Listening looks easy, yet hard to master. Don't worry. Here we've collected four books to help you to be a good listener.

    The Good Listener by James E. Sullivan

    The book points out how our poor listening hurts others and how much we can heal（使……好受些）a person just by listening and understanding his/her feelings. It also gives suggestions on how we can improve our listening and how we can share so others will understand us better.

    Just Listen by Mark Goulston

    This book is about listening and giving responses. Just Listen is a good how-to guide to becoming a better face-to-face communicator. It reveals（揭露）how to make a powerful first impression, how to respond positively and more. If you deal with difficult people around you, this is a must-read for you to not only understand them but also make them feel understood.

    Power Listening by Bernard T. Ferrari

    Poor listening can lead to poor business decisions. The book focuses on corporate（团体的）listening. It's great for anyone who leads groups through decision and design. The author offers a step-by-step guide to turn readers into active listeners.

    The Lost Art of Listening by Michael P. Nichols

    What is it that keeps so many of us from really listening? Nichols answers the question. The book is filled with real-world examples that show easy-to-learn techniques for becoming a better listener. The techniques enable us to break through misunderstandings and conflicts in our relationships.

    Like all big cities, Paris has a traffic problem: lots of cars, lots of traffic jams and lots of pollution from exhaust fumes (废气). So the city began a project to improve the situation.

    Under the Velib project ('Velib' comes from velo liberty, or 'bicycle freedom') people can take a bicycle, use it for as long as they want, and then leave it at the same or another bicycle station. The first half-hour on the bike is free, but if you don't return it after 30 minutes, you have to pay. But it's only €1 a day or €29 a year! The bicycles are heavy (25 kg), and they are all gray and have baskets. There are about 20,000 of them in the city, and around 1,450 bicycle stations. So there are a lot more Velib stations than the 298 subway stations!

    Paris is not the first city to have a project like this. But not everybody thinks it's a great idea. One Parisian said, “These bicycles are only for short journeys. If people want to travel across the city, they won't use a bicycle - they'll still use their cars.”

    A city spokesman said, “The bicycle project won't solve all our traffic problems, of course. But it might help reduce air pollution. Traffic, together with factory fumes, is a big problem. There aren't any simple answers to traffic problems and pollution in cities. But unless we do something now, there will be more traffic jams and temperatures will continue to rise, so the problems in our environment will get worse. The bikes might help people to lead a healthier life, too.”

    Did you ever notice your shadow at different times of the day? Shadows change as the day goes on.

    In the morning the sun makes long shadows. In the middle of the day, the sun seems to be right over your head and your shadow is very, very small. As the sun goes down in the afternoon, shadows grow very long again. But the long afternoon shadows fall in a different direction from the long morning shadows.

    Long, long ago people told time by the shadows. Put a piece of paper in the sunlight. Stand a pencil in a spool in the middle of the paper. The shadow of the pencil will fall on the paper and move as the day goes on. Use a watch and every hour marks the place where the shadow falls. Now your paper is a sundial（通过太阳辨别时间的日规）and you can tell every sunny day. Just look at your paper sundial and see where the shadow falls.

    Have you ever learned about F. Scott Fitzgerald? F. Scott Fitzgerald, born on September 24, 1896, an American novelist, was once a student of St. Paul Academy, the Newman School and attended Princeton. University for a short while. In 1917 he joined the army and was posted in Alabama, where he met his future wife Zelda Sayre. Then he had to make some money to impress her.

    His life with her was full of great happiness, as he wrote in his diary:" My own happiness in the past often approached such joy that I could share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and take down parts of it in my diary."

    This side of paradise, his first novel, was published in 1920. Encouraged by its success, Fitzgerald began to devote more time to his writing. Then he continued with the novel the Beautiful and Damned (1922), a collection of short stories Thales of the Jazz Age (1922), and a play The Vegetable (1923). But his greatest success was The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, which quick brought him praise from the literary world. Yet it failed to give him the needed financial security. Then, in 1926, he published another collection of short stories All the Sad Young Men.

    However, Fitzgerald's problems with his wife Zelda affected his writing. During the 1920s he tried to reorder his life, but failed. By 1930, his wife had her first breakdown and went to a Swiss clinic. During this period he completed novels Tender Is the Night in 1934 and The Love of the Last Tycoon in 1940 while his wife was in hospital in the United States, he got totally addicted to alcohol. Sheila Graham, his dear friend, helped him fight his alcoholism.

    When we talk about Americans barely into adulthood who are saddled with(担负着) unbearable levels of debt' the conversation is almost always about student loan debt. But there's a growing body of evidence suggesting that today's young adults are also drowning in credit-card debt and that many of them will take this debt to their graves（坟墓）.

    More than 20% overspent their income by more than $ 100 every single month. Since they haven't built up their credit histories yet, it's a safe bet that these young adults are paying relatively high interest rates on the resulting credit card debt.

    Although many young people blame "socializing" as a barrier to saving money, most of them aren't purchasing $ 20 drinks in trendy bars. They're struggling with much more daily financial demands.

    To a disturbingly large extent, the young and the broke are relying on credit cards to make it until their next payday. This obviously isn't permanent in the long run, and it's going to put a huge drag on their spending power even after they reach their peak earning years, because they'll still be paying interest on that bottle of orange juice or box of spaghetti (意式面条）they bought a decade earlier.

    A new study out of Ohio State University found that young adults are accumulating credit card debt at a more rapid rate than other age groups, and that they're slower at paying it off. "If what we found continues to hold true, we may have more elderly people with substantial financial problems in the future'" warns Lucia Dunn, professor of economics at Ohio State. "If our findings persist, we may be faced with a financial crisis among elderly people who can't pay off their credit cards."

    Dunn says a lot of these young people are never going to get out from under their credit card debt. "Many people are borrowing on credit cards so heavily that payoff rates at these levels are not plenty to recover their credit card debt by the end of their life which could have loss impacts for the credit card issuing banks,"

    I've been really lucky this year. Not only did I have the opportunity to live in France, but I was able to see some other countries with my girlfriend. Now she is studying in Essen, a large city in Western Germany. I recently went to stay with her—it was my first visit to Germany! Essen is a very large city. It has all the conveniences of any large city so I felt immediately at home. I loved the variety of shops, restaurants, shopping malls, cocktail bars, nightclubs, parks and even a lake. There is also a city­wide network of trams, which makes getting around a piece of cake!

    I found the people to be really friendly, and most Germans speak very good English which made life easy for me. I was surprised by the casual attitude to alcohol in Germany, where it seems normal for people to drink beer on the street, or on the tram. My girlfriend and I visited two famous local cities, Düsseldorf and Cologne, which are both on the Rhine River. Düsseldorf is an urban metropolis with a great variety of restaurants. We took a boat tour on the river and went up the Rhine Tower, a really tall building which offers great views across the city. Cologne, as you might know, is world-famous for its perfumes. The cathedral there is an unmissable landmark. We made the effort to climb to the top of one of the cathedral's towers. The spiral (螺旋的) stairs seemed endless, but it was worthwhile for the impressive sights from the top.

    We also went in a cable car over the river and tasted a German delicacy called "Spaghettieis" which is ice cream with strawberry sauce! I also got to try the famous German sausage. I must admit, I really enjoyed the food! The only disappointment was the grey and rainy weather, which proves that Britain does not have the worst weather in Europe!