Danielle was living in a new city with no local bank of her own. She desperately needed to ______ a bank to cash her paycheck. For more than two weeks, she made ______ one after another but in vain. How could she continue to ______ herself and her two children as a single mother?

Taking a break from her ______, Danielle decided to attend a meeting at the local women's resource center. The women there had been a strong source of encouragement since she fled her home ______ for her safety. Sitting next to Danielle, Amy began to share the details of her ______situation. She was just days away from ______ her home and her car. Her phone and electric services were both scheduled to be ______. Her husband had gambled away their money. She had nothing left. Nothing!

As Amy described the degree of the situation, Danielle ______ God’s soft whisper in her heart: “After the meeting, give Amy twenty dollars.” Danielle immediately thought, “But I can’t. I only have forty dollars.” She heard the ______ again. Danielle knew she needed to follow. When the meeting ______, she reached into her purse and ______ handed twenty dollars to Amy. Knowing Danielle's situation, Amy was ______ to accept it at first. But as a crowd of women ______ to give Amy hugs of support, Danielle told her that God wanted her to have it. Then Danielle left.

Now with just twenty dollars left in her wallet, Danielle decided to ______ cashing her paycheck at just one more bank before heading home. ______ she expected the rejection she had received at so many other banks, she was ______ filled with renewed confidence and optimism. Hopefully, she walked into the bank next to the women's center. Moments later, the bank ______ her paycheck with no questions asked. Wearing a big smile, Danielle returned home.

As for Danielle, it has been three years since that day. Realizing true hope has no ______, she continues to be ______ for the lifetime supply that she received for just twenty dollars.

For many parents, the most confusing part about choosing pre-schools is trying to make sense of terms such as “Montessori Method”, “Waldorf Approach”. What do these terms mean and how can these terms help you choose a preschool?

Oftentimes, the key difference between settings is connected to the preschool’s “educational philosophy”. While educational philosophies are numerous and their definitions are not set in stone, we have provided you with definitions for some of the most popular philosophies.

The Montessori Method

Focuses on maintaining the individuality of each child in the learning process. This method believes each child learns at their own pace and educational progress should not be rendered based on comparing students to one another.

The Reggio Emilia Approach

This approach focuses on providing opportunities for problem solving through creative thinking and exploration.

The Waldorf Approach

This approach places an emphasis on imagination in learning, providing students with opportunities to explore their world through the senses, participation and analytical thought.

The Bank Street Approach

This approach places an emphasis on learning through multiple perspectives, both in the classroom setting and in the natural world.

The High/ Scope Approach

This approach focuses on letting children be in charge of their own learning. Children are taught to make a plan for what they would like to do each day and participate in a review session to discuss the success of their plan and brainstorm ideas for the next day.

Outside of the formal educational philosophy, knowing the difference between other common early childhood terms will help you make informed decisions regarding your child’s education.

High-sugar diets raise risks for heart disease, obesity and diabetes, but we do love our sweets, so health experts have tried to suggest alternatives, and honey has been foremost among them.

Honey is actually sweeter than sugar is, which means, in theory at least, that you could enhance flavor equally with a smaller quantity of honey. But honey actually has a higher calorie count. It may have more minerals, which looks better on a label but, in reality, these are such trace amounts that they don’t offer any real advantages.

Honey’s reputation as a medicine is not wholly unfounded. Some honey does indeed have antibacterial properties. One byproduct of enzymes in honey is hydrogen peroxide, a powerful germ killer. Plus, honey’s texture and consistency are good for keeping wounds clean, and bad for bugs that might want to infect them. Honey is moist and its gooey consistency mean it can easily spread over and stay over wounds while keeping the tissue from becoming dry and fragile. The sticky substance means bacteria can not accumulate and multiply easily. It is particularly well-known for fighting bacteria like staph, salmonella, E. Coliand certain bacteria that can infect the gut and cause ulcers.

However, scientists can only say this for sure about Makuna and Malaysian Tualang honey. We don’t know yet whether local home grown honey has the same potency-or safety. A hot cup of tea with some honey stirred in certainly sounds like it would make you feel better. But it’s difficult to say for sure that it will.

When you have a cold, contact with warm water (from tea) may help to bust up phlegm(痰)that blocks your airways. But some suspect the real secret to the qualities of a cuppa is in the honey. There are studies that suggest that honey does work as well or better than cough suppressant(抑制性的) drugs like Robitussin.

Most of these, however, were considered by the academic world to be widely misinterpreted by the media. One of the findings that seemed to have given the honey trend some additional legs came from a study that said there was “no difference”, statistically speaking, between honey and one particular cough suppressant.

Overcoming extreme cold, cruel ice and people dismissing him as mad, Slovenian Davo Kamicar became the first person to ski non-stop down Mount Everest.

After a dramatic fall over almost sheer cliffs of snow, stones and ice, 38-year-old Kamicar emerged in his base camp after five hours of skiing. “I feel only absolute happiness and absolute tiredness,” he said.

At one stage he had to speed over stretches of ice that collapsed and broke underneath him and could have sent him falling into the deep crevasses (裂缝) that dot the mountain.

The descent (下落) had been seen by many as insanely dangerous. The Darwin Awards website, which documents deaths which are foolhardy, urged people to log on to Internet broadcasts of the attempt. “Keep your eyes peeled for a live Darwin Award,” it said.

However, the only body to make the news was the corpse (尸体) of an unknown mountaineer which Kamicar zipped past as he descended, one of an estimated 120 corpses, thought to litter the slopes.

“This mountain is always full of surprises. Seeing a dead man out there was a really shocking experience,” he said.

Thanks to strategically placed cameras on the mountain and one attached to his safety helmet, hundreds of thousands of people witnessed his descent on the Internet, which was one of the record highs ever. During the run more than 650,000 hits were registered on his expedition website jamming it for a time as others tried to access the site.

Weather conditions were so severe that Kamicar had to abandon plans to rest on the summit before attempting to descend. Instead, suffering from fatigue, as soon as he reached the top he put on his skis and flung himself back down the mountain.

Dealing with the mountain had already cost Kamicar two fingers when a previous failed attempt saw him get frostbite as a fierce storm lashed the peak.

Kamicar comes from a skiing family and took part in his first Himalayan skiing expedition in 1989. Since then, he has been tireless in raising funds and sponsorship for more expeditions, with Everest as the permanent goal.

When Oscar Pistorius was convicted (证明有罪的)murder last month, the judge described the case as a “human tragedy of Shakespearean proportions”. The Paralympic athlete’s fall from grace made this comparison appropriate: overcoming severe disability to reach “Olympian heights”, falling in love with a beautiful model, and, in a coincidence that wouldn’t be out of place in one of the plays, taking her life on Valentine’s Day. Mr. Pistorius’s tragic flaw was that he was an excessive paranoia（偏执狂）, which showed itself in an enthusiasm for guns.

Mr. Pistorius’s case is, indeed, peculiarly Shakespearean. But Justice Eric Leach, who delivered the judgment, is but one of those who have turned to the playwright in times of legal need. In 2012, Britain’s High Court quoted “King Lear” in a trial regarding a “threatening” joke on Twitter — they eventually overturned a conviction on the grounds that social-media users “are free to speak not what they ought to say, but what they feel”. A choice snippet of “Hamlet” (“a little patch of ground that hath no profit in it but the name”) was quoted in a 2008 boundary dispute. “Henry VIII” was called forth by Senator Sam Ervin Jr during the Watergate hearings. The condemnation of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, involved in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, was sealed with lines from “Julius Caesar”: “the evil that men do lives after them; the good is often buried with their bones.”

Lawyers’ love of Shakespeare is appropriate given that more of his lines are devoted to discussing law than any other profession. Some think his knowledge of the law was so detailed that the “real” Shakespeare must have been a lawyer. A study by Scott Dodson and Ami Dodson published last year set out to discover “the most literary justice” of those currently sitting(开庭), and which authors were regularly turned to for quotable wisdom. The “most abundant citer and the widest read” was found to be Antonin Scalia, and — no surprise — William Shakespeare topped the list of the often-quoted, along with Lewis Carroll. Both Shakespeare and Carroll accumulated sixteen references from five justices. Other popular authors among the bench were George Orwell, Charles Dickens, Aldous Huxley and Aesop.

The words of Shakespeare are likely to be sounded around courtrooms for decades to come as many universities — particularly in America and Britain — have included him in their law courses. Harvard Law School offers a seminar which focuses entirely on “justice and morality in the plays of Shakespeare”. King’s College London’s “Shakespeare and the Law” model is co-taught by the Literature and Law faculties, and explores “the role of the law in mediating the place of the individual within society”. There are sensible reasons behind this; the University of Southampton, in line with recent studies, states that it offers the opportunity to study law through a literary prism of Shakespeare, Dickens, Kafka and others in order to “help law students to become more ethically sharp”. A study argues that reading literary fiction makes people show empathy, challenge prejudice, and be more flexible in their decision-making. A literary sensibility enables lawyers to present clear, structured opinions and briefs.

But what is it about the work of Shakespeare, in particular, that lends itself to legal quotation and reflection? After all, as Robert Peterson pointed out in “The Bard and the Bench”, all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays have been quoted by American courts, in over 800 judicial opinions. One answer lies in the fact that Shakespeare’s status embodies high culture; quoting him seeks to invest the judgment with credibility and induce a sense of history. Mr. Peterson notes that this can “drive decisions in authentic ways”. Another option is Shakespeare’s universality — everyone has either read, or claims to have read, plays like “Hamlet”. His works have become globally shared; the term “Shakespearean tragedy” induces a rise-and-fall story even if the listener is not familiar with the works themselves. The horrifying details of Mr. Pistorius’s actions on that night, placed in a familiar Shakespearean frame, helps members of the court, and the public, to make sense of the unnecessary bloodshed.

In workplaces and families across the world, people tend to communicate on the Internet. We send endless emails; we video chat rather than travel across the town to meet. Actually, sitting down and interacting with someone in person can seem like a rare luxury nowadays. But as technology develops, are we losing our ability to connect and empathize (移情) with others?

Empathy is the ability to feel another person’s emotions and understand his/her views. In the past few decades, researchers have emphasized our ability to literally read others. The way we usually try to detect other people’s emotions is through their facial expressions—their eyes in particular. We are told that “the eyes are the windows of the soul, and eye contact is certain critical in empathy.”

However, empathy relies on more than reading facial expressions. New research suggests our voice can greatly help us connect. A new study by Michael Kraus from Yale University has found that our sense of hearing may be even stronger than our sight when it comes to accurately detecting people’s emotions. In other words, you may be able to sense someone’s emotional state even better over the phone than in person. Kraus conducted three experiments to arrive at the conclusion. In all these experiments, the participants gave the best performance when they only heard peoples voices (compared to when they looked at facial expressions alone, or looked at facial expressions and heard voices).

In several follow-up studies, Kraus directed his attention to why the voice is such a powerful mode of empathy. He asked the participants to discuss a difficult work situation over a video conferencing platform using either just the microphone or the microphone and the video. Once again, the participants were more accurate at detecting people’s emotions in voice-only calls. When we only listen to the voice, he found, we simply focus more on the nuances(细微差别) as the speakers express themselves.

How can we get better at interpreting emotions in the voices of our coworkers and loved ones? There isn’t much research so far exploring this question specifically. One study on babies, cries suggested that parents with more musical training were better at distinguishing cries of distress from other types of cries. But, really, we might not need much training. Kraus found that, once you remove other inputs (like facial expressions), your attention naturally sharpens when it comes to voice messages. Besides, the human ability to catch nuances in voices may have offered a strong evolutionary advantage to our ancestors, which helped ensure survival.

Authorities have called for nationwide enforcement of food standards in schools amid an ongoing investigation into a Shanghai-based food supplier accused of serving low-quality lunches with expired ingredients at a private school in the city.

The Shanghai Municipal Food and Drug Administration confirmed in a statement on Tuesday that students at the SMIC Private School in the Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park were served expired food, including rotten and moldy produce. Expiration dates on the packaging of some products had been altered. The investigation confirmed what the students’ parents reported during a surprise inspection of the school’s kitchen on Friday.

The State Administration for Market Regulation and the Ministry of Education urged local education and food authorities on Tuesday to strengthen inspections of campus canteens to ensure their safety. On Saturday, SMIC Private School apologized to students, staff and parents and promised to take full responsibility for failing to supervise the vendor, according to its website. The principal of the school has been dismissed.