3 . It was a busy morning and I had several things to do before the day became too hot to be outside the house. As I was walking by the side of a busy road, I saw an old lady, maybe in her 80s, standing dangerously close to the traffic. Although my mind was preoccupied, I thought to myself that I should warn her not to stand so close to the busy traffic rushing by. When I reached the spot where the old lady was standing, I noticed that she was trying to get attention of passers-by who of course were too busy to take note of her.

She kept pointing to the middle of the road. When I tried to gently move her back further away from the edge of the busy road, she said that she was standing there because she dropped her house key in the middle of the road and was unable to enter her house without the key. I looked around and no one seemed to be interested in the two of us. I knew I was getting delayed but decided to help.

The traffic was busy on the road with people on two-wheelers or in cars as well as school buses rushing with school children. It was the worst time of the day to cross a busy road without a traffic light. I asked the old lady to stay at a safe distance, took a deep breath, and carefully stepped onto the road waving my hands crazily, fearing to be hit by an oncoming vehicle. At first one lane (车道) stopped and then I moved further on to the middle of the road continuing to wave my hands.

I quickly picked up the key and ran back to the old lady waiting by the side of the road and returned the key to her. As I turned to continue my hurried walk, the old lady pulled me by my hand and gave me a big warm hug. I felt so happy to have helped this old lady.

4 . Americans use many expressions with the word “dog”. People in the United States love their dogs and treat them well.     1     However, dogs without owners to care for them lead a different kind of life. The expression, to lead a dog’s life, describes a person who has an unhappy existence.

Some people say we live in a dog eat dog world.     2     They say that to be successful, a person has to work like a dog. This means they have to work very, very hard. Such hard work can make people dog tired. And, the situation would be even worse if they became sick as a dog.

    3     This means that every person enjoys a successful period during his or her life. To be successful, people often have to learn new skills. Yet, some people say that you can never teach an old dog new tricks. They believe that older people do not like to learn new things and will not change the way they do things.

    4     People who are unkind or uncaring can be described as meaner than a junkyard dog. Junkyard dogs live in places where people throw away things they do not want. Mean dogs are often used to guard this property. They bark or attack people who try to enter the property. However, sometimes a person who appears to be mean and threatening is really not so bad. We say his bark is worse than his bite.

Dog expressions are also used to describe the weather. The dog days of summer are the hottest days of the year. A rainstorm may cool the weather. But we do not want it to rain too hard.     5    

5 . Three young American men were on a crowded train when they encountered a heavily armed terrorist. With little regard for their personal safety, they rushed the terrorist and controlled him. Only some people seem capable of this split-second form of heroism. Why some men rise to the occasion—and others don’t—has been a bit tricky to explain. Psychologists have explored this question through biological and personality psychology.

Of course, heroism and courage can appear in many forms, and men and women risk their reputations, health, and social standing to do what they think is right. When it comes to physically risky bravery, people assume that men will take the lead. There are sound biological reasons for this fixed image. One of the most common fears in men is that they’ll be outed as a coward (懦夫), and a man who fails to display physical courage will suffer damage to his reputation in a way that a woman will not. Throughout human history, attaining a position of high status or dominance among one’s peers (同龄人) has been the ticket that needs to get punched for men to attract mates and father children.

People tend to have an idea of what heroes are like. When rating the personalities of movie heroes, participants expected them to be more careful and hard-working, open to experience, agreeable, and emotionally stable than the average person. But some studies indicate that people who exhibit heroic behavior score high on personality usually associated with madmen: risk-taking, sensation seeking, coolness under stress, and a tendency to take over in social situations.

The study of the relationship between personality and heroism is at an early stage. Psychologists are still at a loss to predict in advance who will heroically step up when needed. Often, the hero is an otherwise ordinary person who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances. Meanwhile, some individuals trained to behave heroically might hesitate during a crisis. Future disasters will cry out for further acts of true heroism. Hopefully, the right mix of circumstances and personalities enable courage to carry the day.

6 . Have you ever wondered about the universal layout (布局) of supermarkets? Smart designers are behind it, subtly tempting you to walk through each aisle and fill your cart without even realizing it.

Grocery store design is a carefully crafted art from both psychological and marketing standpoints, according to Reeves Connelly, who studied architectural design at the Pratt Institute. He explained there is a specific reason why fruit and vegetables are often located at the front of the store, “You’ll grab the fruits and vegetables first and then hopefully feel less guilty about buying junk food later on.” Meanwhile, essential items such as milk and eggs are placed at the back of the store to ensure customers walk through other aisles with many unhealthy options like snacks and sodas, potentially increasing the likelihood of impulse purchases.

There’s also a reason why you often feel lost in local supermarkets. Shockingly, they move things around. Reeves explained, “They are very much aware that these strategies become less effective after you visit the store a few times and get a better sense of where everything is, so they’ll regularly move the products to different aisles to confuse you. The practice is not limited to a specific store but is employed across various retail chains.”

“Their little tricks always work on me,” one regular shopper admits, “I walk in to get three things and end up spending $300; that’s why I hate grocery shopping,” he said. On the other hand, some shoppers are proud to declare they have never fallen into the trap. “That’s why I always keep a shopping list on me,” another shopper shared. “I’ve started having my groceries delivered. If I have to go to the store, I never grab a cart. If I can’t carry it, I’m not buying it,” he added.

7 . If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal (夜间活动的) species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings. Yet it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.

The benefits of this kind of engineering come with consequence called light pollution whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and completely changes the light levels and light rhythms to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life is affected.

In most cities the sky looks as though it has been emptied of stars, leaving behind a vacant haze (霾) that mirrors our fear of the dark. We’ve grown so used to this orange haze that the original glory of an unlit night—dark enough for the planet Venus to throw shadow on Earth—is wholly beyond our experience, beyond memory almost.

We’ve lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied country, when nothing could be further from the truth. Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being “captured” by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms. Migrating at night, birds tend to collide with brightly lit tall buildings.

Frogs living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses. Humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs. Like most other creatures, we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself.

Living in a glare of our making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural heritage—the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way—the edge of our galaxy—arching overhead.

9 . How to Avoid an Internet Addiction

It may seem like everyone surfs the web these days. But if you can’t have interest in other aspects of your life because of the Internet, you may be on your way to an Internet addiction. You might fear you’re the only one who has experienced that feeling.    1     Luckily, there are some ways to avoid living your life in front of the computer.

    2    

More and more people in the world are becoming addicted to the Internet, and you are not the only one with this problem. So do not be embarrassed. Just be brave to admit that you are on your way to an Internet addiction. And then find others with the same problem and help each other beat it.

Set aside limited time for computer use.

Make sure not to turn it on too many times a week. If you have a laptop, make sure to put it somewhere that you can remember but not somewhere that you see every day. Try keeping the lid closed when you are not using it.     3       If you have a desktop PC, try not to go near it or put something over it like a sheet.

Call people instead of sending instant messages or texts.

If you are free on weekends, call friends and ask them to go outside to do something you enjoy, like playing a sport. This will take your mind off the computer.     4    

Use an alarm clock or timer (计时器).

Before using your computer, decide on a time limit such as 30 minutes. Set the clock or timer and make sure that you get away from the computer when the time is up. Alternatively create a shutdown timer on your desktop.     5