When other nine-year-old kids were playing games, she was working at a petrol station. When other teens were studying or going out, she struggled to find a place to sleep on the street. But she overcame these terrible setbacks to win a highly competitive scholarship and gain entry to Harvard University. And her amazing story has inspired a movie, "Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story" shown in late April.

    Liz Murray, a 22.year-old American girl, has been writing a real-life story of willpower and determination. Liz grew up in the shadow of two drug-addicted parents. There was never enough food or warm clothes in the house. Liz was the only member of the family who had a job. Her mother had AIDS and died when Liz was just l5 years old. The effect of that LOSS became a turning point in her life. Connecting the environment in which she had grown up with how her mother had died,she decided to do something about it.

    Liz went back to school. She threw herself into her studies, never telling her teachers that she was homeless. At night, she lived on the streets. ".What drove me to live on had something to do with understanding, by understanding that there was a whole other way of being. I had only experienced a small part of the society,'' she wrote in her book Breaking Night.

    She admitted that she used envy to drive herself on. She used the benefits that come easily to others, such as a safe living environment, to encourage herself that "next to nothing could hold me down".

    She finished high school in just two years and won a full scholarship to study at Harvard University. But Liz decided to leave her top university a couple of months earlier this year in order to take care of her father, who has also developed AIDS."I love my parents so much. They are drug addicts. But I never forget that they love me all the time."

    Liz wants moviegoers to come away with the idea that changing your life is "as simple as making a decision".

    Maybe you are an ordinary student. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} This is not necessarily so. Anyone can become a better student if he or she wants to. Here's how:

    Plan your time carefully. When planning your work, you should make a list of things that you have to do. After making this list, you should make a schedule of your time. First arrange your time for eating, sleeping, dressing, etc, then decide a good, regular time for studying. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} A weekly schedule may not solve all your problems, but it will force you realize what is happening to your time.

    Make good use of your time in class. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Listening carefully in class means less work later. Taking notes will help you remember what the teacher says.

    Study regularly. When you get home from school, go over your notes, review the important points that your teacher is going to discuss the next day, read that material. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} If you do these things regularly, the material will become more meaningful, and you will remember it longer.

    Develop a good attitude towards tests. The purpose of a test is to show what you have learned about a subject. The world won't end if you don't pass a test, so don't be over worried.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} You will probably discover many others after you have tried these.

A. This will help you understand the next class.

B. You probably think you will never be a top student.

C. Don't forget to set aside enough time for entertainment.

D. No one can become a top student unless he or she works hard.

E. There are other methods that might help you with your study.

F. Take advantage of class time to listen to everything the teacher says.

G. Make full use of spare time to take note of what the teacher says in class.

    The trouble with school is that you can't choose the people you get to see every day. If you're unlucky enough to be stuck with classmates who don't really “get” you, you've just got to try to make the best of it.

    But that doesn't mean you need to “fit in”, or at least in the way that people think. If you try to transform yourself into a clone of everyone else, it won't help you make friends. It'll just make you feel like a fake.

    You also shouldn't shut down or refuse to be friends with everyone who doesn't like you. If you do that, you'll just make yourself miserable. Instead, you've got to work on being comfortable and confident with whom you are while ignoring（忽略）all the haters. Keep on speaking up, asking questions and getting to know people better. If you send out positive energy, then people will generally send some back to you. A couple of them will stay the same, and you're allowed to forget about them.

    If you feel like you've doing all that but still not getting anywhere, then don't give up. Just expand your circle. Get a part-time job at a cool-looking place, join an after-school art class or youth group—do whatever it takes to find a couple of like-minded people to connect with. Even if you don't find anyone right away, you'll still be getting some more social experiences under your belt, and that's always a good thing.

    A fun book called Uncool, by Erin Elisabeth Conley, has some tips for folks like you who want to stay positive at school while being true to your personality:

    Throw caution to the wind.

    Don't tolerate others' mistakes.

    Have patience with people who are different from you.

    Don't change just because someone else thinks you should.

    Know that even though you may be a misfit, there's always some place where you will be welcomed in the world.

    If you cannot afford to travel in any class above economy, flying generally sucks, either a little or a lot, depending on your tolerance level. But it especially sucks if you are too wide for the airline's design.

    Just getting to your seat can be a challenge, as your hips (臀部，髋) bounce from seat to seat on each side of the aisle (过道). If someone is standing up to put things in the overhead locker, there is a decision to be made about whether it's worth trying to squeeze past. Everything is just slightly too small: the seats, the overhead lockers, even the bathrooms—and those, it seems, are getting even smaller.

    The Washington Post recently reported that, on some newer planes flown by American, Delta and United airlines, the bathrooms in economy class are just 61cm wide: about 25cm narrower than the average portable toilet, and roughly the width of the average dishwasher. Your face might be the only thing you can poke in there comfortably—which makes it a poor design, considering what a passenger is likely to need the bathroom for.

    According to the manufacturer, these "Advanced Spacewell" bathrooms make space for six additional passengers, which is great for the airlines' financial bottom line. But what about the other bottom line? Concerning, well, bottoms that can't fit into their planes' bathrooms?

    As bodies get bigger and aeroplane spaces get smaller, the wide among us have come up with solutions. Armrests that turn us into sausages (香肠) can be pulled up, or slowly encased (围住，包起) into the soft flesh of our sides until we go numb (麻木). We can ask the flight attendant to get us a seat-belt extender, if security has confiscated the one we brought with us, as can sometimes happen. But squeezing into a tiny toilet and closing the door behind us? Not workable.

    Unlike the impossible task of squeezing down the aisle to your seat, or the side-to-side dance necessary to get big hips past the armrests, fitting into a space just 61cm wide is not just a challenge—it is almost impossible. It is not like missing out on an option for the in-flight meal—a bathroom is as essential as a safety-compliant seat belt, or the air that is pumped in to the cabin (飞机舱). If airlines are not willing to make space for us, bigger passengers may have no option but to reconsider booking a flight at all.

    Stepinac has become one of the first high schools in the country to drop all textbooks and replace them with a "digital library". When students started classes on Monday, they were zipping to an app on their tablets or laptops and bad instant access to all 40 texts in the Stepinac curriculum (课程).

    Dennis Lauro, director of an information center which provides technical support to public schools in New York, said neither he nor his colleagues were aware of a similar digital effort in a public school setting. "This is the wave of the future." Lauro said. "I'm not surprised that a private school would beat the public schools to it. They have the ability to just do it. There is so much politics involved in public schools, when it comes to a move like that, needing approval from boards and committees."

    For Tom Collins, Stepinac's president, the commitment to digital source material was not so difficult a decision. In the past, students' families had to spend up to $ 700 a year on textbooks. This year — after the one-time purchase of a tablet or laptop — families only need to pay $ 150. Using the digital library is almost as easy as opening a new book. A student can instantly lap into a digital book and open a map of Egypt or a speech by President John F. Kennedy. A teacher can show a page from a digital book on a whiteboard at the front of the class or send students a link to a particular math problem with notes added in.

    The first few weeks may bring some challenges. Stepinac officials expect some parental discomfort over dropping concrete books. They recognize there may be technical faults at first. And they will have to encourage students to leave space-eating photos and music off their tablets — and to keep their tablets charged.