阅读与填词fect · cept · sist

1Want to see all of Willow Lake in one afternoon? The path around the lake is 12 kilometres long and takes about four hours on foot. A bike is the most convenient way to see it all.

Where and when

2You can rent a bike at our shop next to the North Gate. We are open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day except Wednesday. All bikes must be returned by 5:30 p.m.

Prices

3A single bike costs 15 yuan an hour. A double bike for two riders costs 25 yuan an hour. Children under 12 must ride a double bike with an adult. We lend a helmet to every rider for free.

How to rent

4Show your ID card and pay a deposit of 200 yuan. We will give you a receipt. You can return your bike at the North Gate or the East Gate, but deposits are paid back only at the North Gate. Bring your receipt there.

Please note

5Ride only on the green bike path. If your bike breaks down, don't push it back. Just call us on 8866 2100, and we will come to you. If you damage a bike by riding carelessly, we will take the cost of repairs from your deposit.

6Weekends are busy, so book ahead on our website.

1Emma, a student from Canada, spent a term with the Chen family in Guangzhou. She loved almost everything about her new life except one thing: bitter melon.

2“Just try one bite,” Mrs Chen said on Emma's first evening. Emma did, and quickly drank a whole glass of water. She had never tasted anything so bitter. After that, she shook her head every time the dish came to the table.

3Mrs Chen did not insist. She simply kept cooking the dish, and the rest of the family ate it happily.

4One hot afternoon, Emma came home from volleyball practice. She had played in the sun for two hours, and she was tired and very thirsty. Mrs Chen handed her a glass of cold green juice, and Emma drank it all at once.

5“That was perfect!” she said. “What is it?”

6Mrs Chen smiled. “Bitter melon juice, with a bit of honey.”

7Emma stared at the empty glass. The juice had been a little bitter, but on a hot day it had tasted cool and fresh.

8That evening, she picked up her chopsticks and took a small bite of bitter melon. She did not love it. But she took another bite, and then another. Eventually, she finished half the plate.

9When Emma flew home in July, she took a bag of bitter melon seeds to plant in her mother's garden.

1On a summer evening, two friends sit side by side in a park. One goes home with ten mosquito bites; the other does not have a single one. Is it just bad luck? Researchers at Rockefeller University in New York decided to find out, and in 2022 they reported their answer: some people really are “mosquito magnets”.

2To collect each person's smell, the team asked eight volunteers to wear nylon stockings on their arms for six hours a day. Back in the lab, the stockings were tested in pairs. Each test consisted of a simple choice: mosquitoes were let into a clear plastic box and could fly towards either of two stockings. Every stocking was tested against every other one.

3The differences were huge. One volunteer, known as Subject 33, attracted the insects about 100 times more strongly than the least popular person. The results were also consistent. Over three years of testing, the people who were magnets at the start were still magnets at the end, and those who were ignored stayed ignored.

4So what was the key factor? When the scientists studied the skin of the most attractive volunteers, they found much higher levels of certain chemicals in the natural oil on their skin. Bacteria that live on our skin turn this oil into the smell that makes each of us different.

5The team also tested mosquitoes that had been changed so that part of their sense of smell no longer worked. To the scientists' surprise, these insects could still distinguish the magnets from everyone else. A mosquito, it seems, has more than one way to find its dinner.

6The researchers hope their work will help others invent better ways to prevent bites. Such ways are badly needed: the kind of mosquito they studied spreads yellow fever and several other serious diseases in warm parts of the world.

1The cat appeared under the stairs of our building one wet October morning. It was thin and grey, with one torn ear. Whenever I walked past, it would stare at me with round yellow eyes, and if I stopped, it disappeared behind the bikes.

2I started leaving food by the bottom step every day after school: a piece of fish, some rice, a bit of boiled egg. The food was always gone by the next morning, but the cat never came out while I was there.

3After two weeks, I ran out of patience. One afternoon I found it eating, and I slowly reached out my hand. The cat scratched at me and was gone in a second. I went upstairs with three red lines across my fingers. “Leave that cat alone,” Mum said as she cleaned them. “It doesn't want your help.” That evening she took me for a rabies injection.

4But I didn't give up. I just changed my plan. Every afternoon I put the food down, sat on the third step with my homework and didn't look at the cat at all. It took everything I had to resist reaching out again, but I kept my hands on my books.

5Slowly, things began to change. First the cat ate while I was there. Then it ate a little closer to me each week. It also learned to distinguish my footsteps from everyone else's. When the neighbours came down the stairs, it hid. When I did, it came out and waited.

6One freezing evening in December, it walked across the step and pressed its head against my leg. I didn't move. I had waited two months for that small sign of affection.

7The cat now sleeps in a box outside our door. There is a thick blanket in the box, and it was Mum who bought it.

1Last month, my headphones stopped working in one ear. My first thought was that they were ruined, and I nearly ordered a new pair online. Instead, partly as an experiment, I took them to a small repair stall near my school. The man behind the counter opened them up, found a loose wire, fixed it in ten minutes and charged me fifteen yuan. They have worked perfectly ever since.

2I tell this story because I suspect that many of the things we throw away are not really broken. A phone with a tired battery, a jacket with a broken zip, a lamp that needs a new switch: we call these things junk, when in fact each one needs only a small repair. We have grown so used to the convenience of buying new that we rarely stop to ask whether it is necessary.

3Some people are working to change this habit. In 2009, a Dutch journalist named Martine Postma organised the first Repair Café in Amsterdam. The concept is simple: volunteers with tools and know-how help visitors fix their own broken things, free of charge. The idea spread quickly, and there are now thousands of Repair Cafés around the world. Their advocates argue that the benefits go beyond saving money and cutting waste. When you watch someone open up a toaster and find the fault, the machine stops being a mystery.

4Critics make some fair points. Many products today are designed in ways that make repair difficult: parts are glued together, and spare parts can be hard to find. Time is also a factor. For a busy parent, a free Saturday afternoon may be worth more than the money saved by fixing an old kettle. I accept all of this. Repair will never be the answer to everything.

5What I am asking for is something smaller: resist the habit of throwing things away the moment they stop working. Before you click “Buy”, spend five minutes searching online for the problem, or ask someone who knows. You will not save every broken thing. But you may save more than you expect, and the ones you cannot save were heading for the garbage anyway.

1On the morning of 22 December 1938, a fishing boat came into the port of East London, South Africa. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, who ran the town's small museum, had asked local fishermen to tell her about anything unusual they caught, and the captain, Hendrik Goosen, thought he had something for her. Among the catch lay a fish she had never seen before: about 1.5 metres long, with a bright blue body and thick fins that looked almost like legs.

2Courtenay-Latimer could not name it, but she was sure it was important. She telephoned J.L.B. Smith, a fish expert at Rhodes University, but he was away on holiday. So she drew a rough sketch of the fish and posted it to him with a letter.

3Meanwhile, she faced a practical problem. It was the height of summer, and the only cold stores in town large enough to hold the fish refused to take it. As it began to rot, she had it stuffed for display, and its insides were thrown away. Smith did not receive her letter until 3 January.

4The sketch both excited and worried him. Its fins and tail seemed to belong to a coelacanth, a kind of fish known only from fossils. Coelacanths were believed to have become extinct at about the same time as the dinosaurs, more than 65 million years earlier. As he later admitted, his common sense kept telling him the idea was foolish.

5When Smith finally saw the fish in February 1939, his doubts disappeared. He named it Latimeria chalumnae, after Courtenay-Latimer and the river near which it had been caught, and the news made headlines around the world. Without the soft parts, however, he could not determine much about how the animal had lived.

6Smith spent the next fourteen years searching for a second one, and had notices offering a reward of 100 pounds handed out along the east coast of Africa. At last, in December 1952, a fisherman caught one near the Comoro Islands. Since then, coelacanths have been found to exist in deep water off several parts of Africa's coast, and a second species was discovered in Indonesia in the late 1990s.