2 . I like joking. I was always the joker, the one who could make people laugh by some jokes. I was _______very popular but people liked having me around.

However, it all changed when I changed schools. I used to make fun of everybody with my _______friends. We _______whispered others’ names when they walked past us to make it look _______we were talking about them. _______, my new “friends” always kept_______and would never say the things as we did before. So if you _______any of them to _______me in one word, it would probably be: MEAN.

I was never your normal high school mean girl. I never understood why what I said could hurt others. I _______them. It wasn’t much better at ________. Being disrespectful and rude, I’d do all sorts of things to hurt my parents.________ a lot, I wanted someone to help me but I didn’t want to ask for help. So, I became even ________.

One day, while looking for my earphone in my room, I found a long lost video________. After connecting it to the TV, I found there were hundreds of videos of me, as a baby crying, dancing as a toddler（刚学走的小孩）, my first day of school etc. I didn’t ________when my mom and Dad came and sat beside me, holding my hand. We enjoyed the ________together, smiling and laughing as we ________the good days.

At night in my room I started crying, tears of ________. So what if school was bad and life seemed hard? Right now, there were people standing beside me who would be there ________me forever and that was all that________. I wiped the ________and thought silently to myself—“What’s a little pain when you have so much to love?”

3 . Want to help fight global warming? Take off your tie, says the Italian health ministry. It has urged employers to let their staff dress casually at work in the summer so that the air conditioning can be turned down.

“Taking your tie off immediately lowers the body temperature by 2 or 3 degrees centigrade,” the ministry said in a statement. “Allowing a more sensible use of air conditioning brings about electricity savings and protects the environment.”

It called on all public and private offices to let employees wear no tie during heatwaves like the one that has brought Africa-like temperatures to many parts of Italy this week.

The move reacts to a similar action from Italy’s biggest oil group, ENI, which told its staff earlier this month they need not wear a tie at work. The tie makers, however, were left hot under the collar.

“Italy confirms (证实) that it is a strange country,” Flavio Cima said angrily in a letter to financial daily IL Sole~24ORE under the headline: “I, tie maker, am responsible for global warming.”

“We can now happily continue with our lifestyle, using cars, consuming fuel, heating and cooling our homes at leisure. On one condition: we should not wear a tie while we do so,” he wrote.

“I should have listened to my friends and become an oil producer instead.”

Italy is one of the European Union’s worst performers on the pollution front and is among the EU countries expected to exceed (超出) their greenhouse gas emission (排放) targets.

6 . How many friends do you have? Not counting the hundreds on Facebook or the names gathering dust in your address book. But real friends, the ones cast in stone. The kind who would lend you $100 without asking why, or put you up if you were kicked out of your house.

Anthropologist Prof Robin Dunbar feels he can put a number on it: five. No matter how much of a social butterfly you are, you can count your real pals on one hand, he says. To that he says you can add an ideal number of 15 “good friends”, the kind of people you would see in a group and would join for a drink if you bumped into them in the pub, and up to 150 “meaningful contacts”.

Prof Dunbar’s latest research is an exact formula(公式) for friendship: new friendships take 34 hours of one-on-one time to form, in which you’d spend an ideal duration of three hours and four minutes per interaction together over the course of six months. Note that this is to turn an acquaintance into a friend, not one of the close friends that makes up your inner circle of five—to do that, you’d have to devote 90 hours, according to a 2018 University of Kansas study.

According to the experts, the pandemic years have changed the number and nature of our friendship. It gave people more grounds for disagreement: over adherence(遵守) to social-distancing rules, for example. Plenty of people lost relationships in the cracks. “We are always on the outlook for new and better friends, but lockdown has had a big effect in making people reevaluate,” says Dunbar. “Perhaps they’ve decided the time has come to part with some and therefore there’s an empty space to fill.”

The forecast for British friendship was already gloomy before the pandemic. Three million people said they feel lonely “often or always”, according to the Government’s 2019 community life survey. But the average British adult lost four friends over the course of the pandemic, according to the poll.

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Li Hua

8 . Chongqing, a city of more than 32 million people, faced an unheard-of test this summer with a heat wave and drought causing a series of large wildfires since Aug 17.

Local residents have safeguarded their hometown in every way possible, with thousands of volunteers from all walks of life fighting the fires with professionals.

Under a very hot sun, some residents used chain saws(锯) to fell trees to make fire barriers. Others rode motorcycles on newly formed paths to take firefighters and supplies up a mountain, while some volunteers carried food and drinks on their backs by foot. Women and children helped organize supplies and clear the ground, and performed other essential tasks.

On Thursday night, as wildfires approached a man-made barrier on Jinyun Mountain in Beibei district, a total of more than 1000 firefighters and volunteers stood alongside the barrier with fire extinguishers. Seen from overhead, their lights formed a silver wall against the raging fire.

The residents’ stories have touched many people.

“Chongqing people are really amazing.“ said Du Hailang, head of the Beijing Emergency Rescue Association, an NGO founded in 2007 that has taken part in many overseas rescue operations. Du and 10 other members of the association joined the fire rescue team in Chongqing last week.

“The man-made wall was unbelievable, but shocking. It really showed Chinese people’s determination to defend their homeland.” Du said.

The outstanding work of the volunteers and the hospitality of local residents impressed the firefighters, too···

Bai Xueguang, from Gansu Forest Fire Brigade, said, “I never imagined that I would have ice cream and cold drinks at a fire rescue site.”

Zhou Hongyu, from Yunnan Forest Fire Brigade, said every volunteer he met at the scene asked him if he needed anything “It was the first time I had taken a motorcycle to reach a fire scene. We really appreciate the locals’ hospitality. Their support has been wonderful.” Zhou said.