1 . Speeding off in a stolen car, the thief thinks he has got a great catch. But he is in for an unwelcome surprise. The car is filled with a remote immobilizer and a radio signal from a control center miles away will ensure that once the thief switches the engine off, he will not be able to start it again.

The idea goes like this. A control box fitted to the car contains a mini-cellphone, a micro-processor and memory, and a GPS satellite positioning receiver. If the car is stolen, a coded cellphone signal will tell the control center to block the vehicle’s engine management system and prevent the engine being restarted.

In the UK, a set of technical fixes is already making life harder for car thieves. “The pattern of vehicle crime has changed,” says Martyn Randall, a security expert. He says it would only take him a few minutes to teach a person how to steal a car, using a minimum of tools, but only if the car is more than 10 years old.

Modern cars are far tougher to steal, as their engine management computer won’t allow them to start unless they receive a unique ID code beamed out by the ignition(点火) key. In the UK, technologies like this have helped achieve a 31% drop in vehicle-related crime since 1997.

But determined criminals are still managing to find other ways to steal cars, often by getting hold of the owner’s keys. And key theft is responsible for 40% of the thefts of vehicles fitted with a tracking system.

If the car travels 100 meters without the driver confirming their ID, the system will send a signal to an operation center that it has been stolen. The hundred meters minimum avoids false alarms due to inaccuracies in the GPS signal.

Staff at the center will then contact the owner to confirm that the car really is missing and keep police informed of the vehicle’s movements via the car’s GPS unit.

2 . Dramas are usually called plays, and their creators are known as “playwrights” or “dramatists”. Some popular types of drama include comedy, tragedy, farce, opera and docudramas. Now, I’d like to tell you some popular types of drama.

Lighter in tone, comedies try to make the audience laugh and usually come to a happy ending. Comedies put unusual characters in special situations, causing them to do and say funny things. Comedies can also be sarcastic (讽刺的) in nature, creating fun serious topics. There are also several different types of comedy, including romantic comedy, a comedy of manners, and tragicomedy — plays in which the characters take on tragedy with humor while bringing serious situations to happy endings.

Tragedy is based on darker themes. Generally, tragedies show serious subjects like death, disaster, and human suffering in a way that makes the audience think. Hardly enjoying happy endings, characters in tragedies, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, are often troubled by tragic character flaws (缺点) that finally lead to their death.

A farce is a type of drama in which characters overact and present physical humor. Examples of farce include the play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and the hit 1980 movie Airplane! written by David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams.

Opera is a type of drama which combines theater, dialogue, music, and dance to tell stories of tragedy or comedy. Since characters express their feelings through singing rather than dialogue, performers must be both skilled actors and singers. The tragedy La boheme by Giacomo Puccini, and the comedy Falstaff by Giuseppe Verdi are classic examples of opera.

A docudrama is a relatively new kind of drama. Docudramas talk about historic events or non-fictional situations. More often presented in movies and television than in live theater, popular examples of docudramas include the movies Apollo 13 and Twelve Years a slave.

6 . You can relax if remembering everything is not your strong suit. Recent research makes the case that being forgetful can be a strength — in fact, selective memory can even be a sign of stronger intelligence.

Traditional research on memory has focused on the advantages of remembering everything. But looking through years of recent memory data, researchers Paul Frankland and Blake Richards of the University of Toronto found that forgetting can be just as important to our decision-making as what our minds choose to remember.

Making intelligent decisions does not mean you need to have all the information at hand, it just means you need to hold onto the most valuable information. And that means clearing up space in your memory palace for the most up-to-date information on clients(客户) and situations. Our brains do this by generating new neurons(神经元) in our hippo-campus(海马体), which have the power to overwrite existing memories that are influencing our decision-making.

When we forget the names of certain clients and details about old jobs, our brain is making a choice that these details do not matter. Although too much forgetfulness can be a cause for concern, the occasional lost detail can be a sign of a perfectly healthy memory system. The researchers found that our brains further decision-making by stopping us from focusing too much on minor past details.

If you’re an analyst who meets with a client weekly, your brain will recognize that this is a client whose name and story you need to remember. If this is someone you may never meet again, your brain will weigh that information accordingly.

We can get blamed for being absent-minded when we forget past events in perfect detail. These findings show us that our brains are working smarter when they aim to remember the right stories, not every story.

8 . I am traveling home. It is bitterly cold and snowy, but the warm train is right on time. I feel pleasantly satisfied as I look out at the rush hour traffic on the motorway. I feel more satisfied as the smell of fresh coffee announces the arrival of the drinks service. Swiss friends often tell me, proudly, that their rail service is the best in the world, but recently, one experience has proved that the great Swiss love affair with their railway has turned a little sour.

It all began with the decision to end ticket sales on trains. One cold morning I arrived at my local station only to find that the ticket machine was broken. No matter, I thought, I have got a smart phone, and I hurriedly set about buying my ticket that way. This was not as easy as I had expected, busying myself between credit card and phone with freezing cold fingers, but, by the time I got on the train to Geneva, I had an e-ticket and I proudly showed it to the conductor. Unfortunately she told me that my ticket was not valid. Several weeks later a letter arrived from Swiss railways together with a fine for 190 francs ($ 210).

The good people there tell me the formal payment for my ticket from my credit card company arrived four minutes after my train left the station. That means, they say, that I bought my ticket on the train—and that is strictly prohibited.

Swiss railways say their policy is designed to protect honest ticket-paying passengers, but a quick look at their balance sheet suggests something else. The company is making about $ 2 million a month from fines.

Although train travel is still popular, those seats do not feel as comfortable; the coffee does not smell quite so good—because Swiss railways have lost, for now anyway, something far more precious than $ 2 million a month: good relations with their customers.

9 . Welcome to Olympic National Park!

The park is located in the western state of Washington and it is on the Olympic Peninsula, in the northwest part of the state. It covers more than 400,000 hectares. Each area of the park offers visitors something special. Here are some places to go.

★ Elwha Valley

The Elwha Valley is in the central part of the park. It is the Olympic Peninsula’s largest watershed(分水岭). Long ago, the rivers in this area held the most salmon(鲑鱼) outside of Alaska. In the 1920s, a growing community of settlers built two hydroelectric(水力发电) dams to provide energy for the local economy. The dams created many problems for the river. They decreased the water in the rivers, which caused the fish population in the area to decrease. This affected the other animals that depended on fish for food.

The community later decided to fix these problems. In 1992, Congress passed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act. Both dams have been removed. Today, the Elwha River is the site of one of the largest ecosystem restoration projects in National Park Service history.

★ Hoh River Valley

The Hoh River is on the west side of the park. The river is formed from melted glacial ice on top of Mount Olympus. The river is 80 kilometers long. It empties into the Pacific Ocean.

The area receives about 400 centimeters of rain each year. Because of the amount of rain, many different types of plants grow in the Hoh rainforest.

The Hoh River Valley is protected from any logging or development.

★ Hurricane Ridge

Hurricane Ridge is a mountain area in the northern part of the park. It is easy to enter, and provides incredible views of the Olympic Mountains.

The ridge has many hiking paths. In winter, people come here to ski. They also come here to take part in other fun winter activities, like sledding and snowboarding.

Hurricane Ridge usually has snow from December through the end of March. Visitors must be prepared for icy roads and severe weather.