Father's Day

    The United States is one of the few countries in the world that has an official day on which fathers are honored by their children. On the third Sunday in June, fathers all across the United States are given presents, treated to dinner or otherwise made to feel special.

    However, the idea for creating a day for children to honor their fathers began in Spokane, Washington. A woman by the name of Sonora Smart Dodd thought of the idea for Father's Day while listening to a Mother's Day sermon in 1909. Having been raised by her father, Henry Jackson Smart, after her mother died, Sonora wanted her father to know how special he was to her. It was her father that made all the parental sacrifices and was, in the eyes of his daughter, a selfless and loving man. Sonora's father was born in June, so she chose to hold the first Father's Day celebration in Spikane, Washington on the 19th of June, 1910.

    In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge declared the third Sunday in June as Father's Day. Roses are the Father's Day flowers: red to be worn for a living father and white if the father has died.

    When children can't visit their fathers or take them out to dinner, they send a greeting card. Traditionally, fathers prefer greeting cards that are not too sentimental. Most greeting cards are too special so fathers laugh when they open them. Some give heartfelt thanks for being there whenever the child needed Dad.

    What's the biggest online shopping day in the world? Not Valentine's Day. Not Cyber Monday or Black Friday. The winner is China's Singles' Day, celebrated on November11, or 11.11.

    Singles' Day began as a day for unmarried or uncoupled people to celebrate their lives. Single students, looking for an excuse to buy themselves presents, started it on November11,1993, reported The Guardian. It is symbolized by the four mumber ones in the date of November11 and is also called Double Eleven, in reference to the day it was started, said the BBC. It became a major shopping day in 2009. The CEO of an online shopping site --Alibaba-- tried to increase sales at the e-commerce company. The CEO, Daniel Zhang, launched an annual online sale on that day, said Fortune. When it first began, "Sigles' Day was very much an offline comfort to actual single people," noted the website atlas Obscura."A small group of students at Nanjing University are said to have chosen 11.11 as a day that singles could do activities like karaoke together." It quickly became a cultural phenomenon.

    Last year, Alibaba sold more than $1 billion worth of products in the first three minutes of the sales, reported Bloomberg News. Total sales on Singles' Day soared to $9 billion within 24 hours. That's four times bigger than Cyber Monday in the U.S., which is the Monday after Thanksgiving and traditionally a big shopping day. By comparison, online sales in the U.S. last year on Black Friday were just $1.5 billion, reported TechCrunch.

    Today, Singles' Day is very successful. Analysts say that this year, sales on China's Singles' Day will increase to a new high. In the U.S., Jennifer Wang, a co-founder of a company targeting Chinese-Americans, said, "We expect to have 3 million people coming to click Dealmoon for the Singles' Day launch." Some observers think Singles' Day could catch on globally.

    One night, the first floor of the house suddenly caught fire. The fire was big, and soon became a sea of fire. On the second floor lived a little girl and her grandmother; the little girl's parents had died, and she lived together with her grandma. In order to rescue the little girl, the grandmother was burned to death, leaving the little girl crying for help loudly.

    How could people enter the house? At the very moment, a man carrying a ladder rushed to the flames and entered the house through the window. When he appeared again in the eyes of the people, the little girl was in his arms. He gave the child to the crowd, and then disappeared into the night.

    This little girl had no family. Two months later a meeting was held to find a person to adopt the girl. A teacher was willing to adopt this child, and said she could give her the best education; a farmer wanted to adopt this child, saying that village life would let the child grow up healthily and happily; a rich man said, “I can give the child everything that others can do.”

    A lot of people who wanted to adopt this child said a lot about the benefits of their adopting the child. But the little girl's face had no expression. At this time, a man, through the crowd, walked straight to the little girl, and opened his arms for the little girl. People were puzzled, and they found that the man had terrible scars on his arms. The little girl let out a cry, “This is the man who saved me!” She suddenly jumped up and buried her face in his arms and sobbed. Naturally the man adopted the girl.

    If you want to become a fluent English speaker you should take some advice. There are four skills in learning English. They are reading, listening, speaking, and writing. The most important thing you must remember is that if you want to improve your speaking and writing skills, you should first master the skills of reading and listening.

    Read as much as you can. But your reading must be active. It means that you must think about the meaning of the sentence, the meaning of the unfamiliar（不熟悉） words, etc. There is no need for you to pay much attention to grammars or try to understand all the unfamiliar words you come across, but the fact that you see them for the first time and recognize them whenever you see them, for example, in other passages or books, is enough. It would be better to prepare yourself a notebook so you can write down the important words or sentences in it.

    As for listening, there are two choices: besides reading, you can listen every day for about 30 minutes. You can only pay attention to your reading and become skillful at your reading, then you can catch up on your listening. Since you have lots of inputs in your mind, you can easily guess what the speaker is going to say. This never means that you should not practice listening.

    For listening you can listen to cartoons or some movies that are specially made for children. Their languages are easy. Or if you are good at listening you can listen to VOA or BBC programs every day. Again the thing to remember is being active in listening and preferably taking some notes.

    If you follow these pieces of advice, your speaking and writing will improve quickly, and you can be a fluent English speaker one day.

    When a child is told he is "uncool", it can be very painful. He may say he doesn't care, and even act in ways that are different from cool on purpose(故意地）. But these are simple ways to deal with sadness by pretending it's not there.

    Helping a child feel better in school had to be careful. If you say, "Why are you worried about what other children think about you? It doesn't matter!" Children know that it does matter. Instead, an active way may be best. You could say, "I'm going to do a couple of things for you to help you feel better in school."

    If a boy is having trouble making friends, the teacher can help him. The teacher can arrange things so that he has chances to use his abilities to contribute to class things. This is how the other children learn how to value his good qualities and to like him. A teacher can also raise a child's popularity in the group by showing that he values that child. It even helps to put him in a seat next to a very popular child, or let him be a partner with that child in activities, etc.

    There are things that parents can do at home, too. Be friendly when your child brings others home to play. Encourage him to invite friends to meals and then serve the dishes they consider "super" .When you plan trips, picnics, movies, and other shows, invite another child with whom your child wants to be friends.

    What you can do is to give him a chance to join a group that may be shutting him out. Then, if he has good qualities, he can start to build real friendship of his own.

    PhoneSoap: Charge and Clean Your Phone

    You may charge your phone every day, but do you clean your phone as much? Whatever your hands touch, your phones touch. It has been discovered that some phones have 18 times more bacteria and viruses than any surface in a public restroom. So it probably won't surprise you that a 2011 University of London study found that one in six of our phones have bacteria and viruses on them—specifically, the bacteria called E. coli.

    The research on bacteria and viruses led to the invention of PhoneSoap. It is not actually liquid like dishwasher soap. It is a phone charger that uses the electromagnetic radiation (辐射) used in hospitals to kill 99.9 percent of bacteria and viruses, cleaning your phone while it charges.

    “There are really certain types of bacteria and viruses that we should not be in touch with, and they are really on our phones,” says Wes Barnes, the PhoneSoap co-founder. It all started while his cousin and co-founder, Dan LaPorte, was in his cancer research lab at college. “He realized he got the idea of getting rid of bacteria and viruses on the phones,” said Barnes. “In the lab they used UV-C light for destroying them. He realized this would be the fastest, most powerful way to kill any bacteria and viruses living on electronic machines.”

    PhoneSoap looks like a little metal suitcase. Your phone rests in to charge and get cleaned at the same time. Instead of plugging your phone into the wall, you'd plug it into the PhoneSoap charger box. The process only takes a few minutes but, Barnes says, “The idea is that you can leave it in there overnight if you want to keep charging. Reflective paint keeps the light completely around the phone so it cleans the phone fully.”

    The co-founders spent 2013 finding the right companies and they started shipping the product in late November. By last week's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, PhoneSoap was all grown-up. Both co-founders have left their previous jobs and are selling PhoneSoap nonstop. “We're shipping almost more than we can handle each day,” Barnes says. “It's been a great adventure.”