Question: I have recently got a senior position within my company．One of my new tasks is to make monthly progress reports on my department in front of other senior officials. During my first meeting, I presented and then opened the floor to questions．{#blank#}1{#/blank#} My first reaction was to answer defensively(防卫地;戒备地)．Later, I realized that I shouldn't have felt that way．But how can I keep cool and effectively answer questions in this type of settings?

Answer: Congratulations on your new position! Presenting in front of your peers (同事) is a hard task in itself and it becomes much more difficult when a question-and-answer period is required! Question-and-answer periods are a great way to clarify (使……清楚) the message and strengthen key points．{#blank#}2{#/blank#}

●{#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    When a person is asking a question, show interest and a desire to understand the question by listening and asking for clarification.

● Buy time

    When facing a hard question, most people can't give an answer immediately．Buy time by repeating the question in your own words．{#blank#}4{#/blank#} These techniques allow you to quickly organize your thoughts as well as to make sure you will be correctly answering the question.

● Suggest a private meeting.

    A one-to-one meeting is a calmer setting than speaking in front of your peers. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

A．Show your true interest.

B．Restate the question with respect.

C．Some ideas can be quite concrete.

D．There were many difficult questions.

E．It can also be more effective in exchanging ideas.

F．You may also ask for clarification on the question.

G．Here are some ideas that can help prepare for your next meeting.

    One day, at night, a thief tried crawling (爬行) into a farmer couple's house. In the house lived many mice. The woman in the moonlight saw a mouse crawl into the house. “Look! In comes one.” She said to the man in the house. The thief was so frightened that he hurriedly crawled out of the house and said to the one waiting outside, “She found me when I was just in.” But the thief outside didn't believe him, so he said, “Let us two try to crawl into the house together.” At that time two mice happened to crawl into the house, too. The woman saw the mice and shouted, “In come two, catch them!” The two thieves were terribly frightened. The man in the house said, “You saw them come in but where are they? I will catch them tonight” The two thieves started running away at once.

    The two thieves wanted to make it clear whether they had been found or not the night before. The next day they acted as men selling sweet potatoes and came before the house. The man and the woman were working in their fields. The rein (缰绳) broke and the woman came home for a new one. She saw two men selling sweet potatoes and wanted to buy some. She picked out two which looked like mice. At the time the man couldn't wait for her any longer in the fields and he ran back from the fields to hurry her up. The woman showed the sweet potatoes to the man and said, “How they look like the two of last night!” The man said, “I asked you to fetch a rein, why don't you hurry for it?” The two thieves ran away quickly without their sweet potatoes.

    A little boy discovered what looked like a map to an unknown place. He soon realized it was the beginning of an exciting treasure hunt.

    He found two pieces of paper along with the mysterious map. One was written with the instructions, “FIND THE WORDS.” The other piece of paper had several strange symbols scattered all over it.

    Dad, fortunately, was there to help his son figure out the mystery. He folded up the paper with the symbols on it, and together they formed a message, which had another set of instructions, “UNDER STEPS.” The smart little boy knew exactly what to do so he went to look under the steps of his house. Without too much effort, he found a box below the staircase.

    It didn't take him long to figure out what to do next: open it up! Inside the box were some very interesting objects, including another piece of a treasure map and two broken pieces of paper. These were the most interesting finds because they contained what appeared to be a collection of letters on them. Finally, they knew where the treasure was from the letters: IN THE BUSH UNDER YOUR YARD.

    After searching all over the yard, following several clues and wondering where everything would lead, the pair finally found what they had been looking for. And it was exactly what you would want after such an adventure: a treasure box!

    The pair pulled it out of the ground and cleaned away all the dirt. The dad put the box in front of his son, and the little boy couldn't contain his excitement. So he opened it up and finally found out what was inside.

    Inside was more treasure than any little boy could ever want. There were hundreds of coins and all sorts of pirate treasure, including what looks like a pearl necklace and some silver dishes.

    Karen Bystedt was born in Israel, but lived in London and California as a child. In 1982, as a photography (摄影) student at New York University, she was photographing male models for a book when she came across an ad featuring Andy Warhol, a very famous artist. She thought it would be really great to put him in her book.

    So she called Andy Warhol at his studio in Union Square and asked if she could photograph him.

Two weeks later, Bystedt took a rented Hasselblad camera and lights to Warhol's famed "Factory" on 14th street. She ended up taking 36 pictures, and published two in her book, Not Just Another Pretty Face, published in 1983. Warhol came to its launch (发行) party—and that was the last time she saw him.

    A few years later, she packed the portraits in a box and moved to Los Angeles. But after she'd gotten settled, she couldn't find them. She couldn't remember whether she had given the photos away or just left them in some forgotten storage unit. Either way, she thought they were lost forever.

    In 2011, Bystedt became determined to find the missing films(底片). She spent two weeks going through two old garages, where she had put a bunch of belongings decades before. In a cardboard box, she found ten of the original films, covered in dust. She and a friend spent four months digitizing and cleaning the images up, pixel(像素) by pixel.

    Bystedt was not content to merely publish the unseen photos. She invited contemporary artists to paint over and around her Warhol pictures, breathing new life into her old work. So she began reaching out to artists, seeing if they would be interested in putting their own stamp on the pictures.

    The responses was overwhelming. Bystedt's new exhibit, "The Lost Warhols," opened on May 1, 2018 at 178 Sixth Avenue in Soho, New York, included 66 different interpretations of her portraits from 34 artists.

    Tonya, Elsa and Mark are students at LaGuardia High School in New York City. It's a school with regular academic (学术的) classes, but it also gives special attention to the performing arts. Tonya likes dancing, Elsa wants to be an artist and Mark is a singer.

    The students are all 15, and they're in 10th grade. They study subjects like English, math, social studies, science and PE. They also choose a foreign language: French, Italian, Spanish or Japanese. Students have many academic classes, but during the school day they also take classes in the arts, like theater, art, dance and music. Mark says, “I get the basic classes, but I also take a voice class and a music history class.”

    There is even more for LaGuardia students after school. There are more than 40 clubs for students. For example, there's a movie club, a music club and an environment club. “We have so many choices here,” says Tonya. “My favorite club is the camera club. I like taking photos. It's also a great way to meet people with common interests.”

    Students at LaGuardia can also do many sports. For example, they can play basketball, tennis, volleyball and soccer. Elsa is on the gymnastics team. She says, “I like being on a team. It makes me work hard and do my best.” Students practice after school. They compete against other high schools. Mark says, “At school, I study by myself. I'm a singer, and I do that alone, too. That's why I like playing on the basketball team. We work together and compete against other teams.”

    LaGuardia offers many great classes, clubs and sports for students. Students at LaGuardia get a good education and they also develop their own interests. Many LaGuardia students become dancers, singers and actors!

Dave McNee met Claudia Mandekic 14 years ago. When she told McNee how hard it could be to get students excited about math, her favourite discipline, he made a surprising suggestion: "Why not throw in something they enjoy, like sports?" The idea of mixing basketball and mathematics got its first shot in 2011, when the now colleagues — who had launched a tutoring non-profit — were invited to run a summer-school program for kids who'd failed Grade 9 math at Georges Secondary School.

When the students showed up for their first day, they weren't exactly excited. Over the next few hours, Mandekic and McNee gave the kids techniques to improve their shooting while also helping them calculate their field-goal percentage — which, in turn, taught them about fractions and decimal (分数和小数) points. At the end of the game, the winning team was determined based on which group had the highest total percentage and had done the most efficient math. "When the bell rang, they were so fixated on collecting their data and figuring out which team won that they didn't leave," says Mandekic. "I realized we might be onto something."

The classes, later named BallMatics, soon spread to other schools. "I was terrible at math," says Douglas, who enrolled in a fast-track summer program. "But once I started BallMatics and realized the sport I loved was directly tied to math, it made me a lot better at it. Every time I played basketball, I was thinking about math."

Almost any math problem, McNee and Mandekic realized, can be taught on the court. Kids can learn how to navigate an X-Y grid to find their next shooting spot or absorb the basic principles of trigonometry based on the angle at which they release the ball. In 2019, McNec and Mandekic established a private high school called Uchenna Academy. At the school, kids with top basketball skills can study all subjects, train at their sport and work part-time helping out with the BallMatics afterschool programs.

Douglas, now 20 and earning a degree in education believes the school's commitment to academics is the key reason it's been a winner. "If we didn't do our work, we weren't playing at the game," he says, adding that coaches would bench kids who didn't keep up in class. "At Uchenna, we were student athletes, not athlete students."