5 . How would you feel if you were invited to the moon? If you found a gold coin, would you save it, give it to charity or use it for a holiday? Personality quizzes of this kind, known as “psychometrics”, have bothered many job seekers. Now, it is being applied to the oldest problem in finance: will a borrower repay?

In rich countries, lenders use credit scores to weigh risk. But just 7% of Africans and 13% of South Asians are covered by credit bureaus (征信机构). Bailey Klinger of the Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL), which explores new kinds of credit data, argues that psychometrics could include many more people in the financial system. Everyone has a personality, after all.

Judging character is not new. Psychometrics attempts to make it a science. The model developed by EFL has undergone many tests and adapted to different cultures. Its collected data reflect something unnoticed. For instance, young optimists are risky, but old ones are a safe bet.

Clever design cuts cheating. There are no obvious right answers; responses are cross-checked for consistency. The model monitors mouse movements for signs of indecision or distraction. When borrowers lie to get a loan, they often do so in predictable ways. In an EFL test, people are shown pictures of five drinks and asked which one they would be. Choosing water over something with small bubbles may be a sign of cheating.

This sounds fanciful, but there is evidence that it works. In one Indonesian bank, combining psychometrics with existing customer data cut default (违约) rates for small businesses by 45%. A study by the World Bank found that EFL’s model increased lending to those without a credit history.

The technique needs further development. At present, turning to credit bureaus is still the best way to tell if somebody will repay a loan. But bureaus improve more slowly than technology. Lenders will find ever more ways to look into their customers’ souls.

6 . Ahh... Fish, chips and mushy peas! There is nothing more British than fish and chips. Freshly cooked, boiling hot fish and chips, topped with salt and seasoned with vinegar, packed in newspaper and eaten out-of-doors on a cold and wintry day — it simply cannot be beaten!

    1    

Both Lancashire and London claim to be the first to invent this famous meal. Chips were a cheap, basic food of the industrial north while fried fish was introduced in London’s East End.     2     So was born our national dish of fish and chips!

    3     Mr. Lees sold fish and chips from a wooden shelter in the market. Later he moved the business to a permanent shop across the road. However in London, it is said that Joseph Malin, a Jewish immigrant, opened a fish and chip shop in Cleveland Way within the sound of Bow Bells in the 1860s.

Fish and chip shops were originally small family businesses, often run from the front room of the house and were commonplace by the late 19^th century. Through the latter part of the 19th century and well into the 20th century, the fish and chip trade expanded greatly to satisfy the needs of the growing industrial population of Great Britain. Fish and chips became vital to the diet of the ordinary people.     4    

In 1999, the British consumed nearly 300 million servings of fish and chips. That equates to six servings for every man, woman and child in the country.     5     That’s eight for every one Burger King restaurant, making British Fish and Chips the nation’s favourite take-away.

7 . Have you ever found picking out the face of a friend in a group photo is sometimes hard, especially when everyone crowds together? In the same way, it can also be hard to read a passage of text when the letters are too close together. In fact, a new study shows that spacing the letters farther apart can help anyone read faster, and possibly understand more.

Dyslexia is a common reading disorder. Crowded text was especially difficult for people with dyslexia to read. So researchers wanted to see if increasing the spacing between letters would help.

Steven Stagg, a scientist, studies how people think and learn. His team recruited 59 students between 11 and 15 years old, thirty-two of whom had dyslexia. While the researchers recorded them, each student read two passages out loud. One passage was in its original format. In the other, there was an increase of 2.5 points in the spacing between the litters. The recording allowed the scientists to measure their reading speed and count any mistakes, such as skipped words.

People with dyslexia often employ aids to help them read, such as colored overlays (覆盖物). This time they are offered by the researchers. Those colored overlays didn’t help either group of kids. However, kids with dyslexia read the wider-spaced text 13 percent faster than the text with original spacing. These kids also made fewer mistakes. Students without dyslexia read faster, too, although only by 5 percent.

This is very good news. It means teachers and publishers can print material with extra spacing between litters. Readers with dyslexia won’t feel singled out by having to use special aids for reading. An organization called Readability Matters is working on these issues. The group is trying to get tech companies to make changes that should make reading easier.

Stagg says, “Some methods have shown mixed results, but Letter spacing seems to be the one thing that everyone is finding works.”

8 . Mike Mushaw joined the national bone marrow registry (骨髓登记) three years ago by chance. Six months later, he got a call. The 21-year-old football player's bone marrow matched a patient in Virginia. Mushaw gave a second thought to the donation, because apart from some risks, he never knew whether his donation worked.

“Finally I said yes,” Mushaw told the journalist. “Once they took my blood, I thought, ‘All right, this is real. This is going to happen.’”

Mushaw didn't know it at the time, but his donation would go to a five-month-old girl named Eleanor who was sick with a rare disease diagnosed when she was only three months old. Days and weeks passing, her condition had become more dire.

“Eleanor was going to die without a bone marrow transplant,” her mother, Jessica, said. “The choices were to either get a transplant or die early. Luckily, Mushaw’s bone cured her.”

Mushaw didn't know any of this until months after his donation. About six months after the procedure, Eleanor's parents sent him an e-mail to thank him for his selfless love.

Their surprising connection was beginning. Mushaw kept checking on her progress. Eleanor focused her attention on him, too, by watching his football games on TV. In August, Mushaw invited her family to drive from Virginia to Connecticut to meet at one of his games. They had a good time together.

In January, Mushaw reunited with Eleanor, this time in Virginia, to celebrate her birthday. It will likely be first of many celebrations together. “As a parent, it feels really great to watch someone love your kid as much as you do,” Jessica says. “We were two complete strangers, and now we've become such a big part of each other's lives.”

10 . When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow. So at least he thought, and there was a certain amount of evidence to back him up. He had once been an actor—no, not quite, an extra—and he knew what acting should be. Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage: it is harder to find out how he feels. He came from the twenty-third floor down to the lobby on the mezzanine to collect his mail before breakfast, and he believed — he hoped — that he looked passably well: doing all right. It was a matter of sheer hope, because there was not much that he could add to his present effort. On the fourteenth floor he looked for his father to enter the elevator; they often met at this hour, on the way to breakfast. If he worried about his appearance it was mainly for his old father's sake. But there was no stop on the fourteenth, and the elevator sank and sank. Then the smooth door opened and the great dark-red uneven carpet that covered the lobby billowed toward Wilhelm's feet. In the foreground the lobby was dark, sleepy. French drapes like sails kept out the sun, but three high, narrow windows were open, and in the blue air Wilhelm saw a pigeon about to light on the great chain that supported the marquee of the movie house directly underneath the lobby. For one moment he heard the wings beating strongly.

Most of the guests at the Hotel Gloriana were past the age of retirement. Along Broadway in the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, a great part of New York's vast population of old men and women lives. Unless the weather is too cold or wet they fill the benches about the tiny railed parks and along the subway gratings from Verdi Square to Columbia University, they crowd the shops and cafeterias, the dime stores, the tearooms, the bakeries, the beauty parlors, the reading rooms and club rooms. Among these old people at the Gloriana, Wilhelm felt out of place. He was comparatively young, in his middle forties, large and blond, with big shoulders; his back was heavy and strong, if already a little stooped or thickened. After breakfast the old guests sat down on the green leather armchairs and sofas in the lobby and began to gossip and look into the papers: they had nothing to do but wait out the day. But Wilhelm was used to an active life and liked to go out energetically in the morning. And for several months, because he had no position, he had kept up his morale by rising early: he was shaved and in the lobby by eight o'clock. He bought the paper and some cigars and drank a Coca-Cola or two before he went in to breakfast with his father. After breakfast—out, out, out to attend to business. The getting out had in itself become the chief business. But he had realized that he could not keep this up much longer, and today he was afraid. He was aware that his routine was about to break up and he sensed that a huge trouble long presaged(预感)but till now formless was due. Before evening, he'd know.

Nevertheless he followed his daily course and crossed the lobby.

Rubin, the man at the newsstand, had poor eyes. They may not have been actually weak but they were poor in expression, with lacy lids that furled down at the corners. He dressed well. It didn't seem necessary—he was behind the counter most of the time—but he dressed very well. He had on a rich brown suit; the cuffs embarrassed the hairs on his small hands. He wore a Countess Mara painted necktie. As Wilhelm approached, Rubin did not see him; he was looking out dreamily at the Hotel Ansonia, which was visible from his corner, several blocks away. The Ansonia, the neighborhood's great landmark, was built by Stanford White. It looks like a baroque palace from Prague or Munich enlarged a hundred times, with towers, domes, huge swells and bubbles of metal gone green from exposure, iron fretwork and festoons. Black television antennae are densely planted on its round summits. Under the changes of weather it may look like marble or like sea water, black as slate in the fog, white as tufa in sunlight. This morning it looked like the image of itself reflected in deep water, white and cumulous above, with cavernous distortions underneath. Together, the two men gazed at it.

Then Rubin said, “Your dad is in to breakfast already, the old gentleman.”

“Oh, yes？Ahead of me today？”

“That's a real knocked-out shirt you got on,” said Rubin.“Where’s it from, Saks？”

“No, it’s a Jack Fagman—Chicago.”

Even when his spirits were low, Wilhelm could still wrinkle his forehead in a pleasing way. Some of the slow, silent movements of his face were very attractive. He went back a step, as if to stand away from himself and get a better look at his shirt. His glance was comic, a comment upon his untidiness. He liked to wear good clothes, but once he had put it on each article appeared to go its own way. Wilhelm, laughing, panted a little; his teeth were small; his cheeks when he laughed and puffed grew round, and he looked much younger than his years. In the old days when he was a college freshman and wore a beanie(无檐小帽)on his large blonde head his father used to say that, big as he was, he could charm a bird out of a tree. Wilhelm had great charm still.

“I like this dove-gray color,” he said in his sociable, good-natured way. “It isn’t washable. You have to send it to the cleaner. It never smells as good as washed. But it’s a nice shirt. It cost sixteen, eighteen bucks.”