Wild mangoes come from the foothills of the Himalayas. They are by far the most important fruit in India, and have been cultivated there for four thousand years. The arrival of the mango tree in other parts of the world was probably due to the Portuguese who carried mangoes via Goa to Africa, from where they eventually reached the New World. Mango trees are now so well established in many tropical countries that it might appear that they have always been there.

    Like many tropical trees, the mango tree is multi-purpose product. Its wood is used in boat building, and its leaves can be fed to cattle. Most of the mango crop is consumed in the areas where it is grown, but in recent years mangoes have gained in popularity across the world as people in mild climate become increasingly eager to enjoy the delight of the fresh fruit.

    The global market for mangoes is very profitable, and mango producers are keen to make use of the fruit's growing popularity. Modern shoppers not only appreciate the fruit's high nutritional value(the mango is a good source of vitamin A and C, protein and fibre), but also expect it to look and taste perfect. Therefore producers now select only the best quality seedlings which have the most chance of developing into good quality fruit.

    Mangoes are high in fiber, thus making them very good for the heart. The high fiber content is also helps easing constipation. They have high pectin(果胶) and vitamin C content that reduces the blood cholesterol levels and serves as an immune booster. This fruit is rich in anti-oxidants, vitamins, minerals and contain an enzyme(酶) that has stomach soothing properties. These enzymes act as a digestive aid and digestive proteins.

    Although the mango tree has spread from its native Himalayan foothills to the tropics, delivering the fresh fruit to the world's supermarkets presents a challenge, as it does not travel well. Producers transport the fruit by speedy but costly air freight (货运)for minimum delay rather than risk the cheaper but slower road or shipping routes which, can result in damage to the fruit.

    Mangoes are usually in storage for some time after their arrival at their destination. The fruit must be kept cold, or the sweet, juicy flesh will soon become over ripe and the mangoes will be unfit for sale. Fortunately, extremely effective refrigeration is now available and this is the best way of preventing the fruit from going bad before it reaches the supermarket shelves.

    Nowadays more and more people like to travel, especially when vacations come. A great number of people rush out of their homes or companies to travelling spots. They either drive or take a bus, a train, a ship and so on. Some even ride bikes.

    However, there is another way of travelling—poorism. People have a tour in the poorest areas of the world. Some people may take one-day poorest tour, and some even pay to stay in very poor neighborhoods to experience the lowest living standards in the world. Poorism tours take place around the world, and not just in the third world countries. You can, for instance, tour New York neighborhoods in the Bronx, in the Bund of Shanghai. Such tours can take people into the heart of poor areas within large and in some rich cities. These tours may awaken people to pay more attention to long-standing poverty, or the effects of war.

    Some suggest that tours in the poor areas can raise social care. And the money from the tour can be donated to help the people there.

    Are you a procrastinator（拖拉者）? It's a common problem. And it can be harmful, as previous research has shown that people who procrastinate have higher levels of stress and lower well-being, reported the Association for Psychological Science in the US. But a new study has found a way to deal with this problem: Be more connected to your future self.

    Psychologists think that each person believes that they are really two people: “Present Me” and “Future Me”. “People act as if they prefer their current selves' needs and desires to those of their future selves,” wrote psychologists Neil Lewis and Daphna Oyserman.

    Oyserman and Lewis decided to try to find a way to make “Present Me” imagine exactly how “Future Me” would feel the night before a big paper was due, though “Present Me” hadn't started yet. They made “Present Me” think about a far-off event as a number of days away, not months or years.

    Thinking about events in this way meant that something like a friend's wedding seemed 16.3 days sooner when considered in days rather than months and 11.4 months sooner when considered in months rather than years.

    The researchers also tried to find out whether people would take action sooner if they were told a certain event was happening in X days rather than years.  For example, participants imagined they had a newborn child, and that the child would need to go to college in either 18 years or 6,570 days. The researchers found those in the “days” condition planned to start saving four times sooner than those in the “years” condition.

    So if you think of your life in days instead of years, you may get things done quicker.

    There was an earthquake this morning. I was working in front of my computer when it hit the city. The quake started with a sudden loud noise. I thought that something heavy in a neighbor's house probably had fallen. However, the walls and the floor began to shake. I finally realized it was an earthquake.

    My son Zac, a sixteen­year­old boy, was sleeping with his door locked. Being sixteen, he can sleep through any kind of noise. "Zac!" I shouted. "Are you OK?" But nobody replied. I was a little worried. I couldn't imagine that someone was able to get such a deep sleep. The house was dancing. There were waves in the swimming pool. I was afraid the house would come down. "Zac!" I yelled, knocking on his door with an open palm (手掌). "Zac! Wake up! It's an earthquake! We need to get out!"

    My son finally emerged in his underpants. We looked around the room. I knew that we should hide under a table to stop things from falling on us and stay away from glass. Unfortunately, none of our furniture was designed for hiding under. "Should we go into the garden?" Zac asked. "No, trees could fall on us!" I said. Actually, Zac had done earthquake drills (训练) at school. He must have been told to hide under a desk and cover his head. But we had nothing to cover our heads in the house.

    Luckily, before we took any action, the windows stopped moving and the pool calmed down. Everything went back to normal soon. But both my son and I knew what we should do, because we knew if there had been a really big earthquake this morning, we couldn't have escaped from it.

    MacArthur's love for sailing dates back to when she was just four years of age, when she first got the opportunity to have a try. "I'll never forget that feeling as a kid of setting foot on a boat for the first time," MacArthur said. "It's kind of struck me that this boat had everything we needed to take us anywhere in the world. And as a child, that opened up everything," she explained how it felt like the "greatest sense of freedom".

    This experience lighted a passion within MacArthur. She knew then that she wanted to sail around the world. She had no idea how to achieve it — growing up in the countryside, it wasn't the most obvious career path — but she knew that was what she wanted to do at some stage. So, she acquired knowledge and saved up for years to seek a career in sailing. She would have potato and beans every day for eight years so that she could save up to buy the right equipment. By reaching certain financial goals and asking technical questions about sailing, MacArthur felt as though she was getting closer to her ambitions.

    "When you know where you're going, you can actually get there — even if it seems impossible. The impossible could be possible and aiming high is not necessarily such a crazy thing to do." And it seems that MacArthur's drive to become a sailor went beyond her expectations. At the age of 24, she started to receive media attention after participating in the Vendee Globe, a single-handed non-stop yacht (游艇) race that goes around the world. She came in second place. Some three to four years later, MacArthur chose to sail for 71 days and 14 hours, covering more than 26,000 miles during the course of her journey. This led to MacArthur scoring a new world record in 2005, as the fastest person to sail around the globe single-handedly. While this record has since been surpassed, MacArthur is still considered as Britain's most successful off shore racer.

Many people think that listening is a passive business. It is just the opposite. Listening well is an active exercise of our attention and hard work. It is because they do not realize this, or because they are not willing to do the work, that most people do not listen well.

Listening well also requires total concentration upon someone else. An essential part of listening well is the rule known as "bracketing". Bracketing includes the temporary giving up or setting aside of your own prejudices and desires, to experience as far as possible someone else's world from the inside,stepping into his or her shoes. Moreover, since listening well involves bracketing, it also involves a temporary acceptance of the other person. Sensing this acceptance, the speaker will seem quite willing to open up the inner part of his or her mind to the listener. True communication is under way and the energy required for listening well is so great that it can be accomplished only by the will to extend oneself for mutual growth.

Most of the time we lack this energy. Even though we may feel in our business dealings or social relationships that we are listening well, what we are usually doing is listening selectively. Often we have a prepared list in mind and wonder, as we listen, how we can achieve certain desired results to get the conversation over as quickly as possible or redirected in ways more satisfactory to us. Many of us are far more interested in talking than in listening, or we simply refuse to listen to what we don't want to hear.

It wasn't until toward the end of my doctor career that I have found the knowledge that one is being truly listened to is frequently therapeutic. In about a quarter of the patients I saw, surprising improvement was shown during the first few months of psychotherapy, before any of the roots of problems had been uncovered or explained. There are several reasons for this phenomenon, but chief among them, I believe, was the patient's sense that he or she was being truly listened to, often for the first time in years, and for some, perhaps for the first time ever.