I'm a 34-year-old man, married, lived in a nice house, and have a successful career as an educational consultant. But my life was not always so great. I had a learning disability from an early age. I went to a special school where I got plenty of extra help. Still, I suffered the rest of my school days in public schools.

       My life improved remarkably when I discovered art. The art world gave me a chance to express myself without words. I went to a workshop and gradually got good at making things with clay(黏土). Here I learned my first important lesson: disabled as I was in language. I could still be smart and well express myself with clay. And my confidence came along.

I got my next lesson from rock climbing. It was a fun thing but I was scared from the start. I soon noticed it wasn't a talent thing; it was practice. So I did it more. After about five years of climbing, I found myself in Yosemite Valley on a big wall. I learned that if you fall in love with something and do it all the time, you will get better at it.

       Later I decided to apply my previous experience to learning how to read and write. Every day I practiced reading and writing, which I used to avoid as much as possible. After two hard years, I was literate.

       Having gone through the long process with art, rock climbing, and reading and writing, now I've got to a point in my life where I know I am smart enough to dive into an area that is totally unknown, hard, but interesting.

How to Find Yourself

    Do you often feel lost？Do you think you are living somebody else's life? If yes, discover ways to find yourself by going through the following article.

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#} If you are thinking, “how to find yourself when you are lost?”, then the first thing to do is to have a rest from everything—work, personal life and all worldly things. Give time to yourself to think why you seem lost. Is it because of over work? Is it because you are not leading a life that you want to? Or is it because you are not satisfied with the people or things around you? Try to find answers to these questions to determine the cause behind your restlessness.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#} For once, instead of being the way others want you to be, be yourself. Look within and find yourself in you. Think about the things that you would want to do if you didn't have any family obligations or any money issues. Think about the kind of relationship you would want to be in, the place that you would like to stay in, the kind of lifestyle you would like to lead, if you didn't have the society or people around you, judging all the time. If you really want to know how to find inner peace, then think, what you would want others to describe you as—an honest person? Or adventurous? Or loving, or realistic? Once you look within, you will know the answer and then try to be exactly that.

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#}  Thinking deeply about the past, the time or situations when you were the happiest, is another way to find yourself .Think what you were doing or with whom you were, when you were the happiest. This will help you to identify things that you want to do in life that make you happy and also certain people whose company you enjoy.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#} Knowing yourself and determining what you to do with your life will not come to you in a day or two. Discovering oneself is an ongoing process and it can take months or sometimes even years to truly find yourself. So, it's important that you maintain a written record of all your feelings and thoughts, which you can go through at a later stage. Pour all your emotions and feelings about life in it and who knows may be one day going through it, you will find yourself.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#}  Once you have discovered what you want to do with your life, make a move for change and self improvement. Even if it means taking up small things such as dancing or painting, go ahead and do it. If you want a career change, plan and take steps so that it can take place smoothly. If you are stuck in a bad relationship and find yourself unable to mend it, break away. At the beginning, you may find yourself slightly unbalanced, but with time everything will be fine.

    It is very important for you to truly find yourself, before it is too late. If you do not find yourself now, you will spend your life with somebody you do not even know, i.e. yourself.

    Today we eat on the go, at our desks and even in front of computers. We eat takeout, delivered and packaged meals, {#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    “Over the past three decades, people have started eating out more than ever before and purchasing more prepared foods at the grocery store, which tend to contain more fat, salt and sugar than their home-made foods,” noted US healthy living website SparkPeople.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#} It encourages us to value the time we spend preparing, sharing and consuming food, as a recent USA Today article put it. It all started in 1986 with the efforts of Slow Food's founding father, Italian activist Carlo Petrini, who wanted to bring back food varieties and flavors that had gone dark in the face of industrialization. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Now, his idea is almost the mainstream.

    Starting at the table, the movement promotes an unhurried way of life founded on the idea that everyone has a right to cooking pleasure, and that everyone must also take responsibility to “protect the heritage (遗产) of food, tradition and culture that make this celebration of the senses possible”, wrote The Phnom Penh Post.

    “{#blank#}4{#/blank#} It means turning down the speed at which we eat and increasing the amount of time we spend dining together with other people,” Althea Zanecosky, spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, told The Huffington Post.“ {#blank#}5{#/blank#} Dinner table conversations keep families together,” noted the Belgian non-profit organization Greenfudge.

    The 18-year-old girl from Linyi, Shandong province scored 568 points on her college entrance exam this year and was admitted to Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

    On Aug 19, Xu received a phone call from an unknown person telling her that she was due to receive student funding. Following the call, Xu transferred a 9,900-yuan "activation fee" into the man's bank account, hoping the money would appear in her student account, but it never did.

    After discovering they had been cheated, the family immediately reported the incident to the police, but Xu was said to be frustrated. On their way home, she suddenly fainted and despite doctors' best efforts to rescue her, she passed away.

    The death of Xu yuyu immediately caused an outcry over the society, and once again, it fired a public anger towards those who commit heartless fraud(欺诈).

    So how was Xu's private information leaked out?

    Reporters have discovered that there are many people who openly sell the examinee's information online. The information includes the examinee's name, school, phone number, and address. The personal information of examinee has become the target of the online fraud industry.

【写作内容】

1). 用约30个单词写出上文概要；

2). 用约120个词就“Personal information leakage”谈谈你的看法和感受，内容包括：（1）简述个人信息泄露的危害及保护个人信息的重要性；（2）就如何保护个人信息提几点建议（至少两点）。

【写作要求】

1). 阐述观点或提供论据时，不能直接引用原文语句；

2). 作文中不能出现真实姓名和学校名称等。

【评分标准】

内容完整，语言规范，语篇连贯，词数适当。

    In 1940 the German army entered the Netherlands, beginning an occupation that lasted five years. Members of the Dutch royal family(荷兰皇室) were forced to go to the United Kingdom to avoid being caught. However, the threat of German bombing attacks meant that England was not completely safe. For this reason Princess Juliana and her daughters, Princesses Beatrix and Irene, moved to Canada and settled in Ottawa. In January 1943 Juliana gave birth to a third daughter, Princess Margriet Francisca. The Government of Canada temporarily declared her place of birth as outside of Canadian land, meaning Margriet could hold Dutch citizenship and therefore still be qualified for the Dutch throne.

    In 1945, the Dutch royal family returned home. Shortly after her return, Princess Juliana presented 100,000 tulip bulbs to Canada in appreciation of the important role played by Canadian troops in liberating the Netherlands and for providing her family with a safe place during the war. The following year she sent 20,500 tulip bulbs. Juliana continued to send thousands of bulbs as a yearly gift, a tradition that continued after she became queen in 1948. The gift of tulips is an ongoing tradition, and each year the people of the Netherlands and the Dutch royal family each send 10,000 bulbs to Canada in recognition of the close ties between the two countries. The gift of bulbs and the tulip flowers attracted interest and visitors in Ottawa. In 1952 Karsh, an Armenian-born photographer, suggested the idea of a tulip festival to the Ottawa Board of Trade. The first Canadian Tulip Festival took place in 1953. The first festival proved popular, and it became a yearly event. To mark the festival's 50th anniversary in 2002, Canada Post issued a series of commemorative stamps(纪念邮票) and plates featuring the flowers and Princess Margriet returned to visit Ottawa. In the following years the festival began to focus more on international friendship and the festival's historical origins. Now it is one of the world's largest tulip shows.

    Pretending you're someone else can make you creative

    One great irony(讽刺) about our collective fascination with creativity is that we tend to frame it in uncreative ways. That is to say, most of us marry creativity to our concept of self: We are either "creative" people or we aren't, without much of a middle ground.

    Pillay, a tech businessman and Harvard professor has spent a good part of his career destroying these ideas. Pillay believes that the key to unlocking your creative potential is to dismiss the conventional advice that urges you to "believe in yourself". In fact, you should do the exact opposite: believe you are someone else.

    In a recent column for Harvard Business Review, Pillay pointed to a 2016 study showing the impact of stereotypes(刻板印象)on one's behavior. The authors, education psychologists Denis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar, divided their college student subjects into three categories, instructing the members of one group to think of themselves as "eccentric(古怪的) poets" and the members of another to imagine they were "rigid librarians" (people in the third category, the control group, were left alone for this part). The researchers then presented participants with 10 ordinary objects, including a fork, a carrot, and a pair of pants, and asked them to come up with as many different uses as possible for each one. Those who were asked to imagine themselves as "eccentric poets" came up with the widest range of ideas for the objects, while those in the "rigid librarian" group had the fewest. Meanwhile, the researchers found only small differences in students' creativity levels across academic majors—in fact, the physics majors inhabiting(寄生) the personas(伪装的外表) of "eccentric poets" came up with more ideas than the art majors did.

    These results, write Dumas and Dunbar, suggest that creativity is not an individual quality, but a "malleable(可塑的) product of context and perspective." Everyone can be creative, as long as they feel like creative people.

    Pillay's work takes this a step further: He argues that identifying yourself with creativity is less powerful than the creative act of imagining you're somebody else. This exercise, which he calls "psychological halloweenism", refers to the conscious action of inhabiting another persona—an inner costuming of the self. It works because it is an act of "conscious unfocus", a way of positively stimulating the default mode(默认模式) network, a collection of brain regions that spring into action when you're not focused on a specific task or thought.

    Most of us spend too much time worrying about two things: How successful/unsuccessful we are, and how little we're focusing on the task at hand. The former feeds the latter—an unfocused person is an unsuccessful one, we believe. Thus, we force ourselves into quiet areas, buy noise canceling headphones, and hate ourselves for taking breaks.

    What makes Pillay's argument stand out is its healthy, forgiving realism: According to him, most people spend nearly half of their days in a state of "unfocus". This doesn't make us lazy people—it makes us human. The idea behind psychological halloweenism is: What if we stopped judging ourselves for our mental down time, and instead started using it? Putting this new idea on daydreaming means addressing two problems at once: You're making yourself more creative, and you're giving yourself permission to do something you'd otherwise feel guilty about. Imagining yourself in a new situation, or an entirely new identity, never felt so productive.

Title: Pretending you're someone else can make you creative