My friend John has got a restaurant in a big city. It is near a supermarket. He gets ten robots for the restaurant. He bought them from a foreign company in the United States when he decided to open a restaurant last month. Each robot costs 20, 000 yuan. The restaurant is not big, but very popular in that city. Now more and more people come there for dinner.

The robots have different jobs in the restaurant. Two robots cook different kinds of food; one washes the dishes; one cleans the floor and the others give food to the guests (客人). Although all the staff (员工) are robots, it is not expensive to eat in this restaurant. Because John doesn’t need to pay for the robots every month!

Robots do most of the jobs in the restaurant, but John is still very busy. He must do many things to keep the robots working well. Luckily, John is good at studying robots and he knows robots very well. I think in the future, there will be a lot of robot themed restaurants (机器人主题餐厅) around the world.

When you’re not at home, many worries may come to your mind. Did I turn the light off? Did I lock (锁) the door? With a smart home, you can keep away from all of these worries in the future.

A smart home is a home with a network (网络). The network connects (连接) with lights and TV sets, so that people connect them from far away by lines, mobile phone or WiFi over the Internet.

More and more people may want to have a smart home, because it makes life much more convenient. It can help keep your room at a certain temperature. It can record what happens inside your home and send the video to your phone. When you are on holiday in other countries, you can use a smart home controller to turn on or off the electricity when necessary. Some smart homes can receive a visitor, make him come in and service him a drink. They can even feed the cat and water the plants.

Besides, smart homes are easy to fix. When a problem happens, you can deal with it yourself. However, for home-users, the smart home is not perfect. It can be rather expensive to have it. Also, because the smart home system (系统) makes its owner to get home information from anywhere, hackers (黑客) may enter into the smart home easily, and they may use or change their information in the system.

Now, many people are excited at the future of the smart home.

There are others who worry that the smart home will make people lazier and lonelier. But anyway, one thing is for sure—the smart home will change the way we live and work.

Here’s a piece of good news. After years’ research and testing, the hybrid car is developed and put on the market. It’s an interesting and exciting new improvement in today’s world as we look for better ways to protect the quality of the air we breathe and conserve (节约) our natural resources.

The quality of our air is affected by many different things. But one of the largest sources of air pollution is the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and gasoline which is used to power a car’s engine. The EPA has set national standards to help control the level of harmful pollutants sent off into the air, and the automobile industry has acted by producing a hybrid car that uses less gas and therefore causes less pollution.

A hybrid car is a combination of a regular car that runs on gasoline and an electric car that is powered by battery. Some people tend to think that since the hybrid car is partially electric, you have to plug (接通电源) it in to charge it. But that’s not how it works. The 144-volt battery pack is actually recharged through the energy that is produced when the car’s brakes are used. This is referred to as “regenerative braking”, because it generates electricity.

Although the hybrid car still runs on gasoline most of the time, it uses less gas than a regular car. When the driver stops at a traffic light, the engine automatically shuts off to save fuel. Then, as soon as the driver puts the car in gear and touches the gas pedal, the engine starts back up.

Have you ever ridden in a car with someone who ran out of gas? That probably wouldn’t happen if you were riding in a hybrid car. It flashes a warning on its computer screen that says, “I am low on gas.” When it completely runs out, the warning reads, “YOU ARE NOW OUT OF GAS!” Then the electric power supply kicks in (起作用) to let the driver travel a few more miles to a gas station.