Everybody should have some level of first aid ability, because accidents and medical emergencies can happen anywhere at any time. St John First Aid courses give you the knowledge and confidence to provide effective first aid whenever it's needed.

First Aid Level 1

    Ideal(理想的) for anyone who wants to learn basic first aid or needs to renew their first aid qualification. Courses can be held at St John or your workplace.

Fee: $162(includes GST)

Duration(持续时间): Eight hours

First Aid Level 2

    Includes all course content from First Aid Level One, plus an additional half day. Ideal for special first aiders, health and safety managers and anyone who needs a first aid qualification.

Fee: $235(includes GST)

Duration: 12 hours

Pre-Hospital Emergency Care (PHEC)

    Advanced training for first aiders who already hold unit standards 6400 and 6402. Ideal for people who require advanced first aid skills or a pre-hospital emergency care (PHEC) qualification for their work.

Fee: $635(includes GST)

Duration: Three days

Child First Aid

    Ideal for parents, grandparents and other family caregivers. A recognized qualification for childcare workers.

Fee: $65(includes GST)

Duration: Four hours

Outdoor First Aid

    First aid response for accidents and medical emergencies in the wilderness. For groups of eight or more.

Duration: One to two days depending on experience

Sports First Aid

    First aid response for common sporting injuries and medical emergencies. Includes ACC injury prevention advice.

Duration: Eight hours.

    In today's world, English is the most wildly used language. It is our duty to learn English in the new situation of the reform and opening to the outside world. How can we master the English language? I'd like to give you some good advice.

    First, get interested in it. I enjoy listening to foreign friends talking when I was a child. At the same time I watched the English program Follow Me on TV. From then on, I kept on learning English. The more I learned, the more progress I made.

    Second, practice makes perfect. Many people study English very hard, but they are very shy to speak it in public, for they are afraid of making mistakes. Remember you have to make a mistake before you can correct it. A native English speaker makes mistakes sometimes, too.

    Third, the beginners should be encouraged to pay attention to idioms. The English language has many idioms. For example, you should say “ He is as strong as a cow.”

    Metropolis Book Club

    Membership:

    All you need to do is fill out the order form at the bottom of the page, select your first order from our book list and then post the completed form back to us.

    Special offers for new members:

    As a special offer, you may choose any reduced-price books from our new members' book list, to the value of 100 yuan in total.

    Tick the box on your form to order a free watch.

    Join before the end of this month and you receive another free book carefully chosen by our staff.

    Order an audio-book from the many on offer, at half the recommended retail price.

    When you've joined:

    As a member you get around 50% off the publisher's price of every book you buy, and what's more, they come straight to your door. Your free club magazine arrives once a month to keep you up to date with the latest best-sellers we've added to our list. On the Internet, you can find all our titles for the year at our exclusive members' website. Our website also has a book swap service where members can request or offer books for exchange.

    Being a member:

    All you have to do is order four books during your first year. After that, you can decide on the number of books you wish to take.

    In each of your monthly club magazines, our experienced staff choose a "Book of the Month" for you, which is offered at an extra-special price. If you do not want this book, just say so in the space provided on the form and send it back to us. We always send the book if we do not receive this form.

    Once we receive your order, your books are delivered within one week. And remember, you have up to a fortnight to decide if you wish to keep the books you have ordered. If they aren't what you expected just send them back!

    Teens may become more private during adolescence (青春期) because they are learning how to be more independent, says Carl Pickhardt, a Texas­based scientist who studies parenting adolescents. "As they enter adolescence, parents have less control," he says. "You're going to have less communication with the kid who is now entering a larger and more risky world."

    However, Pickhardt says, this does not mean that parents should just sit back and do without any information. He says that parents should tell their kids that there are still things they need to know about, such as why their teen was late getting home from school one day.

    Iowa's mom Patty Link knows this fight well. The mom of three is raising two teenage boys: Graham, a 14-year-old eighth grader, and Carter, a 16-year-old high school student. She says that becoming friends with the parents of her children's friends has helped.

    "A lot of times if I want to get any information out of them, I'll say, 'Oh, I can talk to Adam's mom and she will tell me what was going on Friday night', and it will lead to some other discussion, "she says.

    Parents should watch their use of questions, Pickhardt says, because they can stand for authority (权威), and that is likely to not go over well with teens. "They want their independence to be respected, "he says. Pickhardt suggests using requests such as, "It could really help me if you could tell me," "I would really appreciate it if you let me know, "or "Could you help me better understand." But sometimes teens make mistakes and parents have to correct them. Parents should plainly (直率地) state the problem, Pickhardt says, and avoid judgments of character.

    Parents can also use technology to feel connected. One recent study showed that many teens are friends with their parents on Facebook—and only 5 percent limit what their parents can see.

    If you are worried about the planet, please make sure your rubbish is buried under the ground.

    People talk about "reduce, reuse, recycle." It sounds like a good idea. There is a problem, though. Recycling costs too much money.

    Even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says it only makes sense economically and environmentally to recycle about 35 percent of disabled (废弃的) materials. Among those materials are paper and aluminum(铝) cans. Recycling 1 ton of paper or aluminum cans, the agency says, can save about 3 tons of CO₂ emissions (排放物) over producing those materials anew. Paper producers pay for the trees they process. If it was cost-effective to recycle paper, producers would be beating down your door to buy it. But they aren't. That means it's more expensive to recycle old paper than to cut trees and then replant trees for processing.

    Plastic can be recycled too. Given the recent drop in crude oil (原油) prices, it is now cheaper to make a new plastic container than to recycle an old one. Even if that were not true, the EPA says that recycling a ton of plastic saves only about a ton of CO₂. However, it doesn't take into account the water most consumers use to wash their plastic containers before having them recycled. The New York Times journalist John Tierney recently wrote, "If you wash plastic in water that was heated by electricity, then the effort of your recycling could be more carbon in the atmosphere."

    Glass is another recyclable material. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1 ton you have to recycle 3 tons of glass. If one includes the cost of collecting glass waste from neighborhoods, and the pollution produced by the collection trucks and the recycling process itself, glass recycling creates more greenhouse gas emissions and is more expensive than making new glass, which comes primarily from sand that exists everywhere.

    If recycling were truly cost-effective, private companies would be lining up at your doorstep to buy your rubbish. Don't look now because they're not there.