一、On average, American kids aged 3 to 12 spend 29 hours a week in school, eight hours more than they did in 1981. They also did more household work and participated in more of such organized activities as soccer and ballet. Involvement in sports, in particular, rose almost 50% from 1981 to 1997: boys now spend an average of four hours a week playing sports; girls log half that time. All in all, however, children’s leisure time dropped from 40% of the day in 1981 to 25%. “Children are affected by the same crunch ( 危机 ) that affects their parents,” says Sandra Hofferth, who headed the recent study of children’s timetable. A chief reason, she says, is that more mothers are working outside the home. (Nevertheless, children in both double-income and “male breadwinner” households spent comparable amounts of time interacting with parents, 19 hours and 22 hours respectively. In contrast, children spent only 9 hours with their single mothers.) All work no play could make for some very messed-up kids. “Play is the most powerful way a child explores the world and learns about himself,” says T. Berry Brazelton, professor at Harvard Medical School. Unstructured play encourages independent thinking and allows the young to negotiate their relationships with peers, but kids aged 3 to 12 spent only 12 hours a week engaged in it. The children sampled spent a quarter of their rapidly decreasing “free time” watching television. But that, believe it or not, was one of the findings parents might regard as good news. If they’re spending less time in front of the TV set, however, kids aren’t replacing it with reading. Despite efforts to get kids more interested in books, the children spend just over an hour a week reading. Let’s face it, who’s got the time?
二、.Do you often play with your pet dog or cat? Do you like touching wild animals like squirrels? They are cute. But be careful they don’t bite you. You could get a terrible disease, rabies. Believe it or not, in the last five months, rabies killed more people in China than any other disease. 2, 254 people got rabies in the first nine months of this year. In September, 318 people died of rabies. That is 37 percent more than last September. Animals like dogs, cats, squirrels and bats can have rabies. If they bite or scratch(抓) someone, rabies could infect（感染） the person’s nervous system. The person could even die. It’s important to get the right treatment as soon as possible. Every year, more than 50, 000 people around the world die of rabies. Most of them are from developing countries. India has the most deaths. China is second.

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