It was a hot,humid day, and my brother Walt and I had decided that the only way to surviveit would be to go swimming in a deep swimming hole across Mr. Blickez's pasture(牧场) and through some woods.

    The onlyproblem with our plan was that this pasture was guarded by a huge, meanHereford bull. Mr. Blickez had told us that Elsie was the meanestbull in the township, maybe even the county, and we believed him. But the hotter it got, the more we thoughtthere was something fishy about his claim. For one thing, we remembered Mr. Blickez liked telling tall tales; for another, Elsie seemed like an oddname for a bull.

    Finally, Italked Mom into asking permission for us to walk through the pasture, but thenanother problem surfaced．Mom said she would talk to Mr. Blickez if we would take our cousin Joanie along with us. Joanie was almost two years older than me anda head taller. If her teasingever got around my grade school, it would be all over for me. In fact, I still had a headache from a quarrelwith her that morning.“I'm not goingswimming with that dumb girl cousin.” I told my mom.

  “Either Joaniegoes with, or you stay home alone,” Mom said in her serious tone. I gave in and we set out. On our way across the pasture, Walt yelledsuddenly. Elsie hadapproached him quietly and was licking(舔) his back. Joanie and Idove under the wire fence, but while I was on the ground I looked up and sawthat Elsie wasn't a big mean bull after all. She was going to keep licking my brother's back as long as he stoodstill.

    We had manygood days growing up and visiting our secret swimming hole guarded by theso-called “big mean bull”. And as it turned out, for a girl cousin, Joanie hasn't been too bad. She's been one of my best friends over theyears.

    Why can't some people even get an inch of what they dream of becoming? Blame it on pure dreaming and lack of setting goals for achieving their dreams.

    Setting goals is very significant part of accomplishing and positive actions. It is like scaling (攀爬) a 200 feet construction and marking in the early hours on what feet you would like to reach at this specific period.

    People who set goals literally generate(形成) a map of their goal settings in life, marking where they should start, where to pause, where to study a bit, and where and when to end. Once this map comes into being, it allows the map drawer to check where he is in the scheme(安排) of things and whether or not he is making some planning that will take him closer to his goals.

    By setting goals, people will know how they are doing and what they should be doing to get their goals or dreams in life. They will know if they can relax or if they have to double their efforts when they are falling short of what is expected of them.

    Goal setting means a person is proactive in dealing with challenges that may affect his plans. Being proactive means one is able to outline possible difficulties that may happen as well as the solutions（解决方法）to these difficulties. By doing this, a person is not easily scared or defeated when challenges happen because he has already prepared for them. He knows they can happen and he has prepared a solution or strategy when that time comes.

    Setting goals will enable people to track their progress in whatever hard work they set out to do. It will help people become more confident in themselves and more motivated to get their plans.

Decision-making under Stress

    A new review based on a research shows that acute stress affects the way the brain considers the advantages and disadvantages, causing it to focus on pleasure and ignore the possible negative (负面的) consequences of a decision.

     The research suggests that stress may change the way people make choices in predictable ways.

    “Stress affects how people learn,” says Professor Mara Mather. “People learn better about positive than negative outcomes under stress.”

    For example, two recent studies looked at how people learned to connect images(影像) with either rewards or punishments. In one experiment, some of the participants were first stressed by having to give a speech and do difficult math problems in front of an audience; in the other, some were stressed by having to keep their hands in ice water. In both cases, the stressed participants remembered the rewarded material more accurately and the punished material less accurately than those who hadn't gone through the stress.

    This phenomenon is likely not surprising to anyone who has tried to resist eating cookies or smoking a cigarette while under stress –at those moments, only the pleasure associated with such activities comes to mind. But the findings further suggest that stress may bring about a double effect. Not only are rewarding experiences remembered better, but negative consequences are also easily recalled.

    The research also found that stress appears to affect decision-making differently in men and women. While both men and women tend to focus on rewards and less on consequences under stress, their responses to risk turn out to be different.

    Men who had been stressed by the cold-water task tended to take more risks in the experiment while women responded in the opposite way. In stressful situations in which risk-taking can pay off big, men may tend to do better, when caution weighs more, however, women will win.

    This tendency to slow down and become more cautious when decisions are risky might also help explain why women are less likely to become addicted than men: they may more often avoid making the risky choices that eventually harden into addiction.

    As technology develops, school students who are off class may have no fear of too much absence from class. A small robot may help those children recovering from a long-term illnesses in the hospital or at home. These children may feel isolated from their friends and classmates. The robot takes their place at school. Through the robot, the children can hear their teachers and friends. They also can take part in class from wherever they are recovering.

    Anyone who has had a long term illness knows that recovering at home can be lonely. This can be especially true of children. They may feel left out. Now these children may have a high-tech friend to feel less alone. And that friend is a robot. The robot is called AV1. AV1 goes to school for a child who is at home while recovering from a long-term illness. And the child's school friends must help. They carry the robot between classes and place the robot on the child's desk.

    A Norwegian company called No isolation created the robot. The co-founders of No Isolation are Karen Dolva and Marius Aabel. Dolva explains how the robot AV1 works. She says, from home, the child uses a tablet or phone to start the robot. Then they use the same device（设备）to control the robot's movements. At school, the robot becomes the eyes, ears and voice of the child. The child can take part in classroom activities from wherever she/he is recovering-whether at home or from a hospital bed. The robot is equipped with speakers, microphones and cameras make communicating easy.

    Director James Cameron went to new depths for his film-making on Sunday by setting the world record for the deepest ocean dive by a single person.

    This type of extreme research is nothing new to the director. Cameron, 57, is most famous for directing Titanic (1997) and Avantar (2009). During the several years of research for Titanic, he famously traveled to the bottom of the ocean to visit the sunken ship. He also visited the deep sea as research for his fictional 1989 film. The Abyss, which is about a submarine that comes across an alien species. "Most people know me as a film-maker," Cameron said. "But the idea of exploring the ocean has always been the stronger drive in my life."

    Cameron and his team had been preparing for the trip for seven years. On Sunday, Cameron took more than two and a half hours to make the dangerous 6.8-mile journey down to the Trench, an area with near-freezing temperatures, no sunlight, and heavy water pressure. Cameron traveled in a 24-foot-long mini-submarine he helped design, equipped with lights and 3D cameras for filming the adventure. It also had a mechanical arm for collecting samples of soil and deep-sea creatures. Humans had not visited the Mariana Trench since two divers first reached the deep-sea spot in 1960. The divers Don Walsh and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard spent 20 minutes there but could hardly see anything. They took no pictures.

    In his well-equipped submarine, Cameron was able to spend three hours in the Trench, exploring and filming. He plans to use his recordings in a 3D film production for movie theaters and for a National Geographic TV special. "I see this as the beginning," Cameron said. "It's not a one-time deal. This is just the beginning of opening up this new frontier."

Hip-hop started 50 years ago as an escape from poverty and violence in Bronx, New York City. The music and style appealed to Black and Latino teenagers. As hip-hop spread throughout New York, so did the culture.

People often mix up hip-hop with rap. Rap is a musical style that combines quick recitation of rhymes with musical beats. But hip-hop is more than just music. It is a culture, and rap music is one part of it. Hip-hop also includes other activities, like breakdancing, disc-jockeying and graffiti art. In his 1993 song Hip Hop vs. Rap, KRS-One said: "Rap is something you do. Hip hop is something you live." In the early days of hip-hop, playing music on the streets or turning a basketball court into a dance floor may have seemed like a simple invitation to have fun and party. But it actually was an answer to social and economic injustice in poor neighborhoods. It was a way to show joy and imagination even without resources and wealth.

As hip-hop and rap music grew into a force in American culture, entertainers used it to speak to their personal realities. In 1982, in the song The Message, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five criticized poverty and a lack of investment in Black communities. Several years later, Tupac Shakur complained about police violence in the song Changes. Today, hip-hop's influence on music and other industries is so widespread that experts say it becomes difficult to measure.

There is also hip-hop's influence on protest, resistance and political dissent(异议)around the world. From the Arab Spring and the Palestinian freedom fight to feminism and class struggles, rap music is a popular expression for calls to action. Music videos produced by artists in Africa, Europe, Asia and South America often include breakdancers, graffiti and other elements of hip-hop.

"Hip-hop took the chains off us and said, ‘No, we're gonna say it our way,' " Al Sharpton, American civil rights leader, said, "It was that freedom. It was that raw, non-watered down kind of expression."