Passage 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.

Passage 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 less 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.

Passage 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 passed 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 cross 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 cross 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.

Passage 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 consciousness 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 consciousness some 80 minutes later.

Passage 26
Face and Fortune
Recently, at the instigation of my publisher, I had some photographs taken. I do not enjoy the process 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.

Passage 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 weakness 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 less 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.

Passage 28
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie, known, as the king of steel, built the steel industry in the United States, and, in the process, became one of the wealthiest men in America. His success 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 progress 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.

Passage 29
Princess Diana
What was it about Diana, Princess 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 princess. 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 expression 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 asset.

Passage 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.”