I was playing in my kitchen. My mom stood in front of me, hardly keeping the tears from spilling over. She told me that my little cousin had cancer. Hearing this, I went completely numb. How could this be happening? I had just seen her, and she was fine.

    These things didn't happen to our family, that's what my uncle said. It seemed like the world turned upside down; just last week my grandmother had passed away. I felt like I couldn't get my feet on solid ground.

    That's when my sister, Ella, came down the stairs with her long brown hair freshly washed. She sat next to me and smiled. Despite what was happening, everything would work out, her smile seemed to say.

    “Mom, do you think I could get my hair cut tomorrow?” Ella asked.

    “Sure,” Mom said, starting to wash the dishes.

    “I want to donate it to Locks of Love” Ella smiled.

    My mom stopped washing and turned to look at her. “Are you sure?” I noticed that Mom was holding back tears. This was a sacrifice(牺牲) for Ella. Her long hair was an important part of her.

    “Yeah, it's just hair. Eventually it will grow back.” She said.

    “All right,” Mom said quietly, smiling again.

    Ella gave up a part of herself for a while. She let a piece of herself go to someone else, someone she didn't know. That day she became my hero too.

    As sea levels climb, even Washington, D. C. could see more frequent and widespread flooding at high tide.

    Strong storms and high winds sometimes bring floods to coastal areas. But cities and towns along the US East Coast are flooding even in calm and sunny weather. Among them is Maryland's capital Annapolis. Tourists there must sometimes walk through water flooding downtown streets surrounding the habor. Sometimes water covers roads in Atlantic City, N. J. Even the yards and basements of coastal homes near New York City sometimes flood.

All are suffering from this trend—normal high tides surpass (超过) a rising sea level.

    Sea levels have climbed, on average, about 20 centimeters (8 inches) over the past 135 years. And a sharp increase in tide flooding is one of the more visible impacts affecting many coastal areas, notes William Sweet, an oceanographer.

    Sweet and his co-workers recently analyzed data from 45 tide gauges (计量表) along the US coasts. These tools record the changing heights of tides as they rise and fall. From these data, Sweet's team calculated the number of : “troublesome floods” in various coastal cities. These floods, Sweet explains, typically occur when water level is about 30 centimeters (1foot) above the historic level of the highest tides. In June 2014, the team reported finding a growing rise in these flooding events.

    In Charleston, S.C. from 1957 to 1963, the city experienced troublesome floods an average of 4. 6 days per year. Bur from 2007 to 2013, the occurring rate of troublesome floods jumped five times. Annapolis city was even more serious. From1957 to 1963，troublesome floods were roughly 3. 8 days per year. From 2007 to 2013, the average was 10 times higher- 39. 3days a year.

    “Over the next few decades, climate change probably drives sea levels even higher,” Sweet says. “So today's flooding problems promise to become only more widespread and frequent.”

    Most of us have friends as close as family, who, when necessary, we'd call at 3 a.m. for comfort or congratulations because we know they won't get angry about us. They're almost part of us, and we share with them with our troubles and successes. But although I love these Pour Your Heart Out friends, I also need the energy of my Let's Party friends. These friends care on a different level—less stressful, less deep—but they still care.

    And such friendships are important. 'With some friends, you want to be playful rather than deeply opening your heart,' says psychotherapist (心理治疗师) Susie Orbach. 'They feel relaxed and easy that you won't keep talking about your problems or stories, and you also feel the same way. It's healthy to have lots of different friends at different levels of closeness because not only is it impossible to be close to everyone, it's also unnecessary. You need to look at yourself from different angles (角度). This is the only way you can experiment with different parts of yourself.'

    Of course, it's upsetting to be with friends who can't-or-won't -allow you to open up your heart when you really need to find someone to listen to. But if we accept our Let's Party friends for what they want to offer us—fun, laughter, full stop—then we enrich our lives greatly.

    Over the past 40 years, China has helped more than 700 million rural residents out of being poor, and the poverty rate -- the proportion of people living below the Chinese poverty line -- had fallen among the rural population from 97.5 percent in 1978 to 3.1 percent at the end of 2017, official figures shows. China's achievements in poverty alleviation (扶贫) made the world look at China with admiration.

    "For me, it is unbelievable that over 40 years, that is, over the course of one working lifetime, China has gone from one of the poorest countries in the world to one that is about to eliminate(消除) absolute poverty," said Craig Allen, president of the US-China Business Council.

    Varaprasad Sekhar Dolla, a professor of Chinese studies at India's Jawaharlal Nehru University, also spoke highly of China's achievements in poverty reduction. "If global poverty came down greatly in the last three or four decades, it's partly because of the Chinese contribution to reducing poverty within its own national boundaries," said the Indian scholar.

    In the eyes of Khairy Tourk, a professor of economics with the Stuart School of Business at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, "many countries look up to China to learn from its experience." "The Chinese experience is based on building a modern infrastructure (基础设施) and then on setting up special economic zones that would help underdeveloped countries to become more industrial," he added.

    In the government work report delivered at the opening of the annual NPC session (全国人大会议) on March 5, China promises to reduce its population of rural poor by over 10 million this year.

Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist (生理学家) best known for his discovery of classical conditioning (经典条件反射). During his studies on the digestive systems of dogs, Pavlov found that the animals salivated (流口水) naturally upon the presentation of food. However, he also noticed that the animals began to salivate whenever they saw the white lab coat of an experimental assistant. By associating the presentation of food with the lab assistant, he finally found that a dog would salivate to the presence of a stimulus (刺激物) other than food. He called this response a conditional reflex.

Ivan Pavlov was born in a small village in Ryazan. Russia, where his father was the village minister. His earliest studies were focused on theology (神学), but reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species had a powerful influence on his future interests. He soon stopped his religious studies and devoted himself to the study of science at the University of Saint Petersburg. Pavlov's interests were the study of physiology and natural sciences. He helped found the Department of Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine and continued to manage the program for the next 45 years.

Pavlov received much praise for his work. He worked in the Russian Academy of Science and won the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology. The Soviet government also offered lots of support for Pavlov's work, and the Soviet Union soon became a leading center of research on physiology. While Ivan Pavlov was not a psychologist, and reportedly disliked the field of psychology, his work had a major influence on the field, particularly on the development of behaviorism. His discovery and research on reflexes influenced the growing behaviorist movement. and Pavlov's discovery had a major influence on many thinkers, such as John B. Watson.

A grocery store in Ann Arbor, Michigan opened on Tuesday to the public. This is an artist's uneatable creation. The Plastic Bag Store presents shelves filled with items such as meat, eggs, cakes and so on, all of which are made from single-use plastics taken from streets and garbage.

The store at times during the day will be transformed into a stage for a series of short films in which puppetry(木偶戏表演), shadow play, and handmade sets are used to tell a story of how the overabundance of plastic waste we leave behind might be misinterpreted by future generations—and how what we value least may become our most lasting "cultural legacy (遗产)".

Theater and film director Robin Frohardt is the creative driving force behind the Plastic Bag Store. "I got the idea many years ago after watching someone bag and double-bag and triple-bag my groceries," Frohardt said on Tuesday. "I just was sort of struck by how much packaging was involved in our everyday lives. And it just seemed so unreasonable. I just thought, maybe I could set up a project to change it." Combining a real-life supermarket with film experience, Frohardt planned to use art and humor to question our culture of consumption and convenience and to show one of the greatest problems of our planet.

Plastic bags are created by fossil (化石) fuels and often end up as waste in landfills and the ocean. Americans throw away 100 billion plastic grocery bags per year. She hopes that she can continue to tour with the project and bring it to different communities. "My dream would be that this project will become unnecessary one day," said Frohardt.

 "Frohardt's work reminds us, with humor, to think not just about the next two weeks, but also about the next two decades and the next two centuries. What will remain hundreds of years later? We hope that our legacy will be plays rather than piles of plastics," said Tim Tompkins, President of Times Square Alliance.