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    In 2006，Paul Letourneau of Worcester，Mass，lost his parents，his home and his pet dog.And that August，his life­long mild depression took a turn for the worse as he became suicidal(有自杀倾向的)．

    “I said I didn't want to be alive anymore，”Letourneau,67，recalled telling his best friend.

    He and his friend had gone for a walk when Letourneau stopped and asked his friend about ways to die painlessly.His friend advised him to admit himself to a hospital.

    “When I went back home，physically，I was shaking so much－and emotionally，I couldn't stop，”Letourneau said，“I knew I had to get help.”

    For many men，it takes a lot more than feeling down to recognize that they are depressed and then step through the doors  of a hospital，or a friend's or relative's home to ask for help.Men who are depressed usually refuse to get appropriate treatment，depression experts and patients say.

    “When men get depressed，the depression can be quite severe，”said Dr.lan Cook，professor of psychiatry at the Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.“The challenge is getting men to acknowledge that they're depressed.”

    Depression affects about 15 million people in the United States，according to the National Institutes of Mental Health，and men get depressed about half as often as women.

    “It's unclear how much of this is a reporting bias，”Cook  said.“The stigma(耻辱)issues are somewhat different for men than they are for women.”

    “Men intend to consider that asking for help is a sign of  weakness，but when they can't complete the task of bringing themselves to the Promised Land，they become at risk.” said  Steven Lappen，who was once a depression patient.

    World Expo 2010 will be held in Shanghai. It will last from May 1st to October 31st, 2010. The Expo site covers a total area of 5.28 km². It spans(横跨) both sides of the Huangpu River, with 3.93 km² in Pudong and 1.35 km² in Puxi. There are five functional zones marked A, B, C, D and E. Each of them has different functions.

    Zone A will host the national pavilions(国家馆) of Asian countries except southeast Asian ones.

    Zone B will be home to the China Pavilion(中国馆) and Oceania (大洋洲的) countries, Pavilions for International Organizations, Theme Pavilions(主题馆), Expo Centre, and Performance Centre etc.

    Zone C will host the national pavilions of European, American and African countries. A large public amusement park will be built at the entrance of this zone.

    Zone D is home to Corporate Pavilions(企业馆), the land is one of the original places of modern China's national industry. So some of the old industrial buildings will be kept and renovated(修复) into Expo pavilions.

    Zone E will host stand-alone(独立的) Corporate Pavilions, Urban Civilization Pavilion (城市文明馆), and Urban Best Practices Area.

    Asking a patient to hum(哼唱)piano tunes and play fin instrument while undergoing brain surgery(手术)may sound like a strange request from a doctor．However，that is exactly what a team of brain specialists，led by Pilcher，requested Dan Fabbio to do．

    In 2015，the then 25-year-old musician was diagnosed with a brain tumor(肿瘤)，which was located in the part of the brain known to be active when people listen to and make music．“Removing a tumor from the brain can have significant consequences depending on its location，”Pilcher says．“Both the tumor and the operation can damage tissue and affect communication between different parts of the brain．”

    Fabbio，therefore，feared the surgery would cause him to lose his musical ability．To prevent that from happening，Pilcher and his colleague designed many tests，including asking Fabbio to listen to piano tunes and hum back during MRI scans．This enabled the physicians to locate the area that is vital for music and language processing and create a 3-D map of Fabbio's brain．

    Despite the great starting point，it was not a perfect way to prevent possible damage to the．The only way was to keep the patient awake and ask him to hum piano tunes during the surgery so that the surgeons could identify the areas to avoid．While the surgery went smoothly，the real test came when Fabbio was asked to play a song on his saxophone．The tunehad been simplified to ensure that it would not require too much strength and cause harm to the stitches(缝线)in the brain．He played it faultlessly，and when he finished，the entire operating room erupted in applause．

    The researchers say that a year after the groundbreaking surgery，the young musician can once again hear tunes in everything—even his electric toothbrush．

    We have encountered a crisis around the corner. You mean global warming? The world economy? No, the decline of reading. People are just not doing it anymore, especially the young. Who's responsible?

Actually, it's more like, what is responsible? The Internet, of course, and everything that comes with it – Facebook, Twitter. You can write your own list.

    There's been a warning about the imminent death of literate civilization for a long time. In the 20th century, first it was the movies, then radio, then television that seemed to spell doom for the written world. None did. Reading survived; in fact it not only survived, it has flourished. The world is more literate than ever before – there are more and more readers, and more and more books.

    The fact that we often get our reading material online today is not something we should worry over. The electronic and digital revolution of the last two decades has arguably shown the way forward for reading and for writing. Take the arrival of e-book readers as an example.

    Devices like Kindle make reading more convenient and are a lot more environmentally friendly than the traditional paper book.

    As technology makes new ways of writing possible, new ways of reading are possible. Interconnectivity allows for the possibility of a reading experience that was barely imaginable before. Where traditional books had to make do with photographs and illustrations, an e-book can provide readers with an unlimited number of links: to texts, pictures, and videos. In the future, the way people write novels, history, and philosophy will resemble nothing seen in the past.

    On the other hand, there is the danger of trivialization. One Twitter group is offering its followers single-sentence-long "digests" of the great novels. War and Peace in a sentence? You must be joking. We should fear the fragmentation of reading. There is the danger that the high-speed connectivity of the Internet will reduce our attention span—that we will be incapable of reading anything of length or which requires deep concentration.

    In such a fast-changing world, in which reality seems to be remade each day, we need the ability to focus and understand what is happening to us. This has always been the function of literature and we should be careful not to let it disappear. Our society needs to be able to imagine the possibility of someone utterly in tune with modern technology but able to make sense of a dynamic, confusing world.

    In the 15th century, Johannes Guttenberg's invention of the printing press in Europe had a huge impact on civilization. Once upon a time the physical book was a challenging thing. We should remember this before we assume that technology is out to destroy traditional culture.

    Donald Watson was a man who thought very much about the food he ate. He was born in Yorkshire, England, in September 1910. And he died in November 2005, at the age of 95. That is a very great age. Watson explained that it was because he never ate any food from animals.

    When he was a boy, Watson stayed on a farm. .He loved to see the animals. He said that they gave so much to people. And all the animals were so friendly. Then, one day, he saw a man killing a pig. He was very sad. From then on, Watson decided that he would never again eat meat. Twenty years later he decided that he wouldn't eat anything from animals, such as milk, cheese or eggs. He became vegan (素食主义者).

    Watson formed a group called "The Vegan Society". In its newspaper, The Vegan Society thought it was terrible and wrong to eat food from animals. At first, there were not many people who agreed with him. They thought it was crazy to do it. Most people thought it was too difficult and unhealthy. However, over time, more and more people began to agree with Watson and The Vegan Society.

    People become vegans for many reasons. Watson and his friend stopped eating because they loved animals. They believed that it was wrong to hurt another living thing.

    Now, people also become vegans for environmental reasons. Keeping animals takes a lot of resources(资源), including water and food. Also, in some places, people are cutting down trees to create more land for cows. By avoiding food from animals, vegans hope to protect these forest areas.

    Finally, just like Watson, some people believe that being a vegan is healthier. They believe that food from animals causes heart problems, a high body weight and many other health problems.

    By now you've probably heard about the "you're not special" speech, when English teacher David McCullough told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School: "Do not get the idea you're anything special, because you're not." Mothers and fathers present at the ceremony 一 and a whole lot of other parents across the Internet — took issue with McCullough's ego-puncturing (伤自尊的) words. But lost in the uproar (喧嚣)was something we really should be taking to heart: our young people actually have no idea whether they're particularly talented or accomplished or not. In our eagerness to elevate their self-esteem, we forgot to teach them how to realistically assess their own abilities, a crucial requirement for getting better at anything from math to music to sports. In fact, it's not just privileged high-school students: we all tend to view ourselves as above average.

    Such inflated self-judgments have been found in study after study and it's often exactly when we're least competent at a given task that we rate our performance most generously, in a 2006 study published in the journal Medical Education, for example, medical students who scored the lowest on an essay test were the most charitable in their self evaluations, while high-scoring students judged themselves much more strictly. Poor students, the authors note, "lack insight" into their own inadequacy. Why should this be? Another study, led by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning, offers an enlightening explanation. People who are incompetent, he writes with coauthor Justin Kruger, suffer from a “dual burden": they're not good at what they do, and their very clumsiness prevents them from recognizing how bad they are.

    In Dunning and Kruger's study, subjects scoring at the bottom on tests of logic, grammar and humor -extremely overestimated'' their talents. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile (百分位数) they guessed they were in the 62nd. What these individuals lacked (in addition 9 clear logic, proper grammar and a sense of humor) was "meta cognitive skill" the capacity to monitor how well they're performing. In the absence of that capacity, the subjects arrived at an overly hopeful view of their own abilities. There's a paradox here, the authors note: The skills that lead to competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that field? In other words, to get better at judging how well we're doing at an activity, we have to get better at the activity itself.

    There are a couple of ways out of this double bind. First, we can learn to make honest comparisons with others. Train yourself to recognize excellence, even when you yourself don't possess it, and compare what you can do against what truly excellent individuals are able to accomplish. Second, seek out feedback that is frequent, accurate and specific. Find a critic who will tell you not only how poorly you're doing, but just what it is that you're doing wrong. As Dunning and Kruger note, success indicates to us that everything went right, but failure is more ambiguous: any number of things could have gone wrong. Use this external feedback to figure out exactly where and when you screwed up.

    If we adopt these strategies — and most importantly, teach them to our children — they won't need parents, or a commencement (毕业典礼)speaker, to tell them that they're special. They'll already know that they are, or have a plan to get that way.