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#003: Food is now easier to prepare. Is this a good thing? ===== Nowdays, poeple are getting busier and busier. They bustle and hustle all day long without taking a rest. It seems that taking a break is a luxury to us. People get up in the morning, dress themselves up and make a toast or a sandwich for breakfast. Then they go to offices. They work till lunchtime. You may think that they can take a rest in lunchtime. No, you are wrong. People usually have very tight working schedules. They are very stressed and they worry that they may not finish their works on time. They have to keep on working during lunchtime. Most of them buy simple foods or instant foods for their lunch. After office hour, there may be still a pile of paperworks stacking in front of them on their decks. They have to work overtime. They can not go home or dine out for dinner. They have to stay in their workplaces to have their dinner. As you can see, people can rarely spend an hour or two for cooking a meal. That is the reason why instant foods are getting more popular. If you go to a supermarket or a grocery store, you can see all sorts of instant foods on racks. For instance, instant noodles, instant coffee and also some instant lunchboxes. You do not have to wash and cut the foods before cooking. You do not need to be a good chef having excellent cooking skill in cooking the food. You also do not have to clean up the mess in your kitchen. What you have to do is just put the instant foods in a microwave oven. Sit down and wait for a couple of minutes, then the foods will be done. They are very simple and easy to cook. Everybody can be a chef. They smell good and they taste delicious. Though instant foods indeed save people a lot of time in cooking, we should not eat too many instant foods because they have a very low nutrition. Should we eat them only when there are no other choices for us.

TM staff, Thank you for your comment. I really appreciate it. I have one more favour. Can you tell me what is my score. I really have no idea about my level. Thank you very much.

I sincerely welcome any of your comment. Your little help is a great help to me. Please feel free to drop a comment. #011. Luck has nothing to do with success. ======== Success is built up by hardworking bit by bit, little by little. Many successful people work very hard day by day. Thay have to give a lot of time and energy before being successful. No one can be succsesful with sheer luck. However, if we look at the history, we can see a lot of great inventories and discoveries were partly due to luck. For example, penicillium was discovered by luck. The scientist discovered that a sample he was studying was contaiminated by bacteria. In usual practice, scientists would throw the contaiminated sample away and start the experiment all over again. However, the scientist did not throw that away, instead he studied the sample. He wonder why there were some areas in the sample did not grow mold and some areas did. Finally, he knew that the bacteria in the sample created an antibiotic (he named it penicillium) which could prohibit the growth of mold. He extracted the antibiotic and made it a drug which could cure human diseases. Nowaday, antibiotics are very important drugs. Doctors can use antibiotics to cure many untreatable or deadly diseases. Newton is a great sicentist. He discovered gravity which has changed and reshaped the science of physics. However, his great discovery was due to a very trivial and ordinary event. One day, he was sitting under a tree and suddenly an apple dropped to him. Many people didn't think about the reason why the apple dropped. They thought that it was a common sense that everything would drop to the ground when you throw it up. However, Newton didn't jump to the conclusion without thinking. He wondered and studies the reason of it. He did a lot of experiments and calculations and eventually he concluded that it was due to gravity. Without luck, penicillium may not have been discovered and Newton may not have discovered gravity and the world would be so different without their discoveries. However, we can not conclude that their discoveries were all due to luck. They did not succeed right after the incidents. If they had not spent time and energy to study the reason and if they had not read books and done a lot of researches before. They would not have the knowledge to unveil the secret. We appreciate the above scientists not because of their great discoveries. It is because of their spirit and attitude in working. They work very hard and they would not give up. They would try and try until they solve the problems. So luck only triggered their success and it didn't create their success.

33 You have received a gift of money. The money is enough to buy either a piece of jewelry you like or tickets to a concert you want to attend. Which would you buy? Use specific reasons and details to support your answer. ===== If I have got a gift of money from my friend, I would spend money on buying tickets to a concert. If I were a woman, I may choose to buy a piece of jewelry, because it means eternality and beauty. However, I am not as emotional and sentimental as women, I don't see eternality and beauty from the piece jewelry, I can only see a piece of rock containing greed and jeolosy. I have heard a piece of news about black diamond. guerillas in Africa controlling mine fields and forcing civilians to dig up diamonds for them for the warfare. The mines' conditions are very bad, many people suffer serious disease in the mines. Though they risk their lives in digging the diamonds, they may be empty-handed afer working for a whole day. If they are lucky, they may find a very tiny diamond which costs only about several US dollars. Though the news is spreaded all over the world, and the public is also stunned by it. People have no way to stop it. Traders don't care about the history of the diamond, in their eyes, they can only see money from it. They sell the black diamonds to the market and customers have no way to distinguish them from other "clean" diamonds. In other words, customers are giving money to the warfare and also damaging miners' lives. Plus, women buy jewelry for showing off. They may squeeze their husbands' or boyfriends'money to buy jewelry for themselves. They don't know that the love is the ultimate eternality and beauty not the gem. I will spend the money on buying tickets to a concert and I would invite the one who gave the money to me to go the concert together because I reckon that sharing is happier than owning