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      A new collectionof photos brings an unsuccessful Antarctic voyage back to life.

Frank Hurley's pictures would be outstanding—undoubtedly first-rate photo-journalism—if they had been made last week. In fact, they were shot from 1914 through 1916, most of them after a disastrous shipwreck(海滩), by a cameraman who had no reasonable expectation of survival. Many of the images were stored in an ice chest, under freezing water, in the damaged wooden ship.

The ship was theEndurance, a small, tight, Norwegian-built three-master that was intended to take Sir Ernest Shackleton and a small crew of seamen and scientists, 27 men in all, to the southernmost shore of Antarctica's Weddell Sea. From that point Shackleton wanted to force a passage by dog sled(雪橇) across the continent. The journey was intended to achieve more than what Captain Robert Falcon Scott had done. Captain Scott had reached the South Pole early in 1912 but had died with his four companions on the march back.

As writer Caroline Alexander makes clear in her forceful and well-researched story The Endurance, adventuring was even then a thoroughly commercial effort. Scott's last journey, completed as be lay in a tent dying of cold and hunger, caught the world's imagination, and a film made in his honor drew crowds. Shackleton, a onetime British merchant-navy officer who had got to within 100 miles of the South Pole in 1908, started a business before his 1914 voyage to make money from movie and still photography. Frank Hurley, a confident and gifted Australian photographer who knew the Antarctic, was hired to make the images, most of which have never before been published.

    We do not know when man first began to use salt, but we do know that it has been used in many different ways throughout history. Historical evidence shows, for example, that people who lived over 3,000 years ago ate salted fish. Thousands of years ago in Egypt, salt was used to preserve (保存) the dead.

    Stealing salt was considered a major crime (罪行) during some periods of history. In the eighteenth century, for example, if a person was caught stealing salt, he could be put in prison and his ears could be cut off.

    In the Roman Empire, one of the most important roads was the one that carried salt from the salt mines to Rome. Guards were stationed(安置) along the route to protect against salt thieves, and they received their pay in salt, thus bringing the English word, salary. Any guard who fell asleep while on duty was thought to be “not worth his salt”, and as a result he would get a little less salt on his next payday. The expression, “not worth his salt”, is still used today in English.

    In the modern world salt has many uses beyond the dining table. It is used in making glass and airplane parts, in the growing of crops, and in the killing of weeds (杂草). It is also used to make water soft, to melt (融化) ice on roads and highways, to make soap, and to fix colors in cloth.

    Salt can be got in various ways besides being taken from mines underground. Salt water from the ocean, salt water lakes or small seas can be used to make salt. Yet, no matter where it comes from, salt will continue to play an important role in the lives of people everywhere.

    Andreea, 18, from Romania, sent a photograph of the view from her window and included a brief (简短的）apology: “Sorry, this picture is plain and boring. No one would like it.”

    At home in New Jersey, US, Coreen Burke, 16, clicked on the same image in her inbox. She saw a village with its old houses, and a distant chimney puffing smoke.

    “Isn't this amazingly different from my country?” she thought to herself.

    Burke saw potential in that photo. She posted it to her blog, Outside My Window，which features a daily snapshot (快照）of someone's window view from different people around the world.

    The concept (理念）is simple: We can all relate to the act of staring through a pane of lass (一块玻璃)，onto the scene on the other side,

    “Maybe if we understood the way people from all over the world live,” she added, “we would get along better than we have been lately.”

    On the sit，Can see Frederic's window in the south of France, looking out on sailboats anchored in a tranquil  harbor(宁静的港湾).0r Virginia's view in Canada, a winter scene with trees laced in white.

    Like most high school students, Burke has yet to travel the world. But she hopes to someday collect many stamps in her passport,starting in Greece and India. In the meantime, however, she's devoting herself to her website.she posted the first window view from Switzerland, a sunset captured (拍摄）by an 18-year-old.Then others came flowing in by email, up to seven a day, from as far as Kazakhstan and Indonesia.

    Contributors are marked on a map on her bedroom wall: A blue dot indicates (表示）their country and a pink dot shows their city, if they provide it. The most responses have come from Europe - Estonia, Poland, Italy, Germany and Sweden, to name a few. She is crossing her Angers that she 11 receive a photo from Africa or Antarctica, which are unrepresented so far.

    And while Burke's become a cyber crusader (斗士）for appreciating the beauty outside our own windows, it will probably come as a surprise to learn that she doesn't actually have a window in her own bedroom. But with the views out of other people's she can enjoy whenever she wants to, she surely doesn't mind.

    When Vivienne Harr was 8 years old, she saw a photo she would never forget. It was a photo of two young boys carrying large, heavy rocks on their backs. These children were the same age as Vivienne. But they did not have the same freedom and opportunities that she had.

    In some parts of the world, children have to work hard long days and they can't go to school. Vivienne wanted to change this. “I want all kids to be able to go to school and play,” said Viienne, now 10. “I want them to be happy.”

    To help raise money for children like the two boys in the photo, Vivienne started a lemonade stand (柠檬汽水摊位) near her home in Marin County, California. She promised to work every day for a year, rain or shine. “Sometimes, it was hard for me, when the weather was bad or I wasn't feeling well,” said Vivienne. “But I knew that some children were having a harder time than I was.”

    Vivienne's goal was to raise $100,000 in 365 days. On Day 175, she reached her goal. But that didn't stop Vivienne from working. With the help of her family, she started Make a Stand. The company now puts Vivienne's lemonade into bottles and sells it in 130 stores around the US. A small part of sales goes to help achieve Vivienne's dream — to make the world a better place for all children.

    Life often requires people to join in unpleasant situations. Rather often, these unpleasant situations do not happen on their own, but happen because of other people's actions and words. Fortunately, there are useful ways to deal with conflicts(冲突).

    The best way to solve a conflict is not to let it happen. Nothing useful comes out of a conflict. It is a total waste of time and energy for both sides and thus everyone should try his best to prevent conflict. To do this, you will need to learn the points of view your potential opponents (对手) share and the benefits of understanding people around you.

    If the conflict has already arisen, one of the best methods to settle disagreements is to treat the situation with humor. It does not mean, however, that you must ignore（忽视） your opponent's arguments and make jokes about them; it means that you should be in a friendly atmosphere, saying difficult-to-express things with a bit of humor. Humor will help you reduce anger and re-think problems to make them look easier to settle, and set your opponent's mind to working on a problem with you, not against you. This way, a conflict can become an opportunity for building a greater connection between you and your opponent.

    If the situation turns verbally abusive (恶语中伤), put a stop to it. Firmly but calmly state: "You're very angry right now and you're saying things you don't mean. I'm going to excuse myself. We can talk again after you calm down." Then leave the room or ask them to leave.

    In the kitchen of my mother's houses there has always been a wooden stand (木架)with a small notepad(记事本)and a hole for a pencil.

    I'm looking for paper on which to note down the name of a book I am recommending to my mother. Over forty years since my earliest memories of the kitchen pad and pencil, five houses later, the current paper and pencil look the same as they always did. Surely it can't be the same pencil. The pad is more modern, but the wooden stand is definitely the original one.

    "I'm just amazed you still have the same stand for holding the pad and pencil after all these year." I say to her, walking back into the living-room with a sheet of paper and the pencil. "You still use a pencil. Can't you afford a pen?"

    My mother replies a little sharply. "It works perfectly well. I've always kept the stand in the kitchen. I never knew when I might want to note down an idea, and I was always in the kitchen in those days."

    Immediately I can picture her, hair wild, blue housecoat covered in flour, a wooden spoon in one hand, the pencil in the other, her mouth moving silently. My mother smiles and says, "One day I was cooking and watching baby Pauline, and I had a brilliant thought, but the stand was empty. One of the children must have taken the paper. So I just picked up the breadboard and wrote it all down on the back. It turned out to be a real breakthrough for solving the mathematical problem I was working on."

    This story—which happened before I was born—reminds me how extraordinary my mother was, and is, as a gifted mathematician. I feel embarrassed that I complain about not having enough child-free time to work. Later, when my mother is in the bathroom, I go into her kitchen and turn over the breadboards. Sure enough, on the back of the smallest one, are some penciled marks I recognize as mathematics. Those symbols have traveled unaffected through fifty years, rooted in the soil of a cheap wooden breadboard, invisible(看不到的)exhibits at every meal.