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    There was once a captain who loved money so much that he cheated his sailors at the end of every voyage and took their wages (工资).

    On the last day of one voyage, the ship was in a small port. It was winter time, and the sea was very cold, so the captain said to his sailors, “If one of you stays in the water during the whole night, I will give him my ship. But if he comes out before the sun appears, I shall get his wages.”

    The sailors (船员) had heard about the captain's cheating, so they didn't trust him. But then one of them, who thought that he was cleverer than the captain, said that he would do it. He got into the water, and, though it was very cold, he stayed in it. When it was nearly morning, some fishermen lit a fire on the shore about half a mile away.

    “You are cheating,” the captain said to the sailor. “The fire's warming you.”

    “But it's half a mile away!” said the sailor.

    “A fire's fire,” answered the captain. “I have won.”

    The sailor came out of the water, and said, “Perhaps you think that you are clever because you have won my wages, but you can't cook a chicken.”

    “I can,” answered the captain.

    “If you cook this chicken,” said the sailor, “I shall work for you without wages for seven years, but if you can't, you will give me your ship.”

The captain agreed, took the chicken and said, “Where's the fire?”

    “There it is,” answered the sailor. “On the shore.”

    “But it's half a mile away,” said the captain angrily.

    “‘A fire's fire,' you said,” answered the sailor. “If it is enough to warm me in the water, it is enough to cook your chicken.”

    The Maldives faces the threat of extinction from rising sea levels, but the government said on Thursday it was looking to the future with plans to build homes and a golf course that can float.

An increase in sea levels of just 18 to 59 centimeters would make the Maldives — a nation of a number of tiny coral islands in the Indian Ocean — not suitable for humans to live in by 2100, the UN's climate change experts have warned.

    President Mohamed Nasheed has declared a fight for survival, and last month he signed a deal with a Dutch company to study suggestions for a floating structure that could support a conference centre, homes and an 18-hole golf course.

    The company, Dutch Docklands, is currently building floating developments in the Netherlands and Dubai. Its website said it undertook projects that make “land from water by providing large-scale floating constructions to create similar conditions as on land”.

    The Maldives began to work on an artificial island known as the Hulhumale near the crowded capital island of Male in 1997 and more than 30,000 people have been settled there in order to ease crowdedness. The city, which has a population of 100,000, is already protected from rising sea levels by a 30-million-dollar sea wall, and the government is considering increasingly imaginative ways to fight climate change.

    Nasheed, who held the world's first underwater cabinet (内阁) meeting in October to highlight his people's serious and difficult situation, has even spoken of buying land elsewhere in the world to enable Maldivians to relocate if their homes are completely covered.

    He has also promised to turn his nation into a model for the rest of the world by becoming “carbon neutral (碳中和)” by 2020. His plan involves ending fossil fuel use and powering all vehicles and buildings from “green” sources such as burning coconut husks.

    “He is the best choice for goodwill ambassador.” Indian movie fans in China say.

    Indian actor Aamir Khan has got his major celebrity status in China. Aamir Khan was in China last week to promote his latest Hindi film Secret Superstar. During his weeklong stay, first in Shanghai and then in Beijing, the Indian actor also found out that he has become a major celebrity in a country where Hollywood's reach has been traditionally limited.

    Some local analysts compare his star status in China to that of Hollywood actors Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio. Others wonder if Khan is an activist actor. Still others describe him as a feminist（女权主义者）. The Chinese media seem to have called him Mishu, or Uncle Aamir. The surprising rise in popularity of the 52-year-old Bollywood star is owing to his striking movies. At more than 1 million, Khan has the most followers as an Indian on Sina Weibo, the country's Twitter-like platform.

    Secret Superstar had made more than 400 million yuan（$63 million）earlier this week. The story of a teenage Muslim girl's fight against ugly patriarchy（父权制）to realize her dreams was released in China on Jan 19.

    Last year, his film Dangal, inspired by the real journey of an Indian wrestler through a conservative landscape to turn his daughters into world-class athletes, had made nearly 1.3 billion yuan.

    In 2011, Khan's work first got major attention from Chinese moviegoers with Three Idiots, which was released in India much earlier. A statement on India's orthodox education system, similar to that of China, the Hindi film went along with the local audience. Film critics and fans alike recommended it to their friends.

    Some film critics say the education systems, gender discrimination（性别歧视）and domestic violence（家庭暴力）that Secret Superstar shows are among similarities of social issues in India and China. A series of “masterpieces” have made Khan an effective brand in China, in addition to his movie marketing and film devotion.

    Chimps will cooperate in certain ways, like gathering in war parties to protect their territory. But beyond the minimum requirements as social beings, they have little instinct to help one another. Chimps in the wild seek food for themselves. Even chimp mothers regularly decline to share food with their children, who are able from a young age to gather their own food.

In the laboratory, chimps don't naturally share food either. If a chimp is put in a cage where he can pull in one plate of food for himself or, with no great effort, a plate that also provides food for a neighbor to the next cage, he will pull at random —he just doesn't care whether his neighbor gets fed or not. Chimps are truly selfish.

    Human children, on the other hand are extremely cooperative. From the earliest ages, they decide to help others, to share information and to participate in achieving common goals. The psychologist Michael Tomasello has studied this cooperativeness in a series of experiments with very young children. He finds that if babies aged 18 months see an unrelated adult with hands full trying to open a door, almost all will immediately try to help.

    There are several reasons to believe that the urges to help, inform and share are not taught .but naturally possessed in young children. One is that these instincts appear at a very young age before most parents have started to train children to behave socially. Another is that the helping behaviors are not improved if the children are rewarded. A third reason is that social intelligence develops in children before their general cognitive (认知的) skills, at least when compared with chimps. In tests conducted by Tomasello, the children did no better than the chimps on the physical world tests, but were considerably better at understanding the social world.

    The core of what children's minds have and chimps' don't is what Tomasello calls shared intentionality. Part of this ability is that they can infer what others know or are thinking. But beyond that, even very young children want to be part of a shared purpose. They actively seek to be part of a “we”, a group that intends to work toward a shared goal.

    Your local grocery store is a psychological minefield (布雷区), where even the bananas are ripe with mystery.

    ⒈Southpaws (左撇子) have an invisible (看不见的) advantage

    You've probably seen that stores keep go-to items—produce, meats, dairy—on the outer edge. But did you notice that most of them are set up to make you run counterclockwise (逆时针)? Ninety percent of us are right-handed, so we buy more when it's counterclockwise. You'll also often find the dairy section in the back left corner：Because dairy is likely on your list, stores make sure you take the longest route to get there. In fairness, it's also a more convenient place to put a fridge.

    ⒉Everything is in its place

    It's safe to say that nothing you see on a shelf is there by chance. The cookies on sale at the end of a passage are likely the result of smart product placement. More expensive items are usually placed at an adult's eye level, while colorful treats and other products for kids are positioned lower—to catch the attention of children.

    ⒊Time goes by so slowly

    Stores rarely have windows or clocks. With no reference to the outside world, customers can easily lose track of how long they've been there so that they can buy more. Grocery stores may use another trick to control your sense of time: small floor tiles (瓷砖).