Once a boy came to ask a fisherman how to become cleverer, because his mother always called him “foolish boy”.

    “That's easy,” answered the fisherman. “I know one way to make you become cleverer.”

    “Really?”

    “Of course. It is said a fish head is good for brain. If you eat one, you'll become cleverer indeed. Pay only three pounds for one fish head.” The boy paid him three pounds and the fisherman cut off a fish head and handed it to him.

    A raw fish head is not good—not even for a hungry boy to eat but the boy ate it up in  two gulps.

    “Do you feel anything?” asked the fisherman.

    “Not in my head,” said the boy.

    The boy lay on the ground and thought. “One whole fish costs only two pounds. I have paid him three pounds for the fish head. Why couldn't I have the whole fish for soup, a head for brain and one pound left over?” He jumped up and shouted at the fisherman. “You thief! You are fooling me!” The fisherman laughed, saying, “The fish head works now, you see.”

    In one of the old buildings near our school, one could see an old man sitting by a large window on the first floor. His name was James. During the three years at school, I had hardly ever found him missing from his usual position.

    He was a high-ranking government official and lived happily with his wife. Once there was a bus accident, in which a number of passengers were seriously injured and were taken to the hospital for treatment. James was responsible for the rescue operation. It was a big hospital, but James was shocked to notice how ill-equipped it was. There were no enough life-saving drugs and life—supporting equipment.  The injured and their companions had to struggle there. James attempted to help. However, though he emptied his pockets, many of them died that day.

    That was a turning point in his life. He made a decision to devote his life to helping others, particularly the poor and needy patients and their companions. He began spending much of his income on these people. Since this required a lot of time and energy, he found it difficult to fulfill(履行) his official duties and therefore chose to retire, which, in turn, reduced his income considerably.

    His wife was deeply worried. Most of the time, James was out and paid least attention to home affairs. Meanwhile, as he was spending a lot helping others, she had to struggle even to meet the household expenses. Though she was not opposed to his helping the poor, she urged him not to overlook his own life and home, but it had no effect on him. One day they had a heated argument and in the end she left him, never to return. Though he continued with his work, this was a great blow and did serious harm to his health and enthusiasm and was soon forced to stay indoors. That was when he took his position by the window, spending his time looking outside.

    A few weeks after my graduation, I returned to school, only to find the buildings gone. I heard that they were torn down. All the people left except James. He refused to go and the next morning, he was found at his usual place by the window, dead.

    Imagine a town with crosswalks but no pedestrians, cars and trucks but no drivers. Welcome to Mcity, a fake “city” built by researchers who are testing out the driverless cars of the future.

    The controlled test environment, which opened today (July 20, 2015) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, covers 32 acres (the size of about 24 football fields) and contains all the trappings of a real suburb or small city. There is an entire network of roads lined with sidewalks, streetlights, stop signs and traffic signals. There's even a “downtown” area complete with fake buildings and outdoor dining areas.

    The idea behind Mcity is simple: test out new driverless car innovations in a human-free environment before these technologies are unleashed in the real world.

    "Mcity is a safe, controlled, and realistic environment where we are going to figure out how the incredible potential of connected and automated vehicles can be realized quickly, efficiently and safely," Peter Sweatman, director of the Mobility Transformation Center at U-M, said in a statement.

    The roads of Mcity are built to stand up to “rigorous, repeatable” testing, according to MTC officials. While Mcity drivers don't have to compete with real pedestrians, there will be one mechanical foot-traveler (a robot-like machine named Sebastian) that steps out into traffic to see whether the automated cars can hit the brakes in time. The fake city also features a traffic circle, a bridge, a tunnel, some unpaved roads, and even a four-lane highway with entrance and exit ramps, according to a report by Bloomberg Business.

    In addition to evaluating fully automated, or driverless cars, the researchers also hope to test out so-called connected vehicles within Mcity's limits. Connected cars can either communicate with one another (vehicle-to-vehicle control, or V2V) or with pieces of equipment, such as traffic lights, that are located near roadways (vehicle-to-infrastructure control, or V2I).

    Even the smallest details of Mcity have been planned out in advance to copy the conditions that connected and automated vehicles could face in the real world. For example, there are street signs covered up with graffiti, and faded yellow and white lane markings line the streets.

    Mcity is just one part of a much larger project that MTC and its partner organizations are establishing in an effort to get a whole fleet of connected and driverless cars on the road in Ann Arbor by 2021. In addition to the fake city, MTC is also continuing to launch connected and semi-autonomous(半自动) cars on real roadways. Eventually, the University of Michigan and the Michigan Department of Transportation said they hope to put 20,000 connected cars on the roads of southern Michigan.

    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.

    When the telephone rings late at night, most women guess it must be one of only four or five people calling. A sister? Maybe. An emergency? Possibly. A mother? Probably not at that time of night. Much more probably it is a close female friend calling to tell you that she is heartbroken because she has split up with her boyfriend again or perhaps simply that a good movie has just started on TV.

    At a time when families are spread far and wide and marriages often end in divorce, friendships are becoming more and more important. Erika, a 32-year-old lawyer, is strengthened by her ten year friendship with her married friend Jane. "I was very sick one night, so I called Jane at about 3：00 a. m. to talk about it," she says. "She was very supportive and even came over to take me to the doctor's."

    As American TV shows like Friends have become more popular, many of us are beginning to see the value of such friendships.TV shows like this tell us that our romantic relationships may not last, but we need to keep in touch with our close friends if we want to survive.

    With Erika's family 200 miles away, it is Jane who keeps a spare set of keys to Erika's apartment and waters her plants whenever she is away. "Having Jane around gives me a certain amount of freedom. It is not the kind of thing that you could ask anyone to do, but she knows I would do the same for her. "Jane, who may move to a different city soon, is worried about leaving such a support system of friends. "My friends have more to do with my life than my parents and, therefore, I don't have to spend a lot of time explaining things to them. Friends are more up to date with what is happening."

    Confident, smart and high-tech, they're followers of pop culture and know what social networking is all about. They're tweens, children between the ages of 10 and 12. These young people are no longer little kids but they are not yet teenagers, because tweens are in a state of transition (转变).

    The tween years are hard for children. From a social point of view, tweens are dealing with quite a lot. They have to face changing relationships, middle school and a whole lot of pressure (压力) to succeed and fit in. They may become angry over seemingly small things. A bad test grade, an argument with a friend, a bad day on the ball field, or a request to clean a bedroom might set them off.

    Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, a parenting expert in London and author of Talking to Tweens, says, "The tween years are when young people begin to realize the wider world and to see themselves as separate from their families."

    Right now, tweens' friends are everything to them. It's universal for the age, but they show it in different ways. For boys, the whole friendship thing is through technology and sports. Girls like to talk.

    Tweens are also a hot market. What do tweens consider cool? Music is at the top of the cool list, followed by going to the movies. "Being smart" comes third, tied with video games, followed by electronics, sports, fashion and protecting the environment, according to a report.

    Undoubtedly, tweens have great spending power in the United States. It was the tween market that made Justin Bieber and Harry Potter household names. Retailers(零售商) know tweens are a hot market for clothes, music and entertainment. Tweens have their own sense of fashion and enjoy their own parts of popular culture.