Sharing a room with a family member or a friend can be tough, but it becomes especially difficult when you're sharing it with someone you hardly know. Here are things you can do to help you deal with having a roommate, no matter who it may be.

First of all, you have to remember that you get what you give. If you are nice to others, then others will be nice to you as well. You also need to set boundaries for yourself and for the other person. So before your new roommate moves in, talk to him. Set the rules early on and discuss your expectations.

Remember that there are two things that make up any good relationship: trust and respect. The same thing applies to having a roommate. You have to respect each other. Suppose he has that new PS3 game that you've always wanted to try out, what should you do? Ask permission first. If he says no, don’t take it against him. If he lets you borrow his stuff, take care of the item and treat it as if it were your own. Make sure that you return it in the same condition as when you borrowed it.

For chores that can be shared, you may want to divide it equally so that you don’t do all the housework. Take turns in washing the dishes. You may do it every other day or you may split the task so that you only have to do it in the morning and your roommate only has to do it at night.

When it comes to food and grocery items, determine what can be shared. Don't be too mean when it comes to sharing food. The advantage of sharing food is that both of you can save on time and food preparation.

3 . Conservationists go to war over whether humans are the measure of nature’s value. New Conservationists argue such trade-offs are necessary in this human dominated epoch. And they support “re-wilding”, a concept originally proposed by Soule where people curtail economic growth and withdraw from landscapes, which then return to nature.

New Conservationists believe the withdrawal could happen together with economic growth. The California-based Breakthrough Institute believes in a future where most people live in cities and rely less on natural resources for economic growth.

They would get food from industrial agriculture, including genetically modified foods, desalination intensified meat production and aquaculture, all of which have a smaller land footprint. And they would get their energy from renewables and natural gas.

Driving these profound shifts would be greater efficiency of production, where more products could be manufactured from fewer inputs. And some unsustainable commodities would be replaced in the market by other, greener ones — natural gas for coal, for instance, explained Michael Heisenberg, president of the Breakthrough Institute. Nature would, in essence, be decoupled from the economy.

And then he added a caveat: We are not suggesting decoupling as the paradigm to save the world, or that it solves all the problems or eliminates all the trade-offs.

Cynics (悲观者) may say all this sounds too utopian, but Breakthrough maintains the world is already on this path toward decoupling. Nowhere is this more evident than in the United Sates, according to Iddo Wernick, a research scholar at the Rockefeller University, who has examined the nation’s use of 100 main commodities.

Wenick and his colleagues looked at data carefully from the U.S. Geological Survey National Minerals Information Center, which keeps a record of commodities used from 1900 through the present day. They found that the use of 36 commodities (sand, iron ore, cotton etc.) in the U. S. Economy had peaked.

Another 53 commodities (nitrogen, timber, beef, etc.) are being used more efficiently per dollar value of gross domestic product than in the pre-1970s era. Their use would peak soon, Wernick said.

Only 11 commodities (industrial diamond, indium, chicken, etc.) are increasing in use (Greenwire, Nov.6), and most of these are employed by industries in small quantities to improve systems processes. Chicken use is rising because people are eating less beef, a desirable development since poultry cultivation has a smaller environmental footprint.

The numbers show the United States has not intensified resource consumption since the 1970s even while increasing its GDP and population, said Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller University.

“It seems like the 20th-century expectation we had, we were always assuming the future entailed greater consumption of resources,” Ausubel said. “But what we are seeing in the developed countries is, of course, peaks.”

6 . In today’s motivational literature, failure is often viewed as something to be celebrated. Inspirational speakers are fond of quoting the words of the novelist Samuel Beckett-“Fail again. Fail better.” It seems that disappointments are an essential stepping stone to success, a turning point in our life story that will ultimately end in victory.

However, psychological researches find most of us struggle to handle failure constructively. In other words, we fail to “fail forward”. We find ways to devalue the task at which we failed, and become less motivated to persevere and reach our goals. This phenomenon is known as the “sour-grape effect”, which was discovered by Professor Hallgeir Sjastad.

Sjastad explains that “sour-grape effect” is a self-protective mechanism. “Most of us picture ourselves as competent people, so when external feedback suggests otherwise, it poses a serious threat to that self-image,” he says. “The easiest way out is to deny or explain away the external signal, so we can reduce the inconsistency and preserve a positive sense of self. We do this even without noticing.”

If you have one bad interview for your dream job, you might convince yourself that you don’t really want it at all, and stop applying for similar positions. The same goes if you fail to impress at a sports trial, or if a publisher rejects the first submission of your manuscript. “We tend to explain away our shortcomings and convince ourselves our ‘Plan C’ is actually our ‘Plan A’,” Sjastad says.

It doesn’t mean we should persevere in goals all the time. It can be healthy to change ambitions if the process is no longer making us happy. But the “sour-grape effect may lead us to come to this decision prematurely, rather than hanging on a little and seeing whether we might learn and improve.

Failures are unavoidable. By learning to face the disappointment instead of devaluing its importance and pretending nothing happened, you may find it easier to achieve your goals.

Hello, everyone! My name is Li Hua.

That’s all. Thanks for listening!