It was a Friday. Once the school bus dropped me off at my home, I ran quickly into the house. “Dad, I’m here. I’m ready!” I called out. He would drive me to the supermarket and then I would continue taking my driving courses. On the way to the supermarket, I told my dad I needed to get two pairs of shoes. “One pair is enough,” Dad replied.

Unhappy, I felt our car slow down, as he pulled up. “Dad, why are we stopping?” I asked. Dad said, “The lady back there looks like she’s in trouble.” I turned around, seeing a little, old truck pulled to the side of the highway. Dad told me there was a lady inside and that she was having trouble with the truck and needed some help. “Dad, why do we have to stop and help her? Let somebody else do it,” I said, wanting to reach the supermarket quickly.

“Look, girl. Don’t be selfish (自私的),” he said seriously. “By helping this lady, there’s a great possibility that if you ever get stuck or need help, someone just might stop and help you. Sit here. I’ll be right back!”

Then, he walked through the rain back towards the woman’s truck. Minutes later he was back, saying she had run out of gas. Then, he drove to a gas station and bought gas for the lady without asking her to pay. I felt unhappy because helping her took us much time.

Days later, I had my learner’s permit (许可证) and then my driver’s license (驾照). I drove everywhere during the summer, and I was excited when school started because I drove myself to school: no more bus for me. Autumn turned quickly into winter, and I still loved the freedom my second-hand car gave me.

But my first winter of driving in the snow was a challenge. Not knowing it would have an unexpected snowstorm that day and that I would have a big problem, I started my car on that clear winter morning.

I just gladly left home and drove to school.

“I’ll push while you give it a little gas,” the stranger instructed, looking at my car stuck in the snow.

3 . Jenny,18, suffering from coughing and speechlessness, came to Sigmund Freud. She’d become depressed, even having no desire to live. During one session, as he tried to help her uncover the source of her sickness, Freud observed Jenny toying with a small handbag. Interpreting the act as an expression of controlled desire, Freud concluded, “No people can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; the details reveal everything.”

Sometimes a handbag is just a handbag, but modern research does support the idea that secrecy can be a source of mental and physical sadness. Keeping a secret requires constant effort. In one recent study, subjects asked to hide their sexual orientation performed worse on a spatial ability task, reacted more rudely to criticism, and gave up sooner in a test of handgrip endurance (握力耐力). And the bigger the secret, the harder it is to keep. Another study found that subjects asked to recall a meaningful secret believed hills to be more dangerous and distances to be longer than those asked to recall a small secret. When researchers asked to help move books from their lab, the subjects harboring meaningful secrets lifted fewer piles.

Research shows an association between keeping a meaningful secret and illness ranging from the common cold to chronic (慢性的) diseases. It concludes that teens who open their mind to a parent or close friend report fewer physical complaints and less bad behavior, loneliness, and depression than those who sit on their secrets. One reason why secret keeping is such hard work is that secrets, like unwanted thoughts, tend to take up more brain space.

Researchers have identified a small class of “repressors”, who experience fewer intrusive (妨碍的) thoughts about sensitive information they are controlling: they may keep their secrets so tightly wrapped that they manage to hide them even from themselves.

4 . A strong sense of smell is a key component of a healthy and enjoyable life. Yet our sense of smell is in decline as a result of an unnoticed threat to our health: air pollution.

Scientists are finding that anosmia, a loss of the sense of smell, is becoming a widespread problem among people of all ages exposed to PM2. 5 pollutants constantly, which are tiny particles (微粒) that can enter our bodies with every breath we take.

The reason, they suggest, is that the olfactory bulbs (嗅球), which are located in our noses and packed with nerve endings, are affected by exposure to air pollution. The tiny particles cause illness either in the bulbs themselves or in the brain, impacting our sense of smell over time, “Our data show the risk of developing anosmia with constant particulate pollution is 1.6 to 1.7 times higher,” says Ramanathan, a doctor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, America.

Ramanathan is an author of a recent study of nearly 2,700 patients, a fifth of whom had anosmia despite many of them being non- smokers.’ When he and his colleagues looked into the backgrounds of the affected patients, they found most of them lived in neighborhoods with significantly higher levels of air pollution.

The findings prove other studies with similar findings. One of these studies, conducted in a town in Italy, found that more than 200 teenagers and young adults between the ages of 15 and 25 suffered olfactory damage as a result of exposure to NO₂, a common component in traf-fic emissions. “This is alarming as olfactory loss affects patient safety, well-being, and it is a predictor of poor health,” says Ramanathan.

Yet the loss of a sense of smell is a condition that is often overlooked though it can bring about numerous health problems. A sense of smell is linked to memory as well and life is a lot less fun without it. “People don’t remember what the pastry that they ate in childhood looked like, but they remember what the shop smelled like,” says Ramanathan.

5 . Why should I stay off Facebook and other social media when I am involved in a lawsuit or personal injury case? Social media has become an important part of our everyday lives. Facebook, Instagram, and other social media have changed the way we communicate with friends, family, and colleagues. Many of us use these platforms to post opinions, show off our achievements or show your opinions on public affairs.

This means that social media is public information and can be used against you. Lawyers can use social media as evidence. They often look for pictures and posts that could potentially disprove your injury claim. Your posts can still be found even if your information is private when the posts potentially are related to your case. The court may determine that your public posts may lead to admissible evidence. They will not make you offer entire information, but only what they think is related. Defense lawyers wish to prove that the injured party, physically, emotionally, or financially, is lying about their injuries.

Even posting about your emotions can discount your claim greatly. Say, you are suing (起诉) someone for your pain and suffering because you are depressed, yet you post pictures of yourself smiling and you have quoted “Life is good” attached to the photo. If and when the defense lawyers get a hold of the posts, your pain and suffering claim may not hold up in court.

Most people only post about the good times on social media, rarely about the hardships and misfortunes. Insurance companies are allowed to follow you and gather information as evidence. Social media makes it easier. Before social media, insurance companies and lawyers had to hire investigators to follow people around to spy on them. Social media makes this entirely a lot easier.

If you have posted content related to your claim, you must not change evidence. Deleting your account would be considered you’re destroying evidence and that will affect your case. The best practice would be to stay off social media until your case has come to a close.

6 . Is your glass half-empty or half-full? How you answer this age-old question about positive thinking may reflect your outlook on life, your attitude toward yourself, and whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic.

    1    . Instead, it means that you approach unpleasantness in a more positive and productive way. You think the best is going to happen, not the worst.

You can learn to turn negative thinking into positive thinking.     2     —you’re creating a new habit, after all. Here are some ways to think and behave in a more positive and optimistic way Identify areas to change. If you want to become more optimistic and engage in more positive thinking, first identify areas of your life that you usually consider as negative. You can start by focusing on one area to approach in a more positive way. Think of a positive thought to manage your stress instead of a negative one.

    3    . Occasionally during the day stop and evaluate what you’re thinking. If you find that your thoughts are mainly negative, try to find a way to put a positive spin on them.

Be open to humor. Give yourself permission to smile or laugh, especially during difficult times. Seek humor in everyday happenings.     4    .

Surround yourself with positive people. Make sure those in your life are positive, supportive people you can depend on to give helpful advice and feedback. Negative people may increase your stress level and make you doubt your ability to manage stress in healthy ways.

Practice positive self-talk. Start by following one simple rule:     5    . Be gentle and encouraging with yourself. If a negative thought enters your mind, stop and think about what is good about you.

8 . At a time like the pandemic, not only do we miss hugs, but we need them. Touching someone reduces our own stress.     1     . An expert said, “A warm touch is how our systems reach one another. It says we are safe, we are loved, and we are not alone.”

    2     . If you need a hug, take precautions. Wear a mask. Give and take your hugs outdoors. Try to avoid touching the other person’s body or clothes with your face or your mask during a hug.

During a hug, the position of the faces matters most. The two of you should point your faces in opposite directions. Quickly approach each other and briefly embrace.     3     . And do the hug quickly. When you have finished hugging, back away quickly so you do not breathe onto each other’s faces. Wash your hands afterward.

Don’t hug face to face. This position is a higher risk because the faces are so close. When the shorter person looks up, their breath travels up into the taller person’s breathing zone.     4     if the taller person is looking down.

Do let your child hug you around the waist or knees. Hugging at the knee or waist level lowers risk for direct exposure because faces are far apart. However, there is potential for the child’s face to pollute the adult’s clothing. You might change clothes and should wash your hands after a visit that includes hugs with a child.     5     .

“Most hugs last less than 10 seconds. Back away at least six feet before talking again. Holding your breath stops you from exhaling any virus into their breathing zone,” an expert said.

9 . I believe I have a personal responsibility to have a positive influence on society and I’ve tried to achieve this goal by choosing to be a doctor and a scientist. I have ________ principles that guide my life. I think about them every day and have ________ them all my professional life.

First, I am always hungry for ________ I seek and learn every day: from an experiment in the lab, from reading a(n) ________ journal, from taking care of a ________. Because of this, I ________ get bored. I have accepted that I will never know or understand as much as I want.

Second, I believe in working for excellence. I am ________ about the big and small things! I do not ________ for this. This is not anxiety without a ________. This anxiety creates a ________ tension that drives me to reach my limited potential. This has made me a ________ doctor and scientist. Without this tension, I wouldn’t be as focused. This is what keeps the search for knowledge ________!

Third, I believe that as a doctor my goal is to reduce the ________ of humankind. When I chose to ________ AIDS in the 1980s, many of my colleagues thought I was misguided to focus all of my attention on what was ________ considered “just a gay man’s disease”. But I knew deep down that this was going to become a public health ________. Therefore, I have spent all of my professional ________ in AIDS research, care of AIDS patients and public health policy.

I believe that I must ________ seek and learn, accept ________ short of excellence if I want to put this terrible disease under ________.

10 . Sonja Yokum and Eric Stice, psychologists at Oregon Research Institute in Eugene, recently did a study on eating and enjoyment. They recruited (招募) 135 high school students and calculated each person’s body mass index, or BMI. All participants had healthy BMIs when the study began.

The researchers showed pictures of different types of food to the teens as their brains were scanned. Meanwhile, as the teens viewed pictures of a glass of water, they’d get a taste of water. When the milkshake appeared, they got a taste of milkshake. All the while, the scanner kept mapping how their brains responded.

Yokum and Stice repeated the tests with the same teens one, two and three years after the first scan. They then focused on two groups of these students. One group had put on weight. Their BMIs increased by at least ten percent from year one to year three. The other had BMIs that changed by two percent or less over that time. The researchers then looked for differences in the brain scans between the two groups. Changes emerged in two areas of the brain. One region processes taste. The other is known as the reward center.

At first, the taste center responded strongly in teens who went on to gain weight. That was especially true when they tasted the high-fat milkshakes. But three years later, scans showed the taste center of the brain responded less in these teens. Brains of teens with steady BMIs started off less responsive to fat. But over time they got better at detecting it.

Changes emerged in the teens’ reward centers, too. Those whose BMIs later rose started off the study with a strong reward response to tasting high-fat milkshakes. In contrast, teens who maintained a steady BMI throughout initially enjoyed the fattier drinks less. By year three of the study, higher-BMI teens enjoyed the fattier milkshakes much less, while those with steady BMIs enjoyed them far more.

The study suggests that the loss of enjoyment might drive people to overeat particularly tasty, high-energy foods to get the same rewarding “kick”, which may contribute to unhealthy eating habits and unhealthy weight gain.