Hello friends,

    This is Christmas Week, when you may have any emotions of happiness or sadness, pain or panic, fears or frustrations. Put the negative emotions aside and focus on building better relationships with our tips below.

    Relationship Tips for Getting Along at the Holidays

    1). Speak Your Love in Words. The best gift you can give another person is words of praise, thankfulness, and appreciation from your lips.

    2). Hear What Your Friends and Family are Voicing Their Stress. Listen carefully to those around you -- a gift that will lower their stress.

    3). Center Your Heart. Focus on the true, deeper meaning of the holiday season. This will help everyone become easier to get along with because the heart of Christmas will remain whole.

    4). Ask those who are celebrating with you what their expectations are. Communicate the plans clearly so people feel informed.

    5). Be prepared for changes. Don't be a Christmas Scrooge ordering family around. Instead slow the pace, be agreeable, and give choices so that you create an environment of connecting and sharing.

    6). Take Time for being Romantic. The greatest gift you can give your husband or wife, children, and friends is harmony at home.

    7). Express Your Joy. Make memories (and take lots of pictures) by making the most of all your relationships. Capture the best moments with your camera.

    Get the rest of the10 Holiday Tips from each of 14 Experts like this in Simplify Your Holiday Season, available HERE. Get one of the 50 free copies on a first-come, first-served basis or a 50% discount off $30 by Jan 1.2017.

    Mark Your Calendar（日历） for January 4 & 5 our free next online workshop "New Year, New You: Maximize Your Time, Minimize Your Weight."

    Have a very lovely Christmas and Happy New Year! I hope I prepared you well for Christmas, since over 1,000 people downloaded my 8 week Holiday Plan. I hope you were one of them and are peaceful and ready.

Warmly,

Marcia Ramsland, The Holiday Coach

www.OrganizingPro.com/Holidays

"Coaching Busy People to Make Every Day Count!"

    A great white shark in a California aquarium attacked two soupfin sharks(翅鲨), causing their deaths. The attack was not a natural action for food, but a kind of response when the two sharks swam too close to the great white. The great white didn't attacked other fellows, but the officials had to move other soupfin sharks to another tank(贮水池)for their safety.

    These attacks had given rise to calls for the freedom of the 88-pound, 5-foot-3- inch shark. The aquarium housed the shark in a huge tank. However, according to experts, the tank was not big enough for the shark. Its nose was bloody from striking the glass of the aquarium. Great white sharks in the wild had a big amount of migration, sometimes traveling 50 miles a day. Because the shark was still young, there was possibility of his growing. As it grows, it can became more troubled in the limited space.

    Aquarium officials said that keeping the shark in the aquarium allowed them to study their behavior that they cannot study with free great white sharks. When they studied behavioral patterns, scientists believed that they can help great white sharks in the wild.

    Since the shark had been on display, the number of people who visited aquarium increased greatly. The one-year-old shark was the longest surviving great white living here. It had been at the Monterey Bay Aquarium for six months. Other great whites did not survive for longer than 16 days in the aquarium.

阅读下列短文，从每题所给的四个选项 （A 、B 、C  和 D ）中，选出最佳选项。

    Heroes of Our Time

    A good heart

    Dikembe Mutombo grew up in Africa among great poverty and disease. He came to Georgetown University on a scholarship to study medicine — but Coach (教练) John Thompson got a look at Dikembe and had a different idea. Dikembe became a star in the NBA, and a citizen of the United States. But he never forgot the land of his birth, or the duty to share his fortune with others. He built a new hospital in his old hometown in the Congo. A friend has said of this good-hearted man: “Mutombo believes that God has given him this chance to do great things.”

    Success and kindness

    After her daughter was born, Julie Aigner-Clark searched for ways to share her love of music and art with her child. So she borrowed some equipment, and began filming children's videos in her own house. The Baby Einstein Company was born, and in just five years her business grew to more than $20 million in sales. And she is using her success to help others — producing child safety videos with John Walsh of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Julie says of her new program: “I believe it's the most important thing that I have ever done. I believe that children have the right to live in a world that is safe.”

    Bravery and courage

    A few weeks ago, Wesley Autrey was waiting at a Harlem subway station with his two little girls when he saw a man fall into the path of a train. With seconds to act, Wesley jumped onto the tracks, pulled the man into the space between the rails, and held him as the train passed right above their heads. He insists he's not a hero. He says: “We have got to show each other some love.”

    As a Fulbright（富布莱特法案基金）scholar at Yale, I wanted very much to get some individual help from some famous professors, but their office-hours were only once a week and there were always students waiting outside. At first, I was too polite to get their help. Then I realized that Chinese politeness does not work in this society. I needed to be aggressive to get what I wanted. I also noticed that Chinese students or Asian students were very polite in class while American students often interrupted the professor, asking questions and dominating the discussion. The Chinese students were not as aggressive as American students.

    I was impressed by the role of the professor in the class. The professor didn't act as an authority, giving final conclusions, but as a researcher looking for answers to questions together with the students. One linguistic feature of his interacting with his students was that he used many modal verbs-far more than I did in Beiwai. When answering questions, he usually said: “this is my personal opinion and it could be wrong. It would be a good idea if you could read the book I mentioned the other day.” Or,“ You may find the book I recommended helpful.” Or,“You could be right, but you might find this point of view also interesting.” When making comments on students' performances, the professor usually said:” It might have been much clearer if you had taken in some of the ideas we discussed earlier this semester.”

    In China, authorities are always supposed to give wise decisions and correct directions. Therefore students always expect the professor to give an answer to the question. I still remember how annoyed they were when foreign teachers did not provide such an answer. Their expectations from authorities are much higher than those of American students. Once the Chinese students got the answer, they were sure about it. That is why they make far more certain statement than American students. That is why Chinese students find it difficult to use modal verbs because the function of modal verbs is to provide room for negotiation and different ideas.

    In 1888 an Egyptian farmer digging in the sand near the village of Istabl Antar uncovered a mass grave. The bodies weren't human. They were feline — ancient cats that had been mummified(木乃伊化的) and buried in holes in astonishing numbers. "Not one or two here and there", reported English Illustrated Magazine, "but dozens, hundreds, hundreds of thousands, a layer of them, a layer thicker than most coal joints, ten to twenty cats deep. " Some of the linen-wrapped cats still looked presentable, and a few even had golden faces. Village children peddled the best ones to tourists for change; the rest were sold as fertilizer. One ship transported about 180,000, weighing some 38, 000 pounds, to Liverpool to be spread on the fields of England.

    Those were the days of generously funded explorations—that dragged through acres of desert in their quest for royal tombs, and for splendid gold and painted masks to decorate the estates and museums of Europe and America. The many thousands of mummified animals that turned up at religious sites throughout Egypt were just things to be cleared away to get at the good stuff. Few people studied them, and their importance was generally unrecognized.

    In the century since then, archaeology has become less of a treasure hunt and more of a science. Archaeologists now realize that much of their sites' wealth lies in the majority of details about ordinary folks—what they did, what they thought, how they prayed. And animal mummies are a big part of that.

    "They're really displays of daily life," says Egyptologist Salima Ikram. After peering beneath bandages with x-rays and cataloguing her findings, she created a gallery for the collection — a bridge between people today and those of long ago. "You look at these mummified animals, and suddenly you say, Oh, King So-and-So had a pet. I have a pet. And instead of being at a distance of 5,000-plus years, the ancient Egyptians become clearer and closer to us."

    Perhaps you have heard a lot about the Internet, but what is it, do you know? The Internet is a network. It uses the telephone to join millions of computers together around the world.

    Maybe that doesn't sound very interesting. But when you've joined to the Internet, there are lots of things you can do. You can send e-mails to your friends, and they can get them in a few seconds. You can also do with all kinds of information on the World Wide Web (WWW).

    There are many different kinds of computers now. They all can be joined to the Internet. Most of them are small machines sitting on people's desks at home, but there are still many others in schools, offices or large companies. These computers are owned by people and companies, but no one really owns the Internet itself.

    There are lots of places for you to go into the Internet. For example, your school may have the Internet, you can use it during lessons or free time. Libraries often have computers joined to the Internet, you are welcome to use it at any time.

    Thanks to the Internet, the world is becoming smaller and smaller. It is possible for you to work at home with a computer in front, getting and sending the information you need. You can buy or sell whatever you want by the Internet. But do you know 98% of the information on the Internet is in English? So what will English be like tomorrow?