband around eight months ago. Now, the 82-year-old former headmaster of Mumbai’s Jai Hind College lives alone in the apartment next door.

Knowing it would be difficult for her to manage things without any help, I started dropping by. When I found out that she loves meat and chicken, I went with a plate of butter chicken and kulchas. And we started to talk of course.

As we started to talk, I realized how different she was from what I had thought. And that’s where our friendship really began. I found that she related to me in a lot of ways — both of us married of our own free will, and she, too, was a working mother, We spoke about her relationship with her two sisters who live abroad and how they connect with each other every day.

Her liberal thinking, the way she raised her daughter, her love for her culture and stories of her teaching days — including how the boys at her college gave her a hard time — all made for great conversation. I never felt we were generations apart. She, too, loves my company and looks forward to my crazy stories without judgment. I tell her about the challenges I face when raising a child. A chat with her is like a warm hug at the end of a bad day.

Hingorani has become part of my daily life. I look forward to either having a cup of tea with her on her balcony or enjoying a glass of wine on a Saturday night. Our connection is pure. Our friendship is not limited by age. Instead, it is strengthened by the circumstances.

7 . A new study shows that eating nuts and peanut butter may help prevent one form of the disease diabetes (糖尿病). Adult-onset or Type Two diabetes affects about 135 million people around the world. The disease results when the body cannot produce or use a substance called insulin (胰岛素). Insulin is produced in the organ (器官) called the pancreas. Insulin helps turn sugar in foods into energy.

The Journal of the American Medical Association published the findings. Scientists from the Harvard University School of Public Health in Cambridge, Massachusetts completed the research. They studied more than 83,000 women for 16 years. The women were 34 to 59 years old. None of the women had diabetes, cancer or heart disease when the study began. During the study, more than 3,000 women developed diabetes.

The women answered questions every four years between 1980 and 1996. The researchers asked what they ate, including information about nuts and nut products. Some of the women ate nuts five days a week. The size of each serving weighed about 30 grams. Or, they ate a serving of peanut butter five days each week. Other women in the study did not eat nuts or peanut butter. Those who ate nuts five times a week were more than twenty percent less likely to develop Type Two diabetes than the women who did not eat nuts.

Although the study involved only women, the researchers believe eating nuts would also be good for men. The scientists say more research is needed to confirm the findings. But the study suggests that the fats in nuts may improve the way the body makes and uses insulin.

Nuts contain magnesium, which helps balance insulin and levels of sugar in the blood. The fats in nuts also may improve the body’s ability to process sugar in the blood. People who suffer from diabetes have too much sugar in their blood and urine, the body’s liquid waste.

Some teachers can have a great impact (影响) on us. Last year, in my second year of high school I had Mr. Smith as my teacher,     1     I will never forget. He was an     2     (amaze) teacher and was always ready to students and helping them achieve their greatest potential. I was not necessarily     3     best student when it came it writing compositions. Mr. Smith helped me and was always ready to answer my     4     (question), and I was grateful     5     it.

I remember the day of taking my final exam, I was the last one still writing in the exam room as always,     6     (review) my test paper. Everyone else     7     (leave) the room already except Mr. Smith. After turning in my exam paper, I started to leave the room,     8     I decided to turn around and say what I intended to say. I told him I sincerely thanked him for his great help and expressed my love for his lessons. Deeply     9     (touch) by my praise, he said he was proud that I had     10     (true) enjoyed his class.

This is him. He really knows how to inspire his students.

Successful English Speech Contest on Promoting Chinese Traditional Culture

10 . A new experiment shows that the more energy consumed by a clock, the more accurate its timekeeping.

Clocks consume energy and release heat. A kitchen clock, for example, does this by using up its battery. Generally the most accurate clocks require the most energy, which suggests a fundamental connection between energy consumption and accuracy. This is what an international team of scientists from Lancaster. Oxford, and Vienna set out to test.

To do this, they built a particularly simple clock, consisting of a super-thin membrane (薄膜), combined with an electronic circuit. Each vibration (振动) of the membrane generated one electrical tick (滴答). The inventive aspect of this design is that it is powered simply by heating the membrane, while the complete flow of energy through the clock can be measured electrically.

The scientists found that the more heat they supplied, the more accurately the clock ran. In fact, the accuracy was directly relative to the heat released. To make the clock twice as accurate, they needed to supply twice as much heat.

The experiment shows a similarity between the operation of a clock and a steam engine. With a steam engine there is fundamental restriction on how much heat we must supply to do a desired amount of work. This restriction is the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics (热力学) which is central to modern engineering. What this experiment suggests is that clocks, like engines, are restricted by the Second Law, with their output being accurate ticks instead of mechanical work.

Dr Edward Laird of Lancaster University said: “This experiment suggests that clocks are also restricted by thermodynamics. It also poses an interesting question: are all possible clocks limited in this way, or is it just a characteristic of the ones we have studied?”

Interestingly, many everyday clocks have an efficiency that is close to what the scientists’ analysis predicts. For example, their analysis predicts that a wristwatch whose accuracy per tick is one part in ten million must consume at least a microwatt of power. In fact, a basic wristwatch usually consumes only a few times this amount. The laws of thermodynamics, discovered in the nineteenth century, are still finding new applications today.