1. Wearing a seat belt saves lives; it reduces your chance of death or serious injury by more than half.

2. But it will be the driver’s responsibility to make sure that children under 14 do not ride in the front unless they are wearing a seat belt of some kind.

3. However, you do not have to wear a seat belt if you are reversing your vehicle; or you are making a local delivery or collection using a special vehicle; or if you have a valid¹ medical certificate which excuses you from wearing it.

4. Remember you may be taken to court for not doing so, and you may be fined if you cannot prove to the court that you have been excused from wearing it.

5. Professor Taiju Matsuzawa wanted to find out why otherwise healthy farmers in northern Japan appeared to be losing their ability to think and reason at a relatively² early age, and how the process of ageing could he slowed down.

6. With a team of colleagues at Tokyo National University, he set about measuring brain volumes of a thousand people of different ages and varying occupations.

7. Computer technology enabled the researchers to obtain precise measurements of the volume of the front and side sections of the brain, which relate to intellect (智能) and emotion, and determine the human character.

8. Contraction³ of front and side parts as cells die off was observed in some subjects in their thirties, but it was still not evident in some sixty and seventy-year-olds.

9. The findings show in general terms that contraction of the brain begins sooner in people in the country than in the towns.

10. White collar workers doing routine work in government offices are, however, as likely to have shrinking brains as the farm worker, bus driver and shop assistant.

11. We know that you have a high opinion of the kind of learning taught in your colleges, and that the costs of living of our young men, while with you, would be very expensive to you.

12. But you must know that different nations have different ways of looking at things, and you will therefore not be offended if our ideas of this kind of education happen not to be the same as yours.

13. We are, however, not the less obliged by your kind offer, though we refuse to accept it; and, to show our grateful sense of it, if the gentlemen of Virginia will send us a dozen of their sons, we will take care of their education, teach them in all we know , and make men of them.

14. In what now seems like the prehistoric⁴ times of computer history, the earth’s postwar era, there was quite a wide-spread concern that computers would take over the world from man one day.

15. Already today, less than forty years later, as computers are relieving us of more and more of the routine tasks in business and in our personal lives. We are faced with a less dramatic but also less foreseen problem.

16. Obviously, there would be no point in investing in a computer if you had to check all its answers, but people should also rely on their own internal computers and check the machine when they have the feeling that something has gone wrong.

17. Certainly Newton considered some theoretical aspects of it in his writings, but he was reluctant to go to sea to further his work.

18. For most people the sea was remote, and with the exception of early intercontinental travellers or others who earned a living from the sea, there was little reason to ask many questions about it , let alone to ask what lay beneath the surface.

19. The first time that the question “ What is at the bottom of the oceans?” had to be answered with any commercial consequence was when the laying of a telegraph cable from Europe to America was proposed.

20. At the early attempts, the cable failed and when it was taken out for repairs it was found to be covered in living growths, a fact which defied contemporary scientific opinion that there was no life in the deeper parts of the sea.

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