When I came to Cincinnati as an au pair (家庭打工留学生), a lot of things there were different from what I knew. My host family lived in a huge house I could only describe as a "castle"．In Germany I had lived in a small apartment together with my mom. Soon I found out that the "castle" was actually rather small in our neighborhood.

    Everybody there was very friendly and polite. They greeted you when they were walking by at least 3 feet away from you. They must not have seen a German au pair before, for most people I met asked me all kinds of questions about Germany. I enjoyed answering their various strange questions. I made a lot of friends and I started to hang out with them.

    Of course, there were a number of new things, and it took me the whole year to find them all out. I never got homesick. Perhaps it was because I did not have too many negative experiences and felt loved and welcomed there.

    However, I had undergone some painful experience back in Germany. I was frustrated by the way people would run me over and not even say "Sorry." Taking up my studies at the TU-Dresden, I felt lonely. Everybody here seemed to be withdrawn(离群的) and I missed everything I had in Cincinnati. Germany was so "cold". I found it so much harder to make new friends. After six months I got a roommate and only two good friends. I also flew back to Cincinnati several times for long periods. I felt that without those visits I was not able to make it.

    Now I am over this German culture shock. It almost took me an entire year. I am still going back and forward between Dresden and Cincinnati four times a year.

    Windbreaks are barriers (屏障) formed by trees and other plants. Farmers plant these barriers around their fields, which help prevent the loss of soil, stop the wind from blowing soil away. They also keep the wind from damaging or destroying crops. Besides, extra trees and plants can be cut down and used or sold for wood.

    Windbreaks can be highly valuable for protecting grain crops. For example, in parts of West Africa grain harvests were as much as twenty percent higher in fields protected by windbreaks compared to fields without them.

    But here is something interesting about windbreaks. They seem to work best when they allow some wind to pass through the barrier of trees or plants around a field. If not, then the movement of air close to the ground will lift the soil. Then the soil will be blown away. For this reason, a windbreak works best if it contains only 60 to 80 percent of the trees and plants that would be needed to make a solid line. An easy rule to remember is that windbreaks can protect areas up to 10 times the height of the tallest trees in the windbreak.

    There should be at least two lines in each windbreak. One line should be large trees. The second line, right next to it, can be shorter trees or other plants with leaves. Locally grown trees and plants are considered the best choices for windbreaks. Trees reduce the damaging effects of wind and rain. Their roots help protect soil from being washed away. And trees can provide animals outdoors with shade from the sun.

    You might not get what you wish for, but you always get what you work for. I want to be a professional ballerina(芭蕾舞者) with the American Ballet Theatre in New York when I grow up, and I work toward my dream by training over 18 hours a week. I even started homeschooling so I could make more time for dance. I love dancing more than anything. It makes me feel strong and invincible(不可战胜的), like nothing could ever bother me. Most important, it's helped me deal with the most difficult event of my life — the death of my dad when I was seven.

    My dad died of a heart attack while playing hockey, his favorite sport. When my mom first told me, it didn't hit me that I would never be able to see him again. It was also hard to tell my friends and classmates because I didn't know what to say, and they never knew how to respond. But four years later, everything that I do, I do in memory of my dad. I did my first dance solo. “The Love Lives On.” to him when I was nine.

    I would have never gotten through the experience without my mom. She comforted me when I was in grief and pain, and we wrote down all the memories I had with my dad in a special book. Now that I'm older, my mom and I do get on each other's nerves more often — for a while, my schedule was very busy and we were so stressed that our little miscommunications would rise into huge arguments. But after we attended counseling(心理咨询) and I started homeschooling, things got much better, and now my mom and I have more quality time to spend together.

    I've learned that talking and communicating are the most important things to do in any relationship, and that definitely includes friendships, too! When I hang out with my friends, I try not to look at my phone. It's so awkward(尴尬的) when you're sitting at a table with someone else, and she's texting instead of talking to you. I think a good friend is kind, respectful, fair, and funny — and I'll always try to be all of these things in person, not just on the phone!

    As our closest neighbor in space, the moon has been the subject of popular myths, songs and poems since ancient times. And it has no less fascinated scientists. But even after centuries of research many questions remain to be answered about Earth's only satellite. Perhaps the Chang'e-4 lunar probe will be able to reveal more of its secrets.

    On Dec 8, the probe lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan Province. It is the first probe to the far side of moon.

    The Earth's gravity slows the moon's rotation, matching it to the speed of its orbit. Thus, the far side of the moon is always dark and has never been seen. It's this sense of the unknown that makes the far side of the moon such an interesting place for scientific and space exploration.

Long exposed to solar winds, the far side may have the special soil and minerals in its upper mantle(地幔).For this reason, Chang'e-4 will study the effect of solar winds on the lunar surface and any minerals found beneath the spacecraft.

    Chang'e-4 is also carrying flower seeds and potato and silkworm eggs to see whether life is possible on the moon. If it is, then the moon will become a more likely destination for space travel in the future. However, due to communication problems, exploration of the dark side will not be easy.

    As the far side is blocked off from us, radio noise coming off Earth is also blocked. This is why China launched the relay satellite Queqiao in May—so that communication between Earth and the probe could go ahead. Power supply will also be a challenge to the mission.

    Chang'e-4 gets energy from the sun through its solar panels. However, a lunar day has the length of 28 Earth days. This means that the probe will need to orbit the moon for over 20 days to be in a position to be able to land in moon daylight and so use its solar panels.

    According to Xinhua, if everything goes well, the satellite will land on the far side on Jan 2.

    The New York Times described the journey as “groundbreaking”, and wrote that it will “give clues to the history and development of the moon”.

    Ten years ago, I set out to examine luck. I wanted to know why some people were always in the right place at the right time, while others consistently experienced ill fortune. I placed advertisements in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky. Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research. Over the years I have interviewed them, monitored their lives and had them take part in various experiments.

    In one of the experiments, I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, asking them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. I had secretly placed a large message halfway through the newspaper, saying, "Tell the experimenter you have seen this and you will win $50." This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high. It was staring everyone in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

    Unlucky people are generally more nervous than lucky people, and this anxiety affects their ability to notice the unexpected. As a result, they miss opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to gatherings concentrating on finding their perfect partners and miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and miss other types of jobs.

    Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for. My research eventually showed that lucky people are skilled at noticing opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition (直觉), are open to new experiences, and adopt a never-say-die attitude that transforms bad luck into good luck.

Adults check their phones, on average,360 times a day, and spend almost three hours a day on their devices in total. The problem for many of us is that one quick phone-related task leads to a quick check of our emails or social media feeds, and suddenly we've been sucked into endless scrolling.

It's an awful circle. The more useful our phones become, the more we use them. The more we use them, the more we lay neural（神经的） pathways in our brains that lead to pick up our phones for whatever task is at hand-and the more we feel an urge to check our phones even when we don't have to.

What we do know is that the simple distraction of checking a phone or seeing a notification（通知）can have negative consequences. This isn't very surprising; we know that, in general, multitasking does harm to memory and performance. One of the most dangerous examples is phone use while driving. One study found that merely speaking on the phone, not texting, was enough to make drivers slower to react on the road. It's true for everyday tasks that are less high-risk, too. Simply hearing a notification "ding" made participants of another study perform far worse on a task-almost as badly as participants who were speaking or texting on the phone during the task.

It isn't just the use of a phone that has consequences-its me re presence can affect the way we think.

In one recent study, for example, researchers asked participants to either put their phones next to them so they were visible（like on a desk）, nearby and out of sight（like in a bag or pocket）, or in another room. They were found to perform far better when their phones were in another room instead of nearby-whether visible, powered on or not.