Berlin pollution meeting

A meeting of country leaders started yesterday. The three-day-long meeting in Berlin is to talk about ways to reduce pollution. Reports from the first day of the meeting are good and the French team said yesterday that they think the leaders will be able to agree.

Avatar 3 success

After taking more than two years to make, Avatar 3 has arrived. It is the final part of the Avatar series, which is one of the most successful series in movie history. It looks like that success will continue; Avatar 3 has made more money in its first weekend than any other film this year.

New study published

A new study at Oxford University has shown that eating too much chicken can be bad for your brain. Scientists tested more than one thousand people and found that people who eat more than 500g of chicken per week do much worse in intelligence tests than people who eat less.

New uPhone 7SX

The big news this week was the new uPhone 7SX. People waited outside uPhone Stores all night in London. New York and Tokyo to be the first to buy the new smartphone. It’s very light and very slim. uPhone also says that the 7SX is waterproof and can charge to full battery in less than one hour.

Paris Fashion Week

Long skirts, rollneck tops and knee-high boots are everywhere. Paris Fashion Week has started and Europe’s top designers are showing their new looks for the year. The hot topic is that miniskirts are out and longer skirts are in. And the new colour for the winter? Yellow.

New research has found that even if you give up smoking, the damage it has done to your genes (基因) will stay there for a much longer time.

In the research, a team of US scientists studied the blood of 16, 000 people. Among them, some were smokers, some used to smoke, and the rest were non­smokers. Scientists compared their genes and found that more than 7, 000 genes of smokers had changed—a number that is one­third of known human genes.

According to NBC News, both heart disease and cancer are caused by genetic changes. Some people may have had the changes when they were born, but most people get them in their day­to­day lives while doing things like smoking.

When you stop smoking, a lot of these genes will return to normal within five years. This means your body is trying to heal (治愈) itself of the harmful effects of smoking. But the changes in some of the genes stay for longer. They can stay for as long as 30 years. It’s almost like leaving a footprint on wet cement (水泥) — it will always be there, even when you’ve walked away and when the cement becomes dry.

Although the study results may make people unhappy, there is a bright side:the findings could help scientists invent medicine to treat genetic damage caused by smoking or find ways to tell which people have heart disease or cancer risks.

Money is something you’ve been familiar with throughout your life. In fact, you may already consider yourself an expert on the subject. You regularly use money to measure the value of things you own. 【小题1】. It might surprise you to learn that there’s a great deal of disagreement among economists about what money is and how to measure it. Money serves a number of functions, and any definition of money must consider all of its functions.

Money rules out the need for barter (等价交换), the direct exchange of one item for another. Barter is a very inconvenient means of trading. 【小题2】. A seller with a goods or service to offer must search for a buyer who has exactly what the seller desires.

Money provides a unit of account. The value of an item is a measure of what a person will sacrifice to obtain it. How much is a two-week vacation in Hawaii worth to you? If you’re like most people, you’ll probably respond to such a question by valuing the vacation in dollars—approximately $2,000 — rather than in terms of other things (like your car). 【小题4】.

【小题5】. The unit of account for deferred payment of debts is also money. If you borrow money to buy a car, the loan contract specifies how much you must pay back every month and the number of months required to fulfill your duty.