阅读理解

When you're not at home, many worries may start to crowd your mind. Did I turn the coffee maker off?

Did I lock the door? With a smart home, you can keep all of these worries off.

A smart home is a home with a communication network. This network connects devices (装置), such as lights and TV sets, and allows them to be controlled from far away through electrical wiring, mobile phone communication or WiFi over the Internet.

More and more people may start to consider owning a smart home, because it makes life much more convenient. It can help keep your room at a certain temperature. It can record what happens inside the home and send the video to your phone. When you are on vacation abroad, you can use a smart home controller to switch on or off the electricity when necessary. Some smart homes can receive a visitor, allowing him to come in and offering him a drink. They can even feed the cat and water the plants.

Besides, smart homes are easy to fix. Most smart home technology and devices are wireless and can be set up with a minimum of tools, using only the guiding information. When a problem appears, you can deal with it yourself without paying a professional.

However, for home-users, the smart home technology is far from perfect. It can be rather expensive to own the technology and the devices. Also, because the smart home system (系统) allows its owner to get home information from anywhere, it leaves the home easy to be attacked by hackers (黑客)，who may secretly use or change the information in the system.

Now, many scientists are excited at the future of smart home technology. Imagine being able to get fashion advice from your mirror, or receive food shopping suggestions from your refrigerator, while there are others who worry that those smart devices will make people lazier and lonelier. Whatever it is, one thing is for sure — smart home technology will change the way we live and work.

    It was a village in India. The people were poor. However, they were happy. After all, their forefathers (祖先) had lived in the same way for centuries (世纪).

    Then one day, some visitors from the city arrived. They told the villagers there were some people who liked to eat frogs' legs. However, they did not have enough frogs of their own, so they wanted to buy frogs from other places.

    This seemed like money for nothing. There were millions of frogs in the fields around, and they were no use to the villagers. All they had to do was to catch them. They reached an agreement and people sent their children into the fields to catch frogs. Every week a truck (卡车) arrived to collect the frogs and give them the money. For the first time, the people could dream of a better future, but the dream didn't last (持续) long.

    It was not easy to notice (觉察到) the change at first, but it seemed like the crops (庄稼) were not doing so well. It was more worrying that the children fell ill more often, and there seemed to be more insects (虫) around lately.

    The villagers decided that they couldn't just wait to see the crops failing and the children getting weak. They would have to use the money got to buy pesticides (杀虫剂) and medicines. Soon there was no money left.

    Then the people found out the problem. It was the frog. They were not useless. They had been doing an important job—eating insects. Now with so many frogs killed, the insects were increasing (增加) more quickly. They were eating the crops and spreading diseases (传播疾病).

    Now, the people are still poor. But in the evenings they sit in the village square and listen to sounds of insects and frogs. These sounds of the night now have a much deeper meaning.