Are you afraid of getting old?     1     we get past the age of 25, many of us immediately feel the urge to stop the signs of ageing — especially the visible ones. Men and women are now using topical “anti-ageing” creams, spa treatments and medical procedures     2     (oppose) many of them.

    3     these methods can somewhat affect the way you look, ageing is an internal process. A new study has found exactly when during your lifetime this process peaks.

A group scientists based out of the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered that     4     being a smooth, continuous process, ageing surges forward at three distinct stages of life: first, at the age of 34, then at age 60, and finally at 78.

The study, published in Nature Medicine,     5     (reveal) that scientists can not only predict your age by studying the proteome (protein levels in the blood) but also determine which organs are ageing faster than the others, and which age-related diseases your body is     6     (likely) to develop. The study measured plasma proteins (血浆蛋白) collected from 4,263 adults between the ages of 18-95 years and studied the changes in the proteome that occurred with age.

Their ultimate goal was to understand how to identify the changes associated with cardiovascular issues and age-related discases like Alzheimer’s     7     therapeutic treatments can be devised to oppose their attack while there’s still time.

Dr Tony Wyss-Coray, one of the leading members of the study, told Stanford Medicine News Center, “We’ve known for a long time that     8     (measure) certain proteins can give you information about a person’s health status — lipoproteins (脂蛋白) for cardiovascular (心血管的) health, for example. But it hasn’t been appreciated that so many different proteins’ levels — roughly a third of all the ones we looked at — change markedly with advancing age.”

This difference between the chronological (按时间计算的) and physiological (生理的) age, according to the scientists’ “plasma-protein clock”, showed that a lot of people in the study seemed younger than they actually are. What’s more, the study also confirmed that men and women, though equally     9     (represent) in the study, age differently.

Does this mean medicafions and lifestyle methods, with further research, can also be devised to help     10     ages too rapidly and is at risk of contracting age-related diseases like hypertension and Alzheimer’s? You never know.

What’s so bad about processed foods?

Processed foods like chips, soda and frozen pizzas are full of salt, sugar and fat. Now scientists are trying to understand if there is something else about such foods that may be bad for humans. Already, the spread of cheap, _________ foods has been linked to rising obesity rates around the world. Three recent studies offer more _________ on how our increaingly industrialized food supply may be affecting our health.

The researchers came up with a system that groups foods into four categories. The system says highly processed foods are made _________ of industrialized ingredients and additives. Sodas, instant noodles and chicken nuggets are some examples of highly processed foods. But also included are products that can _________ beneficial to health, such as morning cereals, energy bars and some kinds of yogurt.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health conducted a four-week study involving 20 people. They found that people eat about 500 more calories a day when _________ mostly processed food. That is compared with when the same people were given _________ processed foods. The researchers permitted the 20 participants to eat as much or as little as they wanted. They were taken to a medical center so their health and behavior could be _________.

In another study, researchers in France found people who ate more processed foods were more likely to have heart disease. A similar study in Spain linked eating more processed foods to a higher risk of death _________.

When given less processed foods, people in the study __________ more of a hormones that suppressed appetite, and less of a hormone that causes hunger. The reason for the __________ is not clear. The scientists also found that people ate processed foods faster.

Kevin Hall is one of the researchers who led the study. He told the AP that processed foods __________ be softer and easier to chew and swallow. Hall noted the source of nutrients might __________. Fiber from whole fruits and vegetables, for instance, may be better for making people feel full than the types of fiber added to packaged foods such as energy bars and yogurt.

Limiting processed foods can be hard, especially for people with limited time and energy. “What __________ me is when the message is, ‘Change the way we eat,’ without thinking about why people eat the way they eat,” said Sarah Bowen, a professor who studies food and inequality.

Another challenge is the broad range of processed foods, and __________ which ones might be better or worse as companies continually re-engineer products to mislead consumers. So while the newest studies may give us more reasons to avoid industrialized foods, they also underlie the difficulty of coming up with solutions.

The middle-aged woman with the black sweater around her shoulders had assumed an accurately adjusted posture: feet shoulder-width apart, arms slightly bent, fists loosely tightened, muscles relaxed yet alert.

She was not preparing for a tae kwon do match, but performing her personal version of the underground battle engaged in daily by millions of New Yorkers: reading, attentively, on a sardine-can D train heading swiftly toward Brooklyn in the evening rush.

“I am a New Yorker,” the woman, Robin Kornhaber, 54, told me as if those five crisp words explained everything. “I can do anything on the subway.”

Reading on the subway is a New York custom, for the masters of the intricately (错综复杂地) folded newspaper like Ms. Kornhaber, who lives in Park Slope and works on the Upper East Side, as well as for teenage girls thumbing through magazines, aspiring actors memorizing lines and immigrants taking comfort in paragraphs in a familiar tongue. These days, among the worn covers may be the occasional Kindle, but since most trains are still devoid of Internet access, the subway ride remains a rare low-tech interlude (插曲) in a city of multitasking workaholics. And so, we read.

Even without a seat, even while pressed with strangers into human panini, even as someone plays a keyboard harmonica and makes a loud noise with a cup of change, even when stumbling home after a party.

There are those whose commutes are carefully timed to the length of a Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker, those who systematically page their way through the classics, and those who always carry a second novel in case they unexpectedly make it to the end of the first on a slow F train. There is a lawyer from Brooklyn who for the past two months has catalogued what she and other commuters are reading on a blog, “The Subway Book Club,” and a student at the New School who spent the summer passing out 600 donated books to subway riders to spread her passion for reading.

And then there are those reading the readers, imagining their story lines. That man in a suit studying “Rosetta Stone Level 3 Italian” on the No.2 train must be preparing to meet his fiancée’s family in Tuscany. The woman reading a young-adult novel at 81st Street is probably a teacher preparing for class.

Of Special Interest to Freshman

Do not underestimate the power of revision in the days and hours before an examination. The closer you are to the exam, the more chance you have of storing and retaining crucial information. But do not overdo it.     1     An effective daily routine can help you through an exam period, so in the days leading up to your first exam, get into the habit of being up and ready to work by game. It can be a shock to the system after months of working to your own timetable to be mentally alert at that time if you have not prepared for it.

On the day of the exam, have a good breakfast, pack two of everything you need (pens, pencils, erasers, etc.), then make your way to the examination hall in good time.     2    

Once in your seat, simply pause for a few seconds and collect your thoughts. Close your eyes and take in a few slow, deep breaths to help you relax. When you turn over the test paper, spend a short period reading through all the instructions and questions, paying particular attention to key verbs such as "discuss", "compare" and "evaluate".     3     It is wise always to allow for 10 minutes at the end of the exam to give yourself time to go back over your answers. Once you have selected the questions you wish to tackle, begin by attempting the one you think is your strongest. It will give you more confidence when you see a well-answered question down on paper. Also remember to write clearly, and do not be afraid to express the unexpected: after all, examiners can get very bored marking stereotypical answers.

    4     If you do need something else to focus on to help collect your thoughts, choose a fixture in the room, such as the ceiling - or anything else that will not allow you to be distracted.

Finally, once you have finished, never hang around outside afterwards to attend the discussion by other students. Go and have a well-earned rest—then prepare for your next exam.

Offshore production

The world’s consumption of fashion is huge. The European Union imported textiles (clothing and carpets) to the value of €83.7 billion in 2010. Prices have fallen, too, with hand-finished shirts costing less than five euros. To make clothes at these low prices, companies have to keep costs down. They use offshore production to do this. Large companies make their products in developing countries where workers are paid much less than in developed countries.

A point that should be considered in that case is that developing countries encourage developed countries to invest in them to provide jobs. Supporters of overseas production point out that increased investment has positive effects in the long term. Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman points out that the growth in manufacturing has an impact on the rest of the economy, because it reduces the number of people needing to work in agriculture and increases competition for labour. This leads to higher wages, which lead to other improvements, such as the ability to send children to school. On the other hand, the disadvantage of this foreign investment is the fact that it can have a negative impact on the economy of developed countries, because people lose their jobs when production is outsourced to other countries.

It seems that if multinationals are going to benefit from low production costs by using overseas suppliers, they should do more to improve the social situation-for example, by building schools for the children in those communities. It is also clear that multinationals should invest in communities in the developed countries where they sell their products. Furthermore, given multinationals do benefit from lower costs of production in developing countries and their workers, they need to feel obliged to protect the workers in overseas manufacturing plants.