I needed to do something in my community (社区) in order to complete the community service hours required to graduate from high school. Some of my friends had signed up to spend time at a soup kitchen, so I did, too. It seemed like a good thing to do.

I thought that we would just be passing out dinners to those in need, but I found out we would be doing everything from preparing to serving the dinner. We began preparing the food, from mixing salad dressing to separating frozen meat. Much still needed to be done before dinner was served, but already outside the building many homeless people were gathering. It wasn’t until a couple of hours later that we opened the doors and began serving dinner.

As the line of people came toward me, I got a little scared. I’d come face to face with the homeless: How should I act? How would they treat me? Would they hate me for having more than they did? While some of the people looked very friendly, some of them looked so dangerous. I didn’t have too much time to worry about it. I was assigned (分配) to serve the salad with the lady next to me. She smiled at me and said if I needed help, she’d be right there, which I found quite comforting.

I had never seen so many people wanting food. They were of all ages and nationalities. Most of them wore clothes that were torn and dirty. Some looked like they had tally given up on life, while others seemed to be making the best of the situation, smiling and joking. Some were better off than others, but they all needed a good meal and a warm place to eat. It saddened me to think of how many people there were who didn’t have a place to call home and the only food they got came from a soup kitchen.

As they came in my direction, I put on my brightest and happiest smile.

I was so happy that I had earned my service hours in this way.

5 . Adults are often embarrassed about asking for help. Its an act that can make people feel sensitive. The moment you ask for directions, after all, you reveal (泄露) that you may be lost. Seeking someone’s assistance can make you feel like you are broadcasting your incompetence. New research suggests young children don’t seek help in school, even when they need it, for the same reason.

To learn more about how children think about seeking help, we asked 576 children, ages four to nine, to predict the behavior of two kids in a story. One of the characters genuinely wanted to be smart, and the other merely wanted to seem smart to others.

Children thought that the kid who wanted to seem smart would be less likely to ask for assistance. They could still conceive of (想象) situations in which the kid who wanted to seem smart would seek help: when assistance could be sought privately (on a computer rather than in person), children thought both characters were equally likely to ask for it.

We also found that they recognize several more behaviors that might make a child appear less smart in front of fellow kids, such as admitting to failure or modestly downplaying successes. Children are therefore acutely aware of several ways in which a person’s actions might make them appear less clever in the eyes of others.

However, a number of solutions can be found to help children. Our Gist instinct may be to motivate seeking help by emphasizing its educational benefits. But reputational barriers likely require reputation-based solutions. For example, instructors could create activities in which each student becomes an “expert” on a different topic, and then children must ask one another for help to master all of die material. If seeking help is understood as a commonplace classroom activity, kids may be less likely to think of it as indicative (表明) of one’s ability.

Seeking help could even be framed as socially desirable. After all, asking for help often benefits not just die help seeker but also others listening in who have similar questions or struggles.

Winter break was approaching, and all Scott wanted to do was go snowboarding. Unfortunately, Scott's parents had different plans. They had booked a weeklong tropical cruise (热带船游). Scott hated warm weather and asked if he could just stay at his best friend's house so he could snowboard every day at the local mountain. His parents didn't want to hear anything of it. He kept debating them about the topic, but they would not change their minds. Family time was important to them, and it was tradition that they spend winter break together.

The week of the cruise arrived, and Scott continued to mumble (咕哝) his complaints as he and his family left their house to head south. Scott's dad told him that he would only make the vacation worse for himself if he didn't change his attitude and open his mind to a new experience. Scott still couldn't stop thinking about all of the snow he was leaving behind.

When they arrived at the port to board the ship, Scott had a hard time admitting that he was actually impressed with the size of the ship. He had seen the brochures but seeing the ship in person was a whole different animal. Then he remembered that the brochure said something about a surfing pool. Maybe surfing would be somewhat like snowboarding. After all, it involved riding a board.

Scott climbed aboard the ship with his parents, and then they walked around to check everything out. He couldn't believe how fancy the accommodations were. The dining room looked like a royal hall; the game room had all of his favorite games; the ship's deck (甲板) had several different swimming pools for different purposes. Then Scott saw the surfing pool. It was incredible. It wasn't a big pool, but it had big waves, and the young man who was demonstrating how to ride the waves made it look like a ton of fun.

Scott asked his parents if he could try surfing.

Gradually, Scott began to love the cruise.

9 . “A writer’s job is to tell the truth,” said Hemingway in 1942. No other writer of our time had so fiercely stated, or so consistently (一贯地) illustrated the writer’s duty to speak truly. His standard of truth-telling remained, moreover, so high and so strict that he was ordinarily unwilling to admit secondary evidence, whether literary evidence or evidence picked up from other sources than his own experience. “I only know what I have seen”, was a statement which came often to his lips and pen. What he had personally done, or what he knew unforgettably by having gone through one version of it, was what he was interested in telling about.

The primary intention of his writing, from first to last, was to seize and project for the reader what he often called “the way it was”. This is a characteristically simple phrase for a concept of extraordinary complexity, and Hemingway’s concept of its meaning subtly (微妙地) changed several times in the course of his career - always in the direction of greater complexity. At the core of the concept, however, one can invariably recognize the operation of three instruments of beauty appreciation: the sense of place, the sense of fact, and the sense of scene.

The first of these, obviously a strong passion with Hemingway, is the sense of place. “Unless you have geography, background,” he once told George Antheil, “you have nothing.” You have, that is to say, a dramatic vacuum. Few writers have been more place-conscious. Few have so carefully charted out the geographical ground work of their novels while managing to keep background so unnoticeable. Few, accordingly, have been able to record more economically and graphically the way it is when you watch the bulls running through the streets of Pamplona, Spain towards the bull-ring.

“When I woke it was the sound of the rocket exploding that announced the release of the bulls. Down below the narrow street was empty. All the balconies were crowded with people. Suddenly a crowd came down the street. They were all running, packed close together. They passed along and up the street toward the bull-ring and behind them came more men running faster, and then some stragglers (落后者) who were really running. Behind them was a little bare space, and then the bulls tossing their heads up and down. It all went out of sight around the corner. One man fell, rolled to the gutter (排水沟), and lay quiet. But the bulls went right on and did not notice him. They were all running together.”