Acting recently as an expert witness in a murder trial, I became aware of a small legal problem caused by the increasingly multicultural nature of our society. According to English law, a man is guilty of murder if he kills someone with the intention either to kill or to injure seriously. But he is guilty of the lesser crime of manslaughter if he has been sufficiently provoked or if his state of mind at the time was abnormal enough to reduce his responsibility. The legal test here is a comparison with the supposedly ordinary man—the man on the Clapham omnibus, as the legal cliché has it. Would that ordinary person feel provoked under similar circumstances? Was the accused's state of mind at the time of the killing very different from that of an average man?

另一段讲的是瓶装水风靡美国的话题。开头第一句就不好翻。根据记忆在网上找到了原文：

Sparkling or still? Spring or tap? Imported or domestic? Flavored or plain? There’s nothing simple about a drink of water, now that the bottled stuff outsells both milk and beer in the United States. In just a couple of decades, we’ve become a nation awash in bottled water — with tens of billions of plastic empties to prove it — transforming the drinking fountain on a city street into a dated curiosity akin to the public telephone booth.

How one of life’s basic necessities became a heavily marketed beverage in a plastic bottle is the subject of Elizabeth Royte’s new book “Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It.” Royte, an environmental journalist based in Brooklyn, N.Y., shares the many, sometimes bizarre, unintended consequences of cracking open that plastic seal.