Mom was a teacher most of her life. When she wasn't in the classroom, she was educating her children or grandchildren: correcting our grammar; starting us on collections of butterflies, flowers or rocks; or inspiring a discussion on her most recent “Book of the Month Club” topic. Mom made learning fun.

    It was sad for my three brothers and me to see her illness in her later years. At eighty-five, she suffered a stroke(中风) and she went steadily(不断地) downhill after that.

    Two days before she died, my brothers and I met at her nursing home and took her for a short ride in a wheelchair. While we waited for the staff to lift her limp body back into bed, Mom fell asleep. Not wanting to wake her, we moved to the far end of the room and spoke softly. Several minutes our conversation was interrupted by a muffled sound coming from across the room. We stopped talking and looked at Mom. Her eyes were closed, but she was clearly trying to communicate with us. We went to her side.

    “Whirr,” she said weakly.

    “Where?” I asked. “Mom, is there something you want?” “Whirr,” she repeated a bit stronger. My brothers and I looked at each other and shook our heads sadly.

    Mom opened her eyes, sighed, and with all the energy she could gather said, “Not was, say were!”

    It suddenly occurred to us that Mom was correcting brother Jim's last sentence. “If it was up to me…”

    Jim leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Thanks, Mom,” he whispered. We smiled at each other and once again shook our heads…this time in awe (敬畏) of a remarkable teacher.

    Are you interested in some of the most popular brands such as Beats headphones, True Religion jeans, and UGG shoes? They are also expensive. But some experts say they are not much better than cheaper brands.

    For example, Jim Wilcox works for Consumer Reports. He tested all kinds of headphones. He says that $80 Koss Pro headphones provide basically the same quality and comfort as Beats. So why do people pay twice or even 10 times as much for the hottest brands?

    Experts say it's because fashionable, expensive brands send a message. Brands say “I belong” or “I can afford it.”

    Some people think that expensive brand names are worth the price. They say that some designer clothes are really top quality and that they last longer than cheaper brands. Some teenagers choose to wear popular brands because these brands make them feel good about themselves.

    Alexandra Allam, 17, likes to buy brand-name products. “I'd rather spend the extra money to get something I know I'll be satisfied with,” she says. Her friend Emmy Swan agrees, saying “As long as you can afford it, it seems reasonable to buy what you want.” But not all teenagers agree. “Spending hundreds of dollars for designer sunglasses is stupid and unreasonable,” says Daniel Steinbrecher, 16. “It's fake (假的) happiness.”

    People who are against wearing expensive brand names say that many designer brands aren't any better. “It's wasteful to buy things just because they are popular,” says Edmund Williams, 15. “You'll feel better if you buy things because you like them. If you have extra money to spend, it would be better to give it to people in need.”

    National Gallery of Canada

    Position:

    National Gallery (美术馆) of Canada

    380 Sussex Drive (大道)

    P.O. Box 427, Station A

    Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1N 9N4

    Telephone: 613-990-1985 or 1-800-319-ARTS

    Fax: 613-993-4385

    Directions:

    From Highway 417, take the Metcalfe exit (出口). Follow Metcalfe Street around the Museum of Nature and continue to the north until you reach the end of the street at Wellington. You will see Parliament Hill. Turn right onto Wellington Street and continue in the left-hand road until you reach Sussex Drive. As you approach Sussex Drive, you will see the Chateau Laurier hotel on your left-hand side. Make a left turn onto Sus-sex Drive and continue until you see the Gallery on your left-hand side, at the corner of St. Patrick and Sussex. The Gallery is a large glass building with two towers. Just beyond the St. Patrick / Sussex crossroads you will see the entrance to the Gallery's underground parking.

    Opening Hours:

    1 May — 30 September

    Open daily from 10 am to 5 pm, Thursdays to 8 pm.

    1 October — 30 April

    Open Tuesday to Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm; Thursdays until 8 pm. Closed Mondays.

    Closed Christmas Day, New Year's Day and 2 January 2012 (Monday).

    Tickets:

    $9: Adults

    $7: The elderly and full-time students (ID required)

    $4: Youth (12-19)

    $18: Family (2 adults, 3 youths)

    Free admission for children under 12 and members of the Gallery.

    Free admission Thursdays after 5 pm.

    In China, many people are leaving the countryside to find jobs in the cities, because the countryside is much poorer than the city, and often there isn't much work there. Services such as hospital and transport are usually much better in the city than in the countryside. They hope that their lives will improve when they move to the city.

    But in the big cities of Europe like London or Pads, people are moving out of the city. These rich families want to live a quieter life. They are tired of the noise and the dirt of the city, and they are tired of the crowded streets, crowded trains and buses. They don't want to live in the cities any more. They want a house with a garden in the countryside, and breathe the fresh air there.

    So they move out of the cities. Some don't go very far, just a little way out of the city, to the towns near the cities, other people move to the real countryside with sheep, cows and green fields. There, they start new lives and try to make new friends.

    Not all those who move from the city to the countryside are happy. After two or three years, many people who have done this feel that it was a big mistake. They don't make so much money and there isn't much work to do. People in the countryside are very different and aren't always very friendly.

    As a result, quite a lot of people who have moved to the countryside move back to the city. "

    It's wonderful to see crowds in the streets and cinema lights," they say.

    If plastic had been invented when the Pilgrims sailed from Plymouth, England, to North America-and their Mayflower had been stocked with bottled water and plastic- wrapped snacks, their plastic waste would likely still be around four centuries later. Atlantic waves and sunlight would have worn all that plastic into tiny bits. And those bits might still be floating around the world's oceans today, waiting to be eaten by some fish or oyster, and finally perhaps by one of us.

    Because plastic wasn't invented until the late 19th century, and its production only really took off around 1950, we have a mere 9.2 billion tons of the stuff to deal with. Of that, more than 6.9 billion tons have become waste. And of that waste, a surprising 6.3 billion tons never made it to a recycling bin-the figure that shocked the scientists who published the numbers in 2017.

    No one knows how much unrecycled plastic waste ends up in the ocean, the earth's last sink. In 2015, Jenna Jam beck a University of Georgia engineering professor, caught everyone's attention with a rough estimate between 5.3 million and 14 million tons of plastic waste each year just come from coastal regions.

    Meanwhile, ocean plastic is estimated to kill millions of marine(海洋的）animals every year. Nearly 700 species, including endangered ones, are known to have been affected by it. Some are harmed visibly, stuck by abandoned things made of plastic. Many more are probably harmed invisibly. Marine species of all sizes, from zooplankton to whales, now eat microplas-tics, the bits smaller than one-fifth of an inch across.

    "This isn't a problem where we don't know what the solution is, "says Ted Siegler, a Vermont resource economist who has spent more than 25 years working with developing nations on garbage." We know how to pick up garbage. Anyone can do it. We know how to deal with it. We know how to recycle. "It's a matter of building the necessary institutions and systems, he says, ideally before the ocean turns into a thin soup of plastic.

    We tend to think of our dreams as being uniquely personal­nighttime stories built from our own experiences that help us process our day-to-day lives. While dreams can give us a look into our personal selves, scientists have collected data that suggests dreams make their way into our cultural fabric(结构), showing themselves in ways that shape beliefs and expose collective anxieties.

    Roger Ivar Lohmann of Trent University conducted research with the Asabano people of the rainforest of Papua New Guinea, a unique group who didn't have outside contact until 1963. His studies looked at how dreams shape their beliefs and actions.

    According to Lohmann's research, dreams act as a sort of motivator or determinant of Asabano behavior. For instance, a dream may affect the way a person hunts or goes about treating medical conditions. The way dreams determine behavior is due to what Lohmann calls the "night residue" effect. This means that specific memories of dreams can affect the way a person acts when awake and inform their belief system.

    Dreams also seem to have an effect on the way many define themselves within their own cultures, and how sometimes reaching a distinct definition can cause anxiety.

    Matt Newsom of Washington State University spoke with college students in Berlin, and found many students had dreams surrounding conflicting views about their own identities(身份) in relation to what they saw as a return of German nationalism, which is a sensitive subject especially when we think of German identity as it's defined even many years after World War Ⅱ.

    Many students had dreams that centered around anxieties like "Where do I belong?" Many students never talked with one another about identity struggles in their dreams, yet many reported having such dreams. Newsom noted that dreams can be helpful "for identifying (识别) unspoken social and historical anxieties present in a given society."

    All of this research suggests that dreams can do more than help explain the thought of a person; we can learn about entire cultures and collective attitudes as well.