1 . There are ways to make friends online while also keeping yourself protected. These are the top tips that you can follow to ensure this.

Choose the right apps

    1    . However, not all these apps are good. How can you tell the good apps from the bad ones? You should choose apps that only legal members can join. This will largely increase your chances of being safe with your new friends.

    2    

Don’t wait too long to figure out who your friend really is. If you find this person interesting and would like to continue chatting with him, you need to do a little background research.

Trust your feeling

This may seem like a rather old-fashioned idea but it is important.     3    , make it a point to trust what that little voice is telling you. If you have been speaking to someone for a while and you feel uncomfortable, there is probably a reason for that.     4    .

Meet your “friend” in a public place

You can't completely trust someone that you haven't actually met before. If you do decide that it is time to meet each other, then you should set up the place at a busy restaurant or coffee shop.     5    , even if you have met. Try to avoid going to an unfamiliar place.

During winter, Leo noticed that of all the houses on the block, there was one with a messy, dirty yard that looked unattended. One day, after all the snow had melted and the trees were starting to bloom (开花) just in time for spring, Leo couldn’t help but stare at his neighbor’s messy yard a little longer. The melted snow showed all the buried leaves and other trash.

He went back home and brought the tools he needed. It took Leo the entire afternoon to clear the yard. He moved the melting snow out of the pathway and swept the leaves from the ground. He also trimmed (修剪) the bushes and left them as neat as he could.

The following morning, the old woman, Abigail, opened her door with joy. She had quietly watched the young man clean up the yard the day before, much to her relief.

Abigail had not left her house in months. She relied totally on her caregiver for her basic needs and was eager to get fresh air. After sitting in her wheelchair in her front yard for a couple of minutes, her neighbors started to notice her. They walked toward her to say hi, and soon, the crowd grew.

“It’s so lovely to see you outdoors, Abigail! How have you been?” one of them asked.

“I’m so happy to be breathing some fresh air for a change. I couldn’t leave the house for months because of the snow. It was too deep, and I couldn’t afford to hi re someone to help me with it,” Abigail admitted.

“But yesterday, I saw a kind young man cleaning my yard the entire afternoon. I wanted to thank him, but I had no food to offer him because my caregiver had not arrived yet,” she shared. “He is such a blessing. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw him!”

When Abigail praised the “kind young man” who helped her, they immediately knew it was Leo. The neighbors looked at each other, with guilty all over their faces. They realized they had been so blind to Abigail’s problems that no one thought to help her by cleaning her yard.

They decided to thank Leo by visiting his house.

When he opened his front door, Leo was surprised to see his neighbors bearing gifts.

5 . More than 1 billion children, teenagers and adults live with obesity (肥胖) around the world, making it the most common form of malnutrition in many countries, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal The Lancet.

“Previous estimates by the World Obesity Federation suggested that there would be 1 billion people living with obesity by 2030, but that number was already overtaken in 2022,” Dr. Majid Ezzati, senior author of the study and professor at Imperial College London, said in a news conference on Thursday. “We hadn’t expected that the things happened so fast.”

The new global study, conducted by more than 1,500 researchers from the Non-Communicable Diseases Risk Factor Collaboration and the World Health Organization (WHO), analyzed the height and weight measurements of over 220 million people from more than 190 countries.

The study focused on rates of underweight and obesity, both forms of malnutrition that are harmful to people’s health. Adults were regarded as obese if their body mass index (指数) (BMI) was greater than or equal to 30 and considered as underweight if their BMI was below18.5. Children and teenagers were defined as obese or underweight based on age and sex, according to the study.

“Undernutrition and obesity are two faces of the same problem, which is the lack of access to a healthy diet,” Dr. Francesco Branca, director of the WHO Department of Nutrition and Food Safety, said in the news conference. “Public policy must aim to improve monitoring of food producers and ensure fair access to healthy and nutritious food for everyone. Over 3 billion people in the world still cannot afford a healthy diet.”

France, which saw a steady level in its obesity rates in the study, has carried out a national plan called Programme National Nutrition Santé that sets objectives for nutritional policy at the industry, consumer and research levels. Countries in South America have begun carrying out front-of-package nutritional labelling that includes clear warnings about fat, sugar and salt levels. Mexico has led the way on taxation of sweetened drinks, and in Chile, processed foods cannot be marketed to children.

6 . Despite his slim body of work, J. D. Salinger was one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century. His short stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker, inspired the early careers of writers such as Phillip Roth, John Updike and Harold Brodkey.

Born on January 1, 1919, in New York, Salinger was a restless student, attending New York University, Ursinus College and Columbia University. While taking classes at the latter, he met Professor Whit Burnett, who was also the editor of Story magazine. Burnett, sensing Salinger’s talent as a writer, pushed him to create more often and soon Salinger’s works were appearing not just in Story, but in other big-name publications such as Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post.

His career had started to take off, but then, like so many young American men around that time, World War II interrupted his life. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Salinger was drafted into the army, serving from 1942 to 1944. During that time, however, Salinger kept writing for a new novel whose main character was a deeply unsatisfied young man named Holden Caulfield.

When Salinger returned to New York, he quickly set about resuming his life as a writer and soon found his work published in his favorite magazine, The New Yorker.

He also pushed on with the work on his novel about Holden Caulfield. Finally, in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye was published. The book earned its share of positive reviews, but some critics weren’t so kind. But over time the American reading public ate the book up and The Catcher in the Rye became an essential part of the academic literature course. To date, the book has sold more than 65 million copies.

In 1953, two years after the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger moved from New York City to Cornish, New Hampshire. There, Salinger did his best to cut off contact with the public and significantly slowed his literary output. He only published one new story, the 25,000-word Hapworth 16, 1924, before his death on January 27, 2010, in Cornish, New Hampshire.

7 . I just returned from India. While driving home from the airport, I was amazed by how everything in American streets ________ those in Delhi, a city in northern India. “You can eat off the street here!” I said. My family looked at me ________ I had gotten off a spaceship rather than a plane.

During the two years I was away, my friends and family ________ sending texts to each other by phone. After I came back, my phone was no longer ________ as before, just lighting up with the “ding” sound of a text, and I felt very ________. I chose to talk to my friends instead of texting them. I asked my friends for their ________ as I made an effort to ________ with them and rebuild our friendships.

While I was on my ________ trips, most of my friends had moved on with their ________. We felt disconnected from each other’s experiences. Just as ________ would always be part of my life, I understood that raising a family would always be part of theirs. I told them sometimes I felt ________ because I had been away and wasn’t there for their ________ events.

Expats (侨民) in Laos say that sometimes, if you stay abroad too long, you become a permanent ________, never quite making it as a local, and never feeling ________ in your home country. I ________. If you always travel with a heart beating for your beloved ones, no matter how long you have been abroad, you will find satisfaction at home.

10 . Cats are often considered to be colder especially when compared with dogs. But if you find your cat friend is a little hard to get close to, maybe you’re just not speaking their language.

Research shows that it’s actually not so difficult. You just need to smile at them more. Not smile in the human’s way, by showing your teeth, but the cat’s way: by narrowing your eyes and blinking (眨眼睛) slowly. It’s similar to how human eyes narrow when they are smiling, and usually occurs when cats are relaxed and content. The expression is explained as a kind of cat smile.

Jackson Galaxy, a cat behavior expert, says there are some pretty strong feelings behind the cat’s slow blink. He calls it “I Love You Blink”. Galaxy says the cat will blink slowly when cats and people are completely opening up to one another in sharing affection.

Researchers carried out two experiments. In the first experiment, owners slow-blinked at 21 cats from 14 different families. Once the cat was settled and comfortable in one spot in their home environment, the owners were asked to sit about a meter away and slow-blink when the cat was looking at them. The second experiment included 24 cats from 8 different families. This time, it wasn’t the owners doing the blinking but the researchers, who’d had no earlier contact with the cats. They found that not only were the cats more likely to blink back, but that they were more likely to reach the human’s hand after the human had blinked.

Dr Tasmin Humphrey, the first author of the study from the University of Sussex, said: “Understanding positive ways in which cats and humans interact can increase public understanding of cats, improve its welfare, and tell us more about the socio-cognitive (社会认知) abilities of this species.”