We all have our wish lists, whether it is for the holiday season, a birthday or a get-together. The fact is that we are all human and we all desire nice things and fun things. One thing that should not be missed is putting Cuponk on your wish list so that you can have years of fun and entertainment.

For adults, they can start playing Cuponk with their kids, spending quality time together, which is good for close family ties. Adults can also enjoy Cuponk with their own friends,turning a dinner party into something memorable (难忘的).The game is made for everyone, regardless of age or gender.                         

It comes with a special cup with a backboard funnel (漏斗), special balls and trick cards. There are different styles of cups to choose from, just to make it even more personal an experience. The players must pick a trick card when it is their turn. The card will tell them what to do and how many times theyˈre allowed to try that particular trick. The tricks always involve getting the ball into the cup, which will light up and make some crazy sounds of victory afterwards.

The rules allow for everything in the home to be allowable. That means that you can bounce (反弹) the ball off the wall into the cup as creatively as possible, or you can also use tables, chairs, stairs, the ceiling and whatever else you have. What makes it even more special than most others is the fact that all ages can play together. So, a family with different age groups can enjoy a few games together, without any real concern for damages, as the balls are quite light. It’s kind of like beer pong rules, but without the beer.

In a time with economic instability (不稳定), where consumers have chosen to stay at home to save a few dollars, it is a great way to do that without being bored．Playing games with friends or family members is a good way to laugh and pass the time pleasantly, rather than just sitting in front of a television or a computer wasting valuable time．No one will remember watching television, but everyone will remember those memorable moments playing fun games and spending good quality time with the people they love.

Passenger pigeons（旅鸽）once flew over much of the United States in unbelievable numbers. Written accounts from the 18th and 19th centuries described flocks（群）so large that they darkened the sky for hours.

It was calculated that when its population reached its highest point, there were more than 3 billion passenger pigeons – a number equal to 24 to 40 percent of the total bird population in the United States, making it perhaps the most abundant birds in the world. Even as late as 1870 when their numbers had already become smaller, a flock believed to be 1 mile wide and 320 miles (about 515 kilometers) long was seen near Cincinnati.

Sadly, the abundance of passenger pigeons may have been their undoing. Where the birds were abundant, people believed there was an ever-lasting supply and killed them by the thousands. Commercial hunters attracted them to small clearings with grain, waited until pigeons had settled to feed, then threw large nets over them, taking hundreds at a time. The birds were shipped to large cities and sold in restaurants.

By the closing decades of the 19th century, the hardwood forests where passenger pigeons nested had been damaged by Americans’ need for wood, which scattered（驱散）the flocks and forced the birds to go farther north, where cold temperatures and spring storms contributed to their decline. Soon the great flocks were gone, never to be seen again.

In 1897, the state of Michigan passed a law prohibiting the killing of passenger pigeons, but by then, no sizable flocks had been seen in the state for 10 years. The last confirmed wild pigeon in the United States was shot by a boy in Pike County, Ohio, in 1900. For a time, a few birds survived under human care. The last of them, known affectionately as Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden in September 1, 1914.

Everybody sleeps, but what people stay up late to catch or wake up early in order not to miss varies by culture？

From data collected, it seems the things that cause us to lose the most sleep, on average, are sporting events, time changes, and holidays.

Around the world, people changed sleep patterns thanks to the start or end of daylight savings time. Russians, for example, began to wake up about a half-hour later each day after President Vladimir Putin shifted the country permanently to "winter time" starting on October 26.

Russia's other late nights and early mornings generally correspond to public holidays. On New Year's Eve, Russians have the world's latest bedtime, hitting the hay at around 3:30 a. m.

Russians also get up an hour later on International Women's Day, the day for treating and celebrating female relatives.

Similarly, Americans' late nights, late mornings, and longest sleeps fall on three-day weekends.

Canada got the least sleep of the year the night it beat Sweden in the Olympic hockey (冰球) final.

The World Cup is also chiefly responsible for sleep deprivation. The worst night for sleep in the U. K. was the night of the England-Italy match on June 14. Brits stayed up a half-hour later to watch it, and then they woke up earlier than usual the next morning thanks to summer nights, the phenomenon in which the sun barely sets in northern countries in the summertime. That was nothing, though, compared to Germans, Italians, and the French, who stayed up around an hour and a half later on various days throughout the summer to watch the Cup.

It should be made clear that not everyone has a device to record their sleep patterns; in some of these nations, it's likely that only the richest people do. And people who elect to track their sleep may try to get more sleep than the average person. Even if that's the case, though, the above findings are still striking. If the most health-conscious among us have such deep swings in our shut-eye levels throughout the year, how much sleep are the rest of us losing?

Welcome Aboard Your Piccadilly Flight To Heathrow

    The Piccadilly line to Heathrow is not only the most convenient way to travel but also the most cost-effective. So the next time you're travelling to Heathrow, make sure you fly Piccadilly line.

Your Piccadilly flight features

l  Departures from 36 stops on the Piccadilly line, or from over 200 stations, only one change way

l  Service every 5 minutes to and from Heathrow throughout the day

l  Journeys from central London taking less than 50 minutes

l  Only ￡3.70 for a single adult fare

l  See tables below for journey time

  Fares to and from central London

l  Adult single ￡3.70

l  Child single ￡1.50

    If you are traveling as a group，then you are allowed to use the Family Travel card, which means each adult can travel for ￡3.40 and each child for ￡0.80.

    The group must consist of 1 or 2 adults travelling with 1--4 children (from 09:30 Monday-Friday and at any time weekends and Public Holidays)

    Members within the group do not need to be related.

Travelling to Heathrow

Travlling from Heathrow

Australia’s koalas could be wiped out within 30 years unless urgent action is taken to stop the losing in population, according to researchers. They say development, climate change and bush fires have all combined to reduce the number of wild koalas sharply.

       The Australian Koala Foundation said a recent survey showed the population could have dropped by more than half in the past six years. Previous estimates (估计) put the number of koalas at more than 100,000, but the latest calculations (计算) suggest there could now be as few as 43,000.

       The foundation collected field data from 1,800 sites and 80,000 trees to calculate the numbers. In one area in northern Queensland estimated to have 20,000 koalas a decade ago, a team of eight people could not find a single animal in four days of searching.

       The foundation said besides problems caused by cutting down forests, hotter and drier conditions because of global warming had reduced the nutritional (营养的) value of their staple food, eucalyptus leaves, leading to poor nutrition for them.

       Koalas, which live in the forests in Australia’s east and south, are very fussy (爱挑剔的) about what types of the leaves they eat.

       Foundation chief Deborah Tabart said: “The koalas are missing everywhere we look. It’s really no tree, no me. If you keep cutting down trees you don’t have any koalas.”

       She is hoping the new figures will persuade the government’s Threatened Species Steering Committee (TSSC) to list the koala as threatened. But committee chairman Bob Beeton said a decision was not likely recently and the koala’s status as one of the country’s favourite animals would not be a factor. “There’s a number of species which are attractive and people have special feelings towards them. We don’t consider that,” Mr Beeton was reported as saying by the AFP agency.

El Nino, a Spanish term for "the Christ child," was named by South American fishermen who noticed that the global weather pattern, which happens every two to seven years, reduced the amount of fishes caught around Chrisms．El Nino sees warm water, collected over several years in the western Pacific, flow back eastwards when winds that normally blow westwards weaken, or sometimes the other way round．

    The weather effects, both good and bad, are felt in many places．Rich countries gain more from powerful Ninos, on balance, than they lose．A study found that a strong Nino in 1997-98 helped America's economy grow by %15 billion, partly because of better agricultural harvests; farmers in the Midwest gained from extra rain．The total rise in agricultural incomes in rich countries is greater than the fall in poor ones．

    But in Indonesia extremely dry forests are in flames．A multi-year drought (干旱) in south-east Brazil is becoming worse．Though heavy rains brought about by El Nino may relieve the drought in California, they are likely to cause surface flooding and other disasters．

    The most recent powerful Nino, in 1997-98, killed around 21,000 people and caused damage worth $36 billion around the globe．But such Ninos come with months of warning, and so much is known about how they happen that governments can prepare．

    According to the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), however, just 12% of disaster-relief funding in the past two decades has gone on reducing risks in advance, rather than recovery and rebuilding afterwards．This is despite evidence that a dollar spent on risk-reduction saves at least two on reconstruction．

    Simple improvements to infrastructure (基础设施) can reduce the spread of disease．Better sewers (下水道) make it less likely that heavy rain is followed by an outbreak of the disease of bad stomach．Stronger bridges mean village are less likely to be left without food and medicine after floods．According to a paper in 2011 by Mr Hsiang and co-authors, civil conflict is related to El Nino's harmful effects—and the poorer the county, the stronger the link．Though the relationship may not be causal, helping divided communities to prepare for disasters would at least reduce the risk that those disasters are followed by killing and wounding people．Since the poorest are least likely to make up for their losses from disasters linked to El Nino, reducing their losses need to be the priority．

A new study shows students who write notes by hand during lectures perform better on exams than those who use laptops(笔记本电脑).

    Students are increasingly using laptops for note-taking because of speed and legibility(清晰度). But the research has found laptop users are less able to remember and apply the concepts they have been taught.

Researchers performed experiments that aimed to find out whether using a laptop increased the tendency to make notes "mindlessly" by taking down word for word what the professors said.

     In the first experiment, students were given either a laptop or pen and paper. They listened to the same lectures and were told to use their usual note-taking skills. Thirty minutes after the talk, they were examined on their ability to remember facts and on how well they understood concepts.

    The researchers found that laptop users took twice as many notes as those who wrote by hand. However, the typists performed worse at remembering and applying the concepts. Both groups scored similarly when it came to memorizing facts.

    The researchersˈ report said, "While more notes are beneficial, if the notes are taken mindlessly, as is more likely the case on a laptop, the benefit disappears."

In another experiment aimed at testing long-term memory, students took notes as before but were tested a week after the lecture. This time, the students who wrote notes by hand performed significantly better on the exam.

These two experiments suggest that handwritten notes are not only better for immediate learning and understanding, but that they also lead to superior revision in the future.

Animals，including insects，do not have a language like ours．They do not talk to each other in words and sentences．But if we watch them, we can see that they do have ways of communicating with each other．

    Can you see the rabbitsˈ tail？When rabbits see this white tail moving up and down，they run too．The rabbit has reminded them of potential dangers without making a sound．It has given them a signal．

Many other animals use this kind of language. When a cobra is angry，it raises its hood （兜帽） and makes itself look fierce．This warns other animals．When a bee has found some food，it goes back to its home．It cannot tell the other bees where the food is by speaking to them，but it does a little dance in the air．This tells the bees where the food is．

    Some animals say things by making sound．A dog barks，for example，when a stranger comes near．A cat purrs when pleased．Some birds make several different sounds，each with its own meaning. Sometimes we human beings speak in the same way. We make sounds like"Oh"or"Ah!"when we are frightened or pleased or when we drop something on our toes．

    But we have something that no animals have﹣a large number of words which have the meanings of things，actions，feelings or ideas．We are able to give each other all kinds of different information in words and sentences，which no other animals can do．No other animals have so wonderful a language as we have．

In Britain, people usually pay careful attention to politeness. All politeness is based on the rule of showing consideration for others, and expressing thanks for the kindness they show to you.

“Excuse me” is used as an apology for troubling somebody, as when cutting into his conversation or passing in front of him. “Sorry” can be used to replace “no” when you cannot agree to a request like “May I borrow your pen?”

“Pardon” is the polite way of asking somebody to repeat what he has said. “No, please”, so common abroad, would sound unusual in Britain. “Yes, please” is widely used and it is the opposite of “No, thank you” when replying to an offer. When asking for help, British people may say, “I know the trouble I’m causing you, but would you mind...?” Similarly, it is often polite to refuse others by means of such a reply as “Please don’t bother,” followed by an explanation of why you can do without it.

If you are invited to someone’s home, there are other questions to think about. What time should you arrive? If it is a social occasion, not a formal one, it is not polite to arrive early. Your hostess will be preparing for you, so arriving before she is quite ready will cause disamenity. Of course, your hostess will be very pleased if you buy her something especially a bunch of flowers. Then too, the British are very serious about table manners. The following are important things for you to remember: sit up straight, copy everyone else, and ask what to do if you are unsure. What time should you leave? There are no rules, but it is most improper to stay too late.

Everyone needs friends. We all like to feel close to someone. It is nice to have a friend to talk, laugh and do things with. Surely, there are times when we need to be alone. We don't always want people around. But we would feel lonely if we never had a friend.

No two people are the same. Sometimes friends don't get along well, which doesn't mean that they no longer like each other. Most of the time they will go on being friends. Sometimes friends move away, then we feel very sad. We miss them much, but we can call them and write to them. Maybe we would never see them again, and we can make new friends. It is surprising to find out how much we like new people when we get to know them. Families sometimes name their children after a close friend. Many places are named after men and women, if they are friendly to people in a town. Some libraries are named this way. So are some schools. We think of these people when we go to these places.

There's more good news for people, if they have friends. These people live longer than those people if those don't have friends. Why? It could be that they are happier. Being happy helps you stay well. Or it could be just knowing that someone cares, if someone cares about you, you take better care of yourself.