Like many perfectionists, I truly believed that self-sufficiency was a virtue. And1my brain was so good at finding what it was looking for, I noticed every single time that idea got proved2 and so I always had lots of3for why it really was better if I just handled everything myself.
This kind of thinking, friends, was the 4in disguise (伪装).
My self-reliance came in handy when I was a kid in the seventies and in adulthood when I was an independent 5Then, in the first years of 6the Organized Artist Company, I found myself 7everything I could about websites, copywriting, graphic design, etc. Later whenever one of my business friends 8about how her website was being held hostage (人质) by her designer, I9felt too satisfied10if mistakes were made in my business, they were all mine.
Now this was where my false11showed up—in not wanting others to know I made mistakes. If I had other people12me, they would see my errors and13. Working alone, I could keep up a pretty good display of 14.
But as the Organized Artist Company became increasingly 15, I realized I was doing harm to the people I was trying to serve by attempting to do everything myself. I was16my growth and the depth of my work.
I had built a business with my own two hands, and I 17with a business that I could hold in my own two hands. Cozy,18limited in scope (范围).
Once I was willing to control my ego( 自负) and admit that my vision of self-sufficiency was a 19my business took a remarkable leap forward, and revenue 20 Little change, big difference.
ELECTRICITY IS AT THE CORE OF MODERN LIFE. DESPITE THIS, THE FULL STORY OF THIS REVOLUTIONARY FORCE HAS REMAINED UNTOLD—UNTIL NOW.
Simply Electrifying offers the comprehensive story of one of mankind's most important journeys: from a time when only a few could even imagine a world with electricity to today when, for most of us, a world without electricity would be unimaginable.
Since the birth of the modern science of electricity 265 years ago, mankind has built an impressive structure to produce, deliver, and use electricity, thanks to a combination of pioneering science, innovative technology, wise business strategy, and pervasive (到处存在的)economic and environmental regulation.
Simply Electrifying brings to life the stories of the people that made it all possible—from early pathfinders like Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein to innovators such as Samuel Morse, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla. In modern times, business strategists and economic and environmental regulation driven by many, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rachel Carson, and even President Barack Obama, have shaped how we use and understand electricity in crucial ways. Today, Elon Musk and others are on the edge of again changing the way we think about and interact with it.
Simply Electrifying is painstakingly researched and beautifully written, showing us how both profit-makers and policy-makers must use a wide-angle lens to truly understand the past and predict the future.
As countless unmade beds and unfinished homework assignments prove, kids need rules. Yet how parents make demands can powerfully influence a child's social skills, psychologists at the University of Virginia recently found after the conclusion of a study investigating the transition from adolescence to adulthood.
Initially 184 13-year-olds filled out multiple surveys, including one to assess how often their parents employed psychologically controlling strategies, such as inducing guilt or threatening to withdraw affection. The kids rated, for example, how typical it would be for Dad to suggest that “if I really cared for him, I would not do things that caused him to worry”or for Mom to become “less friendly when I did not see things her way.”
The researchers followed up with the subjects at ages 18 and 21, asking the young adults to bring along a close friend and, later, a romantic partner if they had one. These pairs were asked to answer hypothetical (假设的) questions that were purposefully written to inspire a difference of opinion. “We wanted to see whether they could navigate a disagreement in a healthy way, ”says study leader Barbara Oudekerk, now at the U. S. Department of Justice's bureau of statistics.
In the October issue of Child Development, Oudekerk and her colleagues report that the 13-year-olds who had highly controlling parents struggled in friendly disagreements at age 18. They had difficulty stating their opinions in a confident, reasoned manner in comparison to the kids without controlling parents. And when they did speak up, they often failed to express themselves in warm and productive ways.
The researchers suspect that pushy parents ruin their child's ability to learn how to argue his or her own viewpoint in other relationships. Although parents do need to set boundaries, domineering strategies imply that any disagreement will damage the bond itself. Separate findings suggest that parents who explain the reasons behind their rules and turn disagreements into conversations leave youngsters better prepared for future arguments.
The consequences of tense or domineering relationships appear to get worse with time. This study also found that social difficulties at 18 predicted even poorer communication abilities at age 21. Psychologist Shmuel Shulman of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, who did not participate in the work, thinks these conclusions convincingly reveal how relationship patterns “carry forward” into new friendships.
Exposing living tissue to subfreezing temperatures for long can cause permanent damage. Microscopic ice crystals (结晶体) cut cells and seize moisture (潮气), making donor organs unsuitable for transplantation. Thus, organs can be made cold for only a few hours ahead of a procedure. But a set of lasting new antifreeze compounds (化合物)—similar to those found in particularly hardy (耐寒的) animals—could lengthen organs' shelf life.
Scientists at the University of Warwick in England were inspired by proteins in some species of Arctic fish, wood frogs and other organisms that prevent blood from freezing, allowing them to flourish in extreme cold. Previous research had shown these natural antifreeze molecules (分子) could preserve rat hearts at -1.3 degrees Celsius for up to 24 hours. But these proteins are expensive to extract (提取) and highly poisonous to some species. “For a long time everyone assumed you had to make synthetic (人造的) alternatives that looked exactly like antifreeze proteins to solve this problem, ”says Matthew Gibson, a chemist at Warwick who co-authored the new research. “But we found that you can design new molecules that function like antifreeze proteins but do not necessarily look like them.”
Most natural antifreeze molecules have a mixture of regions that either attract or repel water. Scientists do not know exactly how this process prevents ice crystal formation, but Gibson thinks it might throw water molecules into push-pull chaos that prevents them from tuning into ice. To copy this mechanism, he and his colleagues synthesized spiral-shaped molecules that were mostly water-repellent—but had iron atoms at their centers that made them hydrophilic, or water-loving. The resulting compounds were surprisingly effective at stopping ice crystals from forming. Some were also harmless to the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, indicating they might be safe for other animals.
“These compounds are really cool because they are not proteins—they are other types of molecules that nonetheless can do at least part of what natural antifreeze proteins do, ”says Clara do Amaral, a biologist at Mount St. Joseph University, who was not involved in the research. Gibson's antifreeze compounds will still need to be tested in humans, however, and may be only part of a solution. “We don't have the whole picture yet,”do Amaral adds. “It's not just one magical compound that helps freeze-tolerant organisms survive. It's a whole suite of adaptations.
I remember my childhood summers fondly, as many of us do. Those golden days in which I would leave the house after a still sleepy, leisurely breakfast and come home only for lunch in the middle of a day spent entirely outdoors. We did not live in town and, thus, playmates were limited to siblings (兄弟姐妹) and the cousins who lived down the road.
Our backyard became the playground in which our imaginations would run wild—turning those few acres into magical forests, the creek (小溪) into a violent river and our trusty dog, Rex, into the many roles of horse, monster and any other creature that we children did not want to play. By the end of the three months of summer break we were sunburned from our hours in the sun, full of the memories of a thousand magical moments and bonded to our siblings in a way that winter's forced hibernation (冬眠) never seemed to connect us.
Today, I live on the same acreage that I did as a child. My children have the blessing of having the same grassy patches to scratch their bare feet as they run through it, the same creek to stomp(跺脚)through, and not the same dog—but their very own energetic pup to imagine away the days with.
However, this is not the same world as it was twenty, thirty years ago. There are screens everywhere in the house to demand attention—televisions with hundreds of channels, computers with access to a thousand entertaining sites, tablets stocked with apps. There is also no longer the expectation of a stretch of an unscheduled three months. Their school friends tell competitive stories of carefully planned vacations, spending time traveling to all of the local attractions—various parks, the zoo, the science center, all of the festivals which come breezing through town. On the very first day of school they will be asked to list their favorite activities of the summer and no longer are these lists filled with things like finding wood to make a bridge over a creek or a day spent in imaginative play with their siblings. The lists are now full of trips, overscheduled days and “camps” that no longer offer a stay in nature.
Our children have become used to being entertained every minute. In our house, we have limits on electronics and kick the kids outside on a nice day. Even as we try as parents to set limits and get our children out in nature, the new cry of childhood seems to be “I'm bored,” which is not really just meaning “I'm bored,” “but “Please find something to entertain me, as I no longer can entertain myself even for a short period of time.” Our children no longer know how to sit in silence, entertain themselves while even waiting for a few minutes and have lost the awe of nature as they have become addicted to screen time.
We have made a choice in this household to do what is no longer expected of children in many households—we will ensure that there are days of “boredom.” We refuse to spend our days scheduling our children's every hour. There will be many days with no plans at all, when they will be sent outside with only the grass and the trees and their own imaginations to entertain them.
The screens will be turned off and our children will find that times of quiet can be just as or even more entertaining. They will bond with their brother and sister, making memories that they will replay in their minds well into adulthood. Even though sunscreen will be religiously applied, they will leave summer with sunburned and scratches coming from climbing trees, stomping through creeks and chasing the dog in the field.
This summer I will be giving my children the greatest gift of all—boredom. For inside boredom is the gift of getting to know your own mind, of finding comfort and joy in nature and in the realization that the greatest gifts are experience, not things.
Pleasure and Enjoyment
When considering the kind of experience that makes life better, most people first think that happiness consists in experiencing pleasure: good food, all the comforts that money can buy. We imagine the satisfaction of traveling to exciting places or being surrounded by expensive devices. If we cannot afford those goals, then we are happy to settle for a quiet evening in front of the television set with a drink close by.
Pleasure is a feeling of contentment that one achieves whenever expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met. The taste of food when we are hungry is pleasant because it reduces a physiological (生理的) imbalance. Resting in the evening while passively absorbing information from TV, with alcohol or drugs to dull the mind overexcited by the demands of work, is pleasantly relaxing. Traveling to Acapulco is pleasant because the exciting novelty (新奇) restores our sensations (感觉) exhausted by the repetitive routines of everyday life.
When people think further about what makes their lives rewarding, they tend to move beyond pleasant memories and begin to remember other events, other experiences that overlap(重叠) with pleasurable ones but fall into a category that deserves a separate name: enjoyment. Enjoyable events occur when a person has not only met some expectation or satisfied a need or a desire but also gone beyond what he or she has been programmed to do and achieved something unexpected, perhaps something even unimagined before.
Enjoyment is characterized by this forward movement: by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment. Playing a close game of tennis that stretches one's ability is enjoyable, as is reading a book that reveals things in a new light, as is having a conversation that leads us to express ideas we didn't know we had. Closing a contested business deal, or any piece of work well done, is enjoyable. None of these experiences may be particularly pleasurable at the time they are taking place, but afterward we think back on them and say, “That really was fun” and wish they would happen again. After an enjoyable event we know that we have changed, that our self has grown: in some respect, we have become more complex as a result of it.
Experiences that give pleasure can also give enjoyment, but the two sensations are quite different. For instance, everybody takes pleasure in eating. To enjoy food, however, is more difficult. A gourmet (美食家) enjoys eating, as does anyone who pays enough attention to a meal so as to discriminate the various sensations provided by it. As this example suggests, we can experience pleasure without any investment of psychic energy, whereas enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual investments of attention. A person can feel pleasure without any effort, but it is impossible to enjoy a tennis game, a book, or a conversation unless attention is fully concentrated on the activity.
Pleasure and Enjoyment
Main contents | Detailed information |
Pleasure | Pleasure is a feeling that one achieves what one has on a biological or social level. Things like good food, exciting travelling and a quiet rest can ring one pleasure because they can help restore one's physiological balance, reduce one's heavypressure and save one from boredom. |
Enjoyment | Enjoyment from the achievement of something unexpected or even unimagined before. Enjoyment a sense of novelty and accomplishment such as a close tennis game, a valuable book and a conversation productive of ideas. |
Pleasure is often related to the comforts that money can buy, while enjoyment, more linked to one's inner world, makes one feel rewarded and changed for the. While some experiences give both pleasure and enjoyment, some enjoyable ones are not pleasurable when taking place but bring wonderful feelings. Pleasure requires nowhile enjoyment can never be achieve without the investment of the full of attention. | |
Conclusion | Enjoyment is a level of pleasure and the two differ from each other in several aspects. |
| Chinese actress Liu Yifei is set to star as the titular female warrior in Disney's live-action adaptation of the classic Chinese epic, Mulan. The film will be set fora release in 2019. The original animated version in 1998 earned $304. 3 million worldwide as well as Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations. |
| A Hero Born, the first volume of famous Chinese martial arts novelist Jin Yong's Legends of the Condor Heroes, was published in English for the first time. After years of hard work, the 400-page translation, priced at 14.99 pounds($20. 8), finally hit bookstores. This latest translation project is the most ambitious with regard to Jin Yong's works. |
| It's been 14 years since customer services manager Anthony Gentles was inspired to cheer up the “blank faces”of passengers with wisdom from his favorite book, Tao Te Ching (道德经). Mr. Gentles said offering up pearls of wisdom from ancient China was his way of trying to make people feel more welcome as they braved the Underground. |
写作内容:
1）用约30 个单词概括上述信息的主要内容;
2）简要谈谈你对“中国元素影响世界”的感受;
3）你觉得我们怎样才能更好地进行文化输出? (不少于两点)。
写作要求:1）写作过程中不能直接引用原文语句;
2）作文中不能出现真实姓名和学校名称;
3）不必写标题。
评分标准:
内容完整, 语言规范，语篇连贯, 词数适当。
