Life Is Beautiful is a 1997 Italian film directed by and starring Roberto Benigni. The film was a critical and financial success, winning Benigni the Academy Award for Best Actor as well as the Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

    In 1939 in the Kingdom of Italy, a bookstore keeper Guido, who is a Jew, falls in love with a local school teacher, Dora, who is to be engaged to a rich civil servant. Guido steals her from her engagement party on a horse. Soon they are married and have a son, Giosue.

    In 1945, Guido and his son are forced onto a train and taken to a concentration camp. Despite being a non-Jew, Dora demands to be on the same train to join her family. In the camp, Guido hides their true situation from his son, telling him that the camp is a complicated game in which Giosue must perform the tasks Guido gives him, earning him points；the first team to reach 1,000 points will win a tank.

    Guido uses this game to explain features of the concentration camp that would otherwise be scary for a young child. Despite being surrounded by the misery, sickness and death at the camp, Giosue does not question this fiction because of his father's convincing performance and his own innocence. Guido keeps the story right until the end when, in the chaos（混乱）of shutting down the camp as the Americans approach, he tells his son to stay in a small box until everybody has left, this being the final competition before the tank is his. Guido tries to find Dora, but is caught and killed by a Nazi soldier. As he is taken away to be shot, he maintains the fictions of the game by marching in a goose-step on purpose…

    Most people who own iPhones use them as their alarm clocks―making it very easy to check emails one last time before falling asleep and hard to ever feel away from work and social networks.

    Several years ago, my boss fainted due to exhaustion after staying up late to catch up on work. She banged her head and ended up with five stitches (缝针) and became what she calls a "sleep evangelist (传教士)." Now she leaves her phone charging in another room when she goes to bed and encourages her friends to do the same.

    "I sent all my friends the same Christmas gift―a lovely alarm clock―so they could stop using the excuse that they needed their very attractive iPhones by their beds to wake them up in the morning." she said.

    If your phone wakes you up in the morning, it may also be keeping you up at night. A 2008 study showed that people exposed to mobile radiation took longer to fall asleep and spent less time in deep sleep. "The study indicates that during laboratory exposure to 884 MHz wireless signals, components of sleep believed to be important for recovery from daily wear and tear are severely affected," the study concluded.

    A quarter of young people feel like they must be available by phone around the clock, according to a Swedish study that linked heavy cellphone use to sleeping problems, stress and depression. Unreturned messages carry more guilt when the technology to deal with them lies at our fingertips. Some teens even return text messages at midnight.

    Most of us choose not to set limits on our nighttime availability. Nearly three quarters of people from the age of 18 to 44 sleep with their phones within reach, according to a 2012 Time poll. That number falls off slightly in middle age, but only people aged 65 and older are leaving the phone in another room as common as sleeping right next to it.

    When I was a boy, my parents and I traveled from New York City to the Pennsylvania countryside for a weeklong taste of rural life. We stayed in a guesthouse on a farm, joining the daily routines and eating meals with the farmer and his family. We got up early to see the cows as they were milked. I even tried my hand at milking one, and then joined the farmer as he released the cows into the field afterward.

    Decades later I still have vivid memories of that trip which made me realize the value of a vacation, of seeing new things, meeting new people and sharing memorable experiences with family members. To this day, I still consider that family trip when I plan to take time off with my wife and kids. Vacations are a time for resting and connecting. As a bank manager, I spend much of my workday encouraging my customers to save their money. One of the reasons I give is that we should all have enough for a family vacation every year. In our busy lives, family is what we should be saving our money and time for.

    For my family, our vacation starts when we begin planning the trip. We talk about destinations and our budget (预算) ahead of time. Among the things we discuss: Can we save money by renting a house instead of spending six nights in a hotel? Would it be better to buy groceries and cook for ourselves rather than eat out every night? Involving (使参与) the kids in planning the vacation makes sure that they have a great vacation too. I prefer to visit historical sites and museums while they love to fish and swim. So I build in some relaxation time for us all so that the vacation can work for everyone.

    Each year, setting aside vacation time to spend together is especially important to us. A relaxing environment opens the doors to all kinds of conversations—deep, silly or meaningful. There's no pleasure from the usual everyday tasks. What matters is that everyone is having a great time.

    People living in the country enjoy several advantages that people living in the city cannot enjoy.

    They are in close contact (接触)with nature. They make friends with trees and stones. They breathe fresh air. They fight with strong winds. They listen to the song of birds. This contact with nature is good for health. There are many diseases that are common in the city, but are not to be found in the country. For example, near­sightedness is almost unknown to country people. Because of the absence of cars, one can walk more freely in the country than in the city. There are no rules of the road nor traffic signs to obey. People living in the country can easily get fresh vegetables, fresh fruit and fresh milk, and they get them at lower prices than in the city. Country life is economical (节俭的)in other ways, too. There are practically no temptations to waste money.

    Country people are mostly honest. They say what they mean, and make and keep promises with sincerity (诚意). They do not put on air (摆架子). They do not pretend to have those ridiculous (荒谬的)manners which are necessary in what we call polite society.

    In the first few years of their lives, children brought up in English-speaking homes successfully master the use of hundreds of words, including those for objects, actions, emotions, and many other aspects of the physical world. However, when it comes to learning colour words, the same children perform very badly. If shown a blue cup and asked about its colour, typical two-year-olds seem as likely to come up with "red" as "blue".

    Cognitive (认知) scientists at Stanford University in California supposed that children's incompetence at colour-word learning may be directly linked to the way these words are used in English. They are used mostly in pre-nominal position (e.g. "blue cup"), in contrast to post-nominal position (e.g. "The cup is blue."). The difficulty children have may simply come down to the challenge of having to make predictions from colour words to the objects they refer to, rather than from the objects to the colour words.

    To explore this idea further, the research team recruited 40 English children aged between 23 and 29 months and carried out a three-phase experiment. It considered of a pre-test, followed by training in the use of colour words, and finally a post-test that was identical to the pre-test. The pre- and post- test materials comprised six objects that were unfamiliar to the children. There were three examples of each object in each of three colours — red, yellow and blue. The objects were presented on trays (托盘), and in both tests, the children were asked to pick out objects in response to requests in which the colour word was either a pre-nominal ("Which is the red one?") or a post-nominal ("Which one is red?").

    In the training, the children were introduced to five sets of familiar items (balls, cups, crayons, glasses, and toy bears) in each of the three colours. Half the children were presented with the items one by one and heard them labeled with colour words used pre-nominally, while the other half were introduced to the same items described with a post-nominal colour word. After the training, the children repeated the selection task on the novel items in the post-test. Correct choices on items that were consistent across the pre- and post-tests were used to measure children's colour knowledge.

    According to the assessment, children's performance was consistent when they were both trained and tested on post-nominal adjectives, and worst when trained on pre-nominal adjectives and tested on post-nominal adjectives. Comparing the pre- and post-test scores across each condition revealed a significant decline in performance when children were both pre- and post-tested with questions that placed the colour words pre-nominally.

    Most heroes are not super. They don't appear in comic books, on television, or in movies. They just do what they believe needs to be done to make their world a better place. Bike Batman is one of them.

    Bike Batman is a 30-year-old married engineer who lives in Seattle, Washington. He's a cyclist who also buys and sells bikes as a hobby.

    About three years ago, he was looking for a bike for his wife. He found one on Craigslist, a website where people list things they want to sell. As he often does, he also looked at Bike Index, a popular website that allows users to register their bikes and post reports when they're taken. The bike, which he was considering purchasing, clearly matched one reported stolen on Bike Index. Then he called the person who claimed to be the bike's owner and arranged to meet him-- supposedly to complete the sale. When the two men met, Bike Batman told the thief, "You've got two options. You can wait until a police officer gets here, or you can just get out of here." You can imagine what the thief did.

    After that first success, Bike Batman developed a safer routine. When he sees questionable bike ads on Craigslist, he cross-references the image with bikes reported on Bike Index. Once he has confirmed it with the owner, he arranges a meet-up with the thief and will call the Seattle police department so that officers can participate in the action. In more than half of the 22 cases in which he has got back and returned bikes, the thieves have been arrested. In one case, Bike Batman even helped a family recover a wide range of prized possessions that suspects had stolen during a home burglary.

    His nickname came from a discussion with a police officer who suggested he be called "Robin Hood". Since he wasn't exactly stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, "Batman" seemed a better fit. The idea of a superhero punishing criminals feels pretty silly to him, but the main reason he continues his work is to keep up Seattle's reputation as a friendly city.