2 . Living Well with Others

A good life is one that is beneficial to living well with others, while living comfortably and honestly. However, not everyone can deal with the relationship well with others.     1    

This article will cover some ideas you may want to consider.

Smile at those around you. It’s often been said that a smile is catching. Research suggests that’s true. Studies suggest that friendly engagement (交往) with others improves happiness levels, at least in part.     2    

Help others. Studies have shown that helping others has a direct relation to individual happiness.     3     Volunteering to help others has been connected to better quality of life.

    4     The golden rule is still the most important rule for getting along with others. Think of how you would like your friends to act around you. If you treat people with love and respect, they will treat you with the same.

Value your friendships with others. The quality of a person’s friendship has a direct effect upon their well-being. Friends can increase a sense of your sense of belonging and purpose.     5    

4 . Van Gogh painted sunflowers for the first time in the summer of 1886. Two years later, his interest appeared again after he settled in Arles. After he had invited the French artist Paul Gauguin, whom he admired, to join his Studio of the South, he began painting sunflowers to brighten up the whitewashed walls of the yellow house he was living in, not far from the town’s railway station.

Gauguin accepted Van Gogh’s invitation. When he began dragging his heels, Van Gogh painted the last two of the four original Sunflowers for the modest bedroom where his guest would sleep following his arrival that autumn. “Van Gogh saw the Sunflowers for Gauguin’s bedroom as a way of attracting his friend to come from Brittany,” says Bailey.

According to Martin Gayford, “Gauguin was very surprised by the Sunflowers, which he repeatedly praised and asked for as a gift. Years later, Gauguin himself painted some sunflower pictures.”

Van Gogh’s Sunflowers stand for his relationship with Gauguin. “I think he painted them for the joy of it,” says Jansen. “Van Gogh was at the height of his powers in the summer of 1888,” explains Bailey. “He painted the Sunflowers quickly and with great energy and confidence.” Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in late August, “I’m painting quickly now, which won’t surprise you when it’s a question of painting large Sunflowers.”

Van Gogh recognized at once that he had created something important and that his sunflowers were so different. As he told Theo in January 1889, while other artists were known for painting other flowers, “The sunflower is mine.” This, in fact, explains the reason for the popularity of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers today.

5 . How do we make good things out of bad? How do we look at ourselves? Can there be a _______ side even in our pain?

There was an elderly woman who needed to walk down to the river every morning to _______ water for drinking, cooking and cleaning. She _______ two buckets, filled them up on the riverbank and walked back with them to her rural _______.

One of the buckets was newer, perfectly sealed (密封) and _______ its water completely. The second bucket was older and contained a few thin cracks that would _______ water as the elderly woman walked. By the time she arrived home, _______ about one third of the water in the second bucket was left.

One day, on the walk down to the river, the cracked bucket that had always felt like it wasn’t as good as the other bucket said to the elderly woman, ‘‘I want you to know that water has been _______ out every morning for the past several years. I’m so sorry for being cracked and making your life more _______. I understand if you need to ________ me with a better bucket.” The elderly woman ________, ‘‘do you really think I haven’t known about your cracks this whole time? Look at all the beautiful flowers that grow on the ________ from my cottage to the river. I ________ their seeds, but every morning it was you who ________ them.”

We all have a few cracks, but choose to see how it’s exactly those ________ that make us good enough.

6 . Reunions offer a chance to reflect on how much has changed. One happened in Hollywood when Here premiered (首映), bringing together the actors, director and writer behind Forrest Gump 40 years later for a new film. The stars were “de-aged” using new AI tools, making them more youthful in some scenes and enabling the filmmakers to see the transformation in real time while shooting.

With the use of generative AI in film making come things worth watching. The first is how AI will be used to tell new types of stories, as storytelling becomes more personalised and interactive. No one is quite sure how the nature of storytelling will change, but it is sure to. David Thomson, a film historian, compares generative AI to the advent of sound. “When movies were no longer silent, it changed the way plot points were made and how deeply viewers could connect with characters.” Cristóbal Valenzuela, who runs a company providing AI-enhanced software, says AI is like a “new kind of camera”, offering a fresh “opportunity to reimagine what stories are like”. Both are right.

Another big development to watch is how AI will be used as a time-saving tool. Generative AI will automate and simplify complex tasks like film-editing and special effects. For a glimpse of the future, watch Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2023. It featured a scene that used a “rotoscoping” tool to edit out the green-screen background and make a talking rock more believable. It shortened into hours what might have otherwise taken days of video-editing.

What is also noticeable is more dramatic conflicts between creators and those running AI platforms. This year is likely to bring floods of lawsuits (诉讼) from authors, musicians and actors about how their works have been used to train AI systems without permission or payment. Perhaps they can agree on some sort of licensing arrangement, in which AI companies start paying copyright-holders.

It will probably be a few years before a full-length film is produced entirely by AI, but it is just a matter of time.

In the 12th century, the Southern Song Dynasty moved its capital to Lin’an. Near Lin’an, on the banks of Lake Tai is the city of Suzhou. Given its location near the capital and its     1     (nature) beauty, Suzhou became a preferred place     2     (live). Thus, there were over 300 gardens     3     (build) here, and more than 60 are still in existence. Among these gardens, the Humble Administrator’s Garden (Zhuozheng Yuan) is the largest and the most famous, and water pools take up a third of its area.     4     (surround) the water pools is a luxuriant (繁茂的) group of flowers, plants, and trees, all carefully chosen according to the way their seasonal colors reflect off the sparkling water below. As is typical     5     Suzhou gardens, this garden     6     (separate) into different sections, offering     7     (vary) kinds of spaces in diverse shapes and sizes that represent different moods and feelings.

Since it is such a large garden, no simple     8     (describe) of the garden will do.     9     you have to do is walk among the water and plants, enjoy every moment,     10     find your own treasures depending on your mood that day.