Paage 16 New York May Never Win Its War on Rats Video of rats scampering acro a New York City restaurant floor may have disturbed viewers worldwide but some experts say the rodents are le dangerous than other creatures drawn to restaurants — humans.
The video broadcast on television a week ago showed rats running wild at a KFC/Taco Bell restaurant just one day after the outlet had paed a city Health Department inspection.
It took a bite out of the share price of parent company Yum Brands Inc.and forced a city Health Department shake-up that removed the inspector who conducted the review from duty and led to 13 more restaurant closures on Thursday.
The owner of the KFC/Taco Bell franchise, ADF Companies, has closed 10 of its restaurants until they pa inspections, and the city closed three other restaurants because of unsanitary conditions or mice, the Health Department said.
Yum Brands on Friday hired an urban pest control expert to review standards at its New York City restaurants.
The Health Department warned that greater threats to public health include restaurant employees who fail to wash their hands or food stored at improper temperatures.One epidemiologist agreed.Still, the incident reinforces New York’s reputation of having a more severe rat problem than other big cities.New York’s crowded quarters force restaurants to store trash indoors until it can be collected, providing rats with an indoor food source.In addition, New York’s real estate boom means construction is pervasive, scattering rats to a wider geographic area.
Paage 17 Beauty Industry With a bit of “physical preparation” — artificial breast implants, a nose job and a little trimming of fat from the hips — you too can aspire to be Mi World.So says Venezuela’s latest candidate for the world beauty contest.Andreina Prieto admitted that were it not for the help of cosmetic surgery, she probably would not have made the line-up.The raven-haired 19-year-old was chosen from among 40 other contestants to represent the South American country at the Mi World competition in South Africa.Prieto, wearing a blue bikini, told reporters that prior to entering the competition, she had three separate operations: one to improve the shape of her nose, a liposuction to remove fat from her hips and breast implants.“If it wasn’t for that, I probably wouldn’t be here,” she said.She displayed a brilliant smile, but did not say if that too was the result of surgery.Oil-rich Venezuela takes the beauty industry very seriously and has gained a reputation as a “factory” of international beauty contest winners.Venezuelan women have won five Mi World titles and four Mi Universe crowns.A private company, the Mi Venezuela Organization, specializes in preparing candidates for the Mi World and Mi Universe contests, and spends around $72,000 on each contender, in clothes, diets and, of course, cosmetic surgery.
Paage 18 Population Growth The growth of population during the past few centuries is no proof that population will continue to grow straight upward toward infinity and doom.On the contrary, demographic history offers evidence that population growth has not been at all constant.According to paleoecologist Edward Deevey, the past million years show three momentous changes.The first, a rapid increase in population around one million B.C., followed the innovations of tool-making and tool-using.But when the new power from the use of tools has been exploited, the rate of world population growth fell and became almost stable.The next rapid jump in population started perhaps 10,000 years ago, when mankind began to keep herds, plow and plant the earth.Once again when initial productivity gains had been absorbed, the rate of population growth abated.These two episodes suggest that the third great change, the present rapid growth, which began in the West between 250 and 350 years ago, may also slow down when, or if , technology begins to yield fewer innovations.Of course, the current knowledge revolution may continue without foreseeable end.Either way — contrary to popular belief in constant geometric growth — population can be expected in the long run to adjust to productivity.And when one takes this view, population growth is seen to represent economic progre and human triumph rather than social failure.
Paage 19 Food and Health The food we eat seems to have a profound impact on our health.Although science has made enormous steps in making food more fit to eat, it has, at the same time, made many foods unfit to eat.Some research has shown that perhaps eighty percent of all human illnees are related to diet and forty percent of cancer is related to the diet as well, especially cancer of the colon.Different cultures are more prone to contract certain illnees because of the food that is characteristic in these cultures.That food is related to illne is not a new discovery.In 1945, government researchers realized that nitrates and nitrites, commonly used to preserve color in meats, and other food additives, caused cancer.Yet, these carcinogenic additives remain in our food, and it becomes more difficult all the time to know which things in the packaging labels of proceed food are helpful or harmful.The additives which we eat are not all so direct.Farmers often give penicillin to beef and poultry, and because of this, penicillin has been found in the milk of treated cows.Sometimes similar drugs are administered to animals not for medicinal purposes, but for financial reasons.The farmers are simply trying to fatten the animals in order to obtain a higher price on the market.Although the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has tried repeatedly to control these procedures, the practices continue.
Paage 20 UK Urged to Update Copyright Laws The UK is currently using copyright laws that are more than 300 years old.Ministers in the United Kingdom are being urged to modify copyright laws to allow users to be able to legally rip CDs and DVDs for personal use.The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) wants users to have a “private right to copy” digital content.The IPPR acknowledged that the music and film industries are justified in battling illegal file sharing.But the IPPR argues that making copies for personal use does not have significant impact on copyright holders.Millions of Britons are violating current copyright laws by ripping CDs onto their MP3 players and /or PCs.Currently, Britons are violating an outdated 300-year-old law when copying CDs and DVDs.The British Phonographic Institute has already stated that it will not pursue its rights to bring private copying cases against users if the copying truly is for private purposes only.An independent research study reports that around 59 percent of Britons believe copying CDs and DVDs to other devices is legal.The chairman of the culture, media and sport select committee inquiry admits that he and his children are in violation of the law.“My own view is that the current laws are unsatisfactory as it is difficult to say to consumers that this bit of the law matters and this bit doesn’t matter,” Conservative MP John Whittingdale said.
Paage 21 A Growing Number of American Men Get Alimony Acro the country, a growing number of divorced men are getting alimony from their former wives.While far more women receive alimony than men, divorce lawyers estimate that 5% to 10% of their male clients now get such payments, up from only 3% five years ago.
Men seeking financial support from the rich and famous ex-wives have made headlines in recent years.But the ranks of ex-husbands getting alimony from their former spouses now are as likely to include the guy around the corner who gets a monthly check from an ex-wife whose bank account is fatter than his.“Women are getting better, higher-paying jobs at the same time that men’s wages are decreasing,” says Kathryn Rettig, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, explaining why the number of men receiving alimony is increasing.She adds， “If women want equality under the law, they have to take the responsibility for supporting dependent spouses.”
Like women, men are being awarded alimony for a few years as compensation for putting their wives through college or graduate school or for following transferred spouses around the country.And, like women, men are persuading judges to award them alimony indefinitely if they are sick or disabled or have stayed home to raise children.In out-of-court settlements, high-income women are even agreeing to pay alimony to their ex-husbands instead of giving them some property because alimony is tax-deductible.
Paage 22(92) Rainbow I wonder if there is any girl or boy who does not like to see a rainbow in the sky.It is so beautiful! There is a fairy tale saying whenever you see a rainbow you should run at once to the place where it touches the ground, and there you would find a pot of gold.Of course, it is not true.Neither could you find the pot of the gold, nor could you ever find the rainbow’s end.No matter how far you run, it always seems at a great distance.A rainbow is not a thing which we can feel with our hands as we can feel a flower.It is not solid, for it is only the effect of light shining on raindrops.The light from the sun shines on the rain as it falls to the earth.The raindrops catch the sunlight and break it up into all the wonderful colors which we see.It is called a rainbow because it is made up of raindrops and looks like a bow.That is also why we can never see a rainbow in a clear sky.We see a rainbow only during showers or storms, only when there is still rain in the air and the sun still shines brightly through the clouds.Every rainbow has many colors which are arranged in the same order.The first or the top color is always red, next comes orange, then yellow and green, and last of all the blue and deep blue or violet.A rainbow is indeed one of the wonders of nature.
Paage 23 Gratuitous Gratuities Everybody loathes it, but everybody does it.A recent poll showed that 40% of Americans hate the practice.It seems so arbitrary, after all.
In America alone, tipping is now a $ 16 billion-a-year industry.Consumers acting rationally ought not to pay more than they have to for a given service.Tips should not exist.So why do they? The conventional wisdom is that tips both reward the efforts of good service and reduce uncomfortable feelings of inequality.The better the service, the bigger the tip.
Such explanations no doubt explain the purported origin of tipping.In the 16th century, boxes in English taverns carried the phrase “To Insure Promptitude” (later just “TIP”).But according to new research from Cornell University, tipping no longer serves any useful function.The paper analyses data from 2,547 groups dining at 20 different restaurants.The correlation between larger tips and better service was very weak: only a tiny part of the variability in the size of the tip had anything to do with the quality of service.Customers who rated a meal as “excellent” still tipped anywhere between 8% and 37% of the meal price.
Tipping is better explained by culture than by economics.In America, the custom has become institutionalized: it is regarded as part of the accepted cost of a service.In Europe, tipping is le common.In many Asian countries, tipping has never really caught on at all.
How to account for these national differences? Look no further than psychology.According to Michael Lynn, the Cornell paper’s co-author, countries in which people are more extrovert, sociable or neurotic tend to tip more.Tipping relieves anxiety about being served by strangers.
Paage 24 Football Team’s Only Game Was Drugs They looked like a real football team — with snarling coach included.But the 10 men arrested at the weekend in Spain’s southern province of Cadiz were not going to play a match, despite their yellow and blue kit.They were drug traffickers who used their footballs, knapsacks and club strips, emblazoned with the team name of a local town, Guillen Moreno CF, as a ruse to fool border police as they paed from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, in North Africa, to Algeciras, on the southern Spanish mainland, a police spokesman in Cadiz said.
The fake team would usually cro the Straits of Gibraltar into the province of Cadiz on Saturday afternoons with the hash tucked beneath their jerseys and stage a drama to enhance their credibility before border agents.The supposed manager, 49, would carry a roster in his hand and continuously bark at the young men “Everybody pay attention, everybody stay right here!” and “Come on, follow me!”.
The players would cro back to Ceuta on Sundays after the fictional match and actual drug sales in Spain.Police do not know how long the fake season lasted before a tip spurred an investigation.The game ended when officers stopped their cars in Cadiz and found a total of 16kg of hash hidden beneath the men’s strips in little pellets taped to their bodies.
Paage 25(93) Sleep Sleep is a part of a person’s daily activity cycle.There are several different stages of sleep, and they too occur in cycles.If you are an average sleeper, your sleep cycle is as follows.When you first drift off into slumber, your eyes will roll about a bit, and your temperature will drop slightly, your muscles will relax, and your breathing will slow and become quite regular.Your brain waves slow down a bit too, with the alpha rhythm of rather fast waves predominating for the first few minutes.This is called stage 1 sleep.For the next half hour or so, as you relax more and more, you will drift down through stage 2 and stage 3 sleep.The lower your stage of sleep, the slower your brain waves will be.Then about 40 to 60 minutes after you lose consciousne you will have reached the deepest sleep of all.Your brain waves will show the large slow waves that are known as the delta rhythm.This is stage 4 sleep.You do not remain at this deep fourth stage all night long, but instead about 80 minutes after you fall into slumber, your brain activity level will increase again slightly.The delta rhythm will disappear, to be replaced by the activity pattern of brain waves.Your eyes will begin to dart around under your closed eyelids.This period of rapid eye movement lasts for some 8 to 15 minutes and is called REM sleep.It is during REM sleep period that your body will soon relax again, your breathing will grow slow and regular once more, and you will slip gently back from stage 1 to stage 4 sleep — only to rise once again to the surface of near consciousne some 80 minutes later.
Paage 26 Face and Fortune Recently, at the instigation of my publisher, I had some photographs taken.I do not enjoy the proce of being photographed.However, after I compared the new photograph with one taken twenty-five years ago, my feminine vanity suffered.My first instinct was to have the prints “touched up”.As I thoughtfully considered the photographs, I knew that a still more important principle was involved.A quarter century of living should put a great deal into a woman’s face besides a few wrinkles and some unwelcome folds around the chin.In that length of time she has become intimately acquainted with pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, life and death.She has struggled and survived, failed and succeeded.She has lost and regained faith.And, as a result, she would be wiser, gentler, more patient and more tolerant than she was when she was young.Her sense of humor should have mellowed, her outlook should have widened, and her sympathies should have deepened.And all this should show.If she tries to erase the imprint of age, she runs the risk of destroying, at the same time, the imprint of experience and character.I know I am more experienced than I was a quarter century ago and I hope I have more character.I released the pictures as they were.
Paage 27(94) Readers Reveal Stuff of Dreams Psychologists have confirmed what writers have always believed: that books are literally the stuff of dreams.A survey has confirmed that readers of Iris Murdoch or JK Rowling are more likely to have bizarre dreams than people deep into a history of the crusades.People with a taste for fiction experienced dreams that contained more improbable events, and their dreams were more emotionally intense.The survey also found that people who read thrillers were no more likely to have nightmares.But those with a weakne for science fiction were rather more likely to wake up suddenly with a cold sweat.According to Mark Blagrove of the University of Wales, the study is perhaps the first experiment to determine a link between the waking world and dreams.Dr.Blagrove and colleagues distributed 100,000 questionnaires about sleep patterns and literary tastes, and got more than 10,000 replies.They found that 58% of all adults had experienced at least one dream in which they were aware they were dreaming — and that women could recall more dreams than men.Older people seemed to dream le and have fewer nightmares.About 44% of children said their dreams were affected by the books they had been reading.Children who report reading scary books have three times the number of nightmares as children who don’t.
Paage 28 Andrew Carnegie Andrew Carnegie, known, as the king of steel, built the steel industry in the United States, and, in the proce, became one of the wealthiest men in America.His succe resulted in part from his ability to sell the product and in part from his policy of expanding during periods of economic decline, when most of his competitors were reducing their investments.Carnegie believed that individuals should progre through hard work, but he also felt strongly that the wealthy should use their fortunes for the benefit of society.He opposed charity, preferring instead to provide educational opportunities that would allow others to help themselves.“He who dies rich, dies disgraced, ” he often said.
Among his more noteworthy contributions to society are those that bear his name, including the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, which has a library, a museum of fine arts, and a museum of national history.He also founded a school of technology that is now part of Carnegie Mellon University.Other philanthropic gifts are the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to promote understanding between nations, the Carnegie Institute of Washington to fund scientific research, and Carnegie Hall to provide a center for the arts.
Few Americans have been left untouched by Andrew Carnegie’s generosity.His contributions of more than five million dollars established 2,500 libraries in small communities throughout the country and formed the nucleus of the public library system that we all enjoy today.
Paage 29 Prince Diana What was it about Diana, Prince of Wales that brought such huge numbers of people from all walks of life literally to their knees after her death in 1997? What was her special appeal, not just to British subjects but also to people the world over? A late spasm of royalism hardly explains it, even in Britain, for many true British monarchists despised her for cheapening the royal institution by behaving more like a movie star or a pop diva than a prince.To many others, however, that was precisely her attraction.Diana was beautiful, in a fresh-faced, English, outdoors-girl kind of way.She used her big blue eyes to their fullest advantage, melting the hearts of men and women through an expreion of complete vulnerability.Diana’s eyes, like those of Marilyn Monroe, contained an appeal directed not to any individual but to the world at large.Please don’t hurt me, they seemed to say.She often looked as if she were on the verge of tears, in the manner of folk images of the Virgin Mary.Yet she was one of the richest, most glamorous and socially powerful women in the world.This combination of vulnerability and power was perhaps her greatest aet.
Paage 30 A Greek to Remember Diogenes was a famous Greek philosopher of the fourth century B.C., who established the philosophy of cynicism.He often walked about in the daytime holding a lighted lantern, peering around as if he were looking for something.When questioned about his odd behavior, he would reply, “I am searching for an honest man.”
Diogenes held that the good man was self-sufficient and did not require material comforts or wealth.He believed that wealth and poeions constrained humanity’s natural state of freedom.In keeping with his philosophy, he was perfectly satisfied with making his home in a large tub discarded from the temple of Cybele, the godde of nature.This earthen tub, called a pithos, and formerly been used for holding wine or oil for the sacrifices at the temple.One day, Alexander the Great, conqueror of half the civilized world, saw Diogenes sitting in this tub in the sunshine.So the king, surrounded by his countries, approached Diogenes and said, “I am Alexander the Great.” The philosopher replied rather contemptuously, “I am Diogenes, the Cynic.” Alexander then asked him if he could help him in any way.“Yes,” shot back Diogenes, “don’t stand between me and the sun.” A surprised Alexander then replied quickly, “If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.”
