1 . Many of us like to eat out and treat ourselves to delicious food. We are used to choosing hearty, fat-filled dishes and sugary desserts, which are not easily cooked at home.

The recent rise of light meals, however, gives us a smarter choice. According to Economic Daily, low-calorie, low-fat and high-fiber meals have become popular in China’s restaurants and online delivery platforms.

The country saw a rapid increase of restaurants concentrating on light meal. From just 600 in 2017 to more than 3,500 in 2018. According to a report published by Meituan a major online food delivery platform, the number of light meals ordered online also rise 75 percent from the previous year.

Having a light meal, however, doesn’t mean eating only vegetables. Different from the meat-free lifestyle, a typical light dish avoids oily, salty and spicy food. Instead, it contains things like boiled meat, whole grains, fruits and vegetables.

Healthy nutrients are the theme of the light meal. These dishes are useful for keeping healthy and controlling your weight. That’s probably why so many people, especially the youths are into them.

They see it as “a great way to avoid getting fat,” wrote the Telegraph.

“After eating several light meals, I now prefer light flavours,” Zou Jing a college teacher in Wuhan, told China Daily. She shared a picture of her lunch: a mixture of beef eggs, corn, mushrooms and cherry tomatoes.

These changes in eating behaviour are connected to deeper changes in how people think about food, says Walter Willett. Chairman of the nutrition department at the Hanard T. Chan School of Public Health, U.S.,“ Diet quality, not quantity is important for both weight control and long-term well-being.” Willett told The New York Times. So the next time you have a party with friends, try a light meal, it will satisfy, not only your stomachs but may be also your hearts.

5 . When I was growing up, I had an old neighbor, Dr. Gibbs. He didn’t look like any doctor I’d ever known. He never invited us to play in his yard, but he was a very kind person. When Dr. Gibbs wasn’t saving lives, he was planting trees. He owned a large field and wanted to make it a forest.

The good doctor had some interesting ideas about planting trees. He never watered his new trees. Once I asked why, he said that watering plants spoiled them, and that if you watered them, each baby tree would grow weaker and weaker, so you had to make things difficult for them and pick out the weaker trees early on. He talked about how watering trees made for shallow (浅的）roots, and how trees that weren’t watered had to grow deep roots in search of water under the earth by themselves. Deep roots were very important. So he never watered his trees. He’d planted an oak and, instead of watering it every morning, he’d beat it with a rolled-up newspaper. I asked him why he did that, and he said it was to get the tree’s attention.

Dr. Gibbs died several years after I left home. Every now and then, I walked by his house and looked at the trees that I watched him plant about twenty-five years ago. They’re very big and strong now. I planted some trees a few years back and carried water to them for a whole summer. After two years of caring too much, whenever a cold wind blows in, they shake a lot.

Every night before I go to bed, I check on my two sons. Mostly I pray (祈祷) that their lives will be easy. But lately I’ve been thinking that it’s time to change my prayer. I know my children are going to face difficulties. There’s always a cold wind blowing somewhere, so what we need to do is to pray for roots that reach deep into the brave heart, so when the rains fall and the winds blow, we could face it strongly and won’t be beaten down.

6 . If you ever have a chance to go to Finland, you’ll probably be surprised to find how “foolish” the Finnish people are.

Take the taxi drivers for example. You can go anywhere on a journey, tell the driver to drop you at any place, say that you have some business to attend to, and that you will pay the taxi driver later. He will agree without any anxiety but just accept your words in good faith (诚意).

The dining rooms in all big hotels not only serve their guests, but also provide outside diners. Hotel guests have their meals free, so they naturally go to the free dining rooms to have their meals, and the most they would do to show their good faith is to wave their registration card (住房卡) to the waiter. With such a loose check, you can easily use any old registration card to take a couple of friends to wine and dine free of charge.

Finnish workers are paid by the hour. If you work in Finland and have agreed with the boss on the hourly rate (费用), then you just say how many hours you have worked and they will be paid accordingly.

With so many loopholes（漏洞) in everyday life, surely Finland must be a country to those who love to take “small advantages”. But the strange thing is, all the taxi passengers would always come back to pay their fare after they have attended to their business, not a single outsider has ever been found in the free hotel dining rooms, workers always give the exact hours they put in. As the Finns always act on good faith and always have an attitude of “right is right” and “wrong is wrong” in everything they do, so living in such a society has turned everyone into a real “gentleman”.

What we regard as “foolish” is actually the Finnish people’s way of life.

7 . How do you learn English? Are you trying to improve your speaking? Then aim for fluency and “standard” pronunciation. Do you want to get better at writing? You should practice vocabulary and grammar.

But this way of learning, though necessary, misses one big thing: people from different places may speak English differently. For example, people from the US and the UK speak very differently. If a British friend invited me to eat lunch at his apartment, he might say: “Come over to mine round 1 p.m.” But if I invited him over, I might say: “Be at my place a little after 1 p.m.” “My place” is more commonly used in the US; “mine” is more frequently used in the UK—both are informal ways of saying “my house” or “my apartment”.

Even people in different parts of the US speak very differently. For example, imagine that you are talking to a group of people and want to address them all at once. What pronoun do you use? “You”, you should reply—that’s the correct pronoun whether you’re addressing one person or a group. But using “you” to address many people feels strange in a conversation. The most common choice around the US is to say “you guys”. But working class natives of my hometown, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, say “yinz”. In eastern Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey, some people say “youse”. In the southern US, people say “y’all”.

The point is that there’s a lot more to languages than what’s standard and proper. So take a tour around the US, y’all. Yinz will be glad that youse do it.

8 . Audio digital (有声数字化) books are becoming more and more popular these years. One of the reasons for this is that audio digital books can be “read” in many places comfortably.

The first favourite place for many people is in bed, before going to sleep. There are nights when a person would want to do nothing but lie in bed going over what has happened in the day. Many people like to just lie in bed in the dark before they fall asleep at night. This would be the perfect time to listen to an audio digital book. If you read an ordinary book, the lights have to be turned on and you have to turn the pages with your hand. An audio book can just be listened to while a person stays comfortably in bed.

The next favourite place to listen to audio digital books would be in the kitchen. For some people kitchen work is boring. Audio digital books provide good entertainment, and people don’t need to turn pages.

An audio digital book is a favourite while a person is gardening. They can help take a person’s mind off job at hand. It can be fun and exciting to do gardening with the help of these books.

Another great place would be while exercising. It allows the mind to be free while the legs, body and arms are kept busy. This would be a great place to listen to these books.

The next favourite place would be while we are on the road to and from work on buses, trains or even on long flights. Audio digital books have become good companions and help us relaxed.

9 . One of my earliest memories was walking up to the smell of camp smoke and my mother’s hot chocolate. My parents were poor, and we lived in the countryside in Portland. Dad had two jobs and Mom was disabled, but that didn’t stop them from heading into the Cascade Mountains several times a year.

Our clothes were old and worn and our food was usually cheap and simple. However, we were always satisfied with our hot chocolate, which was made in a traditional way handed down from my grandmother to my mother.

There was no store to buy anything we needed. We just had powdered cocoa in our camp.

Mom would set the smoke-blackened coffee pot at the side of the fire and slowly warm the milk, adding chocolate and sugar, and stirring (搅拌) until the contents became thick and rich brown. The wonderful smell of chocolate filled the camp. More than once, I could remember people that we had just met hours before stepping into our camp to enjoy mother’s creation.

Once we were trapped in our tent for days because of a terrible rainstorm. Every morning I was woken up by the attractive smell of Mom’s hot chocolate.

Now, many years have passed, when we head for the mountains, I still use that worn coffee pot. And we always bring extra cups for the neighbours who will certainly turn up.

I have told my family a lot about Mom, and it seems that nothing brings back those warm memories better than sitting around the fire at night and tasting sweet hot chocolate.