What is success? I am not going to try to explain success. I think a precise meaning is impossible! Is it winning a Gold Medal at the Olympic Games or winning Wimbledon, or being awarded a Nobel Prize? What else? I believe personal success could be anything at all- it does not have to involve public recognition. Who is more successful? A millionaire who is unhappy, or an unnoticed person, who has led a simple, quiet, sincere and happy life? The simplest definition of success, I think, is “to set out to do something and to succeed in doing it.

    The first step on the road to success starts with belief. Believe you can succeed and you will. Achieving success in whatever endeavor(努力)you choose may be the goal of life; because it gives you freedom from worry. Could that be?

    Success means different things to every one of us. Some people believe it is measured in financial term; others believe it is helping others rather than helping themselves. However, most people are motivated to a great extend by public recognition. How many people are really happy? How many people are really doing what they want to with their lives? Incidentally, to imagine makes us different from animals.

    Most important of all, I believe success is a matter of personal growth. If every day you are developing or growing just a millimeter, I believe one is successful. Just being a slightly better person each day for me is success. I've got a very long way to go them!

    Finally, always remember success is a process and is not simply a matter of arriving at a destination. It's the journey that really matters. Success is what you become in the often very difficult and dangerous journey down the river of life.

    Imagination Stage is a children's theater in the state of Maryland. A special performance is put on for children with autism (自闭症) each day. People with autism have difficulty communcating and socializing with other people. Children in the theater are allowed to move around during the performance. It's OK if they shout out or hold their ears when the music is too loud. These special performances are sometimes the only thing that a family can go to the theater together to see if a child has autism.

    That is the same idea with Autism on the Seas. This company organizes vacations for families of children with autism, especially vacations on cruise ships. Jamie Grover is director of group development in Autism on the Seas. He said, “With our staff on board, parents know that they are going to be able to relax, enjoy their vacation, and participate in ship activities. They know that their children are well taken care of.”

    The benefit of such vacations organized by Autism on the Seas is not waiting in huge lines on departure day. The company has staff to help in the ports. Waiting in long lines or being in the middle of big crowds can cause problem behavior in children with autism. Autism on the Seas helps families avoid situations like that.

    Autism on the Seas works with the help of cruise companies like Royal Caribbean. Special times or places are arranged for families to play video games, go skating or rock climbing, or eat dinner. Autism on the Seas also directs families to organizations that can help them pay for these vacations.

    Bambi Van Woert from the state of Michigan went on a cruise with her 7-year-old Ben, who has autism. She said, “I would never do something like this myself. I cannot take Ben shopping by myself at this point, so for me to try to do a cruise without help would be absurd.”

In the latest beauty craze(狂热)sweeping social media in China，women--and even some men--are boasting that they are paper thin，by posting photographs of their waists behind a vertical(垂直)piece of A4 paper．To qualify，the waist must be entirely hidden by the paper．A piece of A4 paper is 8.3 by ll.7 inches，roughly the size of a sheet of American letter paper．

    With the A4 Waist，the trend is attracting hundreds of photographs and thousands of comments on Weibo and other social media networks like Weixin or WeChat．Being abnormally thin is a widespread standard of beauty for women，one that has been criticized as an unhealthy ideal of female attractiveness．

    The tiny waist has a long tradition in China，going back at least to King Ling of Chu，who ruled from 540 to 529 B．C．Many in China know the passage from the Book of Han，the history of the Western Han Dynasty：“The King of Chu loved a narrow waist．Many people at court starved to death．

    Several commentators have found the A4 trend disturbing．In a telephone interview，He Xiaobin，senior fashion features editor at the Chinese edition of GQ magazine，said，“I find it completely stupid．Everybody has a different frame and body shape．Using a single size to define all human beings and thinking you have created a new standard is foolish．''The A4 waist challenge annoyed him，saying that it allows certain people to gain bragging rights，while leaving others in depression．

    Luckily，some who do not qualify are turning to humor for comfort．Can they substitute a different paper size，such as A3，which is 11.7 inches across Or measure a body part besides the waist?

    Smoking is harmful. But as soon as you quit the habit, everything will be OK, right?

    Wrong

    New research has found that even if you give up smoking, the damage it has done to your genes(基因) will stay there for a much longer time. In the research, a team of US scientists studied the blood of 16,000 people. Among them, some were smokers, some used to smoke, and the rest were non-smokers. Scientists compared their genes and found that more than 7,000 genes of smokers had changed—a number that is one-third of known human genes.

    According to NBC News, both heart disease and cancer are caused by genetic changes. Some people may have had the changes when they were born, but most people get them in their day-to-day lives while doing things like smoking.

    When you stop smoking, a lot of these genes will return to normal within five years.

    This means your body is trying to heal (治愈) itself of the harmful effects of smoking. But the changes in some of the genes stay for longer. They can stay for as long as 30 years. It's almost like leaving a footprint on wet cement (水泥)—it will always be there, even when you've walked away and when the cement becomes dry.

    Although the study results may make people unhappy, there is a bright side: the findings could help scientists invent medicine to treat genetic damage caused by smoking or find ways to tell which people have heart disease or cancer risks.

    Philosophy of Education is a label applied to the study of the purpose, process, nature and ideals of education. It can be considered a branch of both philosophy and education. Education can be defined as the teaching and learning of specific skills, and the imparting of knowledge, judgment and wisdom, and is something broader than the societal institution of education we often speak of.

    Many educationalists consider it a weak and imprecise field, too far removed from the practical applications of the real world to be useful. But philosophers dating back to Plato and the Ancient Greeks have given the area much thought and emphasis, and there is little doubt that their work has helped shape the practice of education over the millennia.

    Plato is the earliest important educational thinker, and education is an essential element in “The Republic” (his most important work on philosophy and political theory, written around 360 B.C.). In it, he advocates some rather extreme methods: removing children from their mothers' care and raising them as wards of the state, and differentiating children suitable to the various castes(社会等级), the highest receiving the most education, so that they could act as guardians of the city and care for the less able. He believed that education should be holistic(全面的), including facts, skills, physical discipline, music and art. Plato believed that talent and intelligence is not distributed genetically and thus is to be found in children born to all classes, although his proposed system of selective public education for an educated minority of the population does not really follow a democratic model.

    Aristotle considered human nature, habit and reason to be equally important forces to be cultivated in education, the ultimate aim of which should be to produce good and virtuous citizens. He proposed that teachers lead their students systematically, and that repetition be used as a key tool to develop good habits, unlike Socrates' emphasis on questioning his listeners to bring out their own ideas. He emphasized the balancing of the theoretical and practical aspects of subjects taught, among which he clearly mentions reading, writing, mathematics, music, physical education, literature, history, and a wide range of sciences, as well as play, which he also considered important.

    During the period of Middle Age, the idea of Perennialism was first formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas in his work “De Magistro”. Perennialism holds that one should teach those things deemed to be of everlasting importance to all people everywhere, namely principles and reasoning, not just facts (which are apt to change over time), and that one should teach first about people, not machines or techniques. It was originally religious in nature, and it was only much later that a theory of worldly Perennialism developed.

    During the Renaissance(文艺复兴), the French doubter Michel de Montaigne (1533 - 1592) was one of the first to critically look at education. Unusually for his time, Montaigne was willing to question the conventional wisdom of the period, calling into question the whole structure of the educational system, and the assumption that university-educated philosophers were necessarily wiser than uneducated farm workers, for example.

    One summer I was driving from my home town of Tahoe City, Calif., to New Orleans. In the middle of the desert, I came upon a young man standing by the roadside. He had his thumb out and held a gas can in his other hand. I drove right by him. There was a time in the country when you'd be considered a jerk if you passed by somebody in need. Now you are a fool for helping. With gangs, drug addicts, murderers, rapists, thieves lurking everywhere, "I don't want to get involved" has become a national motto.

    Several states later I was still thinking about the hitch­hiker. Leaving him standing in the desert did not bother me so much. What bothered me was how easily I had reached the decision. I never even lifted my foot off the accelerator.

    Does anyone stop any more? I wondered. I recalled Blanche DuBois's famous line: "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers". Could anyone rely on the kindness of strangers these days? One way to test this would be for a person to journey from coast to coast without any money, relying solely on the good will of his fellow Americans. What kind of Americans would he find? Who would feed him, shelter him, carry him down the road?

    The idea intrigued me.

    The week I turned 37, I realized that I had never taken a gamble in my life. So I decided to travel from the Pacific to the Atlantic without a penny. It would be a cashless journey through the land of the almighty dollar. I would only accept offers of rides, food and a place to rest my head. My final destination would be Cape Fear in North Carolina, a symbol of all the fears I'd have to conquer during the trip.

    I rose early on September 6, 1994, and headed for the Golden Gate Bridge with a 50­pound pack on my back and a sign displaying my destination to passing vehicles: "America".

    For six weeks I hitched 82 rides and covered 4,223 miles across 14 states. As I traveled, folks were always warning me about someplace else. In Montana they told me to watch out for the cowboys in Wyoming; in Nebraska they said people would not be as nice as in Iowa. Yet I was treated with kindness everywhere I went. I was amazed by people's readiness to help a stranger, even when it seemed to run contrary to their own best interests.