By the time 18-year-old Amy Waldroop returned to her grandmother’s tiny house, it was nearly midnight and she was exhausted. After a full day’s work at a flower shop, she had put in another six hours waiting tables before heading home. This was her typical weekends.

Pushing the key into the lock, she quietly opened the door so as not to wake her younger siblings. She stepped into the front room, and froze. The house was a mess: plates of half-eaten food were scattered in front of the TV; clothes, shoes and exercise books were everyone.

Amy’s eyes welled with tears. “This is just too much for me.” she thought. Terrible memories began to race through her mind. Two years before, her parents lost their lives in an accident, leaving Amy and her siblings for their grandma, Helen, who had spent half of her life in a wheelchair. The life burden fell on Amy’s shoulders, which was too much for a girl.

Life moved on. One day, walking across the school grounds, Amy found a table littered with university brochures. She browsed through pictures of spacious campuses and happy peers, all of it looking unachievable for her, given the current situation and financial conditions. But her teacher gave her unexpected hope, saying“ You could attend university for free. It would take a scholarship, though, and for that you’d need much better grades.”

During her final year of high school, Amy diligently attended classes, then went to work after school, returned to her grandmother’s house, cared for her sisters and brothers and went through homework till the early hours of the morning, struggling for her dream university.

One afternoon, she walked home from school, holding a sheet of paper tightly. It was a letter from the University of California, informing her that she would be offered a scholarship and was admitted to the university. It was what she’d been longing for, a place where she could study to become someone special-a nurse, perhaps, or maybe even a lawyer.

Yet the letter only made Amy struggle inside.

The next afternoon, Amy spotted the wrinkled letter she threw into the dustbin on the table when arriving home.

4 . Once you get close enough to someone, it’s easy to assume they’ll be a friend for life — but friendships take work, too, and it’s important that you make time to cultivate these relationships as well.     1    . Read on to discover some questions you should ask your close friends.

1. “How do you think we’ve both changed since we became friends?”

There’s a good chance that you’ve been friends with those closest to you for some time, which means you’ve both changed in certain ways over the years. Shari, founder of Imperfectly Perfect Life, says it’s important to reflect on that change. “    2    ,” she shares.

2. “    3    ”

“You don’t have to just focus on your own friendship. People vary greatly in what makes them feel most connected to others — for some it’s sharing something exciting together, while for others, it’s doing daily tasks together,” Julia, a clinical psychologist, notes.

3. “What is the best advice you’ve ever received?”

Another way you can “gain a deeper understanding of your friend’s values, beliefs, and the lessons they’ve learned along their journey” is by asking them about the best advice they’ve ever received. “This provides an opportunity to share wisdom that has had a significant impact on their personal growth,” Natalie shares. “    4    , fostering mutual understanding within your friendship.”

4.“What are your biggest dreams for your life?”

    5    , if you are truly committed to being friends for life. “Many friendships keep the friends locked in to their current reality,” Moore cautions. “But knowing your friend’s goals can create the space for your friendship to grow.”

My name is India Opal Buloni, and last summer my daddy, a busy bee, sent me to the store for a box of cheese, some white rice, and two tomatoes on my own.

When I walked into the produce section of the Winn-Dixie grocery store to pick out my two tomatoes, I almost bumped right into the store manager. He was standing there all red-faced, screaming and waving his arms around.

“Who let a dog in here?” he kept on shouting. “Who let a dirty dog in here?” At first, I didn’t see a dog. There were just a lot of vegetables rolling around on the floor, tomatoes and onions and green peppers.

And there was what seemed like a whole army of Winn-Dixie employees running around waving their arms just the same way the store manager was waving his.

And then the dog came running around the corner. He was a big dog. And ugly. And he looked like he was having a real good time. His tongue was hanging out and he was wagging his tail. He stopped sharply and smiled right at me. I had never before in my life seen a dog smile, but that is what he did. He pulled back his lips and showed me all his teeth. Then he wagged his tail so hard that he knocked some oranges off a display, and they went rolling everywhere, mixing in with the tomatoes and onions and green peppers.

The manager screamed, “Somebody grab that dog!” The dog went running over to the manager, wagging his tail and smiling. He stood up on his hind legs. You could tell that all he wanted to do was get face to face with the manager and thank him for the good time he was having in the produce department, but somehow he ended up knocking the manager over. And the manager must have been having a bad day, because lying there on the floor, right in front of everybody, he started to cry. The dog leaned over him, real concerned, and licked his face. “Please,” said the manager. “Somebody call the pound (流浪狗收容所).”

Billy, a fourth-grade student at a primary school in Florida, was bullied for his DIY hand-drawn logo of the University of Tennessee(the UT), but this made students of the UT act in support and the UT even turned his drawing into an official T-shirt.

It all started at “College Colors Day” on August 30. On that day, the primary school students were invited to wear their favorite university’s football team’s colors. Billy, wore an orange T-shirt representing his favorite university, the UT. He took it one step further to draw his own UT logo with pen and paper and put it to his T-shirt. Billy excitedly showed his T-shirt to Laura, a fourth-grade teacher at the school. She was greatly impressed and praised him for his wonderful idea.

But after lunch, Billy came back to Laura’s office, crying. Billy was upset and hurt because some girls at the lunch table had made fun of the hand-drawn logo on his T-shirt. Laura knew sometimes kids could say really cruel words. She knew although the logo was not well-drawn and of course not the most beautiful, Billy had tried his best to use the resources he had available to him to take part in College Colors Day in his own way.

In an effort to cheer him up, Laura wrote in a post on Facebook, a popular social media website, on Wednesday that one of her students was “SO EXCITED” to show her his orange T-shirt pinned with a hand-drawn “UT” logo, but was made fun of. Laura wrote that she was planning to buy him an official UT T-shirt to make it a little extra special for Billy and ended the post by asking if any of her Facebook friends had any connections to the UT. What happened next made her shocked.

Her post spread rapidly on Facebook.

When receiving and opening the surprise box, Billy couldn’t believe his eyes.

10 . When margarine (人造黄油) was first sold in the 1800s, plentiful alarmist words were uttered about it. However, it was simply a cream of vegetable oil and water, a processed, more sustainable and healthier alternative to an animal product. Anxiety about new foods and how they are produced continues today. Public discussions are full of concerns that “ultra-processed foods” or “UPFs” are downright unhealthy. One particular category in a fierce spotlight is plant-based meats. But how and where food is made doesn’t determine how safe or nutritious it is.

The term UPFs was first used in 2009 by Carlos Monteiro, a nutritionist. In a 2017 paper, he said he was worried that the shared experience of cooking was being increasingly lost and people weren’t eating together. In particular, he was seeing rising rates of diabetes and obesity. Keen to identify the root cause of these issues, he focused on food not made at home, but in factories. But the thing is, as Monteiro has stated openly, the UPF categorisation was never designed to group foods on the basis of nutrition.

Just like pork sausages and chicken popcorn, plant-based alternatives are made in factories, so are considered UPFs. But unlike those animal products, they don’t require antibiotics (抗生素) or hormones during production, require up to 96 percent less land, have carbon emissions up to 98 percent lower, need up to 99 percent less water and result in 100 percent fewer animals dying.

And side by side, they are almost always healthier than the over-processed animal meat products they replace, especially on fat and fibre content. Just compare the labels on the packets next time you are in the supermarket.

Many loud voices are raising concerns, suggesting that all UPFs, especially plant-based meats, are “unnatural”, “fake” and “full of chemicals”. We are seeing history repeat itself, and a fear of new foods being aroused all over again. But the science is unmistakably clear: diets rich in plant-based options are better for both people and the planet, factory or no factory.