Google's self-driving cars have gone a total of 100000 miles with no accidents and now the company is working towards making their cars even safer. Google recently secured a patent for technology to communicate with pedestrians.

    The details of the patent show that the car will be able to sense when a person is standing in front of or close to it and will then decide the next step to take. The screens, which can be fixed on the doors or hood(引擎盖) could flash warnings like “Stop”, “Safe Cross” or a traffic sign that will inform pedestrians about what the car is doing. The speaker system can shout out the text shown on the screens and send out other warning messages.

    The patent says, “The car may include sensors which detect a pedestrian trying or about to cross the roadway in front of it. The car's computer system may provide a notification(告示) to the pedestrian of what the car is going to do or is doing.”

    This past Halloween, Google was teaching cars how to recognize children who dressed up for the holiday, part of a feature that is educating them how to react and act around children.

    It is also said that an eye or robotic arm will be added that can tell pedestrians the car has “seen” them. The arm could mimic that of a human, as it “sweeps” for pedestrians to cross, but the message can come across unclear when it's coming from a robot and not a real person.

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By teaching your children fire safety you can make sure they know what to do when a house fire occurs. Making sure that your children know exactly what is required of them cuts down on the chaos of the emergency situation and helps keep your family safe and secure.

    Make sure your children know how to correctly stop, drop, and rolland feel confident in the fact that it works. It puts out the flames. The usual response to clothing catching on fire is to run around and run about wildly, which only exposes the fire to more oxygen and feeds the flames.

    Your children should also know to touch door handles before opening the door to see if they are hot. If they are, it means that there is a  fire in the next room, and they should leave the door closed and find  another route out of the house.

    Make sure your children understand that they should never play with Lighters or matches. Fires started by playing with these things are theleading course of fire-related injuries in children under five years old.

Many children are fascinated by lighters and matches and want to experiment with lighting things on fire to see what happens.

      Do regular fire drills to practice your evacuation plan so that your Family .Knows what to do in an emergency. Make sure everyone knows all the possible exit points of the house that they can use; a fire in your home will be a chaotic situation,and it’s best to make sure all members of your family know your evacuation plan well enough so that it is second nature  and they don’t have to waste time thinking if a fire starts.

      Quick, determined response to a fire will save your family members’lives.

Sometimes it is difficult to talk to taxi drivers.They must give all their attention to the road as they work out the shortest way to the place where you are going.However，passengers from Wangfujing were in surprise when they took a taxi.The driver just would not stop talking—in English.

Organized by the Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy，“Dare to Speak”examines if Chinese people will speak English in“real­life”situations.

Matthew Knowles，an acting student from South Carolina at Beijing Film Academy，acted the part as the“driver”.He collected six passengers on Saturday morning，most of whom were female white­collar(白领) workers.

“Of course they were surprised at first，wondering why I’m driving a taxi，and wondering whether this is a real taxi，but then most of them were pretty willing to speak，”he said.Knowles said he was also surprised by his“passengers”.“Apart from my first‘passenger’，who could speak very little English，all the rest spoke English very well，and it was fun to communicate with them，”he said，adding that some“passengers”were quite talkative.

The“foreign taxi driver”project was just one of the“Dare to Speak”activities，which have been going on since the end of October.Other projects included a foreign store owner near a high school in Beijing，a cook in a Shanghai university canteen.They were testing the willingness of Chinese people，especially students and white­collar workers，to speak to foreigners in English.

Rong Xin，senior manager of IELTS(雅思) with the British Embassy，said they hoped to let IELTS takers in China know that communication is the ultimate goal of IELTS.

“We hope that more and more IELTS takers in China can realize the importance of communicating in English in real life，instead of just getting high test scores，”she said.

Many facts suggest that children are overweight and the situation is getting worse, according to the doctors. I feel there are a number of reasons for this.

    Some people blame the fact that we are surrounded by shops selling unhealthy, fatty foods, such as fried chicken and ice cream, at low prices. This has turned out a whole generation of grown-ups who seldom cook a meal for themselves. If there were fewer of these restaurants, then probably children would buy less take-away food.

    There is another argument that blames parents for allowing their children to become overweight. I agree with this, because good eating habits begin early in life, long before children start to visit fast food shops. If children are given fried chicken and chocolate rather than healthy food, or are always allowed to choose what they eat, they will go for sweet and salty foods every time, and this will carry on throughout their lives.

    There is a third reason for this situation. Children these days take very little exercise. They do not walk to school. When they get home, they sit in front of the television or their computers and play computer games. Not only is this an unhealthy pastime (消遣), it also gives them time to eat more unhealthy food. What they need is to go outside and play active games or sports.

    The above are the main reasons for this problem, and therefore we have to encourage young people to be more active, as well as steering them away from fast food shops and bad eating habits.

What is eBay（易趣—知名网上购物网站）？The simple answer is that it is a global trading platform where nearly anyone can trade practically anything.People can sell and buy all kinds of products and goods，including cars，movies and DVDs，sporting goods，travel tickets，musical instruments，clothes and shoes—the list goes on and on. 
    The idea came from Peter Omidyar，who was born in Paris and moved to Washington when he was still a child.At high school，he became very interested in computer programming and after graduating from Tuft University in 1988，he worked for the next few years as a computer engineer.In his free time he started eBay as a kind of hobby，at first offering the service free by word of mouth.By 1996 there was so much traffic on the website that he had to upgrade(升级)and he began charging a fee to members . Joined by a friend，Peter Skoll，and in 1998 by his capable（能干的） CEO Meg Whitman， he_ has_never_  looked_ back.Even in the great.com crashes(崩溃) of the late 1990s，eBay has gone from strength to strength(不断壮大). It is now one of the ten most visited online shopping websites on the Internet. 
    eBay sells connections（连接），not goods，putting buyer and seller into contact with each other.All you have to do is take an e­photo，write a description，fill out a sales form and you're in business；the world is your market place.Of course for each  item(商品)sold eBay gets a percentage and that is a great deal of money.Every day there are more than sixteen million items listed on eBay and eighty percent of the items are sold.

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     Children are getting so fat that they may be the first generation to die before their parents. Today's youngsters have the risk of developing diseases such as diabetes (糖尿病) because of their weight. Fatty fast-food diets combined with sedentary(久坐) lifestyles addicted to televisions and computers could mean kids will die young, says Professor Andrew Prentice, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

     At the same time, the shape of the human body is going through a huge shift because adults are getting so fat. Here in Britain, latest research shows that the average waist size for a man is 36~38 inches, and may be 42~44 by 2032. This compares with only 32.6 inches in 1972. Women's waists have grown from an average of 22 inches in 1920 to 24 in the 50s and 30 now. One of the major reasons why children now are at greater risk is that we are getting fatter younger.

     In the UK alone, more than one million under 16 are classed as overweight or obese (过胖)——double the number in the mid-80s. One in ten four-year-olds are also medically classified as obese.

     The obesity (肥胖症) which started in the US, has now spread to Europe, Australia, Central America and the Middle East. Many nations now record more than 20 percent of their population as clinically obese and well over half the population as overweight.

     Professor Prentice said the change in our shape has been caused by an oversupply of easily available high-energy foods combined with a dramatic drop in the energy we use as a result of

technology developments.

Are you unhappy about your nose? Or you feel that your ears are too big or your eyes too small? They can all be put right by a surgeon. Surgeons are doctors who make sick people well by operating on them. But some surgeons today are really beauty specialists. Their job, which is called plastic surgery, is to make ugly or plain people beautiful.

    Plastic surgeons are very popular in some countries. They make lots of money by selling beauty to persons, especially women. Plastic surgery is very expensive. Suppose I can afford to pay so much money and want to change my ugly nose for a more handsome one, I must consult a plastic surgeon.

    First of all, he will ask me to enter a nursing home（护理院）. I shall have to spend about three weeks there. The surgeon will give me an anesthetic（麻醉药）. Then he will operate on my nose. He will put a plaster case to keep its new shape. I shall have to spend the next week or two anxiously wondering whether the operation has been successful or not. “Will my nose really look better or leave scars? What shall I do if my nose is not the shape I wanted?” And so on. Then the surgeon will take off the bandages and the plaster, I shall see my expensive new nose! Will it be worth all the trouble and expense? Sometimes these operations go wrong, and then patient comes away looking worse than before.

Modern people have a hard time controlling their desire to eat. Often you eat not because you are hungry, but because you are affected by many other things. How much you eat is strongly affected by how much those around you eat. People eating alone eat least. People eating with one other person eat 35 percent more than they do at home. People dining in a party of four eat 75percent more. Eating with overweight friends, you’ll eat more. If your waitress overweight, you’ll eat more. Wide variety of food You’ll eat more.
    Plates can decide how sweet dessert tastes. If people ate it off a paper plate, they’d say, “This is good.” If they ate it off a fancy silver plate, they would say, “This is the greatest cake I’ve eaten in my entire life.”
    Your knowledge about what makes food good or bad also affects how much you eat. You tend to eat more when you think the food is good, and less when you think it is bad. So Grandma’s cookies always taste better than other cookies. “Good food” even has a “health halo(光环) effect”. If we’re eating something healthy, we feel that everything in that meal is healthy. Due to this, people often believe that a cheese cake with a salad has fewer calories than the cheese cake alone. That’s perhaps also why eating organic food might turn you into an annoying guy. Your brain may use anything that makes you feel good about your own morality to excuse your immoral behavior .
    Food and hunger affect your judgment too. Hungry judges give more serious sentences. Kids who don’t eat breakfast behave worse than kids who eat their breakfast. People who have low blood sugar are more likely than the average person to have trouble concentrating and controlling their unpleasant emotions.

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       When you are traveling, it’s vital to know about the customs and etiquette（礼仪，礼节）of the global village. What we consider polite behavior at home isn’t always accepted outside our borders.

    ● Etiquette of Gift Giving

    Gift giving should be a happy, positive experience. When selecting a present for someone in Netherlands, don’t purchase fancy kitchen knives or scissors. Giving sharp, pointy objects as gifts is considered unlucky. Be careful when presenting flowers to a friend or a business partner in Russia. Yellow blooms suggest cheat or a relationship break up. Traditionally, red carnations are placed on the tombs of the dead. Writing cards or notes while visiting South Korea, be mindful of your pen’s ink color. Writing a person’s name in red ink traditionally suggests that the person has passed away—an important point to remember when giving a birthday card.

    ● Eating Customs

    Being early or on time is viewed as being rude, too eager or even greedy in Venezuela. If you are invited to someone’s home for a meal, it’s recommended that you arrive 10 minutes later than the requested time. When having a meal in Egypt, don’t use the salt shaker（盐瓶）. It’s insulting to your host to spread salt on your food, which means that you find the meal terrible. Japan is a very polite nation, and their fondness for etiquette extends to the use of chopsticks. According to Japanese custom, if you’re in the middle of eating, use the opposite end of your chopsticks to secure food from a shared plate. When doing business in Turkey, it’s the custom for your host to pay for your meal. Requests to split the bill won’t be accepted. If you would like to pay your fair share, Turks recommend inviting your host to a follow-up meal.