When asked about happiness, we usually think of something extraordinary, an absolute delight, which seems to get rarer the older we get.

For kids, happiness has a magical quality. Their delight at winning a race or getting a new bike is unreserved (毫无掩饰的).

    In the teenage years the concept of happiness changes. Suddenly it's conditional on such things as excitement, love and popularity. I can still recall the excitement of being invited to dance with the most attractive boy at the school party.

    In adulthood the things that bring deep joy—love, marriage, birth—also bring responsibility and the risk of loss. For adults, happiness is complicated (复杂的).

    My definition of happiness is “the capacity for enjoyment”. The more we can enjoy what we have, the happier we are. It's easy to overlook the pleasure we get from the company of friends, the freedom to live where we please, and even good health.

    I experienced my little moments of pleasure yesterday. First I was overjoyed when I shut the last lunch-box and had the house to myself. Then I spent an uninterrupted morning writing, which I love. When the kids and my husband come home, I enjoyed their noise after the quiet of the day.

    Psychologists tell us that to be happy we need a mix of enjoyable leisure time and satisfying work. I don't think that my grandmother, who raised 14 children, had much of either. She did have a network of close friends and family, and maybe this what satisfied her.

    We, however, with so many choices and such pressure to succeed in every area, have turned happiness into one more thing we've got to have. We're so self-conscious about our “right” to it that it's making us miserable. So we chase it and equal it with wealth and success, without noticing that the people who have those things aren't necessarily happier.

    Happiness isn't about what happens to—it's about how we see what happens to us. It's the skillful way of finding a positive for every negative. It's not wishing for what we don't have , but enjoying what we do possess.

    A spaceship is flying to the sun in summer 2018! It will be the first-ever to a star and will be one of the biggest achievements space exploration (探险) in human history. The purpose is to study the sun's outer atmosphere and better understand how stars work.

The spaceship, with no man inside, will fly within 4 million miles of the sun's surface - right into the solar atmosphere, where the temperature is over 4,500℃. To protect the spaceship, it is covered with a 12cm-thick coating.

    The spaceship is called Parker Solar Probe and it is named after Eugene Parker, a professor from the University of Chicago. It's the first NASA spaceship to be named after a researcher who is still alive. In 1958, Eugene Parker first created the term “solar wind”-the sun sending out a flow of particles (颗粒) and energy.

    “The spaceship is going where it has never been before. It's very exciting that we'll finally get to know more about the solar wind. I'm sure there will be some surprises. There always are,” said Professor Parker.

    Parker calls it a heroic scientific space adventure, and he means that the spaceship will have to experience high temperatures and sun radiation (辐射). “The spaceship is going to do the hottest and fastest work. I love to call it the coolest hottest work under the sun,” said Scientist Fox Nasa.

From birth to death, the word kick has been given an important part in expressing human experience. The proud and happy mother feels the first signs of life kicking inside her body. And that same life——many years later—— comes to its end in a widely-used expression, to kick the bucket( 吊桶) . The expression to kick the bucket is almost 200 years old. One belief is that it started when an English stableman(马夫) killed himself by hanging while standing on a bucket. He put a rope around his neck and tied it to a beam(梁柱) in the ceiling, and then kicked the bucket away from under him.

    Another old expression that comes from England is to kick over the traces. Traces were the chains（链子） that held at horse or mule to a wagon(货运马车)or plow. Sometimes, an animal refused to obey and kicked over the traces.

    Kick around is an expression that is heard often in American English. A person who is kicked around is someone who is treated badly. Usually he is not really being kicked by somebody's foot. He is just not being treated with the respect that all of us want. A person who has kicked around for most of his life is someone who has spent his life moving from place to place. In this case, kicking around means moving often from one place to another. Kick around has another meaning when you use it with the word idea. When you kick around an idea, you are giving that idea some thought.

    There is no physical action when you kick a person upstairs, although the pain can be as strong .You kick a person upstairs by removing him from an important job and giving him a job that sounds more important, but really is not.

    Still another meaning of the word kick is to free oneself of a bad habit, such as smoking cigarettes. Health campaigns urge smokers to kick the habit.  

    Chinese has overtaken French, Spanish and German to become one of the most promising foreign languages for job seekers in the UK. Research shows graduates in Chinese earn an average yearly salary of 31,000 pounds or more.

    Chinese students set themselves up for a different university experience from others who take traditional subjects. While an English student may have as little as six hours of a week, those studying Chinese are in class for most of the day. "I had a lot of friends on other courses who didn't do much in first or second year. You can't play at Chinese. You have to spend hours and hours writing characters," says Hannah, who graduated in Chinese Studies from Sheffield University. "The first year was really difficult. Most of my friends admitted at one point to crying because of the pressure. I was almost told at one point that I might want to reconsider and drop out. "

    So are the evenings in learning characters while your friends are at the student bar really worth its Despite the painful studying experience, most of the graduates think so. They use Chinese in their chosen careers, and would not have been in the jobs they do now without their knowledge of the language.

    Liberty now works for the civil service in Beijing. She earned a place on the Department for International Development graduate scheme with a salary of over 30, 000 pounds within two years. "The degree was absolutely worth it. Looking around at people I know who have studied French or Spanish at university, there's not such a chance to use it in the workplace."

    Hannah has set her apart in the workplace, but she warns ambitious students to think about whether they would really want to live in China in the future." Some people think they are going to learn Chinese and then be a big success, but I think it's important to be quite realistic about that. "

    A study of 27, 000 men showed those skipping (不吃) breakfast were at a greater risk of heart problems. The British Heart Foundation said breakfast helped people resist (抵制) sugary snacks before lunch.

    The men, aged 45-82, were studied for 16 years. During that time there were more than 1, 500 heart attacks or cases of deadly heart failure. However, people who skipped breakfast were 27% more likely to have heart problems than those who started the day with a meal. The researchers took into consideration other lifestyle risk factors (因素) such as smoking and exercise.

    Researcher Dr. Leah Cahill told the BBC: "The take-home message is to eat in the morning when you wake up, preferably within an hour. The results show that something is better than nothing, but it's always better to have something healthy and balanced."

    She said the timing of the meal seemed to be key and waiting until lunch rather than "having breakfast" may be straining (损伤) the body over time. This could be increasing the risk of high blood pressure and fatness which could in turn damage the heart. "Don't skip breakfast," Dr. Cahill suggested.

    Victoria Taylor, an expert with the British Heart Foundation, said: "These researchers only looked at men aged over 45, so we would need to see further research to prove that breakfast has the same effect on the heart health of other groups of people. What we do know is that a healthy breakfast can make that mid-morning biscuit less tempting, as well as giving you another opportunity to widen the variety of foods in your diet. Cereals (谷类食品) with low fat milk are a good way to start the day. Try a banana or dried fruit on top and you'll be on your way to a fine day before you've even left the house."

    The importance of reading literature often seems lost on many Chinese people. Even experts in education think that the first goal of education is to encourage a love of learning. There is therefore the possibility of something wrong with the way students are taught here.

    Why should they read literature? Do stories have value compared with the reading and learning of facts? Studies show clearly that the most powerful ways of learning are by experience, action and doing experiments and taking risks. Yet there are so many important things to learn that cannot be learned in these ways: feelings, problem solving, danger and relationships, for example. Research into this has shown how deep reading is a valuable experience different to a learning of words or facts. Keen(热心的) readers of -literature show a better understanding of others. Their abilities to make good decisions are raised. Young children who enjoy a parent reading stories to them show greater awareness(意识) when they reach school age.

    The best schools do seem to provide a limited (有限的) chance to enjoy literature, usually about the Chinese classic stories but there is not enough "free" time for students. There are enough reading materials (材料). Chinese book shops are full of story books, and most of them are of good quality (质量) in terms of content, plot (情节) and language. Was there not a Chinese author who received a Nobel Prize for literature recently? There are moves in Chinese education to promote (提升) decision making and shared values. The value of literature is helpful to these as well as to the future of China.