Many teenagers feel that the most important people in their lives are their friends．They believe that their family members, especially their parents, don't know them as well their friends do．In large families, it is often for brothers and sisters to fight with each other and then they can only go to their friends for advice．It is very important for teenagers to have one good friend or many friends．Even when they are not with their friends, they usually spend a lot of time talking among themselves on the phone．This communication is very important in children's growing up, because friend can discuss something difficult to say to their family members.

    However, parents often try to choose their children's friends for them．Some parents may even stop their children from meeting their good friends．The question of “choice” is an interesting one．Have you ever thought of the following questions?

    Who choose your friends?

    Do you choose your friends or your friends choose you?

    Have you got a good friend your parent don't like?

    How many ways are there to reach the state of being happy?

    1）  Happiness is not an aim, but a journey. If you seek for pleasure in the course of the journey, the course will become a destination, and what's more, it will be a prolonged, boundlessly beneficial destination for all your life.

    2）  {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Remain standing here, seize the present moment, and you will be happy.

    3）  Happiness is mental before it is physical. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} It is better to eat without meat than to have a load on your mind.

    4）  Happiness is the opposite of unhappiness.{#blank#}3{#/blank#} Release yourself from the unhappy mood and you will be happy.

    5）  Happiness is a matter of giving; the more you give out, the more you will get back. Share your happiness with others and you will enjoy it more.

    6）  Happiness is a very strange thing. It will not turn up when you beckon it, call it, and solicit it. But when you pretend complete indifference, it will pay too much attention to you, learn close to you and live with you.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}

    7） {#blank#}5{#/blank#} It is unwise as well as useless to try to keep it. You have got to keep on making new happiness, so that one happiness follows in the wake of another.

    8） The greatest happiness you can gain is realizing that you are not necessarily in need of it.

A. In dealing with happiness, you should adopt the strategy of leaving it at large to understand it better.

B. The decline of one means the growth of the other.

C. When you meet everyone, try smiling to them.

D. The happy place is this place, and the happy moment is this moment.

E. Happiness is drifting from place to place.

F. Smiling is a gift that God gives us.

G. In order to be physically happy to the full, you must first feel at ease and be free of worry.

    Do you want to live forever? By the year 2050,you might actually get your wish-if you are willing to leave your biological body and live in silicon circuits (半导体电路). But long before then, perhaps as early as 2020,some measures will begin offering a semblance of immortality (虚的永生).

    Researchers are confident that the technology will soon be able to track every waking moment of your life? Whatever you see and hear, all that you say and write, can be recorded, analyzed and added to your  personal chronicles (履历). By the year 2030, it may be possible to catch your nervous systems through electrical activities, which would also keep your thoughts and emotions.

    Researchers at the laboratories of British Telecommunications have given the name of this idea as Soul Catcher. Small electronic equipment will make preparation for Soul Catcher. It would use a wearable supercomputer, perhaps in a wristwatch, with wireless links to microseosors under your scalp (头皮) and in the nerves that carry all five sensory signals. So wearing a video camera would no longer be required.

    At first, the Soul Catcher's companion system-the Soul Reader-might have trouble copying your thoughts in complete details. Even in 2030, we may still be struggling to understand how the brain is working inside, so reading your thoughts and understanding your emotions might not be possible. But these signals could be kept for the day when they can be transferred to silicon circuits to revitalize minds everlasting entities (永生实体). Researchers can only wonder what it will be like to wake up one day and find yourself alive inside a machine.

For people who choose not to live in silicon, semblance of immortal it would not be as useless as they thought. People would know their lives would not be forgotten, but would be kept a record of the human race forever. And future generations would have a much fuller understanding of the past. History would not be controlled by just the rich and powerful, Hollywood stars, and a few thinkers in the upper society.

    situation in which they had to observe two circles on a screen.

    At first glance,price-comparison websites are an example of capitalism at its best.But it has caused fierce competition on price and eviscerated profits.Towers Watson,a consultancy,said that "unnecessary" price competition following the rise of comparison sites in Britain had cost insurers ￡1 billion a year.

    Consumers should celebrate that;the firms' losses are their gains.But there is a catch.Comparison sites introduce a new layer of costs,including their own advertising campaigns.In theory,competition in the market for comparison sites ought to keep those costs down.But David Ronayne of Warwick University argues that consumers often lose out from comparison sites.They earn a commission for each shopper who uses them for consumption such as buying insurance.That referral（委托）cost is included in the price the consumer ends up paying.If the increased costs outweigh the saving the comparison enables,consumers end up worse off.

    These worries are not just theoretical.In 2014,Britain's competition regulator found that many comparison sites were using their contracts with retailers（零售商）to ban them from offering lower prices elsewhere.That weakened rivals' incentive（对手的动机）to cut fees,because prices on their site could not fall.By keeping prices similar,the contracts also reduced the incentive for consumers to search on multiple sites,thus helping sites retain their users.

    Weaker incentives to lower commissions mean weaker incentives to lower costs,too.That might explain why comparison websites advertise so heavily,and sometimes offer free gifts to those who use them.In a recent paper,Ben Edelman of Harvard Business School and Julian Wright of the National University of Singapore argue that when a site knows that the prices merchants provide through it will always be the lowest available,it increases investment in attracting customers,safe in the knowledge that the merchants and at last consumers will bear the cost.

    Is there any way to ensure the market for price comparison is competitive?Asking consumers to check multiple websites defeats the point of using them.One solution is to have only one site,but regulate it as a public utility（功用）. Alternatively,the governments could run the site itself.But creating good search and comparison sites may be too hard for them.It is much better to acknowledge that consumers will always have to do some comparison themselves to "keep the system honest".

    Websites that compare the comparison sites can help,although it is easy to see how they could fall prey to the same problems.Any firm with captive users（被动用户）,be it a comparison site a search engine,or a social-media platform,can charge a high price for access to the eyes of its customers.For all their innovation,Internet middlemen are not unlike supermarkets.Shoppers would never imagine that a single store had the lowest price for all the items they need.

    What's best to read this year?

    Secrets I Know (Random House Children's Books, ages 3-7)

    This tale written by Kallie George and pictured by Paola Zakimi follows a young girl and her little friend as they move from rain to sunshine, from pleasant loneliness to sweet friendship, and finally from adventures on earth to an exploration of the sky above. The colors of Zakimi's pencildrawings are calming and George's poetic text tells her story with simple language.

    Pandora (Clarion Books, ages 3-7)

    The award-winning author Victoria Turnbull tells the story of a little fox Pandora. Pandora lives alone. She makes herself a handsome home, but no one ever comes to visit. Then one day something falls from the sky -- a bird with a broken wing. Little by little, the bird helps Pandora feel less lonely. Turnbull's watercolor and colored pencil drawings make this story of friendship and growth an atmospheric delight.

    Prince and Pirate (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Younger Readers, ages 5-8)

    A different kind of friendship is described in this book, by Charlotte Gunnufson with pictures by Mike Lowery. Prince and Pirate are a pair of mismatched fish put into the same aquarium（水族馆). At first it seems that they'll never learn to be friends. It's only when both take pity on a frightened dogfish that they learn the benefits of cooperation, and soon all three fish become good friends.

    The Giant Jumperee (Dinal Books, ages 3-5)

    The story was written by the award-winning British author Julia Donaldson. When Rabbit hears a loud voice bellowing（吼叫）threateningly from inside a cave, he gathers Cat, Bear and Elephant to help him decide what to do. But it's Mama Frog who fearlessly confronts（面对）the unknown creature. Helen Oxenbury's soft watercolors creat a beautiful countryside and her characterizations of the animals are impressive.

If you are a psychology enthusiast, you have probably heard of the famous marshmallow (棉花糖) test. In this task, kids are given a single treat, such as a marshmallow, and are told that they can eat that marshmallow now, or they can wait a little while, and have two marshmallows instead.

Some kids eat the marshmallow immediately, but most try their best to wait for the experimenter to come back with two marshmallows.

Wait times in the marshmallow test came to be seen as indicators of self-control. But what if the behavior in the marshmallow test has more to do with cultural norms (准则) than self-control? A 2022 study by Yanaoka tested the idea that children may decide how long to wait for rewards based on what they are accustomed to waiting for in their culture. In the United States (with some exceptions), there is no widespread custom of waiting until everyone is served to eat your food. However, in Japan, there is a mealtime custom of waiting until everyone has been served before anyone digs in.

Because of this difference in norms, the researchers assumed that Japanese children would wait longer in the marshmallow test than the American children. This is exactly what they found. The researchers did a clever follow-up experiment. They found one field where children in the U.S. are accustomed to waiting longer than Japanese children are: Opening presents. In the U.S., gifts are usually given on special occasions, such as birthdays and Christmas. On these occasions, children usually have to wait before they can open their presents. In Japan, however, gift-giving happens more often, and children usually open presents immediately.

Given these cultural differences, Yanaoka expected that if they ran the marshmallow test with Japanese and American kids, but they replaced marshmallows with packaged gifts, then American kids would wait longer to open them. Once again, their assumption was correct. When the potential rewards were packaged gifts instead of food, American children waited 15 minutes on average, and Japanese children waited about four minutes on average.

This is a powerful result because it demonstrates the importance of culture and habit in shaping behavior. If a child waits only four minutes before giving up on two marshmallows but then waits almost four times longer to open a gift, can we really say that that child lacks self-control? I don't think so.