【推荐1】On a February day during an unusually mild winter, I found myself missing the snowy beauty. I enjoyed the feeling that comes from watching snow fall gently from heaven while I’m cosy inside with a good fire burning in the stove. But there were more serious concerns, like the lack of rainfall making our woods more accessible to summer forest fires. Local ski fields and hotels, all dependent on a snowy season, felt sorry for the vacant lifts, empty restaurants and unused snowmobiles．Then I happened to see three little robins （知更鸟） fly into our yard. What were they doing here? West of us, in the Willamette Valley, wild flowers burst this time of year. But here in central Oregon, even if a groundhog （ 土拨鼠） had wanted to appear, it couldn’t have broken through the frozen earth. And yet, these robins had arrived.

Their presence brought me a flow of happiness. It felt like a celebration as I dug into my bag of birdseed and spread a handful on the ground. Above me, the deep blue sky was cloudless, perfectly quiet but for some smoke from a neighbor’s chimney. The lively cold made the air fresh and clean.

My robins jumped lightly toward the seed. My soul jumped with them, feeling equally carefree.

Caught up in the moment of spring fever, I checked out snowless flower beds. To my delight, I spotted a green branch sticking out through the brown soil. Despite the cold, it wasn’t ready to go back inside. Just a short meeting with those robins had renewed my spirit. The next day I would return to my outdoor work with a cheerful heart and a hopeful eye for these signs of spring.

【推荐3】There’s this boy in my band, Spanish and math class. His name was Nathan. I never really liked him since he was a slowpoke. He didn’t have any friends at all. He always sat alone at the lunch table with his phone listening to music. People just walked past him without caring. And in class whenever he was asked a question, he would take a long time to answer it. The whole class would get annoyed and whenever he got an answer wrong, the whole class would laugh. I didn’t know why but I didn’t care enough to know.

On Nov. 17, I walked into band class and was ready to play my flute. Mr. Kohler began the class. We played music for a little while then he asked us to tune our instruments. I saw Nathan, he was just walking around like usual looking for something. There is nothing surprising about that, he does that in every class. He doesn’t just sit the whole class period, he walks around looking for Kleenex or a new reed for his instrument. He plays clarinet 单簧管) by the way.

So then Mr Kohler asked the class to tell what note it was just by hearing the pitch (音高).Nobody raised their hand except for Nathan. The moment I saw him, I laughed but not out loud. I thought he couldn’t do anything properly. How could he possibly guess the note when the pitch is played? But he could. He guessed every pitch right, even when Mr. Kohler played 2 and 3 pitches at the same time.

At that moment I got goosebumps. How did he do that? That day I realized that I shouldn’t judge people based on the little things I see. I need to see the great things people can do.

From that day on I had a different opinion on Nathan. I forgot about all the things he was bad at and focused on the things he was good at. Whenever I saw him, I just said to myself, “that’s the guy who impressed me. That’s the guy who is musically talented.”

【推荐2】A few years ago, Adina Lichtman was handing out sandwiches on the streets of New York City to help people experiencing homelessness. One man, grateful for the sandwich, approached her and offered a surprising idea.

“It’s great that you’re giving out sandwiches,” he said, “but one thing we really need is socks, especially as winter approaches.”

“Here I was, sandwiches in hand, thinking I knew the best way to help people,” Lichtman said. “It was a powerful lesson, and I wanted to put it into action.”

She began that night, with a simple step: going door-to-door on the floor of her dormitory at New York University, asking her classmates if they could each just donate (捐赠) just one pair of their own socks to someone experiencing homelessness. She got 40 pairs of socks in a single night, from a single floor. The next morning she opened her door to find a lot of socks that other people had donated.

That morning officially kicked off Knock Knock, Give a Sock (KKGS), a new nonprofit (非营利的) organization that has now provided over 350,000 pairs of socks to the homeless across America. To date, over 50 colleges and high schools across the US have joined KKGS over the years.

“While many people donate clothing, 9 out of every 10 clothing donors have never donated socks. On top of that, people who are trying to donate socks often find it difficult to donate used socks,” she says. “KKGS is one of the only organizations that collects used socks. We have volunteers knocking on doors of their classmates in school, of their workmates at work, and even of their neighbors.”

But, whether you’re 26 or 62, you don’t need to wait to organize your own sock drive, collect socks, or even wash and clean some of your own to donate to your local shelter, or someone in need who you meet on the street.

【推荐3】A 14-year-old killer whale named Wilkie has learned how to “speak” to humans. Wilkie, who lives at a whale aquarium（水族馆）in France, is able to imitate（模仿）a human saying “hello”, “bye-bye” and “one, two” after working with a team of researchers from the UK, Spain, Chile and Germany.

“Killer whales use their blowholes to make noises, almost like speaking out of your nose, so we were not expecting it to be perfect,” Jose Abramson, the lead author, told The Independent. “But we were surprised by how close it was.”

This isn’t the first time animals have learned how to imitate human sounds. Scientists have already made a record of animals like elephants，parrots，dolphins and beluga whales all imitating our words and noises, but it marks a first for killer whales.

Wilkie had already been trained to imitate the actions of a fellow killer whale. Once the scientists made her again learn how to mimic an action; they had her repeat four familiar sounds made by her 2-year-old calf（幼鲸），Moana. Next, they had her make five killer whale sounds she had never heard before, like a noise of opening the door. Then the researchers had Wilkie imitate the sounds made by a human and，finally，words like “ah ha” and her trainer’s name, “Amy”.

Wilkie was quickly able to imitate all the sounds and words, and she was even able to imitate some on the first try. Researchers said they had the first evidence that killer whales might be learning sounds by imitation, but they had no evidence that the killer whales understood what their “hello” stood for.