【推荐1】After a year at sea, 16-year-old Laura Decker can finally say, “Job pulled off!” Last month, she finished a daring trip around the world aboard her 38-foot boat, Guppy. Decker, who is from the Netherlands, traveled more than 30,000 miles all by herself. She is the youngest person ever to sail around the globe alone.

Decker had wanted to take on this challenge when she was even younger. She first tried to set sail at the age of 13, but a court (法院) in the Netherlands stopped her. They said that she was too young to make such a risky trip by herself. But Decker insisted she had the sailing skills and patience of an adult sailor.

She finally took off on January 20, 2011. During her trip, Decker battled loneliness, storms, and worries about pirates. But she also got to surf, scuba dive, and started a new hobby: playing the flute. Although Decker didn’t spend all of her time at sea — she stopped at ports (港口) along the way — she did spend her 16th birthday on the open ocean. To celebrate, she ate doughnuts for breakfast.

But Decker didn’t sail into the record books. Guinness World Records and the World Sailing Speed Record Council no longer recognize records for “youngest” sailors. They dropped the official recognition in 2009 ta discourage children from trying such dangerous feats (壮举). But that didn’t stop Decker, who was born on a yacht during a seven-year world travel at sea undertaken by her parents.

Decker doesn’t mind that she won’t hold an official record. She says it was a personal goal, and she is happy she achieved it.

“I am not feeling down at all that Guinness World Record won’t recognize my achievement.” Decker wrote on her website. “I did not start on my trip to achieve any record… I did it just for myself.”

【推荐2】At the age of 9, my father passed away. I often helped mum with the housework and changing the vacuum cleaner (真空吸尘器) bag and picking up things the machine did not suck up always drove me crazy. One day 20 years later, in 1978, I was doing chores at home alongside my wife. The vacuum cleaner was screaming, and worse still, I had to empty the bag several times. But for my wife’s comfort, I would have lost it just as I did many years ago. It was at that time that I decided to make a bagless vacuum cleaner. And I even imagined myself using it for the next weekend cleaning.

Easier said than done, of course. I didn’t realize that I would spend the next five years perfecting my design, a process that resulted in 5,127 different prototypes (设计原型). By the time I made my 15th prototype, my third child was born. By 2,627, my wife and I were really counting our pennies. By 3,727, my wife was giving art lessons for some extra cash, and we were getting further and further into debt. These were tough times, but with my family, I pulled through and each failure brought me closer to solving the problem.

I just had a passion for the vacuum cleaner as a product, but I never thought of going into a business with it. In the early 1980s, I started trying to get licensing agreements (许可协议) for my technology. The reality was very different, however. The major vacuum makers had built a business model based on the profits from bags and filters (滤网). No one would license my idea, not because it was a bad one, but because it was bad for business.

That gave me the courage to keep going, but soon after, the companies that I had talked with started making machines like mine. I had to fight legal battles on both sides of the Atlantic to protect the patents on my vacuum cleaner. However, I was still in financial difficulties until 1993, when my bank manager personally persuaded Lloyds Bank to lend me $1 million. Then my bagless vacuum cleaner was produced in large numbers. Within two years, the Dyson vacuum cleaner became a best-seller in Britain.

Today, I still embrace risk and the potential for failure as part of my life. “Go out and brainstorm new ideas.” I often tell myself.

【推荐3】It's a little hard to figure out the rules for sure but the baby African buffalo (水牛）seems to have the upper hand. The two stand a couple   feet apart, staring at each other. Behind them, their mothers look on with the kind of indifference (不关心）of mothers everywhere who see their kids playing a harmless game.

The alarm went off about half an hour ago, the second time tonight. Here，one bell means "elephant ",two "rhino"(犀牛），and three and four，I really can't remember for what，because when you' re awoken by bells in the middle of the night，your first thought won’t be Animal", But as soon as I realized it was the rhino alarm, I was running for the stairs.

Yet I'm the only one watching the animals stare-down. Either nobody else died of a heart attack when the bells went off, or I was the only one in the entire hotel who didn't turn the alarm switch to off before going to bed.

The Ark, a hotel shaped like the biblical ark(圣经的方舟), lies in the highlands of Kenya’s Aberdare National Park, about 100 kilometers north of Nairobi. At the Ark's prow (船首) are huge windows overlooking a waterhole. Earlier tonight，I'd watched a pack of wolves, buffalos and elephants. And now, at Three or so in the mornings   I'm   down   for   the round of rhino bells. The first time, 2.5 hours ago, it was a single black rhino, which came   down, got a   drink, and left.

I'd have been sorry for the lost sleep. I've already arranged with a guide to take me out at sunrise for the so-called "should-never-missed" bird-watching, where well get to see 30 species, but really, how many times in your life will you get to wake up and say，"Wow! Rhino? Isn't that the definition of a pretty good right? Last week we went from Uganda into Kenya，Before I left home, I thought I'd be happy with ten elephants and five or six giraffes on the whole trip.I   didn't dare to dream the rhino.

【推荐1】Picture a young Chinese woman in a field, dressed in traditional hemp (麻布) clothing, as she picks flowers to create makeup for her cheeks. Imagine the same person making a bamboo sofa, making soy sauce and cooking all sorts of delicious dishes.

It may sound hard to believe, but such a person exists in modern China, and her name is Li Ziqi. On Dec. 14, 2019 she won the Person of the Year in the category of cultural influence awarded by China Newsweek.

With a fan base of more than 27 million people on Sina Weibo and over 10 million followers on the video-sharing site YouTube, Li has made a name for herself in a series of videos that show off a pre-industrial Chinese way of life in rural Sichuan province. “I want to do my part to let more people know about Chinese culture,” the blogger told the reporter. “Much of the popularity of my videos owes to the attraction of Chinese culture.”

Li seems to be a master of all kinds of skills—cooking, painting, design and farming. She raises silkworms to sew a quilt for her grandmother and grows plants. Many videos show her picking seasonal ingredients from her own garden and cooking them up with her wood-fired wok. A warm bowl of soup for the winter, a lighter plate of noodles for the summer, Li follows the seasons in her cooking, as China’s traditional 24 solar terms also do, and makes food suitable for the particular climate.

“She told the stories of Chinese culture and those of China,” the official Sina Weibo account of China Central Television noted. The success of Li Ziqi also comes from her “passion for life, for her home and for her culture”. Indeed, Li’s simple pleasures amaze people living in the hustle and bustle of big cities. “She leads a life that many dream of, but don’t dare to give up their current life in exchange for,” iFeng.com wrote. Her handmade lifestyle is a fantasy for many. “In today’s society, many feel stressed,” she told the South China Morning Post. “When they watch my videos at the end of a busy day, I want them to relax and experience something nice, to take away some of their anxiety and stress.”