女人吸烟
D: Yael, what's that in your hand?
Y: Come on, Don. Haven't you en a cigarette before? Every day in the United States, about 1500 girls begin smoking, and I figured, why not do my share?
D: But Yael, don't you know that tobacco kills more than 140,000 women each year,and that half of tho women are between the ages of thirty-five and sixty-nine?
Y: Yeah, but that's why I smoke a brand with low nicotine and tar content.
D: Although tobacco companies adverti some cigarettes as "light," this is just an advertising ploy to obscure the risks associated with smoking--smoking a light cigarette is just as risky as smoking a regular one. In fact, rearch shows that people who smoke light cigarettes actually smoke differently in order to get higher levels of nicotine.
Y: I didn't know that.
D: The one thing you can say about tobacco companies is that they are really savvy about marketing. While tobacco ads that target men focus on cigarettes as macho or cool, tobacco ads that target women focus on social and political themes important to women. For example, ads will say that you've come a long way, or that you've found your voice, or encourage you to just be yourlf, as if smoking has anything to do with progress and lf-expression. Young women are especially vulnerable to the ads becau addiction, dia, and premature death em so remote to them. And the thing is, people who have smoked as few as one hundred cigarettes report having difficulty quitting.
Y: So, Don, can you pass me that ashtray?
D: With pleasure, Yael, as long as you put it out.
致命的糖
Some methods of prerving food are easy to understand.
For example, it's easy to e that freezing your food, or packing it in salt, would make it inhospitable to the microbes which would otherwi cau it to spoil. You might wonder, however, about jams, jellies, and prerves, all of which are protected from spoiling by a high concentration of sugar. Sugar is one of the most basic foods for all life--bacteria and mold like to eat it just as much as we do. On today's Moment of Science we'll learn how too much of a good thing can be deadly, at least for microorganisms.
Sugar works not by poisoning the food-spoiling microbes, but by causing them to literally die of thirst.
This is becau sugar attracts water very well; the more sugar there is in any solution, the more water it tries to draw from its surroundings. This is bad news for any microbe that happens to be inside a jar of jam. High concentrations of sugar will suck the microbe's vital water right through its cell wall, causing it to dehydrate. This process is called "osmosis," and it can be deadly for bacteria and mold.
In order for osmosis to work, the sugar concentration has to be quite high. If any water fal
ls onto the surface of your jam, the sugar concentration at that spot might become low enough to allow mold to grow. That's why it's important to take the back up measure of refrigerating all jams, jellies, and prerves once you've opened them. Like an oasis in the dert, condend water dripping from the jar's lid can give a dehydrating microbe the relief it needs.
公立学校和私立学校
Helen: What’s the difference between state schools and private schools in the UK? First, Mr. Lenon explains, the main difference between private and state schools is money.
Yes, there are two differences between a private school and a state school. The most important one is that parents have to pay fees to go to a private school. Whereas a state school is free of charge.
A boarding school like Harrow is very expensive; the fees are ￡28,000 a year. It’s a lot of money.
But the other difference is that independent schools in this country are not obliged to follow the national state governed curriculum, or even to take the state examinations. So they have a much greater degree of freedom.
Helen: It’s true. I know some schools u the American high school system and there are also schools that offer European qualifications.
I can tell you that the pupils at the schools are treated just like pupils in every other school including the state schools in England. They are not pampered, very far from it, they are expected to behave well, to work hard; they are punished if they don’t.
男人真的比女人能喝酒?
Well, yael, the average weight difference between women and men is one reason why women tend to get intoxicated faster, but there’s more.
Women also tend to have more fat and less muscle than men, even tall women. This is significant becau muscle tissue contains more water than fat does, and alcohol dissolv
es in water and thus is diluted.
With about ten percent more water in their bodies than women, men can drink more alcohol than women before becoming intoxicated. In fact, studies show that women suffer wor hangovers than men too. Men tend to experience more sweating and vomiting as a result of drinking.
But overall, women suffer from more dehydration, exhaustion, headaches, and naua. With every drink, women are reaching higher degrees of intoxication than their male counterparts and thus it makes n that they’re reaching higher degrees of hangover too. More rearch is needed though to determine for certain why women’s hangovers are wor.
