1 . Both Roberto and Keith have a 45-minute commute (通勤) time from their homes to their workplace. When Roberto drives, he has realistic expectations of how others drive and how long the trip should take. Overall, he is able to adapt to any unexpected challenges he may face on the road. He rarely becomes angry. By contrast, Keith drives with a tendency for becoming angry easily, partly due to unrealistic expectations of other drivers, his quickness to personalize and feel threatened by the actions of others, and his inability to calm his anger.

The difference between how Roberto and Keith experience their drive to work, especially with regard to getting angry, is influenced very much by their emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is crucial for helping individuals choose constructive over destructive anger. A key aspect of healthy anger is being able to pause and reflect on, rather than react to, our thoughts, feelings, and senses associated with getting angry.

Self-regulation and empathy (同理心) are two important components of emotional intelligence, which can be a buffer (缓冲) against destructive anger. Self-regulation helps us to control our moods. Empathy helps us to recognize the humanity in others and ourselves.

Studies suggest that training in emotional intelligence can powerfully impact how anger is managed. This was supported by a three-year study of 476 young adults who showed reduced tendency of becoming angry after training. Children and adults can learn skills to boost their emotional intelligence and, by doing so, develop adaptability for dealing with various negative affect, including anger. Many workbooks offer skills in emotional intelligence to promote empathy and self-awareness regarding emotions and how they impact our beliefs and behavior.

Clearly, through training, Keith would experience greater emotional flexibility that could support a more peaceful commute to work. I firmly believe that learning skills in emotional intelligence should be the focus in helping individuals more constructively manage this highly challenging and complex emotion.

3 . Why we cry with happiness showed: Responding with a negative reaction helps us deal with extreme joy. If you cry with happiness at weddings, you are responding to a happy experience with a negative reaction. The researchers believe the unusual reaction may help renew emotional balance in us and keep extreme emotions under control. The findings make it clear how people express and control their emotions, which could help improve their understanding of people’s mental (精神的) health.

Dr Oriana Aragon set out to explore the phrase “tears of joy”, which she said never made sense to her. But after studying a series of incongruous (不和谐的) expressions, she now understands better why people cry when they are happy. “People may be renewing emotional balance with these expressions,” she explained. “They seem to take place when people are struck by strong positive emotions. People, who do this, seem to recover better from those strong emotions.”

The report showed various examples of responding to a positive experience with a negative emotion, such as, a crying wife seeing the husband returning from war again, and teenage girls screaming at a Justin Bieber concert. Examples also include a baseball player who hits a home run, only to be slapped (拍) on the back by teammates, as well as when people cannot help kissing babies’ faces who they consider lovely.

Dr Aragon and her team discovered that people, who expressed negative reactions to positive news, were able to moderate (缓和) strong emotions more quickly. There is also some evidence that strong negative feelings may provoke positive expressions. For example, nervous laughter often happens when people are faced with a hard situation. We’ve seen people smiling during times of extreme sadness.

“The findings affect our knowledge of how people express and control their emotions, which is importantly related to mental and physical health, the quality of relationships with others, and even how well people work together,” Dr Aragon said.

5 . Like many young people, Jessica wants to travel the globe. Unlike most of them, this 25-year-old is doing it _________. She and her husband have spent the last two years traveling the world, stopping everywhere from Paris to Singapore. It might sound like one long, expensive _________, but the couple has an unusual way to make their travel _________.

They’re part of a new form of the _________ economy (经济): an online group of house sitters.

Throughout their no-cost stays in _________ homes, they feed pets and water plants in the homeowner’s _________.

It’s not all sightseeing. The two travellers carefully _________ their trips, scheduling their days around the pets that are sometimes difficult to _________. But house sitting also offers a level of _________ they can’t find in a hotel. “It’s like __________ at a friend’s house,” Jessica says.

The couple has a high __________ rate in getting accepted as house sitters and they always go beyond the homeowner’s __________. For Jessica, that means __________ plenty of pictures of happy pets, keeping the house __________ and leaving a nice small gift before heading to the next house. “You want to make the homeowner feel that they made the right, __________” she says.

6 . When you are about to go to a boarding school (寄宿制学校) in England, there are many different questions that may come to mind. But once you look at them with some perspective (视角), you will certainly feel easy. Here is a normal boarding day.

Early Morning:

Usually boarders get up around 7:00 am and have around an hour to take a shower and put on their uniform before breakfast.

Lessons:

Classes start at 9: 00 am and every lesson lusts for 50 minutes. After two lessons, at 10: 40 am, you’ll have a short break. The next period of classics will include two more lessons.

Lunch:

Lunch is usually held around 12:30 pm at the dining hall, where you’ll join your friends to enjoy a hot dish. After an hour of lunch, you’ll have three or four more lessons to attend.

Dinner:

At 5:00 pm you will have finished your school lessons for the day. Most boarding schools in the UK offer their full boarders different kinds of hot meals to choose from.

Activities/ Sports:

All boarding schools in the UK provide many different kinds of activities for their boarders, such as football, swimming, golf or art.

Prep:

An important part of boarding school life is the supervised homework session known as “prop”. Although “prep” might sound stressful, it’s a great way for you to keep up with your studies.

Free time:

Once you have done all your classes and activities, it’s time to relax.

Bedtime:

In most boarding schools, the lights go out around 10:30 pm.

Being nervous just before you go to a boarding school is completely normal and understandable. Hopefully, knowing the usual routine (常规) can help you. Once you are there, you will also see how exciting life in a boarding school in England can be.

7 . Every festival has its own meaning. Labor Day, for example, celebrates the value of hard work. Thanksgiving is about showing thanks to people around you. And Valentines’ Day is a time when you express love to your loved ones. But somehow it now seems that all festivals we just care about one thing — shopping. And that can be a big problem.

“In a way, over-consumption (过度消费) is the mother of all our environmental problems,” Kalle Lasn once told CNN. Lasn is the organizer of Buy Nothing Day, a day set up in Canada in 1992 to fight against unhealthy spending habits, and has now become an international event. It’s held on the day, which is known as Black Friday — a famous shopping day in the US and Canada.

You can see the irony (讽刺) here.

Even though the idea of Buy Nothing Day was brought up 26 years ago, we seem to need it now more than ever. It’s just as Lasn said, all the different kinds of pollution in our lives today — bad air quality, the reduction of forest area, endangered animal species, and plastic bags found in the ocean — seem to be the same cause: over-consumption.

The latest example is the Singles’ Day shopping craze of Nov 11, which saw a new sales record. But as Nie Li, a campaigner at Greenpeace, told Reuters, “Record-setting over-consumption means record-setting waste.” And it was reported that last year the Singles’ Day packages left more than 160,000 tons of waste, including plastic and cardboard. The Collins Dictionary has also just named “single-use” its Word of the Year, pointing out the problem that there’re too many things we tow out after only using them once.

So, Buy Nothing Day might only be here for one day a year, but it’s not just to remind us to the a break from shopping on that day, but to change our lifestyle completely, focusing on fun “with people we care about” rather than wasting money on useless things.

8 . At 7 am, in the dark of an autumn morning, parents arrive to drop off their children at the kindergarten in Viimsi a 15-minute drive from Tallinn, before heading off to work in the city.

The day starts officially at 9 am, but Laanelinnu kindergarten that widely gains a liking of working parents opens two hours earlier and does not close until 7 pm. In doing so, working parents won’t worry about being late for work and leaving the office early.

The kindergarten focuses on pre-scnobl education. Classrooms, with vast windows fronting onto forest, fan out around a whitewashed central hall, and outside a large playground surrounds the entire building. Some of the children who attend Laanelinnu are as young as two, but as we enter the building barely a sound can be heard. In each of the classrooms, which are large and well equipped, there are up to 20 children— attentive and focused — supervised by a qualified pre-school teacher and two assistant teachers.

Despite having visitors, the children at Laanelinnu focus on their lessons. In one darkened classroom, they lie on their backs in a quiet comer as their teachers prepare for the day ahead. In another class, there’s music and dancing. In another group, children are doing a project about the human body,while next door there’s a cookery class going on, with a tasting period followed by bread-making.

The pre-school course takes in everything from letters and language skills to art, music and robotics.” Though it’s not called school, it’s the first step of their education, “says the kindergarten’s project manager.” We do teach kids here. It is no longer simply childcare. “By the time they leave, most children will have learned to read and write, but in a relaxed and play-led environment.

The kindergarten system is an integrated part of national education and at the end of their time there, children are given a school readiness card that they take with them to the next stage in their education.

9 . Do you have a best friend at work? A person once said, “Relationships _______ more than work. Years from now, you will forget all the _______ of the work you did, but you still _______ the people there and the relationships you built.”

We hear a lot about this and it’s true. We spend more time with our co-workers than our families. Getting along well with workmates is the _______ to our success in the job.

Gallup, our employee engagement survey provider, has been asking us to _______“Do you have a good friend at work?” for 30 years. He has discovered a strong _______ between having a good friend at work and performance on the job.

I’ve worked with a lot of people over my career. The most _______ achievements were with _______ that I felt a strong social connection with. We were not only working as a team but also spent our spare time _______ with each other and caring for each other’s normal life. I do believe that our success ________ strong social connections at work.

I’ve been through a lot with many people I would ________ my best friends at work. We’ve celebrated our work ________, promotions (升职) and retirements together. We have supported each other through marriages, adoptions, illnesses and even deaths.

Good relationships and a sense of ________ are a part of work culture that we shouldn’t ignore. ________, I have been working with amazing people over the years. Can you imagine going to a ________ every day where there is no fun, laughter or friendship?

10 . As you walk around the UK in March, you might notice that some people are wearing a daffodil (水仙花) on their coats. The British wear these yellow flowers to show they support one of this country’s best-known charities: Marie Curie.

Marie Curie tries to ensure everyone who has cancer is cared for in the best possible way. It also helps fun d research into possible cures. Founded in 1948, it has been continuing with its goal ever since.

The charity was named after Marie Curie, a famous scientist. She experimented with newly-discovered elements to create the theory of radioactivity (放射性). Unfortunately, over-exposure to the radioactive elements made her develop a disease and die in 1934. Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in two different fields. Because of her pioneering work, the charity decided on the name of Marie Curie.

The daffodil is one of the first plants to flower during spring in the UK, which marks the return of flowering plants to the ecosystem after winter. Because of this, the charity uses the daffodil as a symbol, hoping cancer patients could recover from sickness.

Everyone you see wearing a daffodil has contributed to the charity, but each daffodil is worth only what you want to pay for it. The charity does ask that you stick to a minimum amount of £1.

The charity encourages people to start wearing their daffodils at the start of March, when the “Great Daffodil Appeal” kicks off. But that doesn’t mean you can only wear them in March. People are sometimes seen walking around with daffodils on their clothes all year round.