“We haven't found anything that we can't recycle!”

    Cigarette ends are everywhere—littering our streets and beaches—and for decades they've been thought of as “unrecyclable”. But a New Jersey based company, called TerraCycle, has taken on the challenge, and has come up with a way to recycle millions of cigarette ends and turn them into industrial plastic products. Its aim is to recycle things that people normally consider impossible to reuse.

    Obviously it would be even better for the environment if everyone just stopped smoking, but the statistics show that although there has been an increase in anti-smoking ads and messaging, between 2000 and 2014, global sales of cigarettes increased by 8 percent, and a whole lot of those cigarette ends are ending up as trash. Since most of our litter eventually ends up in waterways, cigarette ends can surely pollute the surrounding environment. “It only takes a single cigarette end to pollute a liter of water,” TerraCycle founder, Tom Szaky, said. “Animals can also mistake littered cigarette ends for food.”

    So how do you go about turning all those poisonous ends into something useful? TerraCycle does this by first breaking them down into separate parts. They mix the remaining materials, such as the tobacco and the paper, with other kinds of rubbish, and use it on non-agricultural land, such as golf courses. The filters (过滤嘴) are a little harder. To recycle these, TerraCycle first makes them clean and cuts them into small pieces, and then combines them with other recycled materials, making them into liquid for industrial plastic products.

    They're now also expanding their recycling offerings to the rest of the 80 percent of household waste that currently can't be recycled, such as chocolate packaging, pens, and mobile phones. The goal is to use the latest research to find a way to stop so much waste ending up in landfill (垃圾填埋), and then get companies to provide money for the process. And so far, it's working.

    “We haven't found anything that we can't recycle,” communications director of TerraCycle, Albe Zakes, said. “But with the amount and variety of packaging and litter in the world, we are always looking for new waste streams to address.”

    The world itself is becoming much smaller by using modern traffic and modern communication means. Life today is much easier than it was hundreds of years ago, but it has brought new problems. One of the biggest problems is pollution. To pollute means to make things dirty. Pollution comes in many ways. We see it, smell it, drink it and even hear it.

    Man has been polluting the earth. The more people, the more pollution. Many years ago, the problem was not so serious because there were not so many people. When the land was used up or the river was dirty in one place, man moved to another place. But this is no longer true.

    Man is now slowly polluting the whole world.

    Air pollution is still the most serious. It's bad for all living things in the world, but it is not the only one kind of pollution. Water pollution kills our fish and pollutes our drinking water. Noise pollution makes us angry more easily.

    Many countries are making rules to fight pollution. They stop people from burning coal in houses and factories in the city, and from putting dirty smoke into the air. Pollution by SO2 is now the most dangerous kind of air pollution. It is caused by heavy traffic. We are sure that if there are fewer people driving, there will be less air pollution.

    The earth is our home. We must take care of it. That means keeping the land, water and air clean. And we must take care of the rise in pollution at the same time.

    Travis is the manager of G&G where he is responsible for forty employees (雇员)and profits (利润) of over $2 million per year. He's never late to work. He does not get upset on the job. When one of his employees started crying after a customer screamed at her, Travis took her away. "Your working uniform is your shelter," he told her. "Nothing anyone says will ever hurt you. You will always be as strong as you want to be."

    Travis picked up that lecture in one of his G&G training courses, an education program that began on his first day and continues throughout an employee's occupation. The training has, Travis says, changed his life. G&G has taught him how to live, how to focus, how to get to work on time, and how to master his emotions (情绪). Most importantly, it taught him willpower.

    At the center of that education is an extreme focus on an all-important habit; willpower. Dozens of cases show that willpower is the single most important habit for a person's success.

     And the best way to strengthen willpower is to make it into a habit. "Sometimes it looks like people with great self-control aren't working hard—but that's because they've made it automatic," Angela Duckworth, one of the University of Pennsylvania researchers said. "Their willpower occurs without them having to think about it."

     The company spent millions of dollars developing programs of study to train employees on self-control. Managers wrote workbooks that serve as guides to how to make willpower a habit in workers' lives. Those courses arc, in part, why G&G has grown from a sleepy company into a large one with more than seventeen thousand stores and profits of more than $10 billion a year.

Visit Chicago Children's Museum

    In brief:

    This museum offers plenty of fun hands-on activities for kids. However, this is one of the few Chicago museums not "fun for the whole family" as adults and older kids will be bored to tears.

    Address: 700 East Grand Ave. (Navy Pier), Chicago

    Phone: 312- 527-1000

    Public transportation:

    CTA bus lines # 29 (State Street), #65 (Grand Avenue), and # 66 (Chicago Avenue) all serve Navy Pier.

    Parking fees:

    · Monday through Thursday: $ 20

    · Friday through Sunday: $ 24

    · Holidays: $ 24

    Opening hours:

    · Weekdays: 10 a. m.-5 p. m

    · Weekends: 10 a. m.-8 p. m

    Entrance fees:

    ·Adults: $12

    ·Children: $12

    ·Seniors (65+): $11

    ·Children (under 5): free

    Activities:

    Located at one of Chicago's top tourist attractions, Navy Pier, the museum offers three floors of activities for kids, including:

    ·Play It Safe—all about home safety

    ·Inventing Lab—provides parts and instructions for creating things

    ·Kids Town—a playroom recreating a Chicago neighborhood where kids can pretend to do things like shopping for groceries and driving a CTA bus

    ·Climbing Schooner—a three-floor climbing building

    ·My Museum—kids get to create various pieces of art that are "all about me"

    ·Skyline—kids learn about skyscrapers and design their own buildings

    ·Tree House Trails—a play area designed like a forest

    ·Waterways—water activities showing how pumps and dams work

    I use tea to refer to a snack(点心)taken in the late afternoon or early evening (ie after getting home from work but before the main meal, which I call dinner) and I don't think that's rare(罕见)at all. I think the difference is when you originally had your main meal and I would agree that it's a class thing, not a north/south thing(I've heard the midday meal referred to as both lunch and dinner by different people in all areas of England).

    Dinner was always the main meal. In the past, working class men worked near(or even at)home and came home for their main meal at midday, and so that was their dinner. Middle class men worked in offices far from their homes(often working in the city centre, and living outside the city) and so couldn't go home for a meal at midday. They therefore had a light meal at midday and had their main meal with their family in the evening after they go home from work, so dinner was in the evening. Because most children at state schools were working class, we still use dinner for school meals. For middle and upper class people, tea was a light snack served in the mid-afternoon at which ladies(who didn't, of course, go out to work)could entertain their friends. For working class people, however, tea was the light snack you had before going to bed. Supper, for all classes, was the light snack you had before going to bed.

    However, because work patterns changed and many working class people started eating their main meal in the evening too, dinner, tea and supper started to become interchangeable for them. Also many working class families have since become middle class, so the terms have become less of a current class thing(if class still exists at all) and more of a system of terminology inherited(家族术语)from grandparents etc, different from family to family. When I was a child(Southern English, middle class family, but with working class forebears(祖先)) we called the midday meal dinner and the evening meal tea, but when I was in my early teens I had a new stepfather(from a family that had always been middle class for generations)who used lunch and dinner, and that's what I've used ever since.

    Devon Gallagher, a college graduate from Philadelphia, wants the world to know exactly where she's been while she's on her worldwide vacation in a special way. The traveler, who was born with a bone disease, had her right leg amputated (截肢) at the age of four. Although the amputation caused inconvenience for Gallagher early on, she now sees it as nothing short of inspiration for living her best life.

    To spread that message. Gallagher has gone to social media, where she shares photos of her travels across the world, but instead of simply using a geo-tag (地理位置标签), she writes her location on her artificial leg before taking a picture.

    Now she has been taking pictures across the Continent, which show her cycling over the canal in Amsterdam relaxing on a wall overlooking the city of Barcelona, posing with a waffle in Brussels, taking in the beautiful Parthenon temple in Athens and enjoying a river ride in Budapest, all with the well-known locations written on her artificial leg.

    "I get a new leg every two years and I can choose the design on it. One day I had a sudden thought to get a chalk-board," Gallagher said. "My mum and grandmother didn't like the idea, but my friends thought it was great and told me to go for it, so I did."

    Gallagher said people often stare when she's writing on her leg, but once she shares the photos, she receives only positive feedback (反馈), "My leg hasn't stopped me from doing anything I've wanted to do," she said. "I don't know if it's my determination to prove to myself that I can do it, anyway, I've been able to keep up with people at my age and lead a pretty great life."

    Gallagher shows us that you should never let anything stand in the way of your dreams. And if life gives you an artificial leg, make art.