【推荐2】When I was 16 years old, a boy gave me an important gift.     1    .It was the early autumn of my first year at a junior high school, and my old school was far away.     2    . I was very lonely, and afraid to make friends with anyone.

Every time I listened to other students talking and laughing, I felt my heart break. I couldn’t talk about anyone with my problems. And I didn’t want my parents to worry about me.[

Then one day, my classmates talked happily with their friends, but I sat at my desk unhappily as usual.     3     I didn’t know who he was. He passed me and then turned back. He looked at me, with a smile on his face.

Suddenly, I felt the touch of something bright and friendly. It made me feel happy, lively and warm     4     I started to talk with other students and made friends. Day by day, I became closer to everyone in my class. The boy with the lucky smile has become my best friend now!       5     I believe that the world is what you think it is. If you think it lonely, you might always be alone. So   smile at the world and it will smile back.

A．At that moment, a boy entered the classroom.

B．He’s living in Australia now and he loves it.

C．It doesn‘t matter because all the dark days have gone.

D．It was a smile.

E．That smile changed my life.

F．It’s practically impossible to make friends here.

G．As a result, no one knew who I was.

【推荐1】Everybody knows vegetables are necessary for us, but the difficulty in growing vegetables is more than you think. Many years ago I moved from the city to the country. One of the first things I did was to make a large vegetable garden. It was hard work to change the grassy area to a fine garden. Imagine how much work it must have been for the early pioneer families to break the native wilderness by hand. I planted a full garden that first year -- everything from root vegetables like carrots and beets to green beans, corn, tomatoes, zucchini, acorn squash, and melons. A root vegetable means that we eat the root of the plant that grows in the soil instead of the part that grows above the ground.

My best friends Fritz and Heidi, both German shepherd dogs, loved to play out in the country. They enjoyed discovering all the new places where rabbits and deer appeared. A garden was something new to the dogs. At gardening time Heidi preferred to go exploring but Fritz would stay close to me and help.

Once in a while I would find a cucumber at the side of the garden with dog teeth marks in it.   Who do you think tasted the cucumbers? Since Heidi didn’t stay near the garden, it must have been Fritz!

One day Fritz went into the garden. He sniffed among the leaves of the melon vines growing close to the ground. He had discovered ripe melons by their smell, fantastic! Knowing when melons are just right to pick is very hard for humans. But Fritz knew the exact right time to pick each melon in the garden. From then on, Fritz was my best garden helper even if he did sometimes eat the cucumbers.

【推荐3】Life was not kind to a sweet Boxer-Pit Bull mix. Dog fighting had cruelly taken away his left ear. In 2019, the 4-year-old arrived at a shelter in North Carolina and was then named Van Gogh. Christy Langley explains he was named after the famous painter “not because he is an artist, but because he is a work of art”. What Langley couldn’t predict was that Van Gogh would actually go on to be a successful artist.

Gartner owns a shelter that helps dogs in shelters that are at risk of being put down. She saw Van Gogh and immediately knew she needed to help him. So, she took Van Gogh in from North Carolina in June 2022. Gartner started telling everyone about the friendly and lovely dog on Facebook, Pet Finder, and Rescue Me, but no one responded.

After months of searching for a new owner, Gartner had a new idea. Why not take Van Gogh’s name literally? Gartner explained, “He certainly had the name and the ear for it.” Gartner got to work, putting some paint on a canvas(油画布), wrapping it in a plastic bag, and coating it with peanut butter(花生酱)as a tasty treat for the pup. It only took five minutes for Van Gogh to lick the plastic-coated canvas clean and for a work of art to be created.

They worked on paintings for about a week and then, Gartner invited people to an outdoor art gallery event on October 23, 2022. Sadly, only two people showed up. The next day, Gartner put out a post on Facebook that she felt bad only two people showed up, and said the rest of the paintings were still waiting for their owners. Suddenly, Van Gogh’s pieces were hot items. After two minutes, the paintings were sold out and Gartner raised around $1, 000 for her rescue. The biggest success of all, though, was that on the last day of the silent sale, Van Gogh was finally adopted(收养).

【推荐1】My husband is more a kid at heart. He insists we find gifts for the grandkids while on a trip to Savannah.

I can be a kid at heart, too, but I also can be a mathematician — and even cheap, ugly gifts add up quickly when you have 11 grandkids.

Children like gifts and they want them. So we are digging through piles of cheap key fobs (钥匙链), plastic sun hats, chocolate treats that will melt in the heat, and funny T-shirts, finding nothing.

We go with two hats for the boys but are still empty-handed for the nine girls. Then I spot small bracelets (手链) in a rainbow of colors. He turns one over a couple of times and says, “Nice.”

The bracelets are made of small balls shaped like starfish and turtles. They all look like rock candy, which can be eaten and was popular when we were kids. We buy nine and make a mental note: tell the girls not to eat them.

As the clerk wraps the bracelets, I remember a gift I had as a girl. Once we could choose one thing in a shop to remember our trip. What I selected was a blue plastic soapbox with the lid (盖子) and topped with a pink flamingo (火烈鸟). It was cheap and tacky (俗气的) and I believed it was the loveliest thing a girl could own. It was too beautiful to put soap inside, so it sat in a dresser drawer year after year, slowly aging, yellowing, as a reminder of a family trip long ago.

The girls are married and have families of their own, and those gifts are still in the dresser drawers in their old bedrooms, but I have came to realize that every gift may have its worth and value, saying we are together even though we were apart. That’s always a good deal.

【推荐1】“BEIJING, Sep. 10 (Xinhuanet)—The extra-large model baby in the Spain Pavilion (馆) was ‘conceived (构思)’ by a Spanish filmmaker,” Shi Yingying reports.

Visitors admiring the 6.5-meter-high giant baby, Miguelin, in the Spain Pavilion may be surprised to realize that it was not the concept of a famous designer or a group of groundbreaking engineers. It came from one filmmaker’s interpretation of the meaning of “Better City, Better Life”.

Spanish director Isabel Coixet developed the idea after being asked to contribute to Expo 2010 Shanghai.

“They asked me to do something to tell the Chinese audience about Spain in the future and the first thing jumping to my mind was a baby,” said Coixet. “If we really fight to have better cars, better cities and better lives, it’s for them—for our children.”

Despite her Spanish heritage, Coixet doesn’t focus on making Spanish films or using Spain as the setting. Fans of her various award-winning films, including My Life Without Me, The Secret Life of Words and Elegy, may not even be aware of Coixet’s Spanish background.

“The borders between countries are just illusion (假象),” said Coixet. “Some directors feel really comfortable telling stories that belong to their territory.”

But Coixet feels the opposite: “I’m more comfortable outside my country. It gives me a strange freedom.”

One of her favorite things about being a director is the freedom. “The thing is that the world is wide and this freedom lets you make films everywhere,” she said.

Coixet’s curiosity took her latest exploration and movie work to Japan. In the movie Map of the Sound of Tokyo, the Catalan actor Sergi Lopez is the owner of a wine shop in Tokyo, and Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi is a young woman who works both as a fishmonger and as a hired killer.

The clash (冲突) of the two people’s very different worlds and the tango-like relationship they develop is just one representation of what Coixet is able to produce by mixing cultures.

While she doesn’t know if she will shoot a film in Shanghai, two things have caught her attention: Shanghainese women and crickets (蟋蟀).

After just arriving in the city, she was surprised by the mix of old Chinese culture in a booming metropolis. “Behind the skyscrapers, there is a flower and bird market with heaps of crickets and birdcages in,” she said. “I’m totally amazed with the city.”

【推荐2】Do you find yourself unable to go more than 15 minutes without reaching into your pocket, pulling out your smart phone and checking your e-mail or WeChat? Don't panic. You are hardly alone. A recent survey shows that smart phone users have developed "checking habit"—frequently checks of e-mails and other Apps. The checks normally lasted less than 30 seconds and were often done every 10minutes.

On average, the study subjects check their phones 34 times a day. And the strangest part is that they don't even realize they are doing it. "I hadn't told my hand to reach out for the phone. It seemed to be doing it all on its own," wrote Elizabeth Cohen, a medical correspondent for CNN who watched her right hand sneaking away from her side to grab her phone while sitting on the table at dinner with friends.

Loren Frank, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), explains that checking smart phones is rewarding in some way. "Each time you get an e-mail, it's a little bit exciting, because it means a positive feedback that you're an important person," Frank told CNN. Once the brain becomes used to this positive feedback, reaching out for the phone becomes an automatic action you don't even think about consciously, said Frank. Professor Clifford Nass of Stanford University added that constantly checking your smart phone is also “an attempt to not have to think hard but feel like you are doing something".

However, every coin has two sides. This habit can cause problems. Study show that whenever you take a break from what you are doing to check your smart phone, it is hard to go back to your original task, according to Adam Gazzaley, a neurologist at UCSF. That's not the worst. A survey by South Korean marriage consulting agency Duo earlier this year shows that smart phones are destroying intimate relationships, reports The Korea Herald (韩国先驱报). About half or the respondents said they had had fights with their boyfriend or girlfriend because of smart phones. And 32.8 percent of them fought about smart phone obsession. In this respect, checking smart-phones at regular intervals is a bad habit. But just as an old saying goes, "Bad habits die hard.”

So to get rid of the checking habit, Cohen suggests establishing phone-free times and zones.

【推荐3】Are you wondering whether it’s worth going for a little jog? Don’t hesitate, and get your sports shoes on. A new study shows that proper running lowers the risk of death before the normal time.

In an analysis of 14 previous studies from the US and Denmark, the group of researchers from institutes in Australia and Finland concluded that increasing running participation would probably lead to substantial improvements in population health and longevity. The studies involved 232,149 participants over time periods ranging from 5. 5 to 35 years.

On the whole, people running any distance were associated with a 27% lower risk of death from all causes than those who did not, the study shows. Running was also related with a 30% and 23% lower risk of death from cardiovascular(心血管的)disease and cancer, respectively.

Previous studies had concluded “inconsistent findings” about whether running could lower the risk of premature death, according to the researchers. Lead researcher Jim White, a professor at Victoria University in Melbourne, told CNN: “Our recent findings may encourage physically inactive individuals to take up running and those who already run to keep on doing it.”

He added that doctors may be encouraged by our findings to promote running as a part of “lifestyle medicine”. In their paper, which will be published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the researchers say health professionals are sometimes wary of promoting running because vigorous(剧烈的)use of it has been linked with sudden heart death.

Jim and his team deny this by noting that the benefit of running outweighs the risk. However, they did say advice should be given on a case-by-case basis, as running might not be appropriate for everyone. Although running has a clear health benefit, the researchers point out that higher “doses” of running may not reduce the risk of premature death further. According to the WHO’s guidelines, adults aged between 18 and 64 should take 150 minutes of gentle exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise each week.