It's not easy to just get up and go if you're not a morning person. But with some preparation, you can have a great morning routine (常规) before school, which can also make for a good day.

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#} A great morning routine doesn't include cramming (突击式学习) for a test or struggling to get your homework done as you're running out of the door.

    Shower the night before. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} And if you can, do your hair the night before so when you wake up, you'll be able to freshen yourself quickly to get to school and get on with the day.

    Lay out your clothes. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Make sure to lay out everything you need, including your socks and shoes. Another thing is hair. If your school has a preference (偏爱) of what you do with your hair, be sure to respect that.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#} It helps in the morning if you have something in front of you to check off as you're walking out of the door. The list should include your homework, books and your lunch or lunch money as well as anything else you normally take with you to school.

    Eat a good breakfast. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}  Eating a healthy breakfast helps improve your focus and allows you to stay active in your classes. If you can, prepare your meal the night before. At the least, set out your spoons and plates.

A. Make a list of everything you will take.

B. Brush your teeth after you eat breakfast.

C. Get all your homework done before going to bed.

D. Check the weather forecast and choose your clothing.

E. A great morning routine should always include a good breakfast.

F. Don't hurry and make sure you have everything before you leave.

G. That helps you have a good sleep and save much time in the morning.

    When we think about happiness, we usually think of something surprising and unexpected, a top great delight.

    For a child, happiness has a magic quality. I remember playing police and robbers in the woods, getting a speaking part in the school play. Of course, kids also experience lows, but their delight at tops of pleasure is easily seen, such as winning a race or getting a new bike.

    For teenagers, or people under 20, the idea of happiness changes. Suddenly it's conditional on such things as excitement, love, and popularity. I can still feel the pain of not being invited to a party that almost everyone else was going to. I also recall the great happiness of being invited at another event to dance with a very handsome young man.

    In adulthood the things that bring great joy — birth, love, marriage — also bring responsibility and the risk of loss. Love may not last; loved ones die. For adults, happiness is complex.

    My dictionary explains “happy” as “lucky” or “ fortunate”, but I think a better explanation of happiness is “ the ability to enjoy something”. The more we can enjoy what we have, the happier we are. It's easy for us not to notice the pleasure we get from loving and being loved, the company of friends, the freedom to love where we please, and even good health. Nowadays, with so many choices and much pleasure, we have turned happiness into one more thing we have. We think we own the right to have it, which makes us extremely unhappy. So we try hard to get it and consider it to be the same as wealth and success, without noticing that the people who have those things aren't necessarily happier.

    While happiness may be more complex for us, the answer is the same as ever. Happiness isn't about what happens to us. It's the ability to find a positive for every negative, and view a difficulty as a challenge. Don't be sad for what we don't have, but enjoy what we do possess.

Volunteer Opportunities Abroad

    For those looking to break into the competitive world of journalism (新闻工作), this is for you! You will be working at “The Village”, an English and Romanian language magazine. As a writer you will work on special tasks, reporting local events with guidance from the editor. You will be interviewing local people, writing reports, and taking photographs. You will also have the chance to live with a local host family to experience their culture.

    Volunteers joining our project (项目) in Cambodia will travel to the island of Koh Sdach. You will become part of this tiny island, learn to dive (潜水), and take part in valuable social projects.

    During your stay you will complete a course to learn to dive. After that you will take part in dives to clean up rubbish under the sea and collect information on rare fish. During the two weeks you may also have the chance to join in a village fun day where volunteers play games with the village children.

    On this project you will spend two weeks living with a host family and coaching soccer in friendly West Africa! You will spend your two weeks in Accra helping local children develop their soccer skills. You will develop their skills and confidence while having fun playing soccer at the same time.

    Booking a trip on an online travel site is convenient, but comes with its own set of problems.

    They know who's going to spend more.

    Last year, US travel research company Orbitz tracked people's online activities to test out whether Mac users spend more on travel than PC users. It turns out that on average, Mac users lay out US $20-30 more per night on hotels. As a result, online travel sites show these users more expensive travel options first. To avoid paying more, sort results by price.

    Their software doesn't always link to the hotel's system.

    A guaranteed reservation is almost impossible to come by anywhere — but the risk of your flight or hotel being overbooked increases with third-party providers. The middleman's software isn't immune(防护作用的) to system errors, so always call the hotel or airline to make sure your booking was processed.

    Don't be fooled by packages: Often, they're low-end items grouped together.

    Ever notice how travel sites recommend a hotel, a rental car, and tour package all in one click? These deals usually feature travel that no one wants, like flights with multiple layovers(中途停留). Check the fine print.

    Once your trip is purchased, you're on your own.

    An online travel agency can't provide assistance the same way an agent can if a flight is cancelled or a room is substandard. Basically, when you arrive at the airport or hotel, you're just another customer who booked at the lowest rate.

    “When your mother scolds you, you can look elsewhere and think about other things. Just ignore her words. But remember: such a tough attitude cannot be used often.” These words are from a series of cartoons which outline skills for children to fight against their mothers. The images have created heated debate among Chinese netizens（网民）.

    Regarded as “a book for children aged 6 to 12 who are always scolded by their parents”， the cartoons, drawn by two 10-year-old Beijing girls, list over 20 skills which children can use to deal with their mothers' anger such as crying, pretending to be ashamed, fleeing into the toilet and pleasing her afterwards. Each skill is described with vivid pictures and humorous notes. The creativity of the young girls has amazed netizens, the Yangtse Evening Post reported on Thursday.

According to one of the girls' mothers, her daughter once received a poor mark in an exam, and the mother blamed her and compared her performance with another classmate. The daughter's feelings led to her creating the cartoons. The girl's father, who first posted the pictures on his Sohu Microblog on Monday, said he hopes parents pay close attention to the pictures, allow children to feel free to develop their own characteristics and try not to criticize them so often.

“The cartoons, although an individual case, reflect a modern phenomenon and some of the problems within Chinese family education,” said Yu Qinfang, an expert on family education. According to a survey of 104 children and their parents, Yu discovered that as many as 51.9 percent of primary school students hate being urged to do things by their mothers. “Not giving children enough time and hurrying them to do things seems to be a very tiny detail within family life, but it is potentially a huge problem which can easily be ignored by parents. A mother's blame may lead to negative feelings within her child's heart,” Yu said. “Parents should learn to blame less and be more patient.”

    Even by the standards of poor countries, India is alarmingly — and unnecessarily — dirty. It needs to clean up. Most time of year, its capital, Delhi，smells as if something is burning. That is because of many things: the carcinogenic diesel（柴油）that supplies three quarters of the city's motor fuel, the dirty coal that supplies most of its power, the rice stalks that nearby farmers want to clear after the harvest and so on. All these make Delhi's air the most poisonous of any big city.

    This does not just make life unpleasant for a lot of Indians. It kills them. Recent estimates put the annual death toll from breathing PM 2.5 alone at 1.2—2.2 million a year. The lifespan of Delhi residents is shortened by more than ten years, says the University of Chicago-Consumption of dirty water directly causes 200,000 deaths a year, a government think-tank estimates, without measuring its contribution to slower killers such as kidney disease. Some 600 million Indians, nearly half the country, live in areas where clean water is in short supply. As pollutants taint groundwater, and global warming makes the vital monsoon（季风）rains more abnormal, the country is poisoning its own future.

    Indian pollution is a danger to the rest of the world, too. Widespread dumping of antibiotics（抗生素）in rivers has made the country a hotspot for anti-microbial（抗微生物）resistance. Emissions of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas, grew by 6% a year between 2000 and 2016, compared with 1.3% a year for the world as a whole.

    In the past India has explained its failure to clean up its act by pleading poverty, noting that richer countries were once just as dirty and that its output of waste per person still lags far behind theirs. But India is notably grubby（肮脏的）not just in absolute terms, but also relative to its level of development And it is becoming grubbier.

    It is true that some ways of cutting pollution are expensive. But there are also cheap solutions，such as undoing mistakes that Indian bureaucrats（官僚）have themselves made. By funding rice farmers, for instance, the government has in effect cheered on the overusing of groundwater and the burning of stalks. Rules that encourage the use of coal have not made India more self-reliant, as intended, but instead have led to big imports of foreign coal while blackening India's skies. Much cleaner gas-fired power plants, meanwhile, sit idle.

    Reliant on big business for funding and on the poor for votes, politicians have long ignored middle-class complaints about pollution, failing to give officials the backing to enforce rules. That is a pity, because when India does apply itself to ambitious goals, it often achieves them

    Next year it will send its second rocket to the Moon.

    Narendra Modi, the prime minister, promised with admirable frankness when he took over to rid the country of open defecation（缺陷）. Four and a half years and some $9 billion later, his Clean India campaign claims to have sponsored the building of an astonishing 90 million toilets. This is impressive, but India is still not clean. Its skies, its streets, its rivers and coasts will remain dangerously dirty until they receive similar attention.