The First Rule of Finance is to live within your means by spending no more than 80% of your take-home pay．If you take home $ 100 per week, spend no more than $80．

    But ever look at what people spend their money on? I have relatives and friends deeply in debt, spending $ 12 for every $ 10 they earn instead of the $ 8 you know they should be spending．When I see them, they're proud of their new whatever．"What do you think of my new truck?" asked one from the driver's seat．"Do you like my new shoes?" asked another on high heels．"Check out my new big screen．" said a third while holding the remote in his living room．We've all heard people fishing for compliments on their new toys ．

    Every one of them was proud of what they'd financed．They seem to have bought it for the purpose of being proud, of showing off, of keeping up with the Joneses．"Look at my new …?"is everybody's favorite phrase, even when the object in question isn't theirs at all and won't be new when they've finally paid for it, if they ever do．

    They're proud of being stupid．They think it's cool to drive the financed car, wear the financed shoes, and watch the financed TV, but to smart people, whose opinions are the only ones we should respect, these people look dumb as rocks．

    The Joneses, nine times out of 10, are financially stupid．That's why they have all that stuff on borrowed money．Why try to copy them? Worse, why try to impress them? Copy and impress smart people, the ones who own their stuff．If you want to impress smart people, debt is the last way to go about it．Trying to impress a money-smart person by going into debt is like trying to impress Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps by drowning in a pool．Michael Phelps is impressed by good swimming and a money-smart person by good money management．

    For a year and half, kids sent hurtful messages like “You are ugly.” or “Why are you still alive?” to Rebecca Sedwick. In 2013, Rebecca, then 12, couldn't stand it anymore. She took her own life near her home in Florida. Soon afterward, Trisha Prabhu read about the story. “I was surprised and heart-broken,” said Trisha, now 15, who is from Naperville, Illinois, “I know that I had to do something to stop this from ever happening again.”

    Trisha did some research. Studies show that one fourth to half of all teens in the US have been cyberbullied (网络欺凌). Experts say that if you are ever bullied online, you should tell a trusted adult. Tell the cyberbully to stop, and prevent him or her from contacting you again. Print and save messages to share with the police. This is good advice, agrees Trisha. But these methods all take place after the bullying has already happened. Trisha had a different idea. Why not teach cyberbullies to stop before they post these messages?

    Trisha's research won awards, including a prize in the Google Science Fair. Then, Tresah built the ReThink app (应用软件). It is programmed to recognize words or phrases that could be hurtful. When that happens, different warning messages come out. “Don't say things that you may regret later!” says one message. Others ask, “Are you sure you want to say this?” and “Are these words really yours?”

    Now Trisha is working on a version(版本) of ReThink for computers. “I am a big dreamer,” she says. “I want to stop cyberbullying before the hurt is done.”

    An 18-year-old US girl gained unexpected appreciation and a surprise after she gave “extra help” to an elderly man in the restaurant she was working.

    It's social media that made her seemingly small action go viral and brought her appreciation from hundreds of thousands of strangers and a scholarship to Texas Southern University.

    The heroine Evoni Williams has reportedly been working full-time to earn money for further study in a restaurant in La Marque, Texas，the United States. It was last week when an old man named Adrian Charpentier asked for help to chop his ham for his hands were weak because of illness. On that busy morning when she had loads of work on shoulder, Williams helped the man without hesitation. The moment she was leaning over the counter and cutting the ham was shot by a customer known as Laura Wolf.

    Wolf posted the picture on the Internet and wrote, “I'm thankful to have seen this act of kindness and caring at the start of my day while everything in this world seems so negative. If we could all be like this waitress and take time to offer a helping hand…” According to local reports, Wolf didn't know Williams, neither did Williams know her act was shot and shared on the web. However, the small act of kindness soon accumulated its own power on and outside the Internet.

    Besides praise from netizens and media reports across the United States, a 16000-dollar scholarship to Texas Southern University was recently granted to Williams to support her study plan on business management.

    “We wanted to reward Evoni's act of kindness and let her know that good deeds do not go unnoticed,” said Melinda Spaulding, an administrator at Texas Southern University.

    A good modern newspaper is an extraordinary piece of reading. It's great first for what it contains：the range of news from local crime to international politics, from sports to business, from fashion to science, and the range of comment and special feature(特写) as well, from editorial page to feature articles and interviews to criticism of books, art theatre and music.

    A newspaper is even greater for the way one reads it：never completely, never straight through, but always by jumping from here to there, in and out, glancing at one piece, reading another article all the way through, reading just a few paragraphs of the text.

    A good modern newspaper offers a variety(多样性) to attract many different readers, but far more than the reader is interested in. What brings this variety together in one place is its topicality(时事性), its immediate relation to what is happening in your world and your locality now. But immediacy and the speed of production that goes with it also mean that much of what appears in a newspaper has no more than transient(短暂的) value.

    For all these reasons, no two people really read the same paper：what each person does is to put together, out of the pages of that day's paper, his own selection and order, his own newspaper. For all these reasons, reading newspapers efficiently, which means getting what you want from them without missing things you need and without wasting time, demands skill and self-awareness as you change and apply the techniques of reading.

    Robots are now being employed not just for dangerous tasks, such as discovering mines or rescuing people in disasters. They are also finding application as household helps and as nursing assistants. As increasing numbers of machines, equipped with the latest artificial intelligence, take on a growing variety of specialized and everyday tasks, the question of how people see them and behave towards them becomes ever more urgent.

    A team led by Sari Nijssen of Radboud University and Markus Paulus, Professor of Developmental Psychology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU), have carried out a study to determine the degree to which people show concern for robots and behave towards them based on moral principles.

    According to Sari Nijssen, the study set out to answer the following question:" Under what circumstances would adults be willing to sacrifice robots to save human lives?" The participants were faced with a hypothetical (假设的) moral dilemma: Would they be prepared to put a single person at risk in order to save a group of injured persons? In the situations presented the intended victim was either a human, a humanoid robot that had been humanized (人性化的) to various degrees or a robot that was clearly recognizable as a machine.

    The study suggested that the more the robot was humanized, the less likely participants were to sacrifice it. Situations that included vivid stories in which the robot was described as a merciful being or as a creature with its own understandings, experiences and thoughts, were more likely to stop the study participants from sacrificing it in the interests of anonymous (无名的) humans.

    "This result indicates that our study group attached a certain moral status to the robot," says Paulus. "One possible suggestion of this finding is that attempts to humanize robots should not go too far. Such efforts could come into conflict with their intended function—to be of help to us."

While wandering around a Swedish Christmas market, you'll likely come across booths {#blank#}1{#/blank#} (sell) carved wooden horses, typically in an assortment of bright colors and floral patterns. These {#blank#}2{#/blank#} (tradition) Swedish toys are much more than a classic holiday gift or travel souvenir: the Dala horse has become intertwined (交织) with the very image of Sweden {#blank#}3{#/blank#}.

The little wooden horses of Sweden were originally carved by men that worked in the forests during {#blank#}4{#/blank#} winter. When they returned to their villages, they gave the horses to children as playthings. This was in the 17^th century during {#blank#}5{#/blank#} the horses were also sold at market in small towns and villages in the Dalarna region, in central Sweden. The horses were painted in bright colors that were inspired by the furniture in the region. {#blank#}6{#/blank#} (eventual) , even young children learned to carve wooden horses. 

The global attention didn't come until the 20 ^th century in the World's Fair in New York 1939. That was because an enormous painted Dala horse was placed outside the Swedish pavilion, which caused excitement throughout the crowds of {#blank#}7{#/blank#} (visit) . After this, the Dala horses were seen {#blank#}8{#/blank#} a symbol of Sweden and mass production of the horses started. Since then, Dala horses {#blank#}9{#/blank#} (be) popular souvenirs and inspired other products as well. You can now find anything from clothing to tableware and phone cases with a Dala horse {#blank#}10{#/blank#} (decorate) .