1 . Whether you are a fine art lover or history enthusiast, there are some museums that you should visit in your lifetime. Here’s a list of the best museums in the world.

LE LOUVRE, PARIS

A visit to the Louvre lets visitors discover ancient civilizations and Western art from the Middle Ages to 1848. The palace of the museum, dating back to the twelfth century and developed by architects from 1200 to 2011, is a lesson in architecture. The most famous art work is Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”.

THE UFFIZI GALLERIES, FLORENCE

The museum occupies a large building constructed between 1560 and 1580. It’s famous for its outstanding collections of ancient sculptures and paintings from the Middle Ages to the Modern period, and mainly known for its paintings by Italian artists.

THE BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON

As the first national museum to cover all fields of human knowledge, it was founded in 1753 and opened its doors in 1759. Its eight million objects allow us to explore the diversity of human cultures, and discover the expressions in human being’s life. It boasts the world’s second finest collection of Egyptian antiques.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

Also known as “the Met”, it’s the largest art museum in the America. Presenting over 5,000 years of art from around the world, the museum lives in two sites in New York: The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters. Since its founding in 1870, it has been a treasury of rare and beautiful objects, ranging from European paintings, Egyptian collections to American paintings.

2 . Artists everywhere are getting “understandably nervous” about recent advances in artificial intelligence. Last month, a winner of an art prize at the Colorado State Fair “sparked a violent protest” when he posted the news and explained that he’d created his image using an AI program. Critics quickly accused 39-year-old Lance Allen of cheating. To be fair, Allen had won in the digital art category and made no secret of how the image had been produced. But the rules of art making are clearly changing.

Allen’s creative process, to be clear, “was not a push-button operation, ”said Jason Blain in Forbes. He claims to have spent 80 hours on his entry, first on fine-tuning his text prompts (提示), then by touching up the final image using Photoshop and similar tools, then arranging to print the image on canvas. He made the finished product using AI much as a photographer creates an image using a camera.

But Allen, a tabletop game developer, is awed by AI’s capabilities and urges artists and illustrators to welcome the technology rather than fight it. “Art is dead,” he says. “AI won. Humans lost.” A more inspiring lesson to take from his victory, though, is that image generators are likely to “expand the appreciation for and creation of art” by opening the field to people, like him, who could never draw anything as detailed as his award-winning image. “If anything, we will have more artists,” and as the technology progresses, “we might see the emergence of art styles that none have seen before.”

You can’t blame traditional artists if they’re unhappy. Image generators work their magic, after all, by analyzing the aesthetics (美学) of millions of pre-existing images. One of the most complicated image generators “makes crystal clear just how destructive this technology will be,” said Loz Eliot in New Atlas. Given a specific prompt, it can produce an image of just about anything you can imagine and even follow the style of a favorite artist’s work. Its arrival marks “an incredible popularization of visual creativity” while aiming “a knife to the heart of anyone who’s spent decades improving their artistic techniques hoping to make a living from them.”

4 . In July 1915, sick James Murray, one of the early editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), defined one final word. He had devoted 36 years to the dictionary. Knowing he would not see the project complete, he wrote his last entry: for “twilight”.

The story of Murray’s final days is one of many memorable tales in “The Dictionary People”. Conceived (构思) in 1857, the OED was a huge crowdsourcing project comprising 3,000 people. The idea was to create a “descriptive” dictionary that tracked words’ use and meaning over time. Volunteers read widely, mailing in examples of how “rare, old-fashioned, new” words were used. What is surprising about this random method is that it worked, achieving order through the large number of contributors.

The origin story of Sarah Ogilvie’s book is almost as improbable as that of the dictionary itself. Ms Ogilvie, an editor for the OED, went into the archives (档案馆) of Oxford University Press and came across an old notebook. It had belonged to Murray and contained the names and details of the dictionary volunteers, most of whom had previously been unknown. “The Dictionary People” is her work of detective scholarship, presenting the lives behind the names.

The dictionary’s contributors are an engaging cast, including one of Karl Marx’s daughters and J. R. R. Tolkien. For some, the dictionary was something addictive: one contributor supplied 165,061 quotations. Murray, too, was assiduous. He once wrote to George Eliot to ask about a word choice in “Romola”, published 17 years earlier.

Ms Ogilvie’s book is full of strange but interesting tales. Many dictionary lovers engaged in another crowdsourcing fashion: collecting and measuring rainwater. The presentation of the book is irregular, too, taking its structure from the work it describes. For example, in her first chapter, “A for Archaeologist (考古学家),” she relates the early life of Margaret A. Murray, a pioneering Egyptologist. There are 26 alphabetical (按字母顺序排列的) chapters, each celebrating a group of contributors. This is a clever concept.

5 . Is going alone in an unknown area the right way to go, or do you want a tour guide to show you the highlights? I think that you can combine the two ways in one trip and have the best of both worlds.     1     The best purchase we made was for a bus tour that would take us around the capital and point out all the main sites. That allowed us the next day to travel on foot to the ones we especially wanted to see.

Let’s look at the San Francisco Bay Area which is another one of my favorite vacation spots. Some areas are so familiar to tourists that it’s possible to view the attractions on your own.     2     Fisherman’s Wharf and Pier 39 are good examples. Just by walking a few blocks, you can tour Aquarium of the Bay and the Riptide Arcade on Pier 39.

    3     If you go to Alcatraz Island, you have a choice of going alone, having a live tour guide or being guided by earphones. I would recommend the live tour guides. I went all three ways, and I received more enjoyment by someone telling me items interest I know I had missed on previous tours.     4     It gives you a behind-the-scenes look of colorful Chinatown. The tour covers history, traditions of the local people and culture that you probably wouldn’t know or see by travelling alone.

You can go alone to attractions or take a guided tour. It’s your choice and you can choose whichever would give you the most memorable experience.     5    

7 . Demographic changes, such as aging populations and declining birth rates, pose challenges as well as offer opportunities for industries and countries. To overcome the challenges and seize the opportunities, especially to achieve long-term economic sustainability, economies need to enhance policies promoting innovations.

Now many countries in East Asia are facing the aging population and declining working-age population problem. Compared with other advanced countries, Japan encountered the population aging problem at a slightly earlier stage, starting in the mid-1990s. As Japan’s percentage of elderly population to the total population increased, it impacted the country’s economy, leading to a contraction in domestic demand and decline in both production and consumption, and restricting the growth of economy.

Some innovative companies have actively increased outward FDI (Foreign Direct Investment), providing cost advantages from inexpensive overseas labor to maintain their cost competitiveness. However, the global economy is facing the challenge of declining trade owing to the protectionism practiced by certain countries. Consequently, the chances of boosting growth through outward FDI may be limited.

Developing artificial intelligence is another solution to the negative impacts of the demographic changes. AI and robotics will play a crucial role in stimulating productivity and innovation by making payment for the decline in the working-age population, and the following increase in productivity will in turn raise the demand for labor by creating new employment opportunities.

AI, robotics and other advanced technologies give rise to new tasks within their fields and across other sectors. Therefore, it is necessary to employ cooperation policies to support corporations that promote innovations by increasing investment in research and development, facilitating the growth of new companies, and building a perfect system to protect intellectual properties. Since AI and robotics may replace certain jobs, it is essential to address the potential challenges they may create in the labor market and work out strategies to ensure a balanced and comprehensive transition.

I clearly remember the day I walked into class with a big change — my very first pair of eye glasses and I was the first to wear glasses in my primary school. I was filled with excitement, eager to show them off to my friends. I had chosen pink framed glasses, thinking they would look fantastic on me.

I had never worn glasses before, so selecting them felt like a fun shopping experience. I got to pick the shape I liked and even chose a pretty pink and purple colour combination.

The reason behind getting the glasses was my poor eyesight. I couldn’t copy words and proper grammar from the blackboard because I sat at the back of the class, and everything was too vague for me to see. My friend would read aloud every phrase to me so that I could write them down, like a parrot.

Wearing those glasses was like stepping into a 3D cinematic world. I could see everything as clearly and each tiny detail felt like a delightful surprise.

However, on the day I wore my glasses to school, everyone’s reaction to my transformation was beyond my expectation. All the boys laughed and even teased me. Some kind-hearted girls forced a smile and told me that my glasses looked good on me, but I knew they didn’t. They all lied.

Though I needed those glasses more than I wanted them, yet I started to dislike my new glasses in the following week. A month passed, my classmates still weren’t used to seeing me in glasses and I took them off during the lunch break or when the classes were dismissed. However, little did I know that my decision to wear them would change the lives of many of my friends.

One Monday, one of my friends looked at me with curiosity.

A week later, I was shocked to see the same friend return to school with a pair of glasses.

9 . On a hot afternoon Rhiannon was driving her old van down the highway. As she ________ her window to let in some fresh air, her car registration paper blew off the sun visor (防晒板) and onto the floor inside. When leaning down to ________ it, she accidentally drifted into oncoming traffic. In panic, she over-corrected and pulled the ________ sharply in the other direction. ________, the van rolled over three times, and Rhiannon was thrown onto the road, lying in the middle of the road and bleeding, nearly ________.

A medical student witnessed the accident and came to her ________. He covered Rhiannon with his coat and gave her emergency first aid, including ________ the wound on her left arm before the ambulance arrived.

________, Rhiannon was rushed to a hospital where an emergency room doctor spent hours ________ all the pieces of windshield (挡风玻璃) from her arm, and gave her three dozen stitches (缝针).

Luckily, Rhiannon was saved. Not for the bandage, she would not have ________long enough for the emergency personnel to arrive. Though Rhiannon didn’t know him, she was grateful to the medical student who saved her life. So she ________ the words online, “It’s a pity that I don’t know your name. If you happen to see or hear this story and recognize yourself, thank you for your kind ________.”

Rhiannon also had a message for the other ________ heroes, “Please consider this a pay-it-forward letter of ________— a letter from the ________ you helped who, for whatever reason, couldn’t thank you themselves.”