For most people, Christmas is a time to relax in the company of family and friends. But for Santa Claus, and the thousands of fake Santas who impersonate（模仿） him every year, the Christmas season is time to get to work.

    Although Santa Claus waits until Christmas Eve to take his famous sleigh (雪橇) ride, Santa impersonators can be found at shopping malls around America throughout the six weeks leading up to December 25. "When you see Santa talking with kids at your local mall, that's when you know Christmas really is on the way," says Mary Lewine of New York City.

    With the excitement of Christmas, people often forget about the real people behind the red robes （长袍) and white beards, but being a mall Santa. is a tough job. "There is more to it than just sitting in a chair. There is more to it than just a red suit," said Timothy Connaghan, who has worked as a Santa for.38 years. "Children can really put the wear and tear on you.”

    A recent survey showed some of the challenges that mall Santas face every year. About 90 percent of Santas claimed that children pulled their beards to see if they were real, and 60 percent said that up to ten kids cough or sneeze on them every day. Even more disturbing, one-third of the Santas admit to having children wet themselves while sitting on their laps.

    So why would anyone take this job? For Ben Brauch, a retired high school teacher who has worked as a Santa for the last six years, the answer is simple-the children. "I see maybe 12,000 kids in a six-week period.

    It's hard work, but it's worth it because you get to play with kids." In fact, Brauch loves his job so much that he keeps his white beard long all year.

    Do you have a spare room in your house? What about a driveway for your car? Both of these can help you make money. Many people who are feeling the pinch are taking advantage of what's been called the “sharing economy”.

Perhaps the best-known example of a company in this field is Airbnb—an American web business which allows you to rent out your spare room to holidaymakers. It says it operates in 34,000 cities and it has over 1,500,000 listings.It seems to have concerned the market!

A British company is doing something with parking spaces. JustPark's founder, Anthony Eskinazi, says,“When I had the original idea, Ispotted a driveway close to a sports stadium. It would have been so convenient if I could have just parked in that driveway rather than in commercial car park.” And he has a big clientele（客户）:around 20,000 people have advertised their spaces on the site, and he says around half a million drivers use it. There are other sites doing very similar things, like Uber and Lyft—these let drivers share their cars with other passengers. Any driver knows how valuable a place to park is .A church near Kings Cross in central London has apparently made over £200,000 by renting out space in its yard to travelers!

    Because this is a new business world, those rules aren't there yet and many people are happy to share...as long as it pays!

    But the sharing economy has its critics: the competitors of these new companies. People who run things like traditional B&B, commercial car parks and taxi services are afraid of ending up out of pocket. And there is another issue: regulations on these new business are unclear. How will renting out your driveway affect your neighbor?

    Emily Urich 18 years old Canada

    A 1ot of teens aren't responsible, and that's where I'm different. Not just about school but everyday things, like being able to pay my own credit card(信用卡)bills on time.

    The first time I got a cartoon book was on my third birthday. From then on, I fell in deep love with it. And can you guess how many cartoon books I've read? I don't really know the exact number. But I have three full boxes of them under my bed.

    Joe Miller 16 years old America

    I'm proud of doing things in my own way. So whenever somebody wants me to do something or whatever it is, I feel like they're all other people's thoughts, not really mine. But like others, I love reading, too.

    When I first took skiing lessons, I found it exciting. For skiing racing, there's no question that I'm better than most boys. I think it's fun. I mean, it is a challenge. It's where I picked up the idea of needing a challenge always in my life. In order to improve my skiing skills, I have read many books and magazines about it.

    An Qi 15 years old China

    I'm different because I prefer to drop out of the world to create my own world. I'd like to build a house on a mountain. And I choose to live without electricity, a telephone, or even indoor plumbing(水管装置).

    I have many hobbies such as traveling, reading, writing and spending time with children. I love children because they are smart and creative. They always have many strange ideas. It makes me excited.

    I want to do something for Hope Project and become a country school teacher.

    All of us know that smoking does harm to our health. But do you think everything will be OK as long as you quit smoking?

    Unfortunately, the answer is NO.

    New research has found that even if you give up smoking, the damage it has done to your genes (基因) will stay there for a much longer time. In the research, a team of US scientists studied the blood of 16,000 people. Among them, some were smokers, some used to smoke, and the rest were non-smokers. Scientists compared their genes and found that more than 7, 000 genes of smokers had changed—a number that is one-third of known human genes. According to NBC News, both heart disease and cancer are caused by genetic changes. Some people may have had the changes when they were born, but most people get them in their daily lives while doing things like smoking. When you stop smoking, a lot of these genes will return to normal within five years. This means your body is trying to heal (治愈) itself of the harmful effects of smoking. But the changes in some of the genes stay for longer. They can stay for as long as 30 years, It's almost like leaving a footprint on wet cement (水泥)—it will always be there, even when you've walked away and when the cement becomes dry. Although the study results may make people unhappy, there is a bright side: the findings could help scientists invent medicine to treat genetic damage caused by smoking or find ways to tell which people have heart disease or cancer risks.

    Imagine someone who has spent the majority of their life sitting with a sign on the side of the road and that very person giving someone their last 20 dollars. That's exactly what Marine Corps veteran (退伍军人) Johnny Bobbitt, 34, did in October in Philadelphia.

    Bobbitt served in the U.S. Marine Corps and worked as a paramedic (医务辅助人员) in Vance County, N. C. before he became homeless. Nobody knew how he got to where he was because he was discreet about that.

    One night in October, Bobbitt was sitting roadside with a sign in Philadelphia as usual, when Kate McClure of Florence Township, N. J. was driving home down Interstate 95 and ran out of gas. Scared and nervous, she got out of the car to head to the nearest gas station. As McClure was heading to the nearest gas station, she ran into Bobbitt and he told her to get back in the vehicle and lock the door. Minutes later, he appeared with a red gas can. He'd used his last $20 to buy her gas.

    After that unexpected meeting, McClure and her boyfriend, Mark D'Amico, who both live in New Jersey, visited Bobbitt several times to deliver gift cards, cash, snacks and toiletries. They then decided to create a fund raising page so he wouldn't have to spend the holidays sleeping on the street.

    McClure started the GoFundMe page on November 10. With the page, the couple hoped to raise $10,000, enough money for his rent, a reliable vehicle and up to six months' expenses. Bobbitt's story ran in a local paper. By November 15，more than 10,000 local people had made donations through the GoFundMe page and more than $300,000 had been raised.

    On Thanksgiving, Bobbitt was resting in a hotel, his feet up on the bed, drawing up a grand plan for his new life, thanks to several thousand dollars raised to repay him for a good deed.

    Scientists Diego Kersting and Cristina Linares have found that some coral species are able to recover from harmful warming events through a unique survival strategy (策略)—known as "rejuvenescence" (新生)—among corals in the Mediterranean Sea. The findings represent some rare good news for corals around the world, which are facing numerous severe threats—most notably, climate change.

    "The main threats are climate change, overfishing, pollution and coastal urbanization," Kersting said. "But currently, climate change is probably the one causing the most coral cover declines. Warming stresses corals up to a point that may cause death. Some corals bleach (白化) before dying. Other corals do not bleach but die directly." He went on, "Our findings are significant because this survival strategy was only known from fossil corals that existed hundreds of millions of years ago. It is the first time that it has been found in a living coral. Thanks to our findings, we know now that some corals are able to recover, but unfortunately this is not enough in the current climate change context."

    For their research, Kersting and Linares monitored 243 colonies of the endangered reef-building coral Cladocoracaespitosa in Spain's Columbretes Islands Marine Reserve over 16 years, starting in 2002. The monitoring revealed that Cladocoracaespitosa in the Mediterranean uses rejuvenescence to cope with warming events. This process involves the polyps — or the individual coral animals in a colony—shrinking inward and abandoning their skeletons (骨骼) during warm periods, before rejuvenating at a later point. "What happens is that some polyps in a coral colony—sometimes just one— reduces completely its dimensions and partially retreats from its skeleton," Kersting said. "Once the stressful event is over, the shrunken or rejuvenated polyp recovers its size and builds up a new skeleton. Eventually, it begins to reproduce itself through budding and begins to cover the dead colony surfaces."

    He continued, "The results were very surprising because I started to observe colonies that were dead years ago, that were showing living parts many years after their death."