It was 3:21 a.m. when nine-year-old Glenn Kreamer awoke to the smell of burning. Except for the cracking(爆烈声) of flames somewhere below there was not a sound in the two-storey house at Baldwin Long Island.

    With his father away on night duty at a local factory, Glenn was worried about the safety of his mother, his sister Karen, 14 and his 12-year-old brother Todd. He ran downstairs through the smoke-filled house to push and pull at Karen and Todd until they sat up. Then he helped each one through the house to the safety of the garden. There, his sister and brother, taking short and quick breaths and coughing, fell down onto the lawn.

    The nine-year-old boy raced back into the house and upstairs to his mother's room. He found it impossible to wake her up. Mrs. Kreamer, a victim of the smoke, was unconscious(昏厥的), and there was nobody to help Glenn carry her to the garden. But the boy remained calm and, as a fireman said later, "acted with all the self-control of a trained adult."

    On the bedroom telephone, luckily still working, Glenn called his father and, leaving Mr. Kreamer to telephone the fire brigade and ambulance service, got on with the task of saving his mother.

    First he filled a bucket with water from the bathroom and threw water over his mother and her bed. Then, with a wet cloth around his head he went back to the garden.

    He could hear the fire engine coming up, but how would the firemen find his mother in the smoke-filled house where flames had almost swallowed up the ground floor?

    Grasping firmly a ball of string(线) from the garage, Glenn raced back into the house and dashed upstairs to his mother's room. Tying one end of the string to her hand, he ran back, laying out the string as he went, through the hall and back out into the garden.

    Minutes later he was telling fire chief John Coughlan, "The string will lead you to mother." Mrs. Kreamer was carried to safety as the flames were breaking through her bedroom floor.

    A popular saying goes, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” However, that's not really true. Words have the power to build us up or tear us down. It doesn't matter if the words come from someone else or ourselves — the positive and negative effects are just as lasting.

    We all talk to ourselves sometimes. We're usually too embarrassed to admit it, though. In fact, we really shouldn't be because more and more experts believe talking to ourselves out loud is a healthy habit.

    This “self-talk” helps us motivate ourselves, remember things, solve problems, and calm ourselves down. Be aware, though, that as much as 77% of self-talk tends to be negative. So in order to stay positive, we should only speak words of encouragement to ourselves. We should also be quick to give ourselves a pat on the back. The next time you finish a project, do well in a test, or finally clean your room, join me in saying “Good job!”

    Often, words come out of our mouths without us thinking about the effect they will have. But we should be aware that our words cause certain responses in others. For example, when returning an item to a store, we might use warm, friendly language during the exchange. And the clerk will probably respond in a similar manner. Or harsh (刻薄的) and critical language will most likely cause the clerk to be defensive.

    Words possess power because of their lasting effects. Many of us regret something we once said. And we remember unkind words said to us! Before speaking, we should always ask ourselves: Is it true? Is it loving? Is it needed? If what we want to say doesn't pass this test, then it's better left unsaid.

    Words possess power: both positive and negative. Those around us receive encouragement when we speak positively. We can offer hope, build self-esteem (自尊) and motivate others to do their best. Negative words destroy all those things. Will we use our words to hurt or to heal? The choice is ours.

Shakespeare's Sister

    Let us imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith.

    Shakespeare himself went, very probably — his mother was an heiress — to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin — Ovid, Virgil and Horace — and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached (偷猎) rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighborhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the centre of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practicing his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen.

    Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as curious to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew(炖锅) and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were practical people who knew the conditions of life for a woman. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be engaged to the son of a neighboring wool stapler(经销商). She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or fine dresses, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart?

    The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the woods were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager — a fat, loose-lipped man — howled with laughter. He roared something about puppies dancing and women acting — no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a bar or roam (游荡) the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last — for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows — at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so — who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and confined in a woman's body? — killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses (公共汽车) now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.

    That, more or less, is how the story would run, if a woman in Shakespeare's day had had Shakespeare's genius.

    Jack Ma, the founder and executive chairman of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, and US president-elect Donald Trump met at Trump Tower in New York City on Jan,9th 2017, with Trump calling it a "great meeting" and Ma saying the meeting was "very productive"

    "We had a great meeting, and a great, great entrepreneur（企业家）, one of the best in the world, and he loves this country, and he loves China," Trump said. "Jack and I are going to do some great things."

    The two met with reporters briefly after the meeting, and said they discussed plans to create 1 million US jobs by allowing US small and medium-sized businesses to sell to China through Alibaba's platforms.

"We're focused on small business," Ma told reporters. And he had complimentary words for Trump: "I think the president-elect is very smart, he's very open-minded to listen. I told him my ideas about how to improve trade, especially to improve small business, cross-border trade."

    "We also think that the China and USA relationship should be strengthened — should be friendlier," Ma said. "The door is open for discussing the relationship and trade issues."

    The meeting comes in tensions between China and the incoming Trump administration(政府). Trump has repeatedly criticized China for its economic policies and accused the country of "stealing jobs away" from the US.

Trump also has said he may raise tariffs(关税) on Chinese goods sold in the US.

    A German study suggests that people who were too optimistic about their future actually faced greater risk of disability or death within 10 years than those pessimists who expected their future to be worse.

    The paper, published this March in Psychology and Aging, examined health and welfare surveys from roughly 40,000 Germans between ages 18 and 96. The surveys were conducted every year from 1993 to 2003.

    Survey respondents (受访者) were asked to estimate their present and future life satisfaction on a scale of 0 to 10, among other questions.

    The researchers found that young adults (age 18 to 39) routinely overestimated their future life satisfaction, while middle-aged adults (age 40 to 64) more accurately predicted how they would feel in the future. Adults of 65 and older, however, were far more likely to underestimate their future life satisfaction. Not only did they feel more satisfied than they thought they would, the older pessimists seemed to suffer a lower ratio (比率) of disability and death for the study period.

     “We observed that being too optimistic in predicting a better future than actually observed was associated with a greater risk of disability and a greater risk of death within the following decade,” wrote Frieder R. Lang, a professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

    Lang and his colleagues believed that people who were pessimistic about their future may be more careful about their actions than people who expected a rosy future.

     “Seeing a dark future may encourage positive evaluations of the actual self and may contribute to taking improved precautions (预防措施),” the authors wrote.

    Surprisingly, compared with those in poor health or who had low incomes, respondents who enjoyed good health or income were associated with expecting a greater decline. Also, the researchers said that higher income was related to a greater risk of disability.

    The authors of the study noted that there were limitations to their conclusions. Illness, medical treatment and personal loss could also have driven health outcomes.

    However, the researchers said a pattern was clear. “We found that from early to late adulthood, individuals adapt their expectations of future life satisfaction from optimistic, to accurate, to pessimistic,” the authors concluded.

    We are naturally drawn to friends and colleagues with familiar voices, scientists have found. People prefer those who have a similar accent, intonation and tone of voice to themselves, they discovered.

    Previous research has focused on how male or female a voice sounds. Men with deeper voices and women with slightly higher voices were thought to sound more attractive, because they suggest a bigger or a smaller body.

    But the new study, published by a linguistics expert in Canada, suggests there is a more complex mechanism (机制) at play. Dr Molly Babel, from the University of British Columbia in Canada, said, “The voice is an amazingly flexible tool that we use to construct our identity. Very few things in our voices are changeless, so we felt that our preferences had to be about more than a person's shape and size.”

    She recorded 30 volunteers' voices and asked each to rate the others' attractiveness on a range from one to nine. Each participant was from western America, with similar accents. The people we assessed were all in the same dialect group, but they showed that dialect to different degrees.

     “We seem to like people who sound like we sound, and we like people who fit within what we know,” Dr Babel said. She also found that breathy voices in women—typified by the famous American actress Marilyn Monroe-were seen as more attractive.

    The breathy tone, caused by younger and thinner vocal cords (声带), implied youthfulness and health. A creaky (咯吱作响的) voice, suggesting a person has a cold, is tired or smokes, was seen as unattractive. The participants preferred men who spoke with a shorter average word length and deeper voices.