【推荐1】In 1944, 730 representatives from 44 allied (同盟) nations met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, just as World War Ⅱ was ending. They were attending an important conference. This mostly forgotten event shaped our modern world because the Bretton Woods Conference agreed on the establishment of an international banking system.

To make sure that all nations would be successful, the United States and other allied nations set rules for a postwar international economy. The Bretton Woods system created the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF was founded as a kind of global central bank from which member countries could borrow money. The countries needed money to pay for their war costs. Today, the IMF promotes international trade by guaranteeing the stability of the international currency and financial system.

The Bretton Woods system also set up the World Bank. Although the World Bank shares similarities with IMF, the two institutes remain distinct. While the IMF keeps an orderly system of payments and receipts between nations, the World Bank is mainly a development institution. The World Bank initially gave loans to European countries ruined by World War Ⅱ, and today it lends money and technical assistance specifically to economic projects in developing countries. Its goal is to “bridge the economic divide between poor and rich countries.”

These two specific accomplishments of the Bretton Woods Conference were major. However, the Bretton Woods system particularly benefited the United States and it placed the U.S. dollar as the global currency. A global currency is one that countries worldwide accept for all trade, or international transactions (交易) of buying and selling. Because only the U.S. could print dollars, the United States became the primary power behind the IMF and the World Bank. Today, global currencies include the U.S. dollar, the euro (European Union countries), and yen (Japan).

The years after Bretton Woods have been considered the golden age of the U.S. dollar. More importantly, the conference deeply shaped foreign trade for decades to come.

【推荐3】After seemingly endless waiting, news finally reached President Abraham Lincoln. The North had won at Gettysburg. The citizens of Pennsylvania created a national cemetery（公墓）for the soldiers who lay dead at Gettysburg. A ceremony was planned. Lincoln received an invitation to attend. He was not asked to give the major speech of the day. That honor was given to a New England statesman and professional speaker named Edward Everett. The president was asked instead to say “a few words”.

As the day approached, Lincoln’s wife asked him to reconsider. Their son, Tad, had fallen ill. Mary Lincoln was near crazy. On the morning of the day, Tad was so sick that he could not eat. Lincoln felt unwell himself, but he decided to go anyway.

On Thursday, November 19, for two hours, Everett held the audience spellbound with his rich voice and inspiring words. Then Lincoln rose to speak. “Four score and seven years ago,” he began in his high pitched（声调高的）voice. He spoke for barely three minutes.

As Lincoln sat down, some eyewitnesses recalled little applause（掌声）. Others heard “not a word, not a cheer, not a shout”. A person taking notes asked Lincoln, “Is that all?” Embarrassed, Lincoln replied, “Yes--for the present.” A photographer in the crowd had not even had time to take a picture.

Lincoln thought his speech was a failure. Some newspapers considered it as “silly” and “boring”. But Everett correctly predicted that the Gettysburg Address would “live among the history of man”. A few days after both of them had spoken at Gettysburg, he wrote to Lincoln, saying that he wished he had come “as close to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes”. Lincoln replied, telling Everett how pleased he was that “the little I did say was not entirely a failure.”

Indeed it was not. It gave the North new hope and purpose as to why it was fighting the war. Today, Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is remembered as one of the greatest speeches of all time.

【推荐2】A giant sunfish, about nine feet long, was caught on camera by kayakers off the coast of California. Ocean sunfish and southern sunfish are the world’s biggest bony fish, and they are both found in the Pacific Ocean. Adult ocean sunfish may reach more than 4,000 pounds, which is the same weight as an adult male rhinoceros (犀牛).

During a trip off the coast of Laguna Shore on December 2, Rich German and his friend Matthew Wheaton came across the massive sunfish just a few hundred yards from the beach. They then dialed 911. According to German, who talked to the media, this was the biggest sunfish that any of them had ever encountered.

Sunfish are a genuinely global species that can be found all over the world, but they spend their whole lives in the open ocean. Therefore, encounters like these are few and far between.

German captured images and footage of the sunfish. An underwater close-up shot of a sunfish as it wanders past the camera is included in one of the short films. “It was a one-of-a-kind and really interesting event,” German said of the most recent encounter, which he described as “another indication of why we need to conserve the ocean and the incredible creatures that call it home.”

Beyond its particular shape without the caudal fin (尾鳍), the species also surprises us with its impressive size, up to 3.10 meters long, which allows it to have few natural enemies. However, as a great lover of jellyfish (水母), its greed for food often leads it to confuse plastic bags with its favorite dish, making seawater pollution one of its main threats alongside overfishing.

Behind its impressive size, the sunfish is a harmless swimmer who today faces many threats. The sharp decline observed among its populations is due not to other sea animals of which it would be the food but to human activities which participate in destroying its habitat.

The owner of a house in Sonoma County, California called pest (害虫) control when they spotted worms coming from one of their bedroom walls. Those worms turned out to be meal worms, feeding on an unbelievable amount of acorns (橡树子), believed to be collected by a pair of woodpeckers.

“It was really strange. I had never really seen worms with acorns before,” Castro from the pest control said. But the strangeness was just beginning.

After making a small 4-inch-square hole in the wall, Castro said the acorns began spilling out. That alone wouldn’t be terribly unusual, but they “just kept coming,” he said.

“It was very unbelievable to see the amount,” said Castro. He guesses there were at least 700 pounds of acorns, likely collected over the past two to five years.

Often woodpeckers store acorns on the outside of homes, but hardly do they get them inside. In this case, Castro discovered the birds dropped their treasures through a hole in the chimney and entered the attic through a separate hole to eat.

As they dropped from the attic, tens of thousands of acorns gathered from several nearby oak trees filled the hole of the walls, Castro explained.

But this odd find took unusual to a whole new level for the man who has been working in the pest control industry for more than 20 years.

“On a scale from 1 to 10, this is a 10. It’s a one in a million chance to find something this unusual,” said Castro. “I expected to find a few handfuls, nothing like this.”

It took creating another three holes in the home’s walls to remove all the acorns, which piled and reached about 20 feet high, Castro believed.

Castro and his crew of three spent a full day collecting the nuts.

“We filled eight big black garbage bags. They were so heavy we could hardly pick them up,” said Castro. “They had to have weighed at least a hundred pounds each.”

The acorns were thrown away as they were covered in droppings and bits of fiberglass from the wall’s insulation.