【推荐1】Do you need friends? I'm sure your answer is "Yes, of course. Everybody does!" You need friends when you play and when you work. If you have friends, you will feel happy. If you have no friends, you will feel lonely (寂寞的). Do you know how to make friends? There is only one good way―You make friends by being friendly. A friendly person is interested in other people. He is always helpful if you want to make friends with a new classmate, you can talk with him, tell him about the other classmates in your class and try your best to be helpful to him.

【推荐2】Do you invest too much value into words added by strangers? No matter what you do or say, or how you act, people will always give their opinions about you.     1     Otherwise, you'll allow others' opinions to not only hurt you, but often define you. Here are ways to stop caring about what other people think of you.

Keep in mind not everyone cares. Everyone is troubled by anxiety, and they might be too busy to immediately recognize yours.     2     They're always too busy thinking about their families, work, and whatever else to form a detailed opinion about you.

Think about who you want to be. By allowing others' opinions to influence and dominate your life, you're handing them your power. If you can relate to this, ask yourself, what do you want? Are you making these choices only to impress others?     3    

Accept not everyone will like you. In life, some people will like you and others might not.     4     But most of the time, that's their mindset only, which has nothing to do with you. There will be people who will accept all of you and people who will be supportive and kind. These are the people who deserve to walk with you.

    5     You may worry about ending up looking like a fool because of a mistake, but mistakes are unavoidable. When you overcome your fear of making mistakes and build resilience to the pain that may come from failure, you will be unstoppable. One way to deal with anxieties about messing up is to make a list of all the possible things that could go wrong.

【推荐3】In the United States a voluntary organization called Musician Corps is making a difference in people's lives. Five years ago，Kiff Gallagher，the founder of the organization，realized that music and public services could be used together to help Americans in need. Recognizing that music has a positive effect on Alzheimer's disease and autism（自闭症），he had the idea of creating Musician Corps.

Musician Corps looks for musicians and trains them as teachers. Then the musicians provide these services in city schools，children's hospitals，and assisted-living homes for older adults. They also help organize community concerts. Anyone can play music at these community activities.

Kiff Gallagher says what makes Musician Corps different from other charity organizations is that everybody can take part. It provides a place for people to get involved. He remembers a Musician Corps event at a hospital. Afterwards，he says，the patients are less depressed.

David Meletiche, one of 200 musicians in Musician Corps, teaches an after-school guitar class in a high-crime neighborhood. He is excited that the group gives him not only a job in a difficult economy but also the chance to use the team-building skills he gained in college.

There are 12 high school students in his class. Selena Makwan, one of them who are learning to play the guitar, says the program keeps her busy.“It definitely keeps me off the streets, because without this program I probably would be wandering around right now and I would not know what to do. And it also gives me an opportunity to learn something I've never done before.”

Musician Corps has established programs in California and North Carolina. Kiff Gallagher hopes Musician Corps will continue to expand across America.

【推荐1】 Downing the last drop of an expensive famous brand H₂O as well as remembering to throw the empty bottle in the recycling bin, makes you feel pretty good about yourself, right? It shouldn’t. Even when the bottles are recycled, there are all kinds of other consequences of swallowing bottled water, says Melissa Peffers, the air-quality program manager for Environmental Defense.

The containers are often filled in faraway lands, then shipped from abroad, and stored in refrigerators at your local store. Compare that with the influence on environment of turning on your tap, filling a glass, and drinking up!

Anyone who is choosing bottled water for health reasons is misguided, says Peffers, “Most bottled water is just tap water.” And what comes out of your tap is carefully monitored to follow the strict rules. Consider another fact that bottled water is surprisingly expensive, especially when compared with the alternative, which is almost free, and it is astonishing that America’s desire for bottled water seems impossible to satisfy, reaching nearly 30 billion bottles a year.

“My parents’ generation never had bottled water,” says Isabelle Silverman, an Environmental Defense legal adviser. She has made a commitment to going bottle free. “You don’t need to fetch it home from the store, and it’s cheaper,” she adds.

Bottled water’s role as a status symbol needs to change, Peffers points out. So when a waiter at an expensive restaurant offers “And what’s your drink?” that’s no reason to forget your conviction(信念). “Don’t be afraid to say, ‘I’ll have tap.’ Say it loud enough that the other tables nearby can hear you,” Peffers says. “And then spend that money on a dessert.”

【推荐3】My brother had, for years, a delightfully tame and lively blue-fronted Amazon parrot named Papagallo, which had an extraordinary talent for speech. Living with us in Altenberg, Papagallo flew just as freely around as most of my other birds. A talking parrot that flies from tree to tree and at the same time says human words, gives a much more comical effect than one that sits in a cage and does the same thing. When Papagallo, with loud cries of “Where’s the Doc?” flew about the district, sometimes in a real search for his master, it was funny.       

Still funnier, but also remarkable from a scientific point of view, was the following performance of the bird. Papagallo feared nothing and nobody, with the exception of the chimney sweep. Birds are likely to fear things which are up above. And this tendency is associated with the natural fear of the bird of prey diving down from the heights. So everything that appears against the sky, has for them something of the meaning of “bird of prey”. As the chimney sweep in black stood up on the chimney and became outlined against the sky, Papagallo fell into a panic of fear and flew, loudly screaming, so far away that we feared he might not come back. Months later, when the chimney sweep came again, Papagallo was sitting on the weathercock, quarrelling with other birds who wanted to sit there too. All at once, I saw him stretch his neck and peer down anxiously into the village street; then he flew up and away, crying out in tough tones, “ The chimney sweep is- coming!” “The chimney sweep is coming! The next moment, the man in black walked through the doorway of the yard !

Unfortunately, I was unable to find out how often Papagallo had seen the chimney sweep before and how often he had heard the excited cry of our cook, which meant his approach. It was, without a doubt, the voice and intonation of this lady that the bird copied. But he had certainly not heard it more than three times at the most and, each time, only once and at an interval of months.