2 . Chimps will cooperate in certain ways, like gathering in war parties to protect their territory. But except that, they have little instinct to help one another. Chimps in the wild seek food for themselves. Even chimp mothers regularly refuse to share food with their children, who are able from a young age to gather their own food.

In the laboratory, chimps don’t naturally share food either. If a chimp is put in a cage where he can pull one plate of food for himself or, with no great effort, a plate that also provides food for a neighbor to the next cage, he will pull at random — he just doesn’t care whether his neighbor gets fed or not. Chimps are truly selfish.

Human children, on the other hand, are naturally cooperative. From the earliest ages, they decide to help others, to share information and to participate in achieving common goals. The psychologist Michael Tomasello has studied this cooperativeness in a series of expensive with very young children. He finds that if babies aged 18 months see a worried adult with hands full trying to open a door, almost all will immediately try to help.

There are several reasons to believe that the abilities help, inform and share are not taught, but naturally possessed in young children. One is that these instincts appear at a very young age before most parents have started to train children to behave socially. Another is that the helping behaviors are not improved if the children are rewarded. A third reason is that social intelligence develops in children before their general cognitive skills, at least when compared with chimps. In tests conducted by Tomtasello, the human children did no better than the chimps on the physical world tests, but were considerably better at understanding the social world.

The cure of what children’s minds have and chimps’ don’t in what Tomasello calls shared intentionality. Part of this ability is that they can infer what others know or are thinking. But beyond that, even very young children want to be part of a shared purpose. They actively seek to be part of a “we”, a group that intends to work toward a shared goal.

7 . The most frightening words in the English language are, “Our computer is down.” You hear it more and more when you are on business. The other day I was at the airport waiting for a ticket to Washington and the girl in the ticket office said, “I’m sorry, I can’t sell you a ticket. Our computer is down.”

“If your computer is down, just write me out a ticket.”

“I can’t write you out a ticket. The computer is the only one allowed to do so.”

I looked down on the computer and every passenger was just standing there drinking coffee and staring at the black screen. Then I asked her, “What do all you people do?”

“We give the computer the information about your trip, and then it tells us whether you can fly with us or not.”

“So when it goes down, you go down with it.”

“That’s good, sir.”

“How long will the computer be down?” I wanted to know.

“I have no idea. Sometimes it’s down for 10 minutes, sometimes for two hours. There’s no way we can find out without asking the computer, and since it’s down it won’t answer us.”

After the girl told me they had no backup(备用) computer, I said. “Let’s forget the computer. What about your planes? They’re still flying, aren’t they?”

“I couldn’t tell without asking the computer.”

“Maybe I could just go to the gate and ask the pilot(飞行员) if he’s flying to Washington,” I suggested.

“I don’t know which gate to send you to. Even if the pilot goes to Washington, he can’t take you if you don’t have a ticket.”

“Is there any other airline flying to Washington within the next few hours?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said, pointing at the dark screen. “Only ‘IT’ knows. It can’t tell me.”

9 . Mr Baker lives in a small town. Nobody is richer than him there, but he wishes to get more money all the time. One day, on his way home, he finds there is a ________ on the ground. He picks it up and puts it into his pocket. That evening after he has supper, he brings it out and begins to ________ it in the room. He is interested in a piece of news on it. Some gold is found in a desert (沙漠). He is afraid someone would know about it and he starts off, without ________ anybody about it. He wants to find out ________ the gold is.

The greedy (贪婪的) man walks on the desert for two weeks, but he doesn’t find any gold, and his food and water is gone. His horse is so weak that he can’t ________ it. He has to go back to his hometown, but it is too ________. His horse at last died and he is too hungry and thirsty to go any further. He looks ________, and finds there is nothing but sand. Suddenly he sees a man ________ on the ground far away. He crawls(爬) to him and finds he is dead, with a bag in his hand. He hurries to open the bag to find something to eat, but it is full of ________. He throws it away. As he is dying, he cries and says, “Now, a bag of bread is far ________ than a bag of gold. How sad!”

10 . Linda was a sixteen-year-old girl in Britain. She was feeling bad for several days. Her mother took her to a hospital and the doctors found out that she had cancer.

Linda’s life changed. She began to go to the hospital often for treatment (治疗), and she also became depressed.

The hospitals and the doctors were good, but Linda did not have hope herself. Linda’s mother called a flower shop close to the hospital. “I want some beautiful flowers for my daughter. She is a teen girl with cancer. ” She told the shop owner. Later, the flowers arrived. Then Linda saw something unusual. It was a card. It read:

I own (拥有) this flower shop. I had cancer when I was fifteen years old. I am 24 years old now. Good luck. My heart goes out to you.

Yours,

Alice.

Linda smiled. She finally felt some real hope. She found the will (意志) to live.

Little things make a big difference. All of us can give little things like kindness, encouragement and hope to others.