Archive for May, 2010

The Longer Life

Saturday, May 29th, 2010

Today people are living to be much older than ever before. Some of the main reasons for this are the improved health care and better nutrition available to everyone.
Medical care is more available to people. Although not everyone can get the best heath care, everyone can get basic heath care and advice. When people are seriously ill, they can go to a public hospital and be taken care of. Years ago, health care wasn’t available to everyone. Some people didn’t live near a doctor or a hospital, and others couldn’t pay for the care they needed. They made do with herbal medicines or folk remedies. Of course, some of these worked, but not for the more serious diseases.
The quality of medical care has improved. That’s also a factor in longevity. Doctors know more now about what causes disease and how to care it ,Years ago, doctors only knew about the most basic diseases and cures. Medicine was not very advanced. You could die from something as simple as an infection from a cut. Now we have antibiotics and other medicines to help cure infections.
People are also living longer now because of better nutrition. We ‘re eating better and more healthfully than we used to .That’s reduced the number of people with heart disease and cancer. We try to eat low-fat foods and eat more vegetable and fruits ,which are now available year-round.
Improved medical care and healthy eating habits has greatly expanded our life spans. What we need to do now is make sure that everyone in the world has these benefits.

Move The Restaurant Away

Friday, May 28th, 2010

I can see both advantages and disadvantages to having a new restaurant built in our neighborhood. I’m worried about traffic and how it will affect our neighborhood. However, I think that it will benefit local businesses and increase appreciation for our neighborhood. Overall, I think it is a good idea.
Traffic congestion is always a concern when you build something new. Our streets are narrow, with parking on both sides. More cars traveling through the neighborhood could cause a lot of congesting. Traffic means parking problems, too. Our neighborhood has very few garages attached to the houses. Most of us depend on finding a space to park on the street. If the new restaurant is built, we’ll be competing for those spaces with the restaurant’s patrons. Plus, if the restaurant offers wallet parking, it’ll be even worse. Valet parkers work in teams to grab every possible space available on the street.
I’m also concerned about the type of patrons this new restaurant will bring into our neighborhood. A family restaurant wouldn’t be a problem. However, if it’s going have a bar and dancing, then there could be problems. The restaurant would stay open later, and people leaving the restaurant might be drunk. Who wouldn’t worry about rowdy customers staggering around our neighborhood in the early morning hours, looking for their cars?
I have to admit, though, there are advantages to a new restaurant. Our neighborhood could certainly use the jobs the restaurant would provide. Not only that, the money neighborhood residents would earn there would likely be spent at other neighborhood businesses. This would give a boost to those businesses and make our neighborhood more prosperous.
A new restaurant would also attract a lot of people to our neighborhood. They could see what a nice area this is to live. That might attract new residents to the neighborhood. That would be a good thing, because we’ve been losing residents to the suburbs the last couple of years.
There are a lot of details to consider, but all in all, I support the idea of this new restaurant in our neighborhood.

Is It Better To Eat At Home?

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Some people like to eat out at food stands and restaurants, while others like to prepare food at home. Often it depends on the kind of lifestyle people have. Those with very busy jobs outside the house don’t always have time to cook. They like the convenience of eating out. Overall, though, it is cheaper and healthier to eat at home.
While eating in restaurants is fast, the money you spend can add up. When I have dinner at restaurant with a friend, the bill is usually over twenty dollars. I can buy a lot of groceries with that much money. Even lunch at a fast-food stand usually costs five or six dollars for one person. That’s enough to feed the whole family at home.
Eating at home is better for you, too. Meals at restaurants are often high in fat and calories, and they serve big plates of food–much more food than you need to eat at one meal. If you cook food at home, you have more control over the ingredients. You can use margarine instead of butter on your potatoes, or not put so much cheese on top of your pizza. At home, you can control your portion size. You can serve yourself as little as you want. In a restaurant, you may eat a full plate of food “because you paid for it”.
It’s true that eating out is convenient. You don’t have to shop, or cook, or clean up. But real home cooking doesn’t have to take a lot of time. There are lots of simple meals that don’t take long to make. In fact, they’re faster than eating out, especially if you think of the time you spend driving to a restaurant, parking, waiting for a table, waiting for service, and driving home.
Both eating at restaurants and cooking at home can be satisfying. Both can taste good and be enjoyed with family and friends. I prefer cooking at home because of the money and health issues, but people will make the choice that fits their lifestyle best.

Luck or Work?

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010

When people succeed, it is because of hard work, but luck has a lot to do with it,too. Success without some luck is almost impossible. The French emperor Napoleon said of one of his generals, “I know he’s good. But is he lucky?” Napoleon knew that all the hard work and talent in the world can’t make up for bad luck. However, hard work can invite good luck.
When it comes to success, luck can mean being in the right place to meet someone, or having the right skills to get a job done. It might mean turning down an offer and then having a better offer come along. Nothing can replace hard work, but working hard also means you’re preparing yourself opportunity. Opportunity very often depends on luck.
How many of the great inventions and discoveries came about through a lucky mistake or a lucky chance? One of the biggest lucky mistakes in history is Columbus’ so-called discovery of America. He enriched his sponsors and changed history, but he was really looking for India. However, Columbus’ chance discovery wasn’t pure luck. It was backed up by years of studying and calculating. He worked hard to prove his theory that the world was round.
Success that comes from pure luck and no hard work can be a real problem. For example, consider a teenage girl who becomes a movie star.
Imagine she’s been picked from nowhere because of her looks. She is going to feel very insecure, because she knows she didn’t do anything to earn her stardom. On the other hand, think about an actress who’s spend years learning and working at her craft. When she finally has good luck and becomes a success, she will handle stardom better, she knows she earns it.
People who work hard help make their own luck by being ready opportunity knocks. When it comes to success. I think that hard work and luck so hand in hand.

How Is The Mordern Life Without Television?

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Do movies and television affect our behavior? A special concern is whether movies and television make children and society more violent. I believe that movies and television do influence our behavior, both for the better and for the worse.
Movies do make people more violent. The more we see violent acts on television, the less sensitive we become to them. Eventually violence doesn’t seem wrong .we may even commit violent acts ourselves. This is especially true because we don’t always realize that violence has consequences. Actors can be killed and come back for another movie. Sometimes we confuse that with reality. We forget that killing someone is permanent.
Movies and television also influence our behavior because they make us less active. Looking at films is a passive activity. If we watch too much, we become unhealthy, both mentally and physically. We stop using our own imagination when we see things acted out for us. Mental laziness becomes physical laziness; we’d rather watch sports on to than play sports ourselves. we’d rather visit with the characters on “Seinfeld” or “Friends” than go chat with our own neighbors. Imaginary people have exciting lives. Is it any wonder that some people would rather live a fantasy life than their own?
Of course, watching movies and television can also be good for us. It can give us a broader window on the world. For example, seeing movies can expose us to people of different races and cultures. We can then overcome some prejudices more easily. Recently there have been more handicapped people in films, and this also helps reduce prejudice.
The best influence on our behavior is that movies and television reduce stress. Watching films, we can escape our own problems for a little while. Also, sometime movies show positive ways to resolve problems we all face. While TV and movies shouldn’t be a way to hide from life, sometimes they can help us cope.
It is true that movies and television can influence our behavior negatively. However, I also believe that they influence our behaviors in positive ways. How they affect you depends on how much you watch, what you watch, and how you respond to what you watch.

Books or Experience?

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Not every thing that is learned is contained in books.
“Experience is the best teacher” is an old cliché, but I agree with it. The most important, and sometimes the hardest, lessons we learn in life come from our participation in situations. You can’ learn everything from a book.
Of course, learning from books in a formal educational setting is also valuable. It’s in schools that we learn the information we need to function in our society. We learn how to speak and write and understand mathematical equations. This is all information that we need to live in our communities and earn a living.
Nevertheless, I think that the most important lessons can’t be taught; they have to be experienced. No one can teach us how to get along with others or how to have self-respect. As we grow from children into teenagers, no one can teach us how to deal with peer pressure. As we leave adolescence behind and enter adult life, no one can teach us how to fall in love and get married.
This shouldn’t stop us from looking for guidelines along the way. Teachers and parents are valuable sources of advice when we’re young. As we enter into new stages in our lives, the advice we receive from them is very helpful because they have already bad similar experiences. But experiencing our own triumphs and disasters is really the only way to learn how to deal with life.

What For When We Attend College?

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

People attend colleges or universities for a lot of different reasons. I believe that the three most common reasons are to prepare for a career, to have new experiences, and to increase their knowledge of themselves and the world around them.
Career preparation is becoming more and more important to young people. For many, this is the primary reason to go to college, They know that the job market is competitive. At college, they can learn new skill for careers with a lot of opportunities. This means careers, such as information technology, that are expected to need a large workforce in the coming years.
Also, students go to colleges and universities to have new experiences. This often means having the opportunity to meet people different from those in their hometowns. For most students, going to college is the first time they’ve been away from home by themselves. In additions, this is the first time they’ve had to make decisions on their own. Making these decisions increases their knowledge of themselves.
Besides looking for self-knowledge, people also attend a university or college to expand their knowledge in subjects they find interesting. For many, this will be their last chance for a long time to learn about something that doesn’t relate to their career.
I would recommend that people not be so focused on a career. They should go to college to have new experiences and learn about themselves and the world they live in.

Can the life cycles alternate?

Friday, May 7th, 2010

We all know that the normal human daily cycle of activity is of some 7-8 hours’ sleep alternation with some 16-17 hours’ wakefulness and that, broadly speaking, the sleep normally coincides with the hours of darkness. Our present concern is with how easily and to what extent this cycle can be modified.
The question is no mere academic one. The ease, for example, with which people can change from working in the day to working at night is a question of growing importance in industry where automation calls for round-the-clock working of machines. It normally takes from five days to one week for a person to adapt to reversed routine of sleep and wakefulness, sleeping during the day and working at night. Unfortunately, it is often the case in industry that shifts are changed every week; a person may work from 12 midnight to 8 a.m. one week, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. the next, and 4 p.m. to 12 midnight the third and so on. This means that no sooner has he got used to one routine than he has to change to another, so that much of his time is spent neither working nor sleeping very efficiently.
The only real solution appears to be to hand over the night shift to a number of permanent night workers. An interesting study of the domestic life and health of night-shift workers was carried out by Brown in 1957. She found a high incidence (发生率) of disturbed sleep and other disorders among those on alternating day and night shifts, but no abnormal occurrence of these phenomena among those on permanent night work.
This latter system then appears to be the best long-term policy, but meanwhile something may be done to relieve the strains of alternate day and night work by selecting those people who can adapt most quickly to the changes of routine. One way of knowing when a person has adapted is by measuring his body temperature. People engaged in normal daytime work will have a high temperature during the hours of wakefulness and a low one at night; when they change to night work the pattern will only gradually go back to match the new routine and the speed with which it does so parallels, broadly speaking, the adaptation of the body as a whole, particularly in terms of performance. Therefore, by taking body temperature at intervals of two hours throughout the period of wakefulness it can be seen how quickly a person can adapt to a reversed routine, and this could be used as a basis for selection. So far, however, such a form of selection does not seem to have been applied in practice.

Automation

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

Automation refers to the introduction of electronic control and automatic operation of productive machinery. It reduces the human factors, mental and physical, in production, and is designed to make possible the manufacture of more goods with fewer workers. The development of automation in American industry has been called the “Second Industrial Revolution”.
Labour’s concern over automation arises from uncertainty about the effects on employment, and fears of major changes in jobs. In the main, labour has taken the view that resistance to technical change is unfruitful. Eventually, the result of automation may well be an increase in employment, since it is expected that vast industries will grow up around manufacturing, maintaining, and repairing automation equipment. The interest of labour lies in bringing about the transition with a minimum of inconvenience and distress to the workers involved. Also, union spokesmen emphasize that the benefit of the increased production and lower costs made possible by automation should be shared by workers in the form of higher wages, more leisure, and improved living standards.
To protect the interests of their members in the era of automation, unions have adopted a number of new policies. One of these is the promotion of supplementary unemployment benefit plans. It is emphasized that since the employer involved in such a plan has a direct financial interest in preventing unemployment, he will have a strong drive for planning new installations so as to cause the least possible problems in jobs and job assignment. Some unions are working for dismissal pay agreements, requiring that permanently dismissed workers be paid a sum of money based on length of service. Another approach is the idea of the “improvement factor”, which calls for wage increases based on increases in productivity. It is possible, however, that labour will rely mainly on reduction in working time.