The Enigma (谜）of Beauty

    The search for beauty spans centuries and continents. Paintings of Egyptians dating back over 4,000 years show both men and women painting their nails and wearing makeup. In 18th-century France, wealthy noblemen wore large wigs (假发）of long, white hair to make themselves attractive. Today, people continue to devote a lot of time and money to their appearance.

    There is at least one good reason for the desire to be attractive：beauty is power. Studies suggest that good-looking people make more money, get called on more often in class, and are regarded as friendlier.

    But what exactly is beauty? It's difficult to describe it clearly, and yet we know it when we see it. And our awareness of it may start at a very early age. In one set of studies, six-month-old babies were shown a series of photographs. The faces on the pictures had been rated for attractiveness by a group of college students. In the studies, the babies spent more time looking at the attractive faces than the unattractive ones.

    The idea that even babies can judge appearance makes perfect sense to many researchers. In studies by psychologists, men consistently showed a preference for women with larger eyes, fuller lips, and a smaller nose and chin while women prefer men with large shoulders and a narrow waist. According to scientists, the mind unconsciously tells men and women that these traits —the full lips, clear skin, strong shoulders —equal health and genetic well-being.

    Not everyone thinks the same way, however. " Our hardwiredness can be changed by all sorts of expectations —mostly cultural, " says C. Loring Brace, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. What is considered attractive in one culture might not be in another. Look at most Western fashion magazines：the women on the pages are thin. But is this "perfect" body type for women worldwide? Scientists' answer is no; what is considered beautiful is subjective and varies around the world. They found native peoples in southeast Peru preferred shapes regarded overweight in Western cultures.

    For better or worse, beauty plays a role in our lives. But it is extremely difficult to describe exactly what makes one person attractive to another. Although there do seem to be certain physical traits considered universally appealing, it is also true that beauty does not always keep to a single, uniform standard. Beauty really is, as the saying goes, in the eye of the beholder.

    For those who make journeys across the world, the speed of travel today has turned the countries into a series of villages．Distances between them appear no greater to a modern traveler than those which once faced men as they walked from village to village. Jet planes fly people from one end of the earth to the other, allowing them a freedom of movement undreamt of a hundred years ago.

    Yet some people wonder if the revolution in travel has gone too far. A price has been paid, they say, for the conquest (征服) of time and distance. Travel is something to be enjoyed, not endured (忍受).  The boat offers leisure and time enough to appreciate the ever-changing sights and sounds of a journey. A journey by train also has a special charm about it. Lakes and forests and wild, open plains sweeping past your carriage window create a grand view in which time and distance mean nothing. On board a plane, however, there is just the blank blue of the sky filling the narrow window of the airplane. The soft lighting, in-flight films and gentle music make up the only world you know, and the hours progress slowly.

    Then there is the time spent being “processed” at a modern airport. People are conveyed like robots along walkways; baggage is weighed, tickets produced, examined and produced yet again before the passengers move to another waiting area. Journeys by rail and sea take longer, yes, but the hours devoted to being “processed” at departure and arrival in airports are luckily absent. No wonder, then, that the modern high-speed trains are winning back passengers from the airlines.

    Man, however, is now a world traveler and cannot turn his back on the airplane. The working lives of too many people depend upon it; whole new industries have been built around its design and operation. The holiday maker, too, with limited time to spend, patiently endures the busy airports and limited space of the flight to gain those extra hours and even days, relaxing in the sun. speed controls people's lives; time saved, in work or play, is the important thing—or so we are told. Perhaps those first horsemen, riding free across the wild, open plains, were enjoying a better world than the one we know today. They could travel at will, and the clock was not their master.

    In the waters off Brisbane, Australia, a seven­foot­long sand tiger shark swims in pain. A two­foot­long spike sticks out of her side. It's a piece of fishing equipment that the shark ate carelessly. After traveling into her body, the spike punctured(刺) through the shark's stomach.

    A man swimming in the water notices the shark. Then, he warns Sea World Marine Park in the nearby town of Gold Coast. Sea World sends a 12­person team from its rescue center to where the shark was discovered in Moreton Bay Marine Park. Soon, they find her lying on the seafloor. "She'll die without help，"says Trevor Long, leader of the rescue center.

    Using an onboard crane(吊车), the rescuers move the shark into their boat's 13­foot­long tank(缸). Then Dr. David Blyde gives the shark pain medicine and performs an operation to remove the spike. After that, the team sails with the shark to Sea World 33 miles away. They place the fish in a 49­foot­long tank and wait to see if she gets better.

    To give the shark's stomach time to get better, she isn't fed for the first few days. A week after her operation, Long offers the shark a small, dead fish. The animal refuses to eat. But days later when he drops another fish into her tank, the shark enjoys her meal. By now the shark's wounds are getting better.

    Two weeks after her rescue, they take the shark back to the boat and return her to Moreton Bay Marine Park. As the fish is lowered by the crane to the water's surface, two rescuers jump into the ocean and guide her into the sea. From the boat, Long watches her swim away." The shark has another chance," Long says.

    Lima, the capital of Peru (秘鲁), has countless museums that tourists can't afford to miss. Now start packing up and prepare for your perfect Peruvian history exploration at these wonderful museums.

    ◆Larco Museum

    Stepping inside, visitors get to learn the 5,000-year history of Peru through an unbelievable collection of objects. The best thing about the museum is that it keeps the door to the storeroom open to visitors so that they can admire its collection closely.

    ◆Gold Museum of Peru

    If you like shiny objects or precious metals, then plan a trip to the Gold Museum of Peru. In ancient times, the Peruvian people were celebrated for their skills in metals. And the museum is aimed at preserving this heritage.

    ◆Lima Art Museum

    Art experts are much pleased as the city is also home to the Lima Art Museum. Its permanent exhibit of over 1, 200 pieces is merely a small part of its amazing collection of more than 17, 000 artifacts. The highlight of the museum is its collection of Carlos Baca-Flor's masterpieces, which is considered to be the most complete set in the world.

    ◆Museum of Italian Art

    The only museum dedicated to European art in Peru, the Museum of Italian Art is a storehouse of classical and contemporary paintings and sculptures belonging to the 20th century. The property is easily accessible by a short walk from the Lima Art Museum.

    ◆Museum of Natural History

    Last but certainly not least is the Museum of Natural History. Giving a glimpse into the rich biodiversity in Peru, the museum has on display the skeletons of a sperm whale and fossils of several mammals.

On an autumn afternoon, a remote sheep farm in southern Greenland is quiet. The silence is abruptly broken when dozens of sheep come thundering across the hills overlooking the farm. Walking after them are Lars Nielsen and his 37-year-old son Kunuk Nielsen.

The Nielsen family has owned and run the farm since 1972. Kunuk says the summers now are longer than when he was a child and that drought has become a problem. The fields are not so green as those in the old days. He has to buy hay (草料) from European countries.

The effects of a warming climate are obvious on the land. While he intends to struggle on, his older brother Pilu has chosen a different path.

Pilu, 40, lives in Qaqortoq in the south of Greenland -- a town of about 3,000 people. Ten years ago, he got his helicopter pilot's license and is now part owner of a small company called Sermeq Helicopters. It caters to construction and telecommunication workers and an increasing number of foreign tourists.

Pilu says he loves his family's sheep farm. But he saw that warming temperatures were making remote areas of Greenland more accessible and wanted to look for other opportunities. His company's most popular tours include a visit to Greenland's glaciers.

The warming temperatures are also affecting traditional ways of life, particularly hunting. The sea ice is changing; it's becoming less so that hunting on ice becomes more difficult. When there's no sea ice, it's difficult to use dog sledges (雪橇), and the whole culture around having dogs and dog sledges and doing traditional hunting on the ice is sort of diminishing.

Besides, many Greenlanders, like Pilu, are leaving the countryside for towns and the capital city Nuuk, where opportunities are greater. A report found that Nuuk's share of Greenland's population grew from 17.2% in 1977 to 29.2% in 2014. If there were enough houses in Nuuk, the share would even be bigger.

Many of us were told from an early age that, "you learn from your mistakes". But is this actually true?

The short answer is "yes" — failure can be a teachable moment. But learning from our mistakes is, in reality, very hard because we don't like to fail. It doesn't feel good, so we react to failure in impulsive and emotional ways, like giving up on a task prematurely, telling ourselves we don't care whether we succeed, or finding fault with the task itself. This is self-protective, according to Hallgeir, a professor of psychology at the Norwegian School of Economics. "Most of us want to think of ourselves as competent", he says, so when we fail "it poses a serious threat to our self-image".

Fortunately, there is research to suggest that there are some strategies to help us overcome the emotional barriers around failure. One of them is to adopt a third-person perspective. Instead of asking "Why did I fail?", we could ask "Why did Sam fail?", for example. Multiple studies by psychologist Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan show that adopting a third-person perspective helps to soften our negative emotional reactions, allowing us to look at failure more objectively.

A second strategy involves offering advice to others who may be in the same position as us. This strategy led to better levels of motivation and academic success in the test groups — involving both adults and children — that were asked to give advice based on their own failures. Professors Eskreis-Winkler and Duckworth found that the satisfaction of helping others "forces people to engage with their experience and what they have learned". 

The writer Samuel Beckett once said: "fail again, fail better". But it now seems that we should be saying: "fail again, fail smarter". Failure is an unavoidable part of life, but by learning to overcome the emotional barriers around it, we may find the road to success is a little easier to navigate (确定方向).