【推荐1】A man sat at a metro station in Washington D.C. and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, 1,100 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

Three minutes went by, and a middle-aged man noticed there was musician playing. A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him. They stopped for a few seconds, and then hurried up to meet their schedule.

The one who paid the most attention was a 3-year-old boy. His mother followed him along, hurried, but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally, the mother pushed hard, and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money, but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded（鼓掌）, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the most talented musicians in the world. He had just played one of the most beautiful pieces ever written, on a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.

Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theatre in Boston where the seats averaged $100.

This is a real story. Joshua Bell’s playing in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment.

One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?

【推荐2】People always regret asking me and my wife how we got together. It’s a long story, involving other relationships and several countries, and to be honest, it’s not that interesting, so I’ll spare you the details. We were at a restaurant in Tuscany on our summer holiday last year though, when we met another English couple who had a far more interesting story than us. Lynn and Andy had actually met online before they got together, or at least they thought they had. After a few casual conversations through an online dating agency, they decided to meet for real. Lynn arrived at the restaurant first, and shortly after was approached by Andy, who thought she was someone else. It turns out they’d both arranged to meet different people, but liked the look of each other, and that was that!

And they’re not alone. It seems there are all sorts of places you might meet that special someone. Lukas met Sofie for the first time when he crashed into her car—on his bicycle. “It was raining and I was coming downhill really fast, so I couldn’t really see where I was going. Sofie opened her car door and I went straight into it, and off my bike,” explains Lukas. “I was unconscious for a few seconds, and when I came round there was this beautiful young woman asking me ‘Are you OK?’ Well, after that, she went to the hospital with me and was just really kind, really caring, and we hit it off.”

Every cloud has a silver lining, so they say, and Nick McKiddie would most likely agree. He was leaving the office late one night when he got robbed by a group of young men. He wasn’t hurt, but they stole his phone and wallet, so he called the police. Susan Harris, a young police officer at the time, attended the call. Nick explains, “I don’t know whether I was in shock because of what had happened, but I think it was love at first sight. I would never usually be so confident, but I just asked if she wanted to go for a drink sometime, and to my surprise, she said yes! “Nick and Susan got married last December.”

Animals don’t have the same social inhibitions (顾虑) as humans do, and this was certainly the case when Ri took her dog, Ben, to the local dog park. “As soon as I took his leash off, he ran straight to another dog on the other side of the park, and started getting very friendly indeed,” she laughs. “I actually had to pull him away, and that was when I met Ben, the other dog’s owner. We had a good laugh about it all, especially when we realized he had the same name as my dog. We became friends after that, and well, the rest is history.”

【推荐3】Born in 1918, in the little town of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, Katherine Johnson was simply attracted by numbers. As a child, she counted everything. She counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes she washed …By the time she was 10 years old, she was a high school freshman, which was truly amazing in a time when school for African-Americans normally stopped at eighth grade. To meet her math potential （潜力），her father drove his family 120 miles to Institute, West Virginia, where blacks could continue high school education. Johnson's excellent performance proved her father's decision was the right one: Katherine skipped grades （跳级）to graduate from high school at 14 and from college at 18.

1953, after years as a teacher and later as a stay-at-home mom, she began working for NASA, which began hiring women to measure and calculate the results of wind tunnel （风洞）tests in 1935. In a time before the electronic computers, these women were called "computer". Even after NASA began using electronic computers, the astronaut John Glenn requested that she should personally recheck the calculations made by the new electronic computers before his flight.

She continued to work at NASA until 1986. Her calculations proved critical to the success of the Apollo Moon landing program and the United States' journey into space. Her story was the basis for the 2016 film Hidden Figures.

Katherine Johnson, a great mathematician, physicist, space scientist and the last computer that wore skirts, passed away on February 24, 2020.

【推荐1】Every year thousands of tourists visit Pompeii, Italy. They see the sights that Pompeii is famous for, like its stadium and theatres, its shops, and restaurants. The tourists do not, however, see Pompeii’s people. They do not see them because Pompeii has no people. No one has lived in Pompeii for almost 2,000 years.

Once, Pompeii was a busy city of 22,000 people. It lay at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, a grass-covered volcano. Mount Vesuvius had not erupted for centuries, so the people of Pompeii felt safe. But they were not.

In August of AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted. The entire top of the mountain exploded, and a huge black cloud rose into the air. Soon hot rocks and ash began to fall on Pompeii. When the eruption ended two days later, Pompeii was buried under 20 feet of stones and ashes. Almost all of its people were dead.

For centuries, Pompeii lay buried under stones and ashes. Then, in the year 1861, an Italian scientist named Ginseppe began to uncover Pompeii. Slowly, carefully, Ginseppe and his men dug. The city looked almost the same as it had looked in AD 79. There were streets and fountains, houses, and shops. There was a stadium with 20,000 seats. Perhaps the most important of all, there were everyday objects, which tell us a great deal about the people who lived in Pompeii. Many glasses and jars had some dark blue colour in the bottom, so we know that the people of Pompeii liked wine. They liked bread, too; metal bread pans were in every bakery. In one bakery there were 81 round, flat loaves of bread — a type of bread that is still sold in Italy today.

Ginseppe has died, but his work continues. One-fourth has not been uncovered yet. Scientists are still digging, still making discoveries that draw the tourists to Pompeii.

【推荐2】The Sanxingdui Museum in southwest China’s Sichuan Province enjoyed huge popularity during the three-day Qingming Festival holidays by receiving nearly 20,000 visitors on the peak day, after the new archaeological discoveries brought international attention.

According to media reports, the museum saw over 15,000 visitors on Saturday, the first day of the Qingming Festival, breaking its record for daily visitors. And on the next day, more visitors flooded into the museum to exceed 19,800. To cope with the large flow of people, on Sunday afternoon, the official Weibo account of the Sanxingdui Museum released advice to visitors to reschedule their visiting time and travel off peak.

The Sanxingdui Museum showcases various kinds of precious cultural relics unearthed at the site, such as the 2.62-meter-tall standing statue, 1.38-meter-wide bronze mask, 3.95-meter-high bronze tree. Earlier on March 20, Chinese archaeologists announced some new major discoveries made during the 37^th excavation since its last excavation 35 years ago. The ruins were first discovered in the late 1920s and first excavated in 1934. More than 500 important cultural relics have been unearthed in the six newly-found pits. Since the new discoveries were known to the public, the number of people visiting the Sanxingdui Museum has increased sharply.

The museum said although they are open as usual, the newly-found pits have not opened to the public yet and the newly-excavated cultural relics are still under repair and cannot meet the public at present. But a hall for cultural relic conservation and repair will be in pilot operation in April and officially open on May 18. Visitors to it can see how the relics are repaired, according to Zhu Yarong, vice director of the Sanxingdui Museum.

Dating back about 3,000 years, the Sanxingdui Ruins have cast light on the ancient Shu civilization and cultural origins of the Chinese nation, and have been regarded one of the most important archaeological discoveries in the 20^th century.

【推荐3】Discoveries at the famous Sanxingdui ruins in Southwest China show that the region’s ancient Shu Kingdom Civilization shared similarities with the Maya.

The Sanxingdui ruins belonged to the Shu Kingdom that existed at least 4,800 years ago and lasted more than 2,000 years, while the Mayan civilization built its city-states around 200 AD.

The bronze-made remains of trees unearthed at the ruins of the Shu Kingdom resemble the sacred ceiba tree, which symbolized the union of heaven, earth and the underworld in the Mayan civilization. “They are very important similarties,” says Marco Santos, a Mexican archaeologist stressing that “the representations of tress in both cultures provide a symbolism that is very similar.”

The findings at the Sanxingdui ruins, considered one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century, also show a new aspect of Bronze Age culture, indicating the ancient civilization already had technologies that were thought to have been developed much later.

While the time span between the Shu kingdom and the Mayan culture is great, the findings highlight the closeness between the two civilizations. They developed in areas with comparable climates and reflected their worldview through related symbols. “In the end, man is still man, independent of time and space. What we have is that, at this latitude (纬度), both the Shu people and the Mayans looked at the same sky and had the same stars on the horizon,” the expert says.

One notable feature of the recent discoveries at Sanxingdui was the cross-subject work and technology applied by teams of Chinese archaeologists, which allowed the unearthing of artifacts as fragile as silk remains, which other types of less careful excavation methods would not have been able to register.

Cooperation between Chinese and Mexican archaeologists could benefit projects in the Mayan world, where the rainy climate and humidity are problematic for the conservation of ruins.

“Every time our cultural knowledge increases, regardless of whether we speak one language or another, what it shows us is that we continue to be sister cultures and, therefore, the exchange of such knowledge is fundamental.” says Santos.

【推荐1】The Christmas of 1988, my husband and I had four children. Peter was eleven, Leigh-Ann nine, Laura six and Matthew only two. When Santa arrived, Matthew parked himself on Santa’s lap and remained impressed greatly by him for the rest of the evening. Anyone who had their picture taken with Santa that Christmas also had their picture taken with little Matthew.

Little did any of us know how precious those photos with Santa and Matthew would become. Five days after Christmas, our sweet little Matthew died in an accident. When our first Christmas without Matthew approached, it was hard for us to get into the holiday spirit.

Then, on December 13, we were just finishing dinner when we heard a knock on the front door. When we went to answer it, no one was there. On the front porch was a card and gift. The gift-giver just wanted to help us get through a rough time by cheering us up with his or her name unknown, like a fairy.

In the gift bag was a cassette of favorite Christmas music, which was in a little cardboard Christmas tree. We put the cassette in our player and, song by song, the spirit of Christmas began to warm our hearts, and the thoughtfulness of our “fairy，touched our hearts.

That was the beginning of a series of gifts from the clever giver, one for each day until Christmas. Each gift followed the theme of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” in a creative way. The kids especially liked “seven swans a-swimming,” which was a basket of swan-shaped soaps plus passes to the local swimming pool. “Eight maids a-milking” included eight bottles of chocolate milk in glass bottles with paper faces. Every day was something very special.

The ingenuity and thoughtfulness shocked us as we enjoyed each surprise. We were so caught up in the excitement and curiosity of what would possibly come next, that our grief didn’t have much of a chance to rob us of the spirit of Christmas. What our fairy did was absolutely miraculous.

We give thanks for our fairy who was, we finally realized, our very own Christmas angel. We never did find out who it was, although we have our guess. We actually prefer to keep it that way.

【推荐3】About three years ago, something terrible happened to me. One day, my two brothers and I were coming back from the islands where we often risked going and got more fish than others. All at once, the sky was covered with dark clouds and in less than a minute we were in a terrible storm. A huge wave covered our boat and my younger brother fell into the sea. With the wind and waves, we were going in the direction of the whirlpool(漩涡). We were hopeless. Nothing could save us. We went round and round, nearer and nearer to the horrible edge of the whirlpool. It may appear strange, but at that moment, when we were on the edge of the whirlpool, I felt calmer than when we were moving towards it. I began to think how amazing a thing it was to die in such a way, and how wonderful it was to see the power of nature. Suddenly, we went over the edge. I thought my life was over. But moment after moment passed, and I was still safe.

The boat was on the inside of the huge whirlpool and we were going round in circles at great speed. After a while, I became curious about the whirlpool itself. I then made three important observations. The first, the larger the bodies were, the more rapidly they fell; the second, between two objects of equal extent(面积), round objects fell down less rapidly; and the third, between two objects of the same size, objects shaped like a tube fell down more slowly. So I tied myself to a barrel to help me float. I tried to make my brother understand, but he was too frightened and stayed in the heavy boat. Without waiting, I jumped into the sea to try and escape.

It turned out that I made the right decision. Some time after I left the boat, with my brother in it, it was pulled into the bottom of the whirlpool. Soon after that, the whirlpool became less wild. Then the sky was clear, the wind calmer, and the moon was shining. I was still tied to the barrel and the waves soon carried me to an area where the other fishermen were. In the end, a boat picked me up. I was very tired. The fishermen were my old friends. When I told them my story, they did not believe it. Now I have told you, and I cannot expect you to believe me any more than the fishermen did.