Today, the first thing you see when you drive into the small town of McFarland, California, is a welcome poster. "Home of the State Champions, it says proudly. Written across the bottom are the names of the members of the running teams that have brought McFarland nine state championships over the past twenty years. Today, this little farming town is the "home of champions", but things weren't always like this.

It all began with a group of seven young men, who were McFarland High Schools first running team. They were called "cloud runners" because it looked like they were floating on a brown cloud of dust as they carved paths through the surrounding fields.

They weren't a very good team. But the turning point came one hot summer afternoon when the young men were doing hill practice. As there were no hills in McFarland, their coach, Jim White, made them run up and down large piles of nut shells covered in white plastic sheets.

"Enough!" one of the young men cried. The sound of breaking shells could be heard as he beat his fists on the sheet. The plastic tore and a river of nut shells poured out. "Do you know what these are, Mr. White? They're almond shells. Do you know where they come from? My family has been working on farms picking almonds for forty years.

You and your family, living in your big comfortable home, eat these without giving a single thought to where they came from. And now you are making us run on them! I've had enough!"

"We're losers, Mr. White, not winners," another young man continued his face wet with tears and sweat. "Nothing has changed here for forty years and nothing's ever going to change! Running is for rich kids in private schools in the big city, not for us poor farm boys. We can't even afford real shoes for running. We're 'pickers'. I'm going home!"

Something in Jim White's heart changed that day. He went into the fields and worked with the 'pickers'. He bought running shoes for the boys. He spent evenings having dinner with the boys' families. His wife baked and sold cookies to raise money. One small act of kindness led to another. Other families began to take notice, and slowly, the entire town came to support Mr. White as he helped these young men change from farm workers to champions.

I've always been creative since I was a little girl. My childhood was filled with arts, crafts (手工) and music, and every day was an exciting adventure of creation.

Somewhere along the way, however, I lost touch with my creative self. At 21, I landed a job at a big insurance company out of my business degree. I would go to the office, sit at my desk and repeat the same work five days a week 9 to 5. The days were long and tedious. Working this way for one year was painful enough, let alone a lifetime. Before long I decided to make a change.

One thing I had developed an interest in was sewing, so I took a sewing course at a community college. It was only a five-week course but it awakened my interest and got my confidence up.

As I dreamt bigger, I began looking into college courses for Fashion Design and three months later I signed up for a part-time design course. I attended classes two nights a week. Although exhausting, it gave me energy, enthusiasm and happiness.

As it became clearer that fashion was what I wanted to do full time, the reality of my day-to-day work at the insurance company became harder. I felt bored. No energy, no motivation and zero fulfilment (满足感).

I knew I needed to make a bigger change. After struggling for quite a while, I made a difficult decision—leaving my job and studying my design course full time. Two years later I got my diploma.

The last few years have been exciting because I've been following my heart to do what I love. Today I am living a creative life as the designer of my own fashion brand.

Sometimes it's hard to make a change, but I'm so glad I set the wheels of change in motion with that very small first step because it has led me to where I am today.

Teenagers are learning new communication skills every day. It is important for them to have opportunities to network, or to meet and get to know new people. Online networking, which is very popular with teens today, makes short, superficial connections. But offline networking better encourages meaningful connections that will increase hope, develop skills, and open avenues to career opportunity. Teens need to practice more offline networking. It will prepare them to be confident face-to-face communicators in the real world.

A survey of almost 7,000 teens was conducted in 2019 by three Swiss researchers, and they found that teens were spending too much time on social networking sites. So, they suggested that teens should spend more time with others in real life. It not only contributes to a stronger sense of identity and a happier mood, but also gives us the chance to share happiness with other people. In other words, offline networking seems to actually benefit a teen's emotional health.

Face-to-face communication also gives teens an opportunity to learn to read people. Everyone communicates in person differently than communicating over the phone, through texting, or in online posts. Being face-to-face requires a person to think and respond more quickly—without the safety net of a delete key.

And much of our communication is nonverbal anyway. Facial expressions, gestures, and vocal tones are just a few examples. Teens need to have face-to-face interactions so they can learn to read these nonverbal cues(暗示), which are sometimes even more important than the words a person is saying. A time will come when the teen will need to enter the job market, and this usually means a face-to-face interaction, including interacting naturally with customers, hearing and understanding their words as well as their nonverbal cues in many different kinds of businesses.

Offline networking is important because it can improve a teenager's well-being and help prepare him for the future. That's why every teen should spend time practicing real-world interactions.

Judgement is a quality that is hard to define but important to possess. Sir Andrew Likierman of the London Business School suggests that judgment is "the combination of personal qualities with relevant knowledge and experience to form opinions and take decisions". And he argues that, thus defined, judgment involves a process—taking in information, deciding whom and what to trust, summarizing one's personal knowledge, checking any prior beliefs or feelings, summarizing the available choices and then making the decision.

Expert knowledge can be useful in making judgments. But it is not the same thing. "Academics have expert knowledge," Sir Andrew observes. "They don't necessarily have judgment." People with judgment know when they are out of their depth in making a decision and typically then seek the advice of someone who has the right background and knowledge. "While good judgment is important to success," Sir Andrew cautions, "success is not a signal that there has been good judgment."

The degree of judgment required tends to increase as people take on more responsibility. Those with routine tasks generally have limited scope for judgment. Line supervisors have some discretion (自行决定权). For a chief executive, the proportion of decisions involving judgment is high. Deciding not to take action is also a judgment with potentially serious consequences (for example, "I won't get vaccinated" or "I won't pay my bills"). The world is full of people whose lack of judgment brought their careers or personal life crashing down. Many made the common mistake of assuming everything was fine.

As artificial intelligence gets used for more and more routine tasks in the service sector, exercising judgment may be one area where humans retain an edge over machines. This is far from certain, however. With enough practice, machines may be able to recognize these implicit cues and thus display the equivalent of good judgment. But then, perhaps humans can be taught, too. In the long run, one of the trickiest aspects of human judgment may be knowing precisely when to let machines take decisions and when to leave it to people.

Kun Qu Opera developed under the Ming dynasty (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries) in the city of Kunshan, situated in the region of Suzhou in southeast China. With its roots in popular theatre, the repertory of songs developed into a major theatrical form. Kun Qu is one of the oldest forms of Chinese opera still performed today.

Kunqu has gone through several stages of change over the past hundreds of years. It was composed of long and short lines at the beginning, with a singer singing solo and the orchestra coming in at the end of each line. During the Ming Dynasty (1368—1644), it became more mild, and graceful, with performers attaching great importance to how clearly they recited and sang lines. The songs were written in seven-character or ten-character lines. This contrasts greatly from the opera's emphasis during the Yuan Dynasty(1271—1368), when only percussions(打击乐器) were used in the chorus. In the style that developed during the Ming Dynasty, more musical instruments were used.

It is characterized by its dynamic structure and melody (kunqiang). It combines songs and recitals as well as acrobatics and symbolic gestures. The opera features a young male lead, a female lead, an old man and various comic roles, all dressed in traditional costumes. Kun Qu songs are accompanied by bamboo flute(长笛), small drum, wooden clappers gongs, all used to punctuate actions and emotions on stage. Renowned for the rhythmic patterns, Kun Qu opera has had a considerable influence on more recent forms of Chinese opera, such as the Sichuan or Beijing opera.

The opera has suffered a gradual decrease since the eighteenth century because of the high-level technical knowledge that it requires from both its performers and audience. Of the 400 arias regularly sung in opera performances in the mid-twentieth century, only a few dozen continue to be performed. The Kun Qu opera survived through the efforts of dedicated connoisseurs(行家) and various supporters who seek to attract the interest of a new generation of performers.

Your Food Choices Affect the Earth's Climate

Every action has a cost, even for growing food and delivering it to your dinner plate. A team of researchers has found that meat production releases more climate-warming pollution than it does when producing fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains. Their calculations suggest that people could do a lot to slow global warming if they limited how much meat they eat.

There are plenty of "costs" of food. As to the visible costs, people pay money for the food as well as the fuel needed to get groceries to the store or restaurant. However, producing foods also takes resources, for example, the water used to irritate (灌溉) crop fields or the fertilizer and chemicals used to promote plant growth and fight pests.

Peter Scarborough at the University of Oxford in England decided to calculate some of the less-visible pollution created by food production. His team focused on greenhouse gases emitted through the production of our food, including carbon dioxide(CO2), methane(甲烷) and the nitrous oxide. All three gases are important. While CO2 is the greenhouse gas released in the highest volume, methane and nitrous oxide stay in the atmosphere far longer than CO2 does. As such, they are more powerful in warm the earth's atmosphere.

They used a computer to change the methane and nitrous-oxide emissions for each person's diet into its carbon dioxide "equivalent." That's the amount of CO2 needed to warm Earth's atmosphere by the same amount as the methane or nitrous oxide would.

As for the calculations of the carbon dioxide "equivalent(等量)", in the 1990s, a survey asked65,000 adults what they typically had eaten throughout the past year. Scarborough's team fed those data into a computer and then included the amount of green house gases linked with producing nearly100 common foods. Then the computer matched those green house-gas amounts to the mix of foods each person had reported eating.

It shows that the diet of someone whose meals included an average of 50 to 99 grams of meat each day would be responsible for the daily release of 5.6 kilograms of CO2 equivalent while those vegans had the lowest diet-linked greenhouse-gas emissions (2.9 kg of CO2 equivalent).

Its authors conclude that reducing the intake of meat and other animal-based products can make a valuable contribution to climate change reduction. And compared to meat, more plant-based food calories can be grown on more lands with less water and other resources. In places where many people are going hungry, raising meat may make it harder to ensure that everyone gets enough to eat.

The white rhino is the largest species of rhinos. It has a wide mouth and is known to be sociable. Its eyesight is not very good though. For these reasons, poachers (偷猎者) have found it easier to hunt the white rhino for its horns. There are now serious concerns that the white rhino may soon become extinct.

In the large national parks in Africa where white rhinos live, it is very hard to protect them. The rhino horn these days is more expensive than gold, so poachers are very determined to hunt them. It is said that about three rhinos are killed by poachers every day. If this continues they will be extinct with in the next ten years.

Three years ago, an organization in Adelaide, Australia, began planning The Australian Rhino Project. Its purpose is to create what they call the insurance population. The idea is to create a 120 acre park in Australia where white rhinos from Africa can be kept and protected. They can also breed so over time their numbers will grow. If anything happens to the white rhinos in Africa, they can be replaced with the rhinos in Australia.

It sounds like a good idea, but it's expensive! White rhinos first have to be taken to Australia. Each one weights about 3,000 kilos and the cost of flying them on the 13-hour flight is US $70,000 per rhino! To make sure that the selected rhinos are healthy, they will have to be kept in quarantine before they leave Africa and when they arrive in Australia. This too, is expensive. Some people have said that the money would be better spent on education people in Africa to stop poaching rhinos.

As long as poachers continue to kill rhinos and people want to buy rhino horns, it's probably a wise decision to help protect some of the species in Australia. It would be a tragedy if these huge animals disappeared for ever.

The signs appeared practically overnight. They'd been planted anywhere and everywhere—in front of homes, along sidewalks, around the neighborhood. Each featured just a few uplifting words in simple black type: "Don't Give Up", "You Are Not Alone", "We Will Get Through". The residents in Newberg, Oregon, had suffered huge loss from a major tornado this year, so the town of 25,000 instantly understood the messages. For days, what no one could figure out was who had planted them.

Amy Wolff had. At first, she didn't want anyone to connect her to them. For one thing, the 36-year-old mother of two didn't really feel it was her place to weigh in. However, losing her brother in an accident several years earlier had led her to do so. She planted the signs anonymously because she wanted them to be about their message, not any one person. It was compassion(同情) for compassion's sake. "I couldn't just do nothing," says Wolff.

Yet as Wolff saw the deep chord her signs struck with her neighbors, she decided to step forward to share her message publicly. Instantly, her inbox was flooded with requests for more signs.

That was in May 2017.Since then, the Don't Give Up Movement has spread from Newberg to the hearts and yards of people in every state and several countries. The signs have morphed(变化) into wristbands, bumper stickers, pins, stamps, etc. One of the most heartening elements of the movement is that it has gone viral in a remarkably human way. More and more people have taken action, planting the signs in their lawns, taking selfies, and then posting them to share.

Aware of the added emotional challenges isolation brings under the cloud of COVID-19, the Don't Give Up Movement has since offered to send letters of support to anyone in quarantine who needs it. The group received about 400 requests in just 24 hours. A young woman wrote that she struggled with mental illness and that shelter-in-place rules were especially hard on her and her family; she asked whether the Don't Give Up group could send her relatives a cheerful note. Wolff's message is about to grow yet again.

Quiet the Complainer

For years, Jane Booth's mother made lengthy airing of complaints. It got so bad that Jane felt it was ruining the quality of their time together, so she finally spoke up and helped her mother realize how often she complained. It turned out that Jane's intervention not only helped her mother—it also helped their relationship.

You may not be as direct as Jane was to her mother, but there are other ways to get a constant complainer to end. To be effective, it helps to correct misbeliefs about complaining in the first place. In fact, even the kindest, most considerate people complain. And complaining doesn't always have a negative impact. Sometimes, complaining can change an unfavorable situation into a more desirable one. Other times, it can foster new relationships with people we don't know well.

The problems start when complaining becomes the default mode(默认模式). "When we have a need to be heard, we repeat ourselves," says Dian Killian, a life coach, "the satisfaction for frequent complainers comes from attention, so they are never satisfied with any suggestion to address the problems that they highlight—resolution isn't their aim."

So, how do you quiet a constant complainer, for the sake of your health and his?

Change the subject. Some complainers will switch gears if you shift the conversation in a direction that interests them.

Summarize the complaint. If your complainer keeps repeating himself, he may stop if you demonstrate that you're listening.

Challenge the person to act. When a constant complainer tells you about his latest problem, ask nicely what he's done to improve it.

Be honest. When you have things to do, tell the complainer that you must cut the conversation short—especially if it's someone who's complained to you many times before.

When someone stresses you out with lots of negativity, it's important to talk about the problem. Otherwise, if you bottle up your feelings and continue listening to repeated complaints, you may grow annoyed or start avoiding the person.

Remember: Quieting a constant complainer can be beneficial to both of you.