Our family loves the snow and cheers at the first good storm of the season. While others may think of Florida, we dream of a cabin vacation in New York's Allegany State Park.

    One particular trip, I recall, was just a bit more memorable than the rest. What we now refer to as the snow pants incident began accidentally enough. My husband, Bernie, and our 2-year-old daughter, Faith, were building a snow fort while I sledded down a nearby slope.

On the way back up from one trip, I saw a small stone tumbling down the track I had just made. I was puzzled, since all the other rocks were buried under several feet of snow, as I stood and wondered about the stone—it jumped! This was no stone. This was a mouse.

    Now, I love nature, but that doesn't include mice. I loudly protested the invader, and Bernie, coming to my rescue, assured me that this was not a mouse but a mole, as if that mattered. A mouse or a mole I still didn't like it.

    Bernie and I stood for a few minutes watching the creature disappear from the path into the furry white and come back out again. But soon it disappeared and I headed up the hill again.

    Shortly after I left, my husband screamed out, saying that the mole had gone up the leg of his snow pants. You have to understand Bernie can be quite a joker, and I smelled a rat. Not wanting to be a sucker and fall for another one of his jokes, I laughed it off. When he started running for the cabin, though, I stopped laughing and decided maybe this was for real.

    “Don't you dare take that thing into the house!” I yelled. But like a flash, Bernie was already dashing through the cabin's front door, with his snow pants, the mole and all. If it were me, I'd have been down to my long underwear right there in the snow without a second thought.

A few minutes later Bernie appeared. We relished the rest of our winter vacation, drinking lots of hot chocolate, sitting beside the fireplace and admiring nature—from a safe distance.

    Micro-blog is no longer simply a platform for self-expression, gossip and networking, as it is becoming an increasingly fierce battlefield for businesses wanting to promote their products and services.

    Over the last year, micro-blogging has become wildly popular in China, with some 65 million China based micro-blog accounts registered(注册登记)by the end of 2010 and the number is growing by more than 10 million each month, according to Data Center of the China Internet(DCCI).

    At present, China's largest web portal Sina claims to have 5,000 company micro-blog users, including Starbucks, Channel, and IKEA. On the micro-blog pages of the companies, visitors can not only view advertisements, but also see consumer feedback(反馈)and even commentaries on hot social issues.

    E-commerce(电子商务)expert Lu Bowang says micro-blogging has opened a whole new dimension of marketing. Through micro-blogs, companies can quickly grasp the attention of potential consumers and interact with them on a regular basis so to develop a friendly link with consumers, Lu said.

    An Internet surfer nicknamed Xiaoben posted on his micro-blog page that he enjoyed drinking Puer tea, and within 10 minutes, a micro-blogger who owned an online shop selling Puer tea recommended his shop to Xiaoben. “It is a little bit like magic. I just make a wish, and then I get a micro-blog response.”

    However, with more and more people micro-blogging to make money, experts warn that marketing via micro-blog could be a double-edged sword.

    Huang Heshui, professor from Xiamen University says micro-blogging is highly personal and private, and that too many advertising messages can annoy micro-blog users leading them to dislike certain brands.

    Further, a brand can be as easily damaged as established through micro-blogging, as consumers' negative feedback about a certain product or company can be very quickly spread in the micro-blog community, Huang added.

    The micro-blog managers should set up some rules and regulation to supervise micro-blog marketing, and at the same time, business organizations need to strengthen self-discipline(自律)and try to build up an honesty-based business culture, e-commerce expert Lu Bowang suggested.

    Since many of you are planning to study at a college or university in the future, you may be curious to know what your future study will be like. This is the question I want to discuss with you today.

    First, let's talk about what your weekly timetable will look like. No matter what your major may be, you can expect to spend between four and six hours a week for each class attending lecture. Lectures are usually in very large rooms because some courses such as Introduction to Sociology or Economics often have as many as two or three hundred students, especially at large universities. In lectures, it's very important for you to take notes on what the professor says because the information in a lecture is often different from that in your textbooks. Also, you can expect to have exam questions based on the lectures. So it isn't enough to just read your textbooks; you have to attend lectures as well. In a typical week, you will also have a couple of hours of discussion for every class you take. The discussion part is a small group meeting usually with fewer than thirty students where you can ask questions about the lectures, the reading, and the homework. In large universities, graduate students called teaching assistants, usually direct discussion parts

    If your major is chemistry, or physics, or another science, you'll also have to spend several hours a week in the lab doing experiments. This means that science majors spend more time in the classroom than non-science majors do. On the other hand, people who major in subjects like literature or history usually have to read and write more than science majors do.

    The Taj Mahal, in Agra, India, is one of the most brilliant structures on Earth. It is nearly 400 years old. Emperor Shah Jahan had it built in memory of his wife. It took about 20 years to build the monument. Some 20,000 workers and 1,000 elephants helped get the job done. Today, the Taj Mahal is not just a symbol of cultural history. It's also India's most famous tourist attraction. About 8 million people visit it each year.

    But pollution is turning the white marble monument shades of green, yellow, and brown. The Taj Mahal stands on the polluted Yamuna River. Insects are attracted to the dirty water. They leave greenish droppings on the building. Air pollution is also a big threat. Factories and cars release pollution into the air. It sticks to the Taj Mahal's suidEace. In the 1990s, India's Supreme Court ordered hundreds of factories near the monument to close. Also, car and bus traffic was restricted. From time to time, workers clean the Taj Mahal. But doing so is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. And it doesn't prevent the discoloration.

    On July 11, India's Supreme Court gave the city of Agra a warning: "Either you destroy the Taj Mahal or you restore it". Authorities in the city submitted a draft of an action plan on July 24. It suggests banning plastics and construction from the area. It also calls for the closing of more factories.

    "In order to preserve the Taj Mahal, people must come together to work toward a solution. There needs to be positive pressure on people to act. We need to act immediately," Sachchida Tripathi says. He worked on a 2014 study of pollution at the Taj Mahal. "We are trying," he adds, "but we need to try more."

    It is rightly said one can share any secret with a true friend. He may know your deepest fears and weaknesses and yet will never take advantage of you. However, keeping a friend's secrets to yourself and not telling the world is what makes the bond grow strong and last forever. You need to develop trust and mutual (互相的) understanding before you start sharing secrets with each other. With friends, secret talks never seem to end and it can get really amusing to know what has been going on in your friend's mind.

    There is a certain time in life especially from the teenage years when one starts having a personal periphery (界限) in life and parents are excluded (排斥) from it. It is because there are certain things that they can't understand and we can't discuss with them. That is when friends become the best secret sharers. They are the ones to whom one reveals one's feelings and best kept secrets.

    It is a general belief that only girls share secrets. But boys have their own secrets that they discuss with only closest friends. The secret talks can range (变化) from relationships, talks about fights with parents, secret activities and anything that is not supposed to be known to others! If you think secrets are limited to only teenagers, get your facts right! Secrets can be shared at any age and there is no hard and fast rule that secrets are shared only among youngsters.

    Sharing secrets with a friend is not just fun, but it also helps to develop a lasting trust in one another. Sometimes, sharing secrets will tell you more about the person. You will come to know whether your friend is reliable and trustworthy and whether it is worth sharing your secrets with them. You can call it a test of friendship.

It was a Sunday and the heavy storm had lasted all night. The morning after the storm, though, was beautiful: blue skies, warm air and a calm, inviting sea touching the shore gently.

My father realized it was a good day for fishing and invited my sister and me to go with him. I was only 14 and fishing had never been my thing, but I decided to go all the same. I'm so glad I did.

On the road to the harbour we could see the terrible destruction on the coast, but the harbour itself was in fairly good shape. After all, it was protected by the arms of a bay that had only one tiny channel to the sea. As we got on board, we noticed two big hums (脊背) in the distance.

On approaching them, we saw it was a mother whale with her baby. We couldn't believe it—there aren't any whales along the coast here. The storm must have driven them across the ocean into the bay, in which the still water was so badly polluted that nothing could survive.

The little baby whale—actually as big as our boat—was obviously stuck and could not move. The mother dived under the water and came up suddenly, making big whirlpools (漩涡) and waves. "She's trying to help her baby, but on the wrong side," my father said. At this point, my father moved our boat in a semicircle to the other side and, heading the boat towards the baby whale, pushed it gently. With our several gentle pushes the big hump turned over and disappeared under water. Then it swam up right beside its mum. They struggled in their desperate attempts to escape but missed the exit and started heading in the wrong direction. We hurried up to the whales and tried to lead them towards the bay channel. Slowly, they let us lead them, sometimes rising from the water right beside us to breathe—and to give us a trusting (信任的) look with those huge eyes. Once they hit their first part of clean water flowing straight from the sea, the mum gave us a wave with her tail and off they swam into the distance.

In the excitement it had felt like only a few minutes, but we had been with those wonderful animals for almost an hour and a half. That was the simple and lasting beauty of the day. Nearly four decades later, I still look back fondly to that golden day at sea.