Online shopping has become more and more popular these years. Women have jumped ahead of men for the first time in using the Internet to do their holiday shopping, according to a study published last week in the US.

For years men have been more likely to shop on the Internet than women, but during the 2013 holiday season 58 percent of those shopping online were women.

“It shows how popular the Internet is becoming,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project group, which carried out the study. Rainie said it was only a matter of time before women shoppers caught up with men. This is because women traditionally make decisions about spending.

Users were more likely to shop online to save time. Internet users between the ages 18 and 29 were responsible for some of the surprising increase in the online gift- buying population this time around.

However, three-quarters of the US Internet users did not buy holiday gifts online in 2013. They worried about credit card security(安全），or just compared online prices with off-line prices, thendashed off to the shops to get the best deals.

“But even if shoppers don’t buy online, websites are becoming promotion(促销）tools for stores”，said Dan Hess, vice president of Com Score Network Inc. Hess said that actually most stores，websites can make customers fully believe the security of their credit card numbers. And most are able to ensure that gifts arrive on time.

It’s all about making the shopping experience more efficient, more reliable and more comfortable,” Hess said.

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Parents whose children think the latest Nike or Adidas shoes may be better than buying old-fashioned plimsolls (橡胶底帆布鞋) because they encourage a healthier style of running, researchers said.

Big companies, like Nike and Adidas, make millions of dollars from selling highly-cushioned shoes（厚增高的运动鞋) both as fashion and sports shoes. The researchers warn that wearing such shoes from an early age can make it difficult to run in a healthy way. Once we have grown used to running in this kind of shoes, it is very difficult to change our technique, even if we remove our shoes, it can raise the risk of injury.

Children should be encouraged to wear shoes with thin soles such as plimsolls from a young age to help them develop a natural “barefoot” running style, experts said.

Dr Mick Wilknson, who did the research, told the British Science Festival in Newcastle, “If I would advise someone on what to give their child, I would say don’t go and buy them expensive Adidas or Nike, just get them a pair of flexible, flat shoes. Give them basic foot-ware, nothing fancy, nothing particularly cushioned.”

Running in flat shoes, barefoot, encourages the runner to use the front of their foot which is a better technique for running, especially long distances as the human was designed to do.

Around the world, and in particular in the US, running barefoot is becoming more and more popular with many long distance runners training without shoes.

Dr Mick Wilknson believes that training and running barefoot or in flat running shoes can help reduce injuries to runners, he said: “Injury rates in running have not changed since the 1970s, despite claims of improvements in running shoes. That has led some to conclude that barefoot running is better.”

While income worry is a rather common problem of the aged, loneliness is another problem that aged parents may face. Of all the reasons that explain their loneliness, a large geographical distance between parents and their children is the major one. This phenomenon is commonly known as “Empty Nest Syndrome”（空巢综合症）. 

In order to find better chances outside their countries, many young people have gone abroad, leaving their parents behind with no clear idea of when they will return home. Their parents spend countless lonely days and nights, taking care of themselves, in the hope that someday their children will come back to stay with them. The fact that most of these young people have gone to Europeanized or Americanized societies makes it unlikely that they will hold as tightly to the value of duty as they would have if they had not left their countries. Whatever the case, it has been noted that the values they hold do not necessarily match what they actually do. This geographical and cultural distance also prevents the grown-up children from providing response in time for their aged parents living by themselves. 
   The situation in which grown-up children live far away from their aged parents has been described as “distant parent phenomenon（现象）”, which is common both in developed countries and in developing countries. Our society has not yet been well prepared for “Empty Nest Syndrome”（空巢综合症）. 

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       You might think that good-looking men have every advantage in life. But a new study suggests being handsome may not always work in a man’s favour – at least when it comes to his career.

    The research claims that attractive men are less likely to be given a job in a competitive workplace because they intimidate bosses.

    “It’s not always an advantage to be pretty,” says Marko Pitesa, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland. “It can backfire if you are thought of as a threat.”

    Interestingly, in Pitesa’s study, it was male attractiveness in particular, rather than female beauty, that made the most difference.

    If the interviewer expected to work with the candidate as part of a team, then he preferred good-looking men.

    However, if the interviewer saw the candidate as a potential competitor, the interviewer discriminated in favor of unattractive men.

    In the first experiment, 241 adults were asked to evaluate fictional job candidates based on fake qualifications and experience, in an online setting.

    Men evaluated men and women evaluated women. Interviewers were primed to either think of the candidate as a future co-operator or competitor, and they were given a computer-generated headshot that was either attractive or unattractive.

    A second experiment involved 92 people in a lab. They were asked to evaluate future competitors or partners in a quiz game, based on credentials that included sample quiz answers, and they saw similar headshots.

    There was still a preference to cooperate with the attractive man and compete against the unattractive man.

    A final experiment used photographs of actual European business school students, vetted for attractiveness, and found the same pattern.

    The results suggest that interviewers were not blinded by beauty, and instead calculated which candidate would further their own career.

    “The way we explain it here, pretty men just seem more competent, so it is actually subjectively reasonable to discriminate for or against them.” Pitesa says.

    On a deeper level, she adds, the behavior remains unreasonable, since there’s no evidence that a real link exists between looks and competence.

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.

The biggest threat (威胁) to the future of Oxfordshire’s economy is transport.

That is the key finding of a major new report which interviewed more than 120 county firms. The results show 76 percent of the company owners and directors believe traffic jams and the quality of transport are affecting their business.

More than 30 percent say this is costing them dearly in the form of extra fuel costs, while some say the situation of being stuck in jams on key roads such as the A34 and A40 every day is making it harder to employ workers.

But lack (缺乏) of safer cycling plans is encouraging 72 percent of people to continue to go to work by car.

The report has led the government to try to work out a solution to the situation on the county’s crowded roads.

Nicola Blackwood, an official of Oxfordshire, recently brought transport minister Stephen Hammond to the county and said he became stuck in a traffic jam on the A34.

As a result, he has promised that he will aim to look at entire roads, rather than individual projects such as improving junctions (交叉路口).

Ms Blackwood said: “If we are able to achieve anything like our economic growth, we need to solve the problems that not only affect the new companies but also the growth of existing local businesses. What I want to see most of all is the quick production of a plan to solve the problem of the A34.”

John Cardy, co-founder of Garden Games, said he had considered moving his business from a farm in Garford to Witney but traffic fears had made him reconsider. He added: “Most of our employees were not prepared to use the A40 which is always crowded.”

Researchers said that waitresses who wear red get up to 26 percent extra in tips than they would wearing other colors. However, the team finds that the sexes tip very differently—with the bigger tips coming only from male customers.

No matter what color they wear, female diners will give the same kind of amounts for service every time. Yet men, whether they realize it or not, add anything between 15 and 26 percent more to a waitress in red than they would if it was the same waitress wearing a different color.

The test was simple. Take 11 waitresses in five restaurants over a six-week period and ask them to wear the same kind of T-shirt every day but change the colors. Previous research has suggested waitresses could earn more if they acted charmingly or wore more make-up than their colleagues. But this study, by the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research, only changed the color of the T-shirt. Every other aspect from make-up to behavior remained the same.

When wearing either black, white, green, blue or yellow T-shirts, the size of the tips from both male and female customers was almost identical. But when they wore red, the size of the tips went up by between 15 and 26 percent from male customers, yet stayed the same from female ones.        

A total of 272 restaurant customers were studied by researchers Nicolas Gueguen and Celine Jacob for the international journal of the tourism industry.

Even as a T-shirt, it shows just how much the color red is thought, by men, to increase the physical and sexual attractiveness of woman, said the researchers.

The researchers wrote: As red color has no negative effect on women customers, it could be in their interest to wear clothes at work.

When you get in your car, you reach for it. When you're at work, you take a break to have a moment alone with it. When you get into a lift, you play with it.

Cigarettes?Cup of coffee ?No, it's the third most addictive thing in modem life, the cell phone. And experts say it is becoming more difficult for many people to curb their longing to hug it more tightly than most of their personal relationships.  

   With its shiny surface,its smooth and satisfying touch,its air of complexity, the cell phone connects us to the world even as it disconnects us from people three feet away.In just the past couple of years, the cell phone has challenged individuals, employers, phone makers and counselors(顾问）in ways its inventors in the late 1940s never imagined.

   The costs are becoming more and more evident, and I don't mean just the monthly bill. Dr. Chris Knippers, a counselor at the Betty ford Center in Southern California, reports that the overuse of cell phones has become a social problem not much different from other harmful addictions a barrier to one-on-one personal contact, and an escape from reality.

   Sounds extreme, but we' ve all witnessed the evidence: the person at a restaurant who talks on the phone through an entire meal, ignoring his kids around the table; the woman who talks on the phone in the car, ignoring her husband; the teen who texts messages all the way home from school, avoiding contact with kids all around him.

   Is it just rude,or is it a kind of unhealthiness? And pardon me, but how is this improving the quality of life?

   Jim Williams, an industrial sociologist based in Massachusetts, points to a study by Duke University researchers that found one-quarter of Americans say they have no one to discuss their most important personal business with. Despite the growing use of phones, e - mail and instant messaging, in other words, Williams says studies show that we don't have as many friends as our parents.   

     The United States estimates that about one out of every 10 people on the planet today is at least 60 years old. By 2050, it’s projected to be one out of 5. This means that not only will there be more old people, but there will be relatively fewer young people to support them.

      Professor Richard Lee of the University of California at Berkeley says this aging of the world has a great effect on economics. “Population aging increases the concentration of population in the older ages and therefore it is costly,” he said.

       Aging populations consume (消耗) more and produce less. With more people living longer, it could get expensive. But Mr. Lee says with continuing increases in worker productivity and smart planning, it can be manageable.

       Societies have different methods for caring for the elderly, but each carries a cost. Generally, there are three types of support. Seniors can live off the wealth they gained when they were younger. They can rely on their family to take care of them, or they can rely on the government.

       In industrialized nations, governments created publicly-funded (公共资助的) support systems. These worked relatively well until recent years, when aging population growth in places like the United States and Western Europe began to gradually weaken the systems’ finances. These nations now face some tough choices. Mr. Lee says the elderly in some of these countries must either receive less money, retire later or increase taxes to make the system continuable.

       Most developing nations haven’t built this type of government-funded support, but have instead relied on families to care for their elderly. These nations also generally have a much younger population, which means their situation is not as urgent as more developed nations. But Mr. Lee says that doesn’t mean they can ignore the issue. “Third World countries should give very careful thought to this process, to population aging and how it may affect their economies — now, before population aging even becomes an issue,” he explained.

 It was once common to regard Britain as a society with class distinction. Each class had unique characteristics.

In recent years, many writers have begun to speak the “decline of class”and “classless society”in Britain. And in modern day consumer society everyone is considered to be middle class.

But pronouncing the death of class is too early. A recent wide-ranging society of public opinion found 90 percent of people still placing themselves in particular class; 73 percent agreed that class was still a vital part of British society; and 52 percent thought there were still sharp class differences. Thus, class may not be culturally and politically obvious, yet it remains an important part of British society. Britain seems to have a love of stratification.

One unchanging aspect of a British person’s class position is accent. The words a person speaks tell her or his class. A study of British accents during 1970s found that a voice sounding like a BBC newsreader was viewed as the most attractive voice, Most people said this accent sounded “educated” and “soft”. The accents placed at the bottom in this study, on the other hand, were regional（地区的）city accents. These accents were seen as “common” and “ugly”. However, a similar study of British accents in the US turned these results upside down and placed some regional accents as the most attractive and BBC English as the least. This suggests that British attitudes towards accent have deep roots and are based on class prejudice.

In recent years, however, young upper middle-class people in London, have begun to adopt some regional accents, in order to hide their class origins. This is an indication of class becoming unnoticed. However, the 1995 pop song “Common People” puts forward the view that though a middle-class person may “want to live like common people” they can never appreciate the reality of a working-class life.