“The first and best of victories for a man is to conquerhimself; to be conquered by himself is, of all things, the most shameful,” saysPlato. Self-control is at the root of all the advantages. Let a man give in tohis impulses (冲动) andfeelings, and from that moment he gives up his moral freedom.

A single angry word has lost many friends. When Socrates foundin himself any temper or anger, he would check it by speaking low in order tocontrol himself. If you are conscious of being angry, keep your mouth shut sothat you can hold back rising anger. Many a person has dropped dead in greatanger. Fits of anger bring fits of disease. “Whoever the gods would destroy,they first make them mad.” “Keep cool,” says Webster, “anger is notargument.” “Be calm in arguing,” says George Herbert, “for fierceness (狂怒) makes error a fault.”

To be angry with a weak man is to prove that you are not strongyourself. “Anger,” says Pythagoras, “begins with foolishness and ends withregret.” You must measure the strength of a man by the power of the feelings heconquers, not by the power of those which conquer him.

Self-control is man's last and greatest victory.

If a man lacks self-control he seems to lack everything. Withoutit he can have no patience, no power to govern himself; he can have noself-confidence, for he will always be controlled by his strongest feeling. Ifhe lacks self-control, the very backbone and nerve of character are lackingtoo.

    Each morning Grandpa was up early sitting at the kitchen table, reading his book. His grandson wanted to be just like him and tried to copy him in every way he could.

One day the grandson asked, "Grandpa, I try to read the book just like you, but I don't understand it, and I forget what I understand as soon as I close the book. What good does reading the book do?"

The grandpa quietly turned from putting coal in the stove and replied, "Take this coal basket down to the river and bring me back a basket of water."

The boy did as he was told, but all the water leaked out before he got back to the house. The grandpa laughed and said, "You'll have to move a little faster next time," and sent him back to the river with the basket to try again. This time the boy ran faster, but again the basket was empty before he returned. Out of breath, he told his grandpa that it was impossible to carry water in a basket, so he went to get a bucket instead. The grandpa said, "I don't want a bucket of water; I want a basket of water. You're just not trying hard enough." The boy again dipped the basket into the river and ran hard, but when he reached his grandpa the basket was empty again. Out of breath, he said, "Grandpa, it's useless!"

"So, you think it is useless?" the grandpa said, "Look at the basket."

    The boy looked at the basket and for the first time he realized that the basket was different. It had been transformed from a dirty old coal basket and was now clean.

"Grandson, that's what happens when you read the book. You might not understand or remember everything, but when you read it, you'll be changed, inside and out."

    Imagine a mass of floating waste is two times the size of the state of Texas. Texas has a land area of more than 678,000 square kilometers. So it might be difficult to imagine anything twice as big. All together, this mass of waste flowing in the North Pacific Ocean is known as the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch（太平洋垃圾带）. It weighs about 3,500,000 tons. The waste includes bags, bottles and containers-plastic products of all kinds.

    The eastern part of the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch is about 1,600 kilometers west of California. The western part is west of the Hawaiian Islands and east of Japan. The area has been described as a kind of oceanic desert, with light winds and slow moving water currents（流，流动）. The water moves so slow that garbage from all over the world collects there.

    In recent years, there have been growing concerns about the floating garbage and its effect on sea creatures and human health. Scientists say thousands of animals get trapped in the floating waste, resulting in death or injury. Even more die from a lack of food or water after swallowing pieces of plastic. The trash can also make animals feel full, diminishing their desire to eat or drink.

    The floating garbage also can have harmful effects on people. There is an increased threat of infection（感染）of disease from polluted waste, and from eating fish that swallowed waste. Divers can also get trapped in the plastic.

    Its existence first gained public attention in 1997. That was when racing boat captain and oceanographer Charles Moore and his crew sailed into the garbage while returning from a racing event. Five years earlier, another oceanographer learnt of the trash after a shipment of rubber duckies got lost at sea. Many of those toys are now part of the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.

    In August,2017, a team from the University of California, San Diego became the latest group to travel to it. They were shocked by the amount of waste they saw. They gathered hundreds of sea creatures and water samples to measure the garbage patch's effect on ocean environment.

    From: terri @ wombat. Com. Au

    To: (happylizijun) @ yaboo. com. cn

    Subject: My school

Hi, Li Zijun,

    Thanks very much for your email. I really enjoyed reading it. I think we have a lot in common. I wonder if our school life is similar too.

    I go to a big high school in Sydney called Maylands High School. There are about 1000 students and 80 teachers. My class has 25 students in it, which is normal for a Year 11 class. In the junior school there are about 30 students in a class.

    In the senior high school we have lots of subjects to choose from, like maths, physics, chemistry, biology, history, German, law, geography, software design, graphic arts and media studies. (Different schools sometime have different optional subjects.) English is a must for everyone and we have to do least three other subjects in Year 11 and 12. At the end of Year 12 we sit for a public exam called the High School Certificate.

    As well as school subjects, most of us do other activities at school such as playing a sport, singing in the choir or playing in the school band. We can also belong to clubs, such as the drama club, the chess club and the debating society.

    We have a lot of homework to do in senior school to prepare for our exam, so unless I have basketball practice, I usually go straight home and start studying. I arrive home about 4 pm, make myself a snack and work till 6 pm. Then I help the family to make dinner and we all eat together. I'm usually back in my room studying by 8 pm. I stop at about 10 o'clock and watch TV or read a book for half an hour to relax. On Saturdays, I usually go out with my family or with friends and I sleep in till late on Sunday morning. Then it's back to the books on Sunday afternoon.

    How about you? What's your school life like? Do you have a lot of homework? What do you do to relax when you're not studying? I'm looking forward to finding out.

Your Australian friend

Terrie

    Climate change has had a number of effects on cities around the world, including rising see levels. And, this has become an especially big problem for coastal cities. City officials must now prepare for higher tides on their coasts. The American city of Miami is one example. Located in South Florida, Miami is home to nearly 3 million people and billions of dollars in land and buildings.

    Miami is one of the cities in America most at risk for rising sea levels. The waterfront is central to Miami's culture and economy. But as the seas rise with climate change .the water will not stay put. Large parts of South Florida are in danger of being under water in the coming years. Across Biscayne Bay, the City of Miami Beach is making improvements - raising streets, adding water pumps and more.

    It is costing the city a lot of money. Local communities will spend 500 million dollars for the improvements. Thankfully, the residents, the folks that are paying the bill for this work, realize that the cost of doing nothing is much greater. A possibility officials are discussing with residents is for city to buy homes in some places where flooding has been a problem. The city would then turn that land into parks of grassland that could hold the water.

    Over time, the city may need to take bigger risks. Miami's future depends largely on how much, and how fast, the oceans rise.

    Caroline Lewis leads the climate activism group, the CLEO Institute. She says cities cannot avoid the need to move inland. But, she says，a well-planned withdrawal (撤退) could include measures to keep people safely in place for as long as possible. And, she says, the world could learn from such a model. In these two Florida cities built on wetlands, there remains a lot of hopefulness.

    I'll admit I've never quite understood the obsession (难以破除的成见) surrounding genetically modified (GM) (改变) crops. To environmentalist opponents, GM foods are simply evil, an understudied, possibly harmful tool used by big agricultural businesses to control global seed markets and beat local farmers. They argue that GM foods have never delivered on their supposed promise, that money spent on GM crops would be better channeled to organic farming and that consumers should be protected with warning labels on any products that contain genetically modified ingredients. To supporters, GM crops are a key part of the effort to sustainably provide food to meet a growing global population. But more than that, supporters see the GM opposition of many environmentalists as fundamentally anti-science, no different than those who question the basics of man-made climate change.

    For both sides, GM foods seem to act as a symbol: you're pro-agricultural business or anti-science. But science is exactly what we need more of when it comes to GM foods, which is why I was happy to see Nature devote a special series of articles to the GM food controversy. The conclusion: while GM crops haven't yet realized their initial promise and have been dominated by agricultural businesses, there is reason to continue to use and develop them to help meet the enormous challenge of sustainably feeding a growing planet.

    That doesn't mean GM crops are perfect, or a one-size-fits-all solution to global agriculture problems. But anything that can increase farming efficiency—the amount of crops we can produce per acre of land—will be extremely useful.GM crops can and almost certainly will be part of that suite of tools, but so will traditional plant breeding, improved soil and crop management—and perhaps most important of all, better storage and transport infrastructure (基础设施) especially in the developing world.(It doesn't do much good for farmers in places like sub-Saharan Africa to produce more food if they can't get it to hungry consumers.) I'd like to see more non-industry research done on GM crops—not just because we'd worry less about prejudice, but also because seed companies like Monsanto and Pioneer shouldn't be the only entities (实体) working to harness genetic modification. I'd like to see GM research on less commercial crops, like corn. I don't think it's vital to label GM ingredients in food, but I also wouldn't be against it—and industry would be smart to go along with labeling, just as a way of removing fears about the technology.

    Most of all, though, I wish a tenth of the energy that's spent endlessly debating GM crops was focused on those more pressing challenges for global agriculture. There are much bigger battles to fight.