【推荐1】Don't ignore the difference teenagers can make.

John Michael Thomas, 14，Florida

When John Michael Thomas decided to honor his friend and classmate Elizabeth Buckley, who died from cancer, he remembered how much she loved peacocks (孔雀).

He wanted to build a life-sized peacock fountain (喷泉) in Elizabeth's favorite park in the city. He thought it could be a place for people to relax (放松) and be inspired.

John Michael raised $52,000 to build the fountain.

Barrett England, 13, Utah

The wheels began to turn for Barrett England when he heard about Karma Bike shop, a place where young people can earn free bike by reading and performing community service.

Barrett visited Karma's owner with his idea: He would collect and repair used bikes and donate (捐献) them to the shop.

He expected to get about 10 donated bikes. In the end, Barrett received 39.

Zachary Blohm， 15, Wisconsin

The 25 -year-old playground at an elementary school near Milwaukee, Wis., was so small that only 70 of its 575 students could play on it at a time (一次).

That's when Zachary Blohm saved the day. He and some volunteers wanted to build a huge playground. To raise money, Zac planned T-shirt and bake sales, sold tickets and more. He held monthly money- raising events for more than a year. Overall, he collected $130,000—enough to finish his project.

Jack Zimmerman, 16, New Jersey

For some people, finding a meal is as simple as opening the refrigerator. For more than 366,000 hungry kids (小孩子) in New Jersey, it's not that easy.

That fact didn't sit well with Jack Zimmerman, who organized a drive to lessen (缓解) childhood hunger in his state. His goal: create 40,000 packaged meals that could be donated to those in need.

On game day, Jack and his volunteers started their work. After the final count, the team had packaged 47,124 meals-well above Jack' s goal.

【推荐2】Our local Community Youth Club is a very popular organization with young people in my town. I have been a member for four years now and I’ve taken part in a lot of interesting projects. These include fun activities such as holiday camps and discos. We have organized sports competitions and we even made a video.

But it isn’t all just enjoyment, we have also started doing social work to help people in our neighbourhood. We have organized activities for small children during the holidays. We have also formed a social support group to help young people stop smoking.

We are particularly proud of the most recent group we have created. It organizes regular visits to the local old people’s home. This idea came from a school visit to an old people’s home. My class spent an afternoon at a home and everyone found the visit very rewarding.

The old people at the home were very excited by our visit. They were very talkative and they told us their personal stories. During our visit, the home was filled with the sound of laughter. We sang songs and played games with the old people and had tea together. But we realized that life wasn’t always easy. Some of them were in poor health and were very unhappy. They couldn’t go outside and the visits by children brought some sunshine into their lives.

Many young people like me do not live with our grandparents and we have very little contact with elderly people. As a result, many young people don’t know what they are like and we have a lot of wrong ideas about them. We have little or no idea of the kind of lives they lead in their homes. After this visit, my friends and I decided we should do something to help improve the quality of their lives.

Since the creation of our visiting group, over twenty volunteers have joined us. Up to now, we have organized three group evenings and a concert.But it is the individual (单独的) visits which are the most important. Club members regularly visit old people and everyone finds the experience rich and rewarding.

【推荐3】It was a cold night in Washington, D. C., and I was heading back to the hotel when a man approached me. He asked if l would give him some money so he could get something to eat. I’d read the signs “Don’t give money to beggars.” So I shook my head and kept walking.

I wasn’t prepared for a reply, but he said, “I really am homeless and I really am hungry! You can come with me and watch me eat!” But I kept on walking.

The incident bothered me for the rest of the week. I had money in my pocket and it wouldn’t have killed me to hand over a buck or two even if he had been lying. Flying back to Anchorage, I couldn’t help thinking of him. I tried to rationalize (找借口) my failure to help by thinking government agencies, churches and charities were there to feed him. Besides, you’re not supposed to give money to beggars.

Somewhere over Seattle, I started to write my weekly garden column for The Anchorage Daily News, out of the blue, I came up with an idea. Bean’s Cafe, the soup kitchen in Anchorage, feeds hundreds of hungry Alaskans every day. Why not try to get all my readers to plant one row in their gardens dedicated to Bean’s? Dedicate a row and take it down to Bean’s. Clean and simple.

The idea began to take off. Readers would fax or call me when they got something in their garden. Those who only grew flowers donated them. Food for the spirit.

In 1995, the Garden Writers Association of America held their annual convention in Anchorage and after learning of Anchorage’s program, Plant a Row for Bean’s became Plant a Row for the Hungry. The original idea was to have every member of the Garden Writers Association of America write or talk about planting a row for the hungry sometime during the month of April.

As more and more people started working with the Plant a Row idea, new changes appeared unexpectedly. Many companies gave free seed to customers and displayed the logo, which also appeared in national gardening publications. Row markers with the Plant a Row logo were delivered to gardeners to set apart their “Row for the Hungry”.

Garden editor Joan Jackson, supported by The San Jose Mercury News and California’s nearly year-round growing season, raised more than 30,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables her first year, and showed GWAA how the program could really work. Texas fruit farms donated food to their local food bank after being inspired by Plant a Row. Today the program continues to thrive and grow.

I am surprised that millions of Americans are threatened by hunger. If every gardener in America — and we’re seventy million strong — plants one row for the hungry, we can make quite a decrease in the number of neighbors who don’t have enough to eat. Maybe then I will stop feeling guilty about abandoning a hungry man I could have helped.

【推荐2】Dreams, according to Carl Jung, reveal a certain amount of reality hidden during waking . consciousness:-In Jung’s philosophy, the conflict and chaos experienced in dreams finally bring order to our lives. While Jung’s mysterious theories are debatable, he was not mistaken about the importance of dreaming. A growing number of reports show that a continuous lack of dreaming is damaging our waking hours in many ways.

This trend is causing damage to our immune and metabolic (新陈代谢的) systems, let alone the electronic products that keep us up late at night. Devices like smart phones are ruining our sleep patterns, which has long-term consequences on our memory system. One study showed that not allowing mice to have adequate amounts of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, the stage in which we dream, the mice couldn’t strengthen memories.

You might think this is just a sleep problem, but dreaming is inseparable from our nighttime rest. We sleep in cycles (周期), each lasting about 90 minutes; in a sleep cycle, we go through non-REM sleep before hitting REM. The longer we sleep, the more time we spend in REM, which is why we are often dreaming when we wake up in the morning. If we sleep less than seven hours, however, it becomes harder to achieve this level of REM.

The combination of sleeping and dreaming acts as an emotional stabilizer. We recover from emotional hurt faster when we sleep and dream properly. However, we’re not getting enough sleep to cycle through the stages to take advantage of this natural antidepressant(抗抑郁剂) —— dreams. Instead, we get depressed and turn to alcohol or medicines to get to sleep, which only makes things worse because even one drink leads to late REM while man-made antidepressants ‘promote deep sleep by reducing the time for REM:

We’re paying for this lack of dreaming in many ways. Studies show that volunteers who experienced more REM sleep were better equipped for solving problems requiring creative solutions.

Rowan Hooper, the managing editor at New Scientist, writes that dreams that include an “emotional core” appear to be a main function of REM sleep and that we should look at sleep patterns as seriously as we do diet and exercise habits.

【推荐3】If your fingers get chilly all year round—even in the peak of summer—you’re not alone. Many people get cold hands during all of the seasons, due to a number of causes, from genetic to chronic illnesses.

Common reasons include being elderly and thin. If your hands are regularly cold or numb, however, it’s a good idea to see a doctor to rule out more serious causes. Cold hands are one of the symptoms of both anemia (贫血症) and hypothyroidism (甲状腺机能减退). Diabetes, which reduces blood circulation, can also trigger it. And if your heart is weak from heart disease, your body may prioritize sending blood to your core over your limbs.

For many others, cold hands are a sign they have a largely harmless condition called Raynaud’s disease. When any of us goes out in the cold, our bodies activate the muscles in our smallest blood vessels to make them even smaller—a survival mechanism to keep blood, and thus warmer temperatures, in our core. For people with Raynaud’s, this reaction is too strong, and instead of just a bit less blood going to their fingers, far too little gets there.

Raynaud’s is more common in women, and it most often develops before the age of 30. In fact, if you develop Raynaud’s when you’re older—usually after 40—it can be a sign of another underlying issue. That could be a smaller problem—a previous incident of frostbite (冻伤) or a sign of a more serious autoimmune condition, like lupus (狼疮).

For the majority of people living with Raynaud’s, medication won’t be necessary. However, a rare, more severe form of Raynaud’s affects less than one in 1,000 people. In these cases, blood can become completely blocked, causing sores on the hands. If they go untreated, it can lead to gangrene (坏疽) and, very rarely, amputation (截肢).

【推荐2】The summer vacation is coming. If you are a fan of sports and nature, here are some host cities of Olympics to visit recommended by Lonely Planet.

Athens, Greece (1896 and 2004)

Home to the first modern Olympic games in 1896, Athens’ history of the Olympic tradition dates back to several thousand years. Every four years, the Olympic torch is lit at the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens before beginning its long journey to the new host city. Visitors can walk through the Olympic Velodrome in the Olympic Sports Complex and step back in time at the 50,000-seat stadium.

Barcelona, Spain (1992)

These days Barcelona is among the world’s most visitable cities even without Olympic fame, but that isn’t always the case. The telecommunications tower built for the games by Spanish architect Calatrava is also an iconic (图像的) device of the city’s skyline, and its Olympics stadium- Montjuic Stadium is regularly used to host A-list musical performances like The Rolling Stones, Madonna, and Beyonce.

St Moritz, Switzerland (1924 and 1948)

Appropriately, the town that invented Alpine tourism has hosted the Winter Olympics twice, and continues to make use of its many sports facilities—if you can afford to get there. Stay at the Kulm Hotel for the easiest access to the Kulm Country Club, where guests can skate on the same lake used by mid-century Olympians, or test your courage on the Olympia Bob Run, one of the few places where you can ride a full-speed Olympic bobsled (双人雪橇) on a run constructed entirely of ice.

Sydney, Australia   (2000)

The turn-of-the-century Sydney Summer Olympics were named the “Green Games” by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and were designed to introduce a more environmentally conscious way of hosting the event. The structure that best shows Sydney’s efforts to be an example of continuing Olympic development is the ANZ Stadium.