【推荐1】A man was looking for things of old times. One day he came to a village and found a blue bowl which looked very old. The bowl was on the ground and a cat was drinking milk from it. A farmer, the owner of the cat, was lying beside the bowl. In order not to draw the farmer’s attention to the value of the bowl. The man said to him in a soft voice,” What a nice cat you have! Won’t you sell it to me?’’

“How much would you give me for it? ” the farmer opened his eyes and asked.

“ Twenty dollars. Would it be enough?”

A few minutes later, the farmer agreed. After he paid the farmer, the man said, “ My cat will certainly feel thirsty. May I take the bowl so that the cat can have milk?” But the farmer said, “ I’m sorry I can’t give it to you. Thanks to the bowl, I have already sold twenty cats.”

【推荐2】Nowadays there seems to be an app for everything. And mobile apps have been a part of our life. The following apps are part of the most popular apps.

【推荐3】The world is designed for right-handed people, but why does a tenth of the population prefer the left?     1    

The answer to it remains a bit of a mystery. Since scientists have noticed that left-handedness tends to run in families, it’s assumed that left-handedness has a genetic(基因的) component to it.

    2     In fact, identical twins, who share the same genes, can sometimes prefer to use different hands. There are also plenty of theories on what else might determine which hand you write with, but many experts believe that it’s kind of random.

Historically, the left side and left-handedness have been considered a negative thing by many cultures.     3     In some areas, the left hand became known as the “unclean” hand. In many religions, the right hand of God is the favored hand. For example, Jesus sits at God’s right side. God’s left hand, however, is the hand of judgment. Various activities and experiences become rude or even signs of bad luck when the left hand becomes involved. In some parts of Scotland, it is considered bad luck to meet a left-handed person at the start of a journey.     4    A person giving directions will put their left hand behind them and even physically try to point with their right hand if necessary. In some Asian countries, eating with the left hand is considered impolite.

    5    People come to realize that left-handedness is natural. Some researchers find out that lefties are more creative and can deal with abstract thinking better. The left-handedness is more easily adaptable to the right-handed world as well. Being left-handed is no longer a sad story now; instead, it is a wonderful gift or maybe it is something you should take pride in.

【推荐1】You are a member in a full-time school called “life”. Each day here you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or hate them, but you have designed them as part of your curriculum.

Why are you here? What is your purpose? Humans have sought to discover the meaning of life for a very long time. What we and our ancestors have to overlook is that there is no one answer. The meaning of life is different for every individual.

Each person has his own purpose and distinct path, unique and separate from anyone else’s. As you are travelling your life path, you will be presented with numerous lessons you will need to learn in order to achieve that purpose. The lessons you are presented with are specific to you; learning these lessons is the key to discovering and achieving the meaning of your own life.

As you are travelling through your lifetime, you may meet challenging lessons that others don’t have to face, while others spend years struggling with challenges that you don’t need to deal with. You may never know why you are blessed with a wonderful marriage, while your friends suffer painful divorces, just as you cannot be sure why you struggle financially while your peers enjoy abundance. The only thing you can count on is that you will be presented with all the lessons that you specifically need to learn.

The challenge, therefore, is to arrange yourself with your own unique path by learning individual lessons. This is one of the most difficult challenges you will face in your lifetime, as sometimes your path will be different from others. But don’t compare your path with that of people around you and focus on the differences between their lessons and yours. You need to remember that you will only face lessons that you can learn and are specific to your own growth.

Our sense of fairness is the expectation of equality. Life is not, in fact, fair, and you may indeed have a more difficult life path than others around you, deserved or not. Everyone’s circumstances are unique, and everyone needs to handle his or her own circumstances differently.

【推荐2】In bringing up children, every parent watches eagerly the child’s acquisition (学会) of each new skill in the first spoken words, the first independent steps, or the beginning of reading and writing. It is often tempting to hurry the child beyond his natural learning rate, but this can set up dangerous feelings of failure and states of worry in the child. This might happen at any stage. A baby might be forced to use a toilet too early, a young child might be encouraged to learn to read before he knows the meaning of the words he reads. On the other hand, though, if a child is left alone too much, or without any learning opportunities, he loses his natural enthusiasm for life and his desire to find out new things for himself.

Parents vary greatly in their degree of strictness towards their children. Some may be especially strict in money matters. Others are severe (严格的) over time of coming home at night or punctuality for meals. In general, the controls represent the needs of the parents and the values of the community as much as the child’s own happiness.

As regards the development of moral standards in the growing child, consistency is very important in parental teaching. To forbid a thing one day and excuse it the next is no foundation for morality (道德). Also, parents should realize that “example is better than precept”. If they are not sincere and do not practice what they preach (说教), their children may grow confused when they grow old enough to think for themselves, and realize they have been to some extent fooled.

A sudden awareness of a marked difference between their parents’principles and their morals can be a dangerous disappointment.

【推荐3】Even though people have been paralyzed (瘫痪的) playing sports like rugby and football, extreme sports take the whole ordeal (磨难) to the next level. Sports like downhill cycling are very dangerous because one would be going downhill, over rocky or dirt zone, through forests, even at potentially deadly speeds. A slip up could be your downfall.

Nobody who gets into extreme sports goes with the desire to do harm to themselves. With that, athletes train for years and years before they attempt anything extreme. To most people, extreme sports are extreme simply because they take more skill than what an average person has. An athlete with skill and training makes an extreme thing become a daily routine, which does not wipe out the danger, but greatly reduces it.

Even when there is a lot of skill involved, things might not go the athlete’s way, not at all. Luck and circumstances have a lot to do with how things develop, whether above 8,000 meters or in a wood, going downhill. In some places, crossing the street is an extreme sport, considering how wild traffic can get.

Some view parkour, the sports of running, jumping and climbing under, around and through buildings, as an extreme sport, while it is more of a life philosophy, where the athlete does not have to do anything remotely dangerous. Free soloing, which means climbing a rock or ice face without safety gear, is absolutely deadly, where one slip means almost certain death, depending on the height, of course. Skateboarding is relatively safe, but if you constantly find ridiculous places to practice on, like the fence of a bridge, then things can get very complicated. The extreme part depends on the athlete.

To summarize, yes, extreme sports are dangerous, but the danger depends on the athlete, their choice of sport, direction in which they take it, as well as the circumstances. Some things are out of our control, while others we can influence through exercise and healthier risk choices.