Born on August 9,1963,New Jersey,Whitney Houston almost seemed bound to become a singer.Her mother Cissy Houston was the choir（唱诗班）minister at New Hope Baptist Church,and it was there that a young Whitney got her start.

    When she was 19,Whitney Houston was discovered in a nightclub by the famous Clive Davis of Arista Records. In 1983,Houston made her debut（首演）on national television.In 1985,she released her debut album Whitney Houston and almost immediately became a sensation.Over the next year,her hit singles Saving All My Love for You and How Will I Know helped the album reach the top of the charts,where it staved for fourteen weeks in a row. Houston won a Grammy in 1986 for Saving All My Love for You.

    By 1992,Whitney Houston was on top of the world,but her life was about to get very complicated very quickly. That year she married the R&B singer Bobby Brown.At first the marriage was passionate and loving,but things turned sour as the decade progressed and both Brown and Houston battled drug abuse.

    In spite of these growing personal troubles,Whitney Houston continued to progress in her career,crossing over successfully into acting in 1992 by starring in The Bodyguard.Her single from the movie,I will Always Love You, proved to be Houston's biggest hit ever,spending a record-breaking fourteen weeks on top of the US charts.

    In the late 1990s and early 2000s,Whitney Houston's increasingly rocky marriage,struggles with drug and health problems threatened her career.Over the next few years,Houston attempted to break her drug habit and divorced Bobby Brown in 2007.

    After almost a decade of struggling with her personal life,Houston seemed to be pulling herself together.She released a new album,I Look to You,in 2009.The recording received a warm welcome from music fans.

    In early 2012,Houston worked on a new musical film Sparkle with Jordin Spark.Unfortunately,Houston didn't live long enough to see it.

    Whitney Houston died on February 11,2012,in Los Angeles.With her passing,the music world has lost one of its most outstanding stars.

    Since English biologist Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, scientists have vastly improved their knowledge of natural history. However, a lot of information is still of the speculation, and scientists can still only make educated guesses at certain things.

    One subject that they guess about is why some 400 million years ago, animals in the sea developed limbs (肢) that allowed them to move onto and live on land.

    Recently, an idea that occurred to the US paleontologist (古生物学家) Alfred Romer a century ago became a hot topic once again.

    Homer thought that tidal (潮汐的) pools might have led to fish gaining limbs. Sea animals would have been forced into these pools by strong tides. Then, they would have been made either to adapt to their new environment close to land or die. The fittest among them grew to accomplish the transition (过渡) from sea to land.

    Romer called these earliest four-footed animals “tetrapods”. Science has always thought that this was a credible theory, but only recently has there been strong enough evidence to support it.

    Hannah Byrne is an oceanographer (海洋学家) at Uppsala University in Sweden. She announced at the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Oregon, US, that by using computer software, her team had managed to link Homer's theory to places where fossil deposits (沉积物) of the earliest tetrapods were found.

    According to the magazine Science, in 2014, Steven Balbus, a scientist at the University of Oxford in the UK, calculated that 400 million years ago, when the move from land to sea was achieved, tides were stronger than they are today. This is because the planet was 10 percent closer to the moon than it is now.

    The creatures stranded in the pools would have been under the pressure of “survival of the fittest”, explained Mattias Green, an ocean scientist at the UK's University of Bangor. As he told Science, “After a few days in these pools, you become food or you run out of food... the fish that had large limbs had an advantage because they could flip (翻转) themselves back in the water.”

    As is often the case, however, there are others who find the theory less convincing. Cambridge University's paleontologist Jennifer Clark, speaking to Nature magazine, seemed unconvinced. “It's only one of many ideas for the origin of land-based tetrapods, any or all of which may have been a part of the answer,” she said.

    What is the most important day of your life? For many people the answer is your Wedding Day—the day when you marry another person and promise to live together as husband or wife for the rest of your lives.

    Wedding celebrations differ from country to country—in China the bride wears red while in India the wedding continues for three days. However, in Britain the bride wears white and wedding usually only lasts for one day.

    In the UK it is possible to get married in a religious or civil ceremony. A religious ceremony takes place in a church. A civil ceremony, on the other hand, can be held in an office, in a hotel, or even on a boat.

    On the day of the wedding the bride and groom are kept separate until the ceremony. It is said to be bad luck if the groom sees the bride in her dress before the wedding. The bride arrives at the ceremony accompanied by her father and bridesmaids. They officially give her away to her new husband. During the ceremony the happy couple exchange vows and give each other wedding rings which they will wear forever. At the end of the ceremony they kiss.

    Afterwards they go outside where friends and family throw rice or color papers over them and then they go on to the reception where there is a lot of food and drink. After the meal the father of the bride and the best man make speeches. Then the bride and groom take the first dance. It is a lot of fun. Finally, at the end of the party the newly-weds leave to go on honeymoon, usually to a very romantic destination.

    The strand bookstore is a New York Institution, and Fred Bass was a part of it almost from the moment he was born until the day he died. Every day, dozens of sellers arrive armed with piles of books, and every day thousands of buyers browse through the 18 miles of shelving, squeezing through narrow, dark aisles towered over by high, cramped shelves.

    Film studios wanting a line of books for a backdrop rent them from the Strand by the foot; interior designers looking for books with the same color spine will order a job lot; and hosts wishing to impress dinner guests will order the latest tomes(巨著) to replace on their coffee tables. Some even might be read.

    "You never know what someone is going to walk in with," Bass told The Villager magazine in 2010, adding that there was nothing he loved more than the "treasure hunt". Many books came from critics keen to add to their income by offloading review copies, they came from large estates, fellow bookshops and even publishers quietly offloading surplus(过剩的) stock. One visitor spoke of Bass as a character who could have come from a book. "I remember sensing in Bass, beyond a slightly gruff look, a man of great passion, a man who knew the innumerable and shifting current of the book trade the way that an old sailor knows the changeable sea," wrote Tom Vanderbilt in the New York Review of Books.

    Bass himself took a kind, almost paternalistic(家长式的) approach to the business. Some employees remained with him for decades.  When Greg Farr, a dissatisfied member of staff, published a novel that was critical of the store's management and the unions he still had his job, furthermore, the Strand sold his book.

Fred Bass was born in Manhattan in 1928, the year after his father, Benjamin, a Lithuanian immigrant, founded the Strand bookstore on Fourth Avenue, which was then known as "Book Row". His mother, Shirley, a Polish immigrant, died from cancer when Fred was six. His father remarried, to Esther, a bookkeeper who was involved in various civil rights causes.

    As a child young Fred swept the floors and by 13 he was working behind the counter on Saturdays. He recalled going on buying trips with his father and hauling back bundles of books on the subway, all tied with rope that cut into his hands. The family lived in the Bronx and young Fred studied English at Brooklyn College in the mornings and worked in the shop in the afternoons. His only extended period of time away was two year' service with the US armed forces, but even then he used his leave from the Korean War to work at the shop. In 1957, a year after taking over the business, Bass moved the store from Fourth Avenue to the corner of 12th Street and Broadway, where it stands to this day.

In 1952, Bass, who could eventually afford to purchase an apartment in Trump Tower, married Patricia Miller. They had a son, Stephen, who died in 2001, and a daughter, Nancy, who married Ron Wyden, a senator from Oregon. Since her teens she has worked with her father, developing the store, remodeling the space and adding air conditioning ("I hated it," said Bass). Since 1986 the Strand has run a "Books by the Foot" department, which creates custom book collections based on readers' literary tastes or preferred colors.

    In 1996, after seven decades as tenants(房客), the Bass family bought their building for $8.2 million. Until then they had negotiated the lease with their landlord at the nearby Knickerbock Bar and Grill; now Bass had to deal with himself." When I want to negotiate my own lease I have go to the bar myself", he joked. Even in his late eighties Bass was making buying trips, though no longer by subway.

Time and the Internet have not been kind to booksellers. "Book Row" is now only the Strand, which itself has been redesigned to be more "userfriendly". T-shirts, postcards, fridge magnets and other gifts now account for about 15 per cent of the Strand's turnover. Satellite stores have been set up and new books have joined the traditional secondhand commodities. "I make less money, "Bass said," but it's a little bit more scientific".

    Perhaps the most unusual part of management at the Strand book store was the book quiz­matching authors and title­that job applicants since the 1970 have been required to take.

    Curiosity is what drives us to keep learning, keep trying, keep pushing forward. But how does one generate (产生) curiosity, in oneself or others? George Loewenstein, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, offered an answer in the classic1994 paper, "The Psychology of Curiosity."

    Curiosity arises, Loewenstein wrote, "when attention becomes focused on a gap in one's knowledge. Such information gaps produce the feeling of deprivation (匮乏) labeled curiosity. The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce the feeling of deprivation." Loewenstein's theory helps explain why curiosity is such a force: it's not only a mental state but also an emotion, a powerful feeling that drives us forward.

    Scientist Daniel Willingham notes that teachers are often "so eager to get to the answer that we do not devote enough time to developing the question." Yet it's the question that stimulates (刺激) curiosity; being told an answer stops curiosity before it can even get going.

    In his 1994 paper, George Loewenstein noted that curiosity requires some basic knowledge. We're not curious about something we know absolutely nothing about. But as soon as we know even a little bit, our curiosity is aroused and we want to learn more. In fact, research shows that curiosity increases with knowledge: the more we know, the more we want to know. To get this process started, Loewenstein suggests, take steps with some interesting but incomplete information.

    Language teachers have long used communication in exercises that open an information gap and then require learners to communicate with each other in order to fill it. For example, one student might be given a series of pictures for the beginning of the story, while the student's partner is given a series of pictures showing how that same story ends. Only by speaking with each other (in the foreign language they are learning, of course) can the students fill in each others' information gaps.

The idea of climbing Mt.Qomolangma disgusted me. The mountain came to represent the opposite of everything that I loved and respected about climbing. What had once been the final mountain climbing goal became the focus of a commercial guiding industry. Over the years, the crowds at Base Camp grew, leaving behind tons of trash. Whenever I was asked whether I'd climb Mt. Qomolangma, my answer was always the same： not interested. 

That was probably where my personal Mt. Qomolangma story would have ended, were it not for an old friend Thom Pollard and his obsession （迷恋） with one of the greatest mysteries. In 1999, he began to explore and found the remains of George Mallory, the celebrated British climber who disappeared while he was attempting to be the first to climb Mt. Qomolangma. But Mallory's partner, Sandy Irvine, and the camera he had likely carried, were not found. The mountain climbing world has been wondering whether they might have reached the top in 1924. 

Pollard's story moved me. I began to pack for the climb and expected that our advanced equipment would make it manageable, perhaps easy. I was wrong. On the highest point on the planet, I was more tired than I'd ever been in any climbing. Along the way, I continuously tipped my hat, not just to Mallory and Irvine but to anyone who has the drive to push himself or herself up this route. My search was in vain, but I began to reconsider Mt. Qomolangma.

I witnessed many climbers, who were much more than just self-centered tourists. We shared route information, weather forecasts, and family photos — all united around a common goal. 

I went to Mt. Qomolangma to seek Irvine. But in the end, I found something more difficult to get： the spirit that Irvine and Mallory shared. It was hiding in plain sight, right where it has always been： inside the brave souls who risk so much to follow in storied adventurers' footsteps up Mt. Qomolangma.