【推荐1】Last Sunday, an earthquake struck the Napa Valley area of northern California. It happened in the middle of the night, becoming the strongest earthquake to strike the Napa Valley in 15 years. No one was killed, but many people were treated in hospitals.

I said to my seven-year-old twins, Brad and Brett, and three-year-old Meghan, “We have so much, and these poor people in trouble now have nothing. We’ll share what we have with them.”

I filled a box with foods and clothes. While I was doing this, I advised the boys to choose their toys and donate some of their less favourite things. Meghan watched quietly as the boys took out their old toys and put them together. Then she walked away. A few minutes later she came back with Lucy, her much-loved doll. She put the doll on top of the other toys.

“Oh, dear,” I said. “You don’t have to give Lucy. You love her so much.” Meghan said, “Lucy makes me happy, Mummy. Maybe she’ll make another little girl happy, too.”

I looked at Meghan for a long moment. She taught me a lesson. It’s easy to give something that we don’t want any more, but hard to give what we cherish (珍爱), isn’t it?

【推荐2】I am a middle school student. My name is Wang Jing. My grandfather is 70 years old now. He often says life has changed a lot. It becomes better and better. I asked him what life was like when he was a child. The following was what he said.

When he was a child, he used to feel hungry. There didn’t use to be enough food for him to eat. He has two brothers and two sisters. His parents were both farmers. They were very poor and couldn’t let their children eat as much as possible. As for clothes, they didn’t use to have enough clothes. They didn’t use to buy new clothes. The younger brothers and sisters often wore their old brothers’ and sisters’ clothes. My grandfather is the youngest. Only he went to school and had a job in the city. His brothers and sisters didn’t get an education and live in the countryside now. Now my grandfather has retired(退休) and lives a happy life. He can eat any food that he wants. He can buy clothes that he wants to buy. He says he is much happier than before. He often asks me to study hard. He says if I work hard, I can have a good future.

【推荐2】I was driving from Harrisburg last night, a distance of about eighty miles. It was late. Several times I got stuck behind a slow-moving truck on a narrow road with a solid white line on my left, and I was clinching(紧握) my fists with impatience.

At one point along an open highway, I came to a crossing with a traffic light. I was alone on the road by now, but as I approached the light, it turned red and I braked to stop. I looked left, right and behind me. Nothing. Not a car, no suggestion of headlights, but there I sat, waiting for the light to change, the only human being for at least a mile in any direction.

I started wondering why I refused to run the light. I was not afraid of being arrested, because there were clearly no police around, and there certainly would have been no danger in going through it.

Much later that night, the question of why I'd stopped for that light came back to me. I think I stopped because it's part of an agreement we have with each other.It's not only the law, but it's an agreement we have, and we trust each other to honor it: we don't go through red lights.

It's amazing that we ever trust each other to do the right thing, isn't it? And we do. Trust is our first tendency. We have to make a deliberate decision to mistrust someone or to be suspicious or skeptical. Those attitudes don't come naturally to us.

It's a very good thing too，because the whole structure of our society depends on mutual trust, not distrust. This whole thing around us would fall apart if we didn't trust each other most of the time. We do what we say we'll do; we show up when we say we'll show up；we deliver when we say we'll deliver; and we pay when we say we'll pay. We trust each other in these matters, and when we don't do what we've promised, it's far from the normal. It happens often that we don't act in good faith and in a trustworthy manner, but we still consider it unusual, and we're angry or disappointed with those badly-behaved people. Anyway I was so proud of myself for stopping for the red light that night.

【推荐3】In 2007, Bianca Valenti had an experience which nearly killed her. When she paddled out at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, she met a wave the length of a garage and as tall as a two-story house.

“The second I went under water, I was just getting knocked and spun every which way. And then my feet touched the sand bottom there. I swam to the surface. At this point my lungs were burning painfully. I just thought to myself, ‘If there’s one more wave after this, I’m going to die.’Luckily there wasn’t another wave.” That was when Valenti knew she had the drive and skill to surf big waves.

By 2014, Valenti surfed and won her first big waves contest at Nelscott Reef in Oregon. There, she met fellow professionals Paige Alms, Andrea Moller, and Keala Kennelly. “Two things got me fired up at that point,” she said, “I wanted to have the opportunity to win more events, but there weren’t more events for women. Also I noticed that just the sight of women surfing big waves was opening people’s minds. . . That’s really annoying.” Luckily,                    Valenti, Alms, Moller, and Kennelly became an energetic foursome and decided to stick together, support each other, and then fight together.

The four surfers formed Committee for Equity in Women’s Surfing（CEWS）to fight for entrance at Mavericks — a contest set in the surfing location of the same name, north of Half Moon Bay. Mavericks was invitation-only and was open to only men when CEWS was formed. Now, through the organization’s hard work with the State of California, women are awarded 12 spots to surf.

When Valenti was young, there weren’t many women represented in surfing culture. “I think it’s important for young kids to have all kinds of role models. That way they know all the people who they see as superheroes are just normal people who have crazy dreams. And sometimes the dreams aren’t even that crazy. If you work hard and you stick together with your friends, you can do anything. You can move mountains.”