We all believe we listen well and yet many times we feel others are not listening to us. However, listening goes in both directions—you may believe you are listening well, but how often have you completely forgotten what was said to you? {#blank#}1{#/blank#}

Make eye contact.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#} when People talk, they put out visual clues that add to the conversation and meaning of their words.

Stop talking.

    You can't listen, talk and at the same time completely receive the meaning of the other person's words. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}

React without words.

    Let the other person know you are listening through physical reactions, such as head nods, smiles, frowns and eye movement.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}

Concentrate.

    Concentrate on what the other person is saying. Clear your mind of other thoughts and emotions and focus on the conversation at hand. Be in the moment of that conversation, and don't think about what you want to say back.

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    Behave as an effective listener. The more you continue to behave as a listener, the more you will be an effective listener.

    People in the United States have many ways to get news, some of which are available 24 hours a day. In a recent survey（调查）, about 15 percent of American interviewees said that they spend less than one-half to two hours per day watching, listening to, or reading the news. News comes from every source, not only from printed ways, but from TV, radio, and the Internet as well.

    With the increased availability of news, serious questions have been raised about the role of the news media in society. Should the media report every detail about every story, even when the information does not seem timely or valuable? Some researchers are concerned that by focusing on everything at once, the media increasingly ignore the more important social, political and economic problems that we face. We cannot concentrate on what's important by reading about what is not. One extreme example of this is the type of information covered by the tabloid（小报）media, which focus on negative stories of violence and crime.

    How can people deal with all the news that is available to them? Some become “news resisters” and choose to turn their backs on news, resisting their desire to turn on the TV and read the paper every day. They argue that although daily news reports may provide us with many facts, they do not include the background or some information that we need to understand news events. They suggest that, instead of daily reports, we look for information that has more in-depth analysis of the news, such as monthly magazines.

    Ammie Reddick from East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, was only 18 months old when she had the accident that had scarred(留下创伤）her for life. The curious child reached up to grab the wire of a hot kettle in the family kitchen and poured boiling water over her tiny infant frame.

    Her mother Ruby turned round and, seeing Ammie horribly burnt, called an ambulance which rushed her daughter to a nearby hospital. Twenty percent of Ammie's body had been burned and all of her burns were third-degree. There, using tissue（组织）taken from unburned areas of Ammie's body, doctors performed complex skin transplants(移植）to close her wounds and control her injuries, an operation that took about six hours. Over the next 16 years, Ammie underwent 12 more operations to repair her body.

    When she started school at Maxwelton Primary at age 4, other pupils made cruel comments or simply wouldn't play with her. "I was the only burned child in the street, the class and the school,” she recalled, “some children refused to become friends because of that.”

    Today, aged 17, Ammie can only ever remember being a burned person with scars; pain is a permanent part of her body. She still has to have two further skin transplants. Yet she is a confident, outgoing teenager who offers inspiration and hope to other young burns victims.

    She is a member of the Scottish Burned Children's Club, a charity set up last year. This month, Ammie will be joining the younger children at the Graffham Water Center in Cambridge shire for the charity's first summer camp. “ I will show them how to get rid of unkind stares from others,” she says. Ammie loves wearing fashionable sleeveless tops, and she plans to show the youngsters at the summer camp that they can too.“ I do not go to great lengths to hide my burns scars,” she says, “ Igave up wondering how other people would react years ago.”

    Eudaimonia is an Ancient Greek word, particularly stressed by the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, which deserves far more attention than it has because it corrects the shortfalls (缺失）in one of the most central, but troubling words in our modem language: happiness.

    When we nowadays try to clearly express the purpose of our lives, it is the word “happiness” that we commonly turn to. We tell ourselves and others that the most important principle for our jobs, our relationships and the conduct of our day-to-day lives is the pursuit of happiness. It sounds like an innocent enough idea, but too much reliance on the term means that we frequently unfairly tend to quit or, at least, heavily question a great many challenging but worthwhile situations. The Ancient Greeks did not believe that the purpose of life was to be happy; they proposed that it was to achieve Eudaimonia, a word which has been best translated as “fulfilment”.

    What distinguishes happiness from fulfilment is pain. It is very possible to be fulfilled and—at the same time—under pressure, suffering physically or mentally, overburdened and, quite frequently, in an irritable (易怒的）mood. This is a slight psychological difference that is hard for the word “happiness” to capture, for it's tricky to speak of being happy yet unhappy, or happy yet suffering. However, such a combination is readily accommodated within the respected and noble-sounding idea of Eudaimonia.

    The word encourages us to trust that many of life's most worthwhile projects will sometimes be in conflict with contentment, and yet will be worth pursuing. Properly exploring our professional talents, managing a household, keeping a relationship going, creating a new business venture or engaging in politics… none of these goals are likely to leave us cheerful and grinning on a daily basis. They will, in fact, involve us in all manner of challenges that will deeply exhaust and weaken us, provoke (激怒）and wound us. And yet we will perhaps, at the end of our lives, still feel that the tasks were worth undertaking. Through them, we'll have achieved something deeper and more interesting than happiness.

    With the word Eudaimonia in mind, we can stop imagining that we are aiming for a pain-free existence—and then blaming ourselves unfairly for being in a bad mood. We'll know that we are trying to do something far more important than smile all the time: we're striving to do justice to our full human potential.

    For centuries, dolphins have got our admiration, and it is easy to see why. They are beautiful, cute and smart sea animals. Dolphins are not fish, but warm-blooded animals. They live in groups, and speak to each other in their own language. In this way, they are like other animals, such as bees and birds. But dolphins are very different from almost all land animals. It is said that dolphins are the world's second brightest creatures after humans and have many brain features related to intelligence. Their brain is nearly the same size as our own, and they live a long time at least twenty or thirty years.

    Like some animals, dolphins use sound to help them find their way around. They also make these sounds to talk to each other and to help them find food. We now know they do not use their ears to receive these sounds, but the lower part of the mouth, called the jaw.

    Strangely, dolphins seem to like man, and for thousands of years there have been stories about the dolphin and its friendship with people.

    There is a story about sailors in the 19th century. In a dangerous part of the sea off the coast of New Zealand, they learnt to look for a dolphin called Jack. From 1871 to 1903, Jack met every boat in the area and showed it the way. Then in 1903 a passenger on a boat called The Penguin shot and wounded Jack. He recovered and for nine years more continued to guide all ships through the area－except for The Penguin.

    Today, some people continue to kill dolphins, but many countries of the world now protect them and in these places it is against the law to kill them.