{
 "version": 2,
 "license": "Original texts written for Typingo. Plain ASCII so every character can be typed on a US QWERTY keyboard.",
 "topics": {
  "stories": "Short stories",
  "animals": "Animals",
  "nature": "Nature",
  "space": "Space",
  "ocean": "The ocean",
  "history": "History",
  "science": "Science",
  "food": "Food",
  "travel": "Travel",
  "sport": "Sport and games",
  "technology": "Technology",
  "everyday": "Everyday life",
  "work": "Work and study",
  "health": "Health and wellbeing"
 },
 "texts": [
  {
   "id": "stories",
   "topic": "stories",
   "title": "Short stories",
   "text": "The lighthouse keeper had not seen a ship in eleven days. Each night he climbed the ninety steps, cleaned the great lamp and watched the dark water. On the twelfth night a small boat appeared, its sail torn, its crew waving. He lit every lamp he had. By morning they were safe, drinking tea in his kitchen and telling stories he would repeat for years. Mira found the old bicycle behind the shed, covered in leaves and spider webs. The chain was rusty and one tyre was flat, but the bell still rang. She spent the whole weekend cleaning, oiling and patching. On Monday she rode it to school for the first time, and the bell rang at every corner, just because it could. The bakery on Hill Street opened at five in the morning. Before the sun came up, the smell of fresh bread drifted down the empty road and woke the cats on the wall. Mr Okafor always saved the first loaf for the night nurse from the hospital, who stopped by on her way home, tired but smiling. Nobody in the village knew who planted the sunflowers. One summer they simply appeared along the river path, tall and bright, turning their faces to follow the sun. Children measured themselves against them. Old friends met beside them. When autumn came, someone collected the seeds, and the next year there were twice as many. Leo was nervous about his first day at the new job. He arrived twenty minutes early, sat in the car and practised saying his own name. Inside, a woman with a paper cup of coffee shook his hand and said, \"We are so glad you are here.\" By lunchtime he had forgotten to be nervous at all. The storm knocked out the power just after dinner. At first everyone complained, and then someone found a box of candles and an old board game. They played by candlelight until midnight, laughing at the shadows on the wall. When the lights came back on, nobody wanted to be the first to turn them off. Grandpa kept a notebook of every bird he had ever seen. The pages were soft and yellow, filled with small drawings and careful dates. When his eyes grew tired, he asked Ana to read it to him. She did, slowly, and on the last page she added a new entry of her own: a robin, seen from his window, in the rain. The train stopped in a field for no reason anyone could explain. Passengers looked up from their phones. A girl pointed out of the window, and soon the whole carriage was watching a family of deer cross the tracks, one careful step at a time. When the train moved again, people were still smiling at strangers. Every Friday the two neighbours swapped something from their gardens. One week it was tomatoes for fresh eggs, the next it was mint for a jar of honey. They rarely talked for long, and they never wrote anything down. After ten years, both of them agreed it was the best trade either had ever made. The school play was in one hour and the lead actor had lost his voice. The teacher looked around the room. A quiet boy at the back, who had helped paint the scenery, raised his hand. He knew every line. That night he walked on stage, took a deep breath and did not miss a single word. The town clock had been wrong for six years, and everyone had learned to add ten minutes in their heads. Then a retired engineer asked for the key to the tower. She climbed up every Tuesday with a flask of tea, cleaned the gears one by one, and said nothing to anyone. On a Sunday in March the bells rang at exactly the right hour, and half the town looked up from their gardens. During exam week the library stayed open until midnight. The librarian left a basket of apples by the door and a box of spare pens beside it, and never mentioned either. Students came in tired and left a little less tired. On the last night somebody returned the box with twice as many pens in it, and a note that said, thank you, we will pass it on. The corner shop kept a jar of odd buttons on the counter. If a coat lost a button, you were welcome to dig through and find the closest match, free of charge. Nobody remembered who had started the jar. People added to it more often than they took from it, which is why, after forty years, it had never once been empty."
  },
  {
   "id": "animals",
   "topic": "animals",
   "title": "Animals",
   "text": "Octopuses are clever animals with three hearts and blue blood. They can change the colour and texture of their skin in less than a second to hide from danger. Some have been seen opening jars, escaping from tanks and using coconut shells as portable shelters. Each of their eight arms can taste what it touches. Honeybees talk to each other by dancing. When a bee finds a good patch of flowers, it returns to the hive and performs a waggle dance. The direction of the dance points towards the food, and the length of the waggle tells the other bees how far away it is. A single hive can hold more than 50,000 bees. Elephants have excellent memories and strong family bonds. A herd is usually led by the oldest female, who remembers where to find water during a long dry season. Elephants greet each other with their trunks, look after calves together and have been seen standing quietly beside a friend that has died. Penguins cannot fly, but they are superb swimmers. Their wings have become stiff flippers that push them through cold water at high speed. Emperor penguins survive the Antarctic winter by huddling together in huge groups, taking turns to stand on the windy outside and in the warmer middle. A dog's nose is far more powerful than a human one. Dogs have hundreds of millions of scent receptors, and part of their brain is devoted to reading smells. That is why they can find people lost in snow, sniff out certain illnesses and always know when there is cheese in the kitchen. Hummingbirds are tiny, but their hearts can beat more than 1,000 times a minute. They hover in front of flowers by beating their wings dozens of times each second, and they are the only birds that can fly backwards. To save energy on cold nights, they fall into a deep sleep that is almost like hibernation. Cats spend around two thirds of their lives asleep. When they are awake, they are skilled hunters with sharp hearing and eyes that work well in dim light. A cat's whiskers are about as wide as its body, which helps it judge whether it can squeeze through a narrow gap without getting stuck. Sea otters hold hands while they sleep so that they do not drift apart. They are one of the few animals that use tools, cracking open shells with a stone balanced on their chest. Their fur is the thickest of any animal, which keeps them warm in cold northern seas without a layer of fat. Owls can turn their heads almost all the way round because their eyes cannot move in their sockets. Many owls hunt in complete darkness, finding mice by sound alone. The feathers on their wings have soft edges that break up the air, so they fly almost without a sound. Ants are among the strongest creatures on Earth for their size. A single ant can carry many times its own weight. Colonies work together to build tunnels, farm fungus and even form living bridges with their bodies. Some colonies have lived in the same spot for more than twenty years. Crows are among the cleverest birds alive. They can recognise individual human faces, remember them for years, and tell other crows about them. Some bend twigs into hooks to pull insects out of narrow holes, and city crows have been seen dropping hard nuts onto road crossings so that passing cars break the shells for them. Bats find their way in complete darkness by listening. They send out high squeaks and read the echoes that bounce back, building a picture of the room, the insects and the branches around them. The system is so precise that a bat can catch a moth in mid air, in the dark, without ever bumping into a wall. The arctic fox changes coat with the seasons. In winter it is thick and white, which hides it against the snow and keeps it warm at temperatures far below freezing. In summer the same fox is brown and grey, matching the rocks and low plants of the tundra. It is the same animal, dressed for the weather."
  },
  {
   "id": "nature",
   "topic": "nature",
   "title": "Nature",
   "text": "A single old oak tree can be home to hundreds of different kinds of insects, birds and fungi. In spring it grows thousands of new leaves, and in autumn it drops them to feed the soil. An oak may take fifty years to produce its first acorns and can live for more than five hundred years. Rainbows appear when sunlight passes through drops of water in the air. Each drop bends the light and splits it into colours, from red on the outside to violet on the inside. To see a rainbow, you must stand with the sun behind you. Sometimes a second, fainter rainbow appears above the first, with its colours reversed. Deserts are not always hot. A desert is simply a place that gets very little rain, and some of the largest deserts are cold, icy places near the poles. Even in hot deserts, nights can be freezing, because there are few clouds to hold the warmth of the day close to the ground. Mushrooms are only a small part of a much larger living thing. Under the ground, fungi spread out in fine threads that can stretch for miles. These threads connect the roots of different trees, passing water and food between them. Some scientists call this hidden network the wood wide web. Snowflakes form when water vapour freezes around a tiny speck of dust high in a cloud. As the crystal falls, it grows new arms in a pattern set by the temperature and moisture of the air around it. Because every flake takes a slightly different path, no two are ever exactly alike. Rivers shape the land slowly, carrying sand and stones from the mountains to the sea. Over thousands of years they carve valleys, build new land at their mouths and wind back and forth across flat plains. The longest rivers in the world flow for more than 6,000 kilometres. Bamboo is one of the fastest growing plants on the planet. Some kinds can grow almost a metre in a single day. Although it looks like a tree, bamboo is actually a type of grass. It is strong, light and flexible, and people use it to build houses, bridges, furniture and even bicycles. Thunder is the sound of air being heated suddenly by lightning. A bolt of lightning is hotter than the surface of the sun, and it makes the air around it expand faster than the speed of sound. Count the seconds between the flash and the rumble, divide by three, and you have a rough distance in kilometres. Autumn leaves change colour because trees stop making the green pigment that helps them turn sunlight into food. As the green fades, yellow and orange colours that were there all along begin to show. Red leaves are different: the tree makes that colour fresh in the autumn, especially after bright, cool days. Volcanoes are openings in the Earth's crust where hot, melted rock escapes from deep below. Some erupt with huge explosions of ash, while others let lava flow out slowly like thick syrup. Over time, the ash and lava can form rich soil, which is why farms are often found on the slopes of old volcanoes. On a cold morning you can see a spider web that was invisible the day before. Tiny drops of dew collect along every thread, and the whole pattern appears in the air like a drawing. The web was there all along. The water simply makes it easy to see, for an hour or two, until the sun dries it again. Plants cannot walk, so their seeds travel instead. Dandelion seeds ride the wind under small parachutes. Burrs hook onto fur and trousers and are carried for miles. Berries are eaten by birds and dropped far away, wrapped in their own fertiliser. Every hedge and meadow is the result of journeys like these. Wetlands are among the hardest working places in nature. Reeds and mud slow the water down, sand and silt settle out, and plants take up much of what would otherwise pollute a river. A healthy marsh cleans water, stores carbon, softens floods and feeds an extraordinary number of birds, all at the same time."
  },
  {
   "id": "space",
   "topic": "space",
   "title": "Space",
   "text": "The Moon is slowly moving away from the Earth, by about four centimetres every year. It always shows us the same face, because it spins exactly once for every trip around our planet. Twelve people have walked on its dusty surface, and their footprints are still there, because there is no wind to blow them away. Light from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach the Earth. When you look at the Sun, you are seeing it as it was eight minutes ago. Light from the nearest star after the Sun takes more than four years to arrive, and light from some galaxies has been travelling for billions of years. Jupiter is so large that more than a thousand Earths could fit inside it. It is a giant ball of gas with no solid surface to stand on. Its famous Great Red Spot is a storm wider than our whole planet, and it has been raging for at least three hundred years. Astronauts on the International Space Station see about sixteen sunrises and sunsets every day, because the station circles the Earth every ninety minutes. Without gravity to pull on their spines, astronauts grow a little taller in space. They exercise for about two hours a day to keep their muscles and bones strong. A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. The planet spins so slowly that it takes longer to turn once than to travel all the way around the Sun. It is also the hottest planet in our solar system, hotter even than Mercury, because its thick clouds trap heat like a blanket. Stars are born inside huge clouds of gas and dust. Gravity pulls the gas together until it becomes hot and dense enough to start burning. Small stars can shine for trillions of years, while the biggest ones burn out quickly and may end their lives in a giant explosion called a supernova. Mars is called the red planet because its soil is full of rusty iron. It has the tallest volcano in the solar system, nearly three times the height of Mount Everest. Robots have been exploring its surface for years, looking for signs that water, and perhaps simple life, once existed there. Saturn's rings are made of billions of pieces of ice and rock. Some are as small as grains of sand, and others are as big as houses. Although the rings are about 280,000 kilometres wide, in most places they are thinner than a tall building, which makes them almost disappear when seen from the side. Comets are icy visitors from the outer edges of the solar system. When a comet comes close to the Sun, the ice turns into gas and forms a glowing cloud and a long tail that always points away from the Sun. Some comets return every few years, while others visit only once in thousands of years. On a clear night far from city lights, you can see around two thousand stars with your eyes alone. The pale band across the sky is our own galaxy, the Milky Way, seen from the inside. It contains hundreds of billions of stars, and our Sun is just one of them. Looking at the night sky is a kind of time travel. Light takes time to cross space, so you never see a star as it is now, only as it was when the light set out. Some of that light left before you were born. A few of the faintest points in the sky are galaxies, sending light that began its journey millions of years ago. Meteor showers happen when the Earth passes through the dusty trail left behind by a comet. The specks are mostly smaller than a grain of rice. They burn up high in the atmosphere, drawing bright lines across the sky. The best way to watch is to lie back, let your eyes adjust for twenty minutes and be patient. Astronauts train for weightlessness underwater. A full size model of the space station sits at the bottom of a very deep pool, and crews practise every task in diving suits, slowly and carefully, with helpers floating beside them. By the time they reach orbit, their hands already know the work."
  },
  {
   "id": "ocean",
   "topic": "ocean",
   "title": "The ocean",
   "text": "The ocean covers more than seventy percent of the Earth's surface, yet most of it has never been explored. The deepest point, in the Pacific, is nearly eleven kilometres down. If you placed Mount Everest at the bottom, its peak would still be more than two kilometres under water. Coral reefs look like rocks or plants, but they are built by tiny animals called polyps. Each polyp makes a hard skeleton, and over hundreds of years these skeletons form huge reefs. Reefs cover a small part of the ocean floor, yet they are home to about a quarter of all sea creatures. The blue whale is the largest animal that has ever lived, bigger than any dinosaur. Its heart is about the size of a small car, and its call can travel hundreds of kilometres through the water. Even so, it feeds on krill, tiny shrimp-like animals, eating several tonnes of them a day. Tides rise and fall twice a day because of the pull of the Moon. As the Earth turns, the oceans bulge towards the Moon on one side and away from it on the other. The Sun pulls too. When the Sun and Moon line up, the tides are higher than usual, and we call them spring tides. Deep in the ocean, where sunlight never reaches, many animals make their own light. Some use it to attract food, some to find a partner and some to confuse hunters. Scientists think that most of the creatures living in the deep sea can glow in some way. Sea turtles return to the beach where they were born to lay their own eggs, sometimes after travelling thousands of kilometres. The temperature of the sand decides whether the babies will be male or female. When they hatch, the tiny turtles race across the sand towards the bright horizon of the sea. Waves are made by wind blowing across the surface of the water. The longer and stronger the wind blows, the bigger the waves become. Out at sea, the water in a wave mostly moves in circles and stays in the same place. It is the energy that travels, sometimes across a whole ocean. Kelp forests grow along cool, rocky coasts and can rise more than thirty metres from the sea floor. Kelp is a kind of large seaweed held up by small balls of gas. Fish, crabs, seals and sea otters all live among its swaying leaves, much like birds and animals live in a forest on land. Much of the oxygen we breathe comes from the sea. Tiny drifting plants called plankton float near the surface, catching sunlight and giving off oxygen, just as trees do on land. They are too small to see on their own, yet together they colour whole stretches of ocean green and feed nearly everything that swims. Mangrove trees grow with their roots in salt water, standing on tangled stilts along tropical coasts. The roots trap mud, hold the shoreline together and shelter young fish from bigger ones. When a storm arrives, a thick belt of mangroves can take the force out of the waves before they reach the villages behind. Ocean currents move heat around the planet like slow rivers inside the sea. Warm water drifts away from the equator towards the poles, cools, sinks and travels back along the bottom. This quiet circulation takes hundreds of years to complete and helps decide whether a coast has mild winters or hard ones. Whale song carries further than almost any other animal sound. Low notes travel for hundreds of miles through deep water, so two whales that cannot see each other can still keep in touch. Males of some species sing long, repeating patterns that change from year to year, and every whale in an area learns the new version. A rock pool left behind by the tide is a small world on a timer. For a few hours, crabs, anemones, limpets and tiny fish live in a bowl of still water that grows warmer and saltier by the minute. Then the sea comes back, washes everything clean and starts the whole day again."
  },
  {
   "id": "history",
   "topic": "history",
   "title": "History",
   "text": "The printing press changed the world in the fifteenth century. Before it, books were copied by hand, which took months and made them very expensive. With movable metal letters, a printer could make hundreds of copies of a page in a single day. Ideas began to spread faster than ever before. The Great Wall of China is not one single wall, but many walls built and rebuilt over about two thousand years. Soldiers used towers along the wall to send signals with smoke by day and fire by night. Together, all the sections stretch for thousands of kilometres across mountains and deserts. The ancient Egyptians built the pyramids as tombs for their kings. The Great Pyramid at Giza was the tallest building in the world for almost four thousand years. It was made of more than two million stone blocks, and workers moved them without iron tools, pulleys or wheels as we know them. Paper was invented in China nearly two thousand years ago. It was made from tree bark, old rags and plant fibres, soaked and beaten into a pulp, then pressed and dried in thin sheets. The idea travelled slowly west along trade routes and reached Europe more than a thousand years later. The first successful powered flight lasted only twelve seconds. In 1903, two brothers who ran a bicycle shop flew their home-made aeroplane over a windy beach in North Carolina. Less than seventy years later, people were flying to the Moon and back. Libraries have existed for thousands of years. One of the most famous was the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, which tried to collect a copy of every book in the known world. Ships that arrived in the port were searched for books, which were copied before the originals were returned. The Silk Road was not a single road but a network of routes that linked China with the Middle East and Europe. Merchants carried silk, spices, tea and paper in one direction, and gold, glass and horses in the other. Along with goods, they carried languages, recipes, music and ideas. Before clocks were common, people measured time with sundials, candles marked with lines, and sand glasses. Mechanical clocks appeared in European towers around seven hundred years ago. They often had no minute hand at all, because knowing the hour was usually good enough. The telephone was patented in 1876. Early callers had to speak to an operator, who connected their line to the right person by hand, using a board full of plugs and cables. Today a phone that fits in a pocket can call almost anyone on Earth in a few seconds. Roman roads were built in careful layers: large stones at the bottom, then gravel, then a smooth surface, slightly curved so that rain ran off the sides. Some were built so well that they are still in use as the base of modern roads, two thousand years after the last Roman engineer went home. Before coins, people swapped goods directly, which only worked if each side wanted what the other had. Coins solved the problem by standing for value that everybody agreed on. Early coins were weighed rather than counted, and their designs told you who had made them and therefore whether you could trust them. Sending a letter used to cost so much that the person receiving it paid, and many refused. In 1840 a simple idea changed everything: one small stamp, one low price, paid by the sender, for anywhere in the country. Within a year the number of letters doubled, and ordinary families began writing to each other. The oldest writing we can still read was pressed into soft clay with a cut reed. Most of it is not poetry but accounting: sacks of grain, jars of oil, lists of workers and what they were owed. Clay tablets were baked hard by accident when buildings burned, which is why the records outlived the buildings."
  },
  {
   "id": "science",
   "topic": "science",
   "title": "Science",
   "text": "Water is one of the few substances that expands when it freezes. That is why ice floats and why pipes can burst on a cold night. If ice sank, lakes and seas would freeze from the bottom up, and many of the fish and plants that live in them could not survive the winter. Your brain uses about a fifth of all the energy your body makes, even though it weighs only about 1.4 kilograms. It contains around eighty-six billion nerve cells, each connected to thousands of others. Every time you learn something new, like a key on the keyboard, some of those connections grow stronger. Sound travels about four times faster through water than through air, and even faster through steel. In space there is no air at all, so sound cannot travel. A huge explosion out in space would be completely silent to anyone watching from a distance. Plants make their own food using sunlight, water and a gas called carbon dioxide. This process, called photosynthesis, takes place in tiny green parts of their leaves. As a result, plants release oxygen into the air. Almost every breath you take depends on plants and tiny ocean algae doing this work. Magnets have two ends, called poles. Opposite poles pull towards each other, and matching poles push apart. The Earth itself is a giant magnet, which is why a compass needle points north. Some birds and turtles can sense this magnetic field and use it to find their way across huge distances. Everything around you is made of atoms, so small that millions of them would fit across the width of a hair. Most of an atom is empty space. If the centre of an atom were the size of a marble in the middle of a football stadium, its outer edges would be as far away as the top seats. Your body has about 206 bones in adulthood, but babies are born with nearly 300. As children grow, some of these bones join together. The smallest bone in the body is in the ear and is about the size of a grain of rice. The longest is the thigh bone. Rust forms when iron meets oxygen and water. The iron slowly turns into a reddish, crumbly material that is weaker than the metal it replaces. Paint, oil and other coatings protect iron by keeping air and water away from its surface, which is why bridges are painted again and again. Vaccines work by teaching the body's defences to recognise a germ before it causes a real illness. They contain a harmless piece or version of the germ. Your immune system learns its shape and remembers it, so that it can react quickly if the real germ ever appears. Friction is the force that makes things stop. It comes from surfaces gripping each other, even ones that look perfectly smooth. Friction is why brakes work, why we can walk without sliding, and why rubbing your hands warms them: the movement you lose turns into heat rather than disappearing. Drop a feather and a hammer together on Earth and the hammer lands first, but only because of air. Take away the air and both fall at exactly the same rate. Astronauts tried it on the Moon in 1971 in front of a camera, and the feather and the hammer hit the dust at the same moment. An electric circuit is simply a loop. Electricity leaves a battery or a socket, travels through wires and whatever you have switched on, and returns. Break the loop anywhere and everything stops, which is exactly what a switch is for: a small, deliberate gap that you can open and close whenever you like. Water is always on the move. Heat lifts it from seas and lakes as invisible vapour, it cools and gathers into clouds, it falls as rain or snow, and it runs downhill through soil and rivers back to the sea. The water in your glass has made that journey more times than anyone could count."
  },
  {
   "id": "food",
   "topic": "food",
   "title": "Food",
   "text": "Bread is made from just a few simple things: flour, water, salt and yeast. The yeast eats sugars in the flour and releases tiny bubbles of gas, which make the dough rise. Kneading the dough builds long, stretchy strands that trap those bubbles, giving the bread a soft and airy inside. Chocolate comes from the seeds of the cacao tree, which grows in warm, rainy places near the equator. The seeds are bitter at first. They are left to ferment, then dried, roasted and ground into a paste. Sugar and milk are added later to make the sweet chocolate most people know. Honey never really goes off. Archaeologists have found pots of honey in ancient tombs that were still safe to eat after thousands of years. It has very little water and is slightly acidic, which makes it a difficult place for germs to grow. Bees make it from the nectar of flowers. A good soup starts with patience. Onions are cooked slowly until soft and sweet, vegetables are added, and everything simmers gently with water or stock. Soups are found in almost every kitchen in the world, from spicy lentil soups to cold summer soups made with fresh tomatoes. Rice feeds more people than almost any other food on Earth. It grows best in warm places with plenty of water, often in flooded fields called paddies. There are thousands of kinds of rice, from long, fragrant grains to short, sticky ones that are easy to eat with chopsticks. Spices were once so valuable that they were traded like gold. Pepper, cinnamon and cloves travelled thousands of kilometres by land and sea. Some cities grew rich from the spice trade, and explorers set out across unknown oceans hoping to find faster routes to the places where spices grew. Apples float in water because about a quarter of their volume is air. There are thousands of different kinds, from sharp green ones to sweet red ones. An apple tree grown from a seed will not be the same kind as its parent, so farmers join branches from good trees onto young ones to keep their favourite kinds. Cooking with children is a great way to practise reading, counting and patience. A simple recipe asks you to read carefully, measure exactly and follow the steps in the right order. And at the end, unlike most lessons, you get to eat the results. A boiled egg is a small lesson in timing. Lower it gently into water that is already bubbling, and set a timer: six minutes for a soft, runny yolk, eight for a soft centre that still holds, ten or eleven for firm all the way through. Cool it quickly under a cold tap and the shell will come away cleanly. Salt does more than make food salty. It draws out water, firms up vegetables, helps bread rise steadily and makes sweet things taste sweeter. Add it early in small amounts and taste as you go. You can always add more at the end, but nothing takes it back out again. Tea comes from the leaves of a single plant, grown mostly on cool, misty hillsides. What makes green tea green and black tea black is not the plant but the handling: how long the leaves are left to dry and darken before they are heated. The same bush can produce either one. Leftovers are only leftovers if you forget about them. Cool them quickly, put them in a container with the date on the lid, and keep them where you will see them rather than at the back of the shelf. Rice, soup, roast vegetables and stews all freeze well and make a fast meal on a busy evening. Food bought in season is cheaper, fresher and usually better. It has travelled less, so it has been picked closer to ripe. Visit a market near closing time and you will often find the best prices of the day, along with someone who is happy to tell you exactly how to cook what they are selling."
  },
  {
   "id": "travel",
   "topic": "travel",
   "title": "Travel",
   "text": "Pack light, and you will thank yourself on every staircase. A good rule is to lay out everything you think you need, then put half of it back. Choose clothes that go together, bring one pair of comfortable shoes, and leave a little space in your bag for the things you will find along the way. The best way to know a new city is to walk it. Put the map away for an hour, follow a street that looks interesting, and stop for a coffee wherever the chairs look comfortable. You will get a little lost, but you will also find the small squares and markets that never make it into the guidebooks. Trains are a relaxing way to travel. You can read, work or watch the countryside slide past the window. Night trains are even better: you fall asleep in one country and wake up in another, with the whole day ahead of you and no hotel bill for the night. Learning a few words of the local language goes a long way. Hello, please, thank you and sorry are enough to make people smile. Even if your pronunciation is terrible, the effort shows respect, and it often turns a quick purchase into a friendly conversation. Airports are busiest early in the morning and late in the afternoon. If you can, arrive with plenty of time, keep your passport and boarding pass in one pocket, and drink water on long flights. When you land, try to stay awake until the local bedtime; it is the quickest cure for jet lag. A road trip needs a good playlist, a full tank and snacks that do not melt. Plan the rough route, but leave room for surprises: a lake glimpsed from the road, a town with a festival, a hill with a view worth stopping for. Some of the best moments are the ones you did not plan. Mountains change the weather quickly. A sunny morning can turn into rain or fog within an hour. Hikers carry an extra layer, a map, water and something to eat, even on short walks. They also tell someone where they are going and when they expect to be back. Postcards may seem old-fashioned, but they are still a small joy to receive. Choose a picture of a place you loved, write three honest sentences about your day and add a stamp. Weeks later, long after you are home, someone will pick it up from the doormat and smile. Travelling outside the busy season changes everything. Flights and rooms cost less, queues are shorter, and the people who live there have time to talk. The weather may be cooler and a few places may be closed, but you see the town as it really is rather than as a crowd sees it. A ferry is a slow, generous way to arrive. You watch the coast appear instead of dropping onto a runway, and there is room to walk about, eat, read or simply stand at the rail. Book a seat on the side facing land if you can, and go outside for the last half hour. Take fewer photographs than you think you need. A hundred rushed pictures of the same square are harder to enjoy later than five taken with care. Put the phone away for the first ten minutes somewhere new, look properly, then decide what is worth keeping. Before you leave, photograph your passport, tickets and insurance details and email them to yourself. Keep one card separate from the others, note the number to call if a card is lost, and write down the address of where you are staying on paper. None of it takes long, and all of it helps on a bad day. Every country has its own quiet rules: how loudly people talk on a bus, whether to take your shoes off, how tipping works, which gestures are rude. Watch what the people around you do, ask when you are not sure, and apologise cheerfully when you get it wrong. Most hosts are delighted that you tried."
  },
  {
   "id": "sport",
   "topic": "sport",
   "title": "Sport and games",
   "text": "Football is played by more people than any other sport in the world. All you need is a ball and a bit of space; jumpers can mark the goals. A professional player may run more than ten kilometres during a single match, changing direction hundreds of times. Chess began in India about fifteen hundred years ago and spread across the world along trade routes. Each game can unfold in more ways than there are atoms in the known universe. Good players plan several moves ahead, but they also know when to trust a quick feeling about the board. Swimming uses almost every muscle in the body, but it is gentle on the joints because the water supports your weight. Beginners often hold their breath too long. The trick is to breathe out slowly under the water, so that you only need to breathe in when you turn your head. Marathon runners cover 42.195 kilometres, a distance set at the 1908 Olympic Games in London so that the race could finish in front of the royal box. Most runners train for months, slowly building up their distance, and they eat plenty of pasta the night before the race. Table tennis looks simple, but the ball can spin at thousands of turns a minute. Top players read the spin from the angle of the bat and the sound of the hit. A single rally can last only a few seconds, yet each shot involves dozens of tiny decisions. Cycling is one of the most efficient ways to travel. A person on a bicycle uses less energy per kilometre than a person walking, and far less than a car. In some cities, bicycles outnumber people, and special lanes, bridges and parking areas are built just for them. Basketball was invented in 1891 by a teacher who needed an indoor game for his students during a cold winter. The first baskets were peach baskets nailed to a balcony, and someone had to climb a ladder to fetch the ball after every point. Yoga combines slow movements, stretching and careful breathing. It began in India thousands of years ago and is now practised all over the world. Many people use it to relax after work, while others use it to build strength, balance and focus. New runners usually start too fast. A better plan is to alternate: one minute running, two minutes walking, repeated for twenty minutes, three times a week. The running minutes grow week by week, almost without effort, and after a couple of months most people can run for half an hour without stopping. Badminton is faster than it looks. The shuttlecock leaves the racket quicker than the ball in almost any other sport, then slows down sharply because of its feathers, which is why rallies mix sudden smashes with soft, floating drops. It is also one of the easiest games to set up in a garden. Indoor climbing is a puzzle you solve with your whole body. Each route is a set of coloured holds, graded for difficulty, and the trick is usually footwork rather than arm strength. Beginners are taught to keep their arms straight, push with their legs and rest whenever both feet are solid. Warming up is not a waste of time. Five minutes of easy movement raises the temperature of your muscles, wakes up your balance and makes injury less likely. Afterwards, walk for a few minutes and stretch gently. Stopping suddenly leaves you stiff, and stiffness is what stops people coming back tomorrow. A skipping rope is the cheapest piece of exercise equipment there is. It fits in a bag, works on any hard floor and gets your heart going within a minute. Start with short bursts of thirty seconds, keep your elbows close to your sides, and let your wrists do the turning rather than your arms."
  },
  {
   "id": "technology",
   "topic": "technology",
   "title": "Technology",
   "text": "The first computers filled whole rooms and weighed as much as several cars. Today a phone in your pocket is millions of times more powerful. Computers work by switching tiny electrical signals on and off billions of times a second, representing everything as ones and zeros. A strong password is long and hard to guess. A short phrase of four random words is often better than a single complicated word full of symbols. Use a different password for every account, turn on two-step checks where you can, and never share a code that a website sends to you. Email was first sent in 1971, between two computers standing side by side. The sender chose the @ symbol to separate the name of the person from the name of the computer. Today, more than three hundred billion emails are sent every day. The keyboard layout most of us use, called QWERTY, was designed for typewriters in the 1870s. Some people believe it was arranged to slow typists down, but it was more likely designed so that the metal arms of the typewriter would not jam when common letters were typed one after another. Maps on our phones know where we are thanks to satellites circling high above the Earth. Each satellite sends out a signal with the exact time. By comparing signals from several satellites, a phone can work out its position to within a few metres. Robots are already common in factories, where they weld, paint and pack things quickly and precisely. They are also used to explore places that are dangerous for people, from the bottom of the ocean to the surface of Mars. Some small robots even help to clean floors and mow lawns at home. Solar panels turn sunlight directly into electricity. They are made of thin layers of a material, usually silicon, that releases tiny electric charges when light shines on it. Panels on a roof can power a home during the day, and batteries can store extra energy for the evening. The internet is a huge network of computers linked by cables, many of them lying on the bottom of the sea. When you open a web page, your request may travel thousands of kilometres and back in less than a second, split into tiny packets that find their own way. Backing up your files means keeping a second copy somewhere else, such as an external drive or a cloud service. It sounds boring until the day a laptop is lost or a coffee is spilled. A simple rule is to keep three copies, on two kinds of storage, with one kept in another place. A touch screen works because your body conducts electricity. The glass holds a very faint electrical field, and your finger changes it slightly at the point where it touches. The device measures that change and works out where you pressed, which is why a gloved hand or a pencil usually does nothing at all. Wi-Fi is radio. Your router turns data into radio waves, the laptop turns the waves back into data, and both take turns so they do not talk over each other. Walls, water and metal absorb the signal, which is why a router works best out in the open rather than hidden inside a cupboard. A 3D printer builds an object one thin layer at a time, usually from melted plastic. Nothing is cut away, so shapes that would be impossible to carve are easy to print. Hospitals use them for practice models before surgery, and engineers use them to hold a design in their hands before committing to it. Batteries last longer if you treat them gently. Heat is their main enemy, so a phone left on a sunny dashboard ages faster than one in a pocket. Charging little and often is kinder than draining the battery flat every time, and there is no need to run it down to zero before plugging it in."
  },
  {
   "id": "everyday",
   "topic": "everyday",
   "title": "Everyday life",
   "text": "A tidy desk makes it easier to start work. At the end of each day, spend two minutes putting things away, throwing out old notes and writing down the first task for tomorrow. In the morning you can sit down and begin, instead of wondering where to start. Small plants make a room feel alive. Most indoor plants die from too much water rather than too little, so check the soil with your finger before watering. If it is still damp, wait a few days. Give them light, turn them now and then, and they will grow towards the window. Writing a shopping list saves time and money. Before you go, check the fridge and cupboards and note what you really need. Group the items by where they are in the shop, so you do not walk back and forth. And try not to shop when you are hungry. A good night's sleep starts long before bedtime. Try to go to bed and get up at the same time each day, even at weekends. Put screens away for the last half hour, keep the room cool and dark, and if you cannot sleep, get up for a few minutes and read something calm. Saying thank you costs nothing and often makes someone's whole day. Thank the bus driver, the person who holds a door, the colleague who answered a question. A short, specific thank you, such as thanks for explaining that so clearly, means more than a general one. Walking is one of the easiest ways to stay healthy. It needs no special equipment and can fit into almost any day: get off the bus one stop early, take the stairs, or walk while you talk on the phone. Twenty minutes a day can lift your mood and help you sleep better. Cooking at home does not have to be complicated. Learn five simple meals you enjoy and can make without a recipe. Keep a few basics in the cupboard, such as rice, pasta, beans, onions and spices, and you will always be ten minutes away from a warm dinner. Moving house is stressful, but a little planning helps. Start packing the things you rarely use a few weeks early, label each box with the room it belongs to, and keep a separate bag with a kettle, mugs, snacks, chargers and a change of clothes for the first night. Rainy weekends are perfect for small projects. Sort the drawer that has not closed properly for months, frame the photo that has been leaning against the wall, or finally learn the song you always hum. By Sunday evening you will feel you have done something good. Sewing a button back on takes about five minutes and saves a shirt. Thread the needle, tie a knot, come up from underneath and go down through the opposite hole, four or five times. Wind the thread a few times around the stitches beneath the button so it stands slightly proud, then knot it and cut. A few quiet minutes on a Sunday evening make the whole week easier. Look at what is already fixed, write the three things that really matter, and decide when each one will happen. Anything left over goes on a second list, where it can wait without taking up room in your head. A library card is one of the best deals anyone offers. Books, newspapers, films, music, meeting rooms, story time for children, free internet and often courses, all for nothing. Borrowing instead of buying saves money and shelf space, and somebody else gets to enjoy the same copy next month. Saving works best when it is small, regular and automatic. A modest amount moved on payday, before the rest is spent, grows quietly in the background. It will not feel like much for the first few months. After a year it is the difference between a broken washing machine being a problem or an errand."
  },
  {
   "id": "work",
   "topic": "work",
   "title": "Work and study",
   "text": "Hi Tom, thanks for your message. I have read the report and made a few small changes, which are highlighted in yellow. Could you check the figures on page 4 before Friday? If everything looks right, I will send the final version to the whole team on Monday morning. Best wishes, Priya. Dear Ms Lee, thank you for inviting me to interview for the position of office assistant. I am available on Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon next week. Please let me know which time suits you best. I look forward to meeting you. Kind regards, Daniel Mensah. Meeting notes, 3 June. Present: Ana, Ben, Chris and Dana. Sales rose by 6 percent this quarter. Ben will update the price list by 10 June. Dana will contact the three new clients before the end of the month. Next meeting: Thursday 17 June at 2:30 pm in Room 4. Good notes are short and clear. Write the date at the top, use headings, and keep each point to one line if you can. After a class or meeting, spend five minutes reading your notes again and underlining the three most important points. You will remember far more. Before an exam, sleep matters more than one extra hour of study. Plan your revision over several weeks, test yourself instead of just reading, and take a short break every half hour. On the day itself, read every question twice before you answer, and keep an eye on the clock. When you start a new job, write down the names of the people you meet and one thing about each of them. Ask questions early, when everyone expects you to. Keep a list of the tasks you are given and the dates they are due, and tell your manager as soon as a problem appears. A clear email has a clear subject line. Put the most important point in the first sentence, keep paragraphs short and say exactly what you need and by when. Before you press send, read it once more, check the names and attachments, and ask yourself whether it could be shorter. Hello team, a quick reminder that the office will be closed on Monday for the public holiday. Please make sure all timesheets are submitted by 5 pm on Friday. If you are working from home next week, remember to take your laptop charger. Have a restful long weekend! Presentations go better with practice out loud. Aim for one main message and three supporting points. Use slides with few words and big pictures, and look at the people, not the screen. If you lose your place, pause, breathe and look at your notes; nobody minds a short silence. Dear Mr Adeyemi, I am following up on the quotation we sent on 14 May. I appreciate that you may still be comparing suppliers, so there is no rush. If it would help, I can talk through the delivery dates or adjust the quantities. Either way, please let me know if anything is unclear. Kind regards, Sam. Dear Mrs Petrova, thank you for your patience. Your order has been delayed by a problem at our warehouse, and I am sorry for the inconvenience. The parcel will now arrive on Thursday, and we have refunded the delivery charge. If that date does not suit you, reply to this email and we will arrange another. Name files so that a stranger could find them. Start with the date, written year, month, day, so that the list sorts itself. Add a short description in plain words, and a version number if there will be more than one. Avoid spaces at the start, and never call anything final, because it rarely is. Before a one to one meeting, write three lines: what went well, what is stuck, and what you need. It takes two minutes and turns a vague chat into a useful conversation. Ask for one specific piece of feedback rather than a general opinion, and write down what you agree to do next."
  },
  {
   "id": "health",
   "topic": "health",
   "title": "Health and wellbeing",
   "text": "Good posture at the keyboard protects your back, neck and wrists. Sit with your feet flat on the floor and your back supported. Your elbows should hang loosely at your sides, bent at about a right angle, and the top of the screen should be at or slightly below eye level. Every twenty minutes, look at something about twenty feet away for twenty seconds. This simple rule gives the muscles in your eyes a rest from focusing on a close screen. Blinking often helps too, because people blink much less than usual while they concentrate on a screen. Drinking enough water helps you think clearly. Even mild thirst can make you tired and less focused. Keep a glass or bottle within reach while you work or study, and sip from it regularly instead of waiting until you feel very thirsty. Short breaks make practice more effective. After twenty or thirty minutes of focused work, stand up, stretch your arms and shoulders, and walk around for a few minutes. Your brain keeps working on what you learned while you rest, and you come back fresher. Stretching your hands and wrists before a long typing session can help them feel more comfortable. Gently spread your fingers wide, then make a loose fist, and repeat a few times. Roll your shoulders slowly backwards. Stop any stretch that hurts; it should feel easy and pleasant. Learning something new is good for your brain at any age. Whether it is a language, a musical instrument or touch typing, practising a new skill builds fresh connections between nerve cells. The key is steady practice: a little every day works better than a lot once a week. Laughter really can be good medicine. A good laugh relaxes the muscles, lowers stress and can even help you feel less pain for a while. It is also contagious: people laugh much more often when they are with others than when they are alone. A calm breath can settle a nervous mind before a test or an interview. Breathe in slowly through your nose for a count of four, hold for a moment, then breathe out through your mouth for a count of six. Repeat a few times and notice your shoulders drop. Washing your hands properly takes about twenty seconds, which is longer than most people think. Use soap, cover the backs of the hands, between the fingers and under the nails, and rinse well. It remains one of the simplest and most effective ways ever found to stop illness spreading through a family or an office. Breakfast steadies the morning. Something with protein and slow energy, such as eggs, oats, beans or yoghurt with fruit, keeps you level for hours, while sugar alone lifts you quickly and drops you just as fast. If you are not hungry early, take something with you and eat it a little later. Screens in the evening can push sleep later. The light is bright, the content is interesting, and both tell your body that the day is not over. Dim the screen after dark, stop scrolling half an hour before bed, and keep the phone across the room so that checking it takes a decision. Sitting still is harder on the body than most desks admit. Stand up at least once an hour, even briefly: fill a glass, walk to a window, roll your shoulders. Movement keeps your back comfortable and your mind fresher, and you will type better in the second hour than you would have otherwise. Cold hands type badly. Fingers lose accuracy and speed when they are chilled, and stiff joints tire sooner. Before a long session, run warm water over your wrists for half a minute, or hold a warm cup, then shake your hands loose. It is a small habit that makes practice more comfortable."
  }
 ]
}