One day, while I was walking to work, I decided to bring some flowers that I had picked from my garden that morning. On the way, I 1 a stranger and presented the bunch to him with a smile card. 2 by the sense of joy, I felt from giving flowers to another person, and may be 3 his day, I wanted to do it again.
When I got to my office, I had the 4 of anonymously(匿名) leaving flowers around the workplace. The impersonal(无人情味的) 5 of the building where I work makes me 6. It just feels a little boring sometimes, 7 it's a nice building with great light. I 8 lots of people might feel the same way, so why not put a little 9 there, and throw in an inspirational quote while I'm at it? 10, who doesn't like flowers?
So, for the past month, I've been putting flowers in a little cup on the sink in the11. Each week, I 12 the flowers and the quote. It always feels 13 for me to read quotes like Henry David Thoreau's “If one advances 14 in the direction of his dreams, he will meet with a 15 unexpected in common hours.” and Gandhi's “The fragrance (香味) always 16 on the hand that gives the rose.” If anything, I figured, it at least makes me 17 each time I visit the bathroom.
Then today, when I walked in, I 18 new flowers in the cup, and a quote that someone else had written！It said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”—Gandhi.
The little act 19 that at the end of the day, we're all just people with hearts, 20 the various roles and different hats we may wear in the workplace.
I did a little dance and I am smiling wide for the rest of the day!
The final results of Best-Ever Teen Fiction vote are in. While it's no surprise to see Harry Potter and The Hunger Games series on top, this year's list also highlights some writers we weren't as familiar with. For example, John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars, appears five times in the top 100.
Summer, like youth, passes quickly. But the books we read when we're young can stay with us for a lifetime. The following are the top 4 on the list. Enjoy.
⒈Harry Potter series
The Harry Potter books make up the popular series written by J. K. Rowing. The series includes seven books. The books concern a wizard (魔法师) called Harry Potter and his journey through Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The stories tell of him over coming dangerous obstacles to defeat the dark wizard Lord Voldemort who killed his parents when Harry was 15 months old.
⒉The Hunger Games series
In the ruins of a future North America, a young girl is picked to leave her poor district and travel to Capitol for a battle to the death in the cruel Hunger Games. But for Katniss Everdeen, the main character in this series by Suzanne Collins, winning the Games only puts her deeper in danger as the strict social order of Panem begins to unravel (瓦解).
⒊To Kill a Mockingbird
Author Harper Lee explores racial tensions in the fictional “tired old town” of Maycomb, Ala., through the eyes of 6-year-old Scout Finch. As her lawyer father, Atticus, defends a black man accused of a crime, Scout and her friends learn about the unjust treatment of African-Americans – and their mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley.
⒋The fault in Our Stars
Hazel Grace, a teenage girl, has got all sorts of cancer inside her body, and her lungs aren't working very well. She knows she is dying and doesn't live in hope any more. When a man named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at the Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten.
"Mom, what is that?" asked my son. "The Bride of Chucky?"
The old doll I was holding was pretty scary. Her glass eyes were especially horrible, closing when she stood upright and flying open when she lay flat. Once she had been loved, but she had been stored in an attic (阁楼) for decades, where the extremes of heat and cold can be hard on a girl's looks. Throw her in the waste bin? Maybe. But first, let's check eBay.
I clicked, supplied the required information about condition, including defects (i.e., "Only a miracle could save this doll"), and uploaded its photos. I sold it for $5.
The buyer was happy: "As described!" he wrote on my feedback page. "Super seller!" The doll found a home and, I hope, a new life. Maybe she was used to repair other dolls. Perhaps those strange eyes got fixed and once again can inspire a child's love. It's a win-win, if you ask me.
I also sold lots of other stuff. None of them brought in a lot of money, though I have been surprised at the occasional bidding war, like, for example, the one over an old swimsuit that would have made Brigitte Bardot look bad. And some customers, let's face it, are strange. Recently I had a hard time convincing an Australian would-be buyer of an Irish souvenir bell that I don't shop internationally; it's just too much trouble. He could have flown to Ireland and bought his own bell for the price he was willing to pay. Another time, a buyer complained that the electric wire on an old radio was dirty. Really? Dirty? The wire was black. But I aim to please, so I offered a refund.
So why bother with the dealing and small profits? Because I don't like abandoning the past. All these treasures once had stories. They meant something. But the people who gave them that meaning are gone, and I simply cannot rescue everything. I can't even sew. So I find it satisfying that a new owner, discovered via eBay, will continue the story in his or her own way.
In recent years, a growing body of research has shown that our appetite and food intake are influenced by a large number of factors besides our biological need for energy, including our eating environment and our perception（感知）of the food in front of us.
Studies have shown, for instance, that eating in front of the TV (or a similar distraction) can increase both hunger and the amount of food consumed. Even simple visual clues, like plate size and lighting, have been shown to affect portion size and consumption.
A new study suggested that our short-term memory also may play a role in appetite. Several hours after a meal, people's hunger levels were predicted not by how much they'd eaten but rather by how much food they'd seen in front of them—in other words, how much they remembered eating.
This disparity (新旧研究的差异）suggests the memory of our previous meal may have a bigger influence on our appetite than the actual size of the meal, says Jeffrey M. Brunstrom, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Bristol.
"Hunger isn't controlled individually by the physical characteristics of a recent meal. We have identified an independent role for memory for that meal," Brunstrom says. "This shows that the relationship between hunger and food intake is more complex than we thought."
These findings echo earlier research that suggests our perception of food can sometimes trick our body's response to the food itself. In a 2011 study, for instance, people who drank the same 380-calorie milkshake on two separate occasions produced different levels of hunger-related hormones （荷尔蒙），depending on whether the shake's label said it contained 620 or 140 calories. Moreover, the participants reported feeling more full when they thought they'd consumed a higher-calorie shake.
What does this mean for our eating habits? Although it hardly seems practical to trick ourselves into eating less, the new findings do highlight the benefits of focusing on our food and avoiding TV and multitasking while eating.
The so-called mindful-eating strategies can fight distractions and help us control our appetite, Brunstrom says.
When we talk about Americans barely into adulthood who are saddled with(担负着) unbearable levels of debt' the conversation is almost always about student loan debt. But there's a growing body of evidence suggesting that today's young adults are also drowning in credit-card debt and that many of them will take this debt to their graves（坟墓）.
More than 20% overspent their income by more than $ 100 every single month. Since they haven't built up their credit histories yet, it's a safe bet that these young adults are paying relatively high interest rates on the resulting credit card debt.
Although many young people blame "socializing" as a barrier to saving money, most of them aren't purchasing $ 20 drinks in trendy bars. They're struggling with much more daily financial demands.
To a disturbingly large extent, the young and the broke are relying on credit cards to make it until their next payday. This obviously isn't permanent in the long run, and it's going to put a huge drag on their spending power even after they reach their peak earning years, because they'll still be paying interest on that bottle of orange juice or box of spaghetti (意式面条）they bought a decade earlier.
A new study out of Ohio State University found that young adults are accumulating credit card debt at a more rapid rate than other age groups, and that they're slower at paying it off. "If what we found continues to hold true, we may have more elderly people with substantial financial problems in the future'" warns Lucia Dunn, professor of economics at Ohio State. "If our findings persist, we may be faced with a financial crisis among elderly people who can't pay off their credit cards."
Dunn says a lot of these young people are never going to get out from under their credit card debt. "Many people are borrowing on credit cards so heavily that payoff rates at these levels are not plenty to recover their credit card debt by the end of their life which could have loss impacts for the credit card issuing banks,"
Dear James,
It is a beautiful day here and I am sitting under the big tree at the end of the garden. I have just returned from a long bike ride to an old castle. It seems amazing that at my age I am still fit enough to cycle 20 kilometres in an afternoon. It's my birthday in two weeks' time and I'll be 82 years old! I think my long and active life must be due to the healthy life I live.
This brings me to the real reason for my letter, my dear grandson. Your mother tells me that you started smoking some time ago and now your are finding it difficult to give it up. Believe me, I know how easy it is to begin smoking and how tough it is to stop. You see, during adolescence I also smoked and became addicted to cigarettes.
By the way, did you know that this is because you become addicted in three different ways? First, you can become physically addicted to nicotine（尼古丁）, which is one of the hundreds of chemical in cigarettes. This means that after a while your body becomes accustomed to having nicotine in it. So when the drug leaves your body, you get withdrawal symptoms. Secondly, you become addicted through habit. As you know, if you do the same thing over and over again, you begin to do it automatically. Lastly, you can become mentally addicted. I believed I was happier and more relaxed after having a cigarette, so I began to think that I could only feel good when I smoked. Quitting smoking was really difficult because I was addicted in all three ways. But I did finally manage.
When I was young, I didn't know much about the harmful effects of smoking. I didn't know, for example, that it could do terrible damage to your heart and lungs or that it was more difficult for smoking couples to become pregnant. Neither did I know that my cigarette smoke could affect the health of non-smokers. However, what I did know was that my girlfriend thought I smelt terrible. She told me that she wouldn't go out with me again unless I stopped! I also noticed that I became breathless quickly, and that I wasn't enjoying sport as much. When I was taken off the school football team because I was unfit, I knew it was time to quit smoking.
I am sending you some advice I found on the internet. It might help you to stop and strengthen your resolve. I do hope so because I want you to live as long and healthy a life as I have.
Love from
Grandpa
1）你的苦恼
2）你和父母各持己见的理由
3）询问Tom的建议
注意：
⑴词数不少于100；
⑵可以适当增加细节，使内容充实、行文连贯；
⑶开头和结尾已给出，但不计入总词数。
Dear Tom,
Long time no see. As it won't be long before I graduate from high school, I have to choose an ideal university in advance, which makes me really annoyed.
Yours,
Li Jin
