When I was about twelve, I headed to a restaurant for dinner with my family. It was winter, and on that particular night, the wind was really blowing. As my mom and I headed towards the restaurant from our car, a girl about my age and her mother came up to us. They asked if we had any spare change. My mom immediately asked where they kept their things. They pointed to an old car in a parking across the street. The girl said there were six of them living in that car, which was the same size as my own family.

    My mom said she had something to do after handing the people a few dollars. She sent me inside the restaurant with my dad and my three siblings. But she didn't come.

    Later, I found out she had gone home and practically emptied our cupboards into a few bags. Then, she brought that food over to the car and handed the bags to the family. I wasn't there when that part happened, but I can only imagine the joy it brought to their faces.

A few days later, when I actually found out about what she had done, I asked her why she helped those people. She told me that they were not lucky. I remember the face of that girl who had asked us for change, she was the same age as me, yet we looked so different.

Here I stood, dressed in almost new clothes, headed to dine in a restaurant and then back home to the bedroom I shared with my younger sister. I remember thinking that the other girl didn't have any food to eat. And she was heading back to a cold car shared with five other people.

    After painting this picture in my mind, I understood why my mom had done what she did. I will never forget what she did that night, and how she taught me one of the best lessons I ever learned.

    Lagoon Bar, Iceland

    Blue Lagoon in Iceland is truly the place where you can get rid of all troubles. Here the warmth of hot springs gets you close to nature. A wonderful bar is opened among the hot springs. While you're sitting in the hot water, waitresses bring you a range of cocktails.

    What to order: cocktail “Blue Lagoon” and white wine.

    Baobab Tree Bar Wine Cellar, South Africa

    In the hollow (洞) of a huge 6,000-year-old baobab tree you can not only drink a cocktail, but also rest from the heat of Limpopo Province. Once this safe heaven was known only to the Bushmen, but now this ancient tree is the tourist destination for all kinds of tourists.

    What to order: anything in a glass.

    The Birdsville Hotel and Pub, Australia

    At the edge of the Simpson Desert, among the sand dunes (沙丘), which are the favorite spot for the mice, there is a hotel and a pub. The walls of this bar are decorated with old hats and posters of beer, the oldest of which dates from 1884. Most visitors of this building are the amateurs of racing. They come to this village for the September competition. However, the pub is not empty also on other months: the airstrip (飞机跑道) is located nearby, so those who get off the plane are going to have a glass or two of beer first.

    What to order: a pint of beer.

    Floyd's Pelican Bar, Jamaica

    It appears that these huge palm leaves and trunks fell into the ocean long time ago. They floated on the waves and then piled up year by year, sticking out of the ocean. That's probably how the Pelican Bar, located about a mile from the southwest coast of Jamaica, is built on. Some of its visitors have no room to be fitted inside the bar, and they just drink standing in waist-deep water.

    What to order: cocktail “Pelican Perfection”.

    It was Monday. Mrs. Smith's dog was hungry, but there was not any meat in the house.

    Considering that there was no better way. Mrs. Smith took a piece of paper, and wrote the following words on it: “Give my dog half a pound of meat.”Then she gave the paper to her dog and said gently:“Take this to the butcher(*person whose job is selling meat) and he's going to give you your lunch today.”

    Holding the piece of paper in its mouth, the dog ran to the butcher's. It gave the paper to the butcher. The butcher read it carefully, recognized that it was really the lady's handwriting and soon did it as he was asked to. The dog was very happy, and ate the meat up at once.

    At noon, the dog came to the shop again. It gave the butcher a piece of paper again. After reading it, he gave it half a pound of meat once more.

    The next day, the dog came again exactly at noon. And as usual, it brought a piece of paper in the mouth. This time, the butcher did not take a look at paper, and gave the dog its meat, for he had regarded the dog as one of his customers (*people who buy sth. from a shop).

    But, the dog came again at four o'clock. And the same thing happened once again. To the butcher's more surprise, it came for the third time at six o'clock, and brought with it a third piece of paper. The butcher felt a bit puzzled. He said to himself,“This is a small dog. Why does Mrs. Smith give it so much meat to eat today?”

    Looking at the piece of paper, he found that there were not any words on it!

    I am Henry Jekyll. I was born in the 1 800s. I inherited(继承) a large fortune, a healthy body and an excellent mind. I was naturally hard-working and soon I was very successful in my job. So the outside world saw a serious, hard-working, successful doctor. Behind this quiet character, however, was a wild, fun-loving, irresponsible young man. Both of them were me. They lived together in the same body.

    “Was it possible," I wondered, “to find a drug that could give each side of my character its own separate face and body?"

    After much thought and careful study I believed I had found the answer. I had read many scientific books and spent many hours in my laboratory, searching for the right mixture of chemicals to make my drug. At last I got everything ready.

    Late one night, I mixed everything together and prepared my drug. I watched the smoke rising from the liquid as its color changed from red to purple and at last to green. Then, bravely, I drank every bitter drop.

    I felt a violent sickness in my stomach and a terrible pain in all my bones. The room seemed to turn round and round and I trembled with fear. Then the fear and pain disappeared and a strange, sweet feeling took its place. Wild thoughts danced through my mind- the wild passions of an evil and cruel stranger. But inside myself I felt younger, lighter, more carefree than ever before. "If this is pure evil," I thought, “I like it.”

    I stood there, enjoying these strange new thoughts and passions and suddenly realized that I was shorter. So I decided to go to my bedroom in my new body and take a look at myself in the mirror there. As I came into my room, I saw Edward Hyde for the first time.

    At that time, the good side of my character was stronger than the evil side. Henry Jekyll had his faults, but he was mostly a good, kind man. I believe that is the reason why Edward Hyde was so much smaller than Henry Jekyll. But that was not the only difference between the two men. Henry Jekyll had a kind, open, honest face. But pure evil stared out of Edward Hyde's eyes. I felt no dislike, however. Indeed, I welcomed him. Edward Hyde was me, young and strong and full of life.

    There have always been a lot of commonly believed but false ideas about being fat and doing exercise. Some people believe that they can't help putting on weight as they get older, while others hold that if they stop exercising, their muscles will turn into fat. Here are some more myths:

I'll never lose weight — I come from a fat family.

Wrong! While we can't change the body type we are born with, we can't blame our genes for making us fat. There's plenty of evidence that fatness runs in families, and the main reason is that they share the same habits of eating too much and exercise too little.

    I am fat because I burn calories slowly.

Wrong! Fatness is not caused by a slow metabolism (新陈代谢). If fact, although fat people consume more energy that slim people, they also fail to realize how much they eat! Keeping a diary can help you work out your daily food intake more accurately.

    Exercise is boring.

    Wrong! Anything will become boring if you do it many times. The key is to develop a balanced and varied program that's fun as well as progressive. If you enjoy a Sunday walk, take a different route. If you do Yoga, try a tai chi class. If you like swimming, set yourself a distance or time challenge.

    No pain, no gain.

    Wrong! Exercise is not meant to hurt. Indeed, pain is your body telling you something's wrong, and continuing to exercise could lead to serious injury. You may experience mild discomfort as you begin to exercise regularly, but this your body adapting to the positive changes in your lifestyle and the aches should disappear relatively quickly. If you don't, rest and seek medical advice.

    As the days get shorter and the chilly weather rolls in, we all want to curl up in a blanket and hibernate until spring rolls around. But making time to get outside in the sun, even when it's cold out, could have bigger mood benefits than you might realize.

    While the link between sunshine and mental health is nothing new, new research from Brigham Young University (BYU) has shown that the association may be even stronger than previously realized. It finds that sunlight exposure is by far the greatest weather-related factor determining mental health outcomes. In other words: more sunshine, more happiness.

    For the study, a psychologist, a physicist and a statistician from BYU teamed up to compare daily environmental data from the university's Physics and Astronomy Weather Station with emotional health data archived by day for 16,452 adult therapy patients who were being treated at the BYU Counseling and Psychological Services Center.

    Exposure to sunlight is a significant factor in seasonal affective disorder. Research has shown that the brain produces more of the feel-good neurotransmitter serotonin on sunny days than it does on darker days. What's more, lack of sunlight is linked with lower vitamin D levels, which in turn has been correlated with depression and low energy.

    If you're getting enough sun, your emotions should remain relatively stable, the researchers found. But as the amount of sunlight in the day is reduced, levels of emotional pain can soar. Other weather variables including temperature, pollution and rain were not found to have an impact on mental health.

    “We were surprised that many of the weather and pollution variables we included in the study were not significantly correlated with clients' scores on the distress measure once we had accounted for suntime," Dr. Mark Beecher, a professor of psychology at the university and the study's lead author, told The Huffington Post. “People tend to associate rainy days, pollution, and other meteorological phenomena with sadness or depression, but we did not find that.”