Many Brits firmly believe that no task, from studying to data entry to putting up a shelf, can be accomplished without a good cup of tea.【小题1】 Tea is the response to various situations: waking up, breaking up, meeting a friend, feeling uncomfortable, or feeling happy. How you take your tea indicates your social class and personality.

【小题2】 At first, it was popular among the nobles and then the British East India Company began to in much more tea from the Far East, where it had and drunk for thousands of year. 【小题3】 Tea is one of the few experiences in Britain that cuts across social class race, ethnicity, and income levels. It also gives socially awkward Brits something to do with the their hands.

Tea is traditionally brewed in a pot and poured out into individual cups. Most people, however, could not afford fine bone china. The cups they did have would often crack under the heat of the boiling tea. Milk was therefore added first to the cups to lessen the heat of the hot tea and keep the cups complete. 【小题4】 In modern times, the “milk first" issue is a hot topic. Friendships have been lost over whether it's correct to add milk to your cup before the tea or after.

Kate Fox, the author of Watching the English, notes that milk in tea also gives off social clues to Britain’s all-important social class system. According to Fox, the strongest black tea is drunk by the working class, who have to reduce the bitter taste with plenty of milk and sugar to make “builder’s tea. 【小题5】

Tea communicates a lot, from social standing to emotional state, which is useful for the British, who tend to be suspicious of emotional displays. Best just to have a nice cup of tea instead.

We truly are what we eat—and what our ancestors ate. Food has changed who we are and how we developed for hundreds of thousands of years. From processing (加工) to preserving to cooking, what humans did and continue to do to food played a big role in shaping our evolution (进化).

“Processed food isn’t just a modern invention. It’s as old as human itself and may have helped create our species,” wrote Nicholas Temple, author of The Best Before: The Evolution and Future of Processed Food for the BBC.

Although processing is viewed negatively nowadays, it was important to our development as a species. Processing doesn’t necessarily mean adding chemicals. It also includes pounding or slicing or changing the food in anyway before eating. Compared to our ancestors, modern humans’ teeth, jaws and faces have gotten smaller because of making food easier to chew, especially from cooking.

Cooking food was one of the biggest changes in human history. Researchers believe it could have occurred between 1.8 million to 400,000 years ago. Without cooking, an average person would have to eat around five kilos of raw (未加工的) food to survive and will have to spend most of the day eating. Also, up to 50% of women who only eat raw foods develop a condition that signals that the body can’t support a pregnancy (怀孕) —a major problem for evolution, according to Science American. Processing food leads to a huge gain in leisure time. The less time people spent chewing, the more time they had to develop complex spoken language. Cooking food also breaks down its cells. So our stomachs need to work less to absorb the nutrients and save more energy, which could then be used to power a large brain.

Processed food actually shaped us as a species and made us human—the only species on earth who can cook.