Cakan is a successful businessman from Montenegro, who has earned himself nicknames(昵称)like “the best boss” and “Brother” by being surprisingly generous to his employees.

    Cakan, who owns "Cakan Sports", the largest sporting goods store chain in Montenegro, has been making news headlines for years, but not for his professional success. He is best known for the generosity he shows to his faithful and hard-working employees. The businessman firmly believes that his company can boom only if he keeps his employees happy, and to that end, he has offered the best of them some pretty unbelievable presents.

    Cakan first surprised his workers back in 2012, when he offered four of them brand new cars — 2 VW Golf 6 and 2 VW polo — complete with paid insurance. They were some of the oldest and most hard-working employees of Cakan Sports, and since the company had recently moved its operations outside the city, Cakan thought his best people shouldn't have to struggle to get to work. "When we saw them, we were speechless," Danijela, one of the receivers, remembers. "While the boss was saying 'his is a gift for you', all I could think of was 'this is not real, this can't be happening to us'.” But this was just one of the generous ways Cakan has rewarded his employees over the years. In 2014, after hearing that one of his workers had been saving up his paychecks so he could buy a ticket to the world Cup soccer final, in Brazil, he took him there himself, at his own expense.

    Asked why he doesn't use cheaper means of motivating his employees, like a small raise or a cash bonus, Cakan had this to say, "Money comes and goes, but memories are forever." Asked why many of his employees call him "Brother", Cakan told a reporter that it was because "brothers always help each other".

    All too often, a choice that seems sustainable(可持续的)turns out on closer examination to be problematic. Probably the best example is the rush to produce ethanol(乙醇) for fuel from corn. Corn is a renewable resource —you can harvest it and grow more, almost limitlessly. So replacing gas with corn ethanol seems like a great idea. 

    One might get a bit more energy out of the ethanol than that used to make it, which could still make ethanol more sustainable than gas generally, but that's not the end of the problem. Using corn to make ethanol means less corn is left to feed animals and people, which drives up the cost of food. That result leads to turning the fallow land –including, in some cases, rain forest in places such as Brazil—into farmland, which in turn gives off lots of carbon dioxide (CO) into the air. Finally, over many years, the energy benefit from burning ethanol would make up for the forest loss. But by then, climate change would have progressed so far that it might not help.

    You cannot really declare any practice “sustainable” until you have done a complete life-cycle analysis of its environmental(环境的) costs. Even then, technology and public keep developing, and that development can lead to unforeseen and undesired results. The admirable goal of living sustainably requires plenty of thought on an ongoing basis.

    Mrs. Jones was my first patient when I started medical school—and I owe her a lot.

    She was under my care for the first two years of my medical training, yet I knew very little about her, except that she was thin, perhaps in her mid 70s. It might seem rather negligent not to know the basic facts of my patient ,but I had a valid reason—Mrs. Jones was dead, and had been dead for about three years before I made a patient of her. Mrs. Jones was the dead body that I dissected（解剖）over the first two years of my medical training.

Of course, her name wasn't really Mrs. Jones, but it seemed a little impolite to be conducting research into someone's body without even knowing its name, so out of courtesy, I thought she should have one. "Me and Mrs. Jones, we've got a thing going on," went the song coming out of the radio as I unzipped the bag of her on my first day — and so she was christened.

As the months passed, I soon forgot that Mrs. Jones had, in fact, once been alive. One day, though, she suddenly became very human again. I'd been dissecting Mrs. Jones a good 18 months before I got around to the uterus（子宫）. After I'd removed it, the professor came up to me, "If you look at the opening carefully, you'll see that the angle indicates that this woman has had several children, probably three." I stared at it, and I suddenly felt very strange. This woman, who had given me something incredibly precious that I'd begun to take for granted, wasn't a dead body. She was a person, a mother, in fact.

    At my graduation, the same professor came over to congratulate me. I explained the story about Mrs. Jones to him, and recalled what he'd told me about her having children and how that had affected me all those years ago.

"Well," he said, "at the beginning of your training you had a dead body and managed to turn it into a person. Now you're a doctor, the trick is to have a person and not turn them into a dead body," and he laughed, shook my hand and walked away.

    When we don't understand each other's language, we can talk with the help of signs.

    A Frenchman was once travelling in England. He could not speak English at all. One day he went into a restaurant and sat down at a table. When the waiter came, he opened his mouth, put his fingers in it, and took out again. He wanted to say. "Bring me something to eat."

    The waiter soon brought him a cup of tea. The man moved his head from side to side. The waiter understood him and took the tea away. In a moment he came with a cup of coffee. But the man again refused it. He shook his head whenever the waiter brought him something to drink, for drinks are not food.

    When the man was going away, another man came in. This man saw the waiter, and he put his hand on his stomach. That was enough. In a few minutes there was a large plate of meat and vegetables on the table in front of him.

    So you see, we cannot understand the language of signs as well as we can understand the language of words.

    Phil White has just returned from an 18,000-mile, around-the-world bicycle trip. White had two reasons for making this epic journey. First of all, he wanted to use the trip to raise money for charity, which he did. He raised ＄70,000 for the British charity, Oxfam. White's second reason for making the trip was to break the world record and become the fastest person to cycle around the world. He is still waiting to find out if he has broken the record or not.

    White set off from Trafalgar Square, in London, on 19th June 2004 and was back 299 days later. He spent more than l,300 hours in the saddle(车座)and destroyed four sets of tyres and three bike chains. He had the adventure of his life crossing Europe, the Middle East, India, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the Americas. Amazingly, he did all of this with absolutely no support team. No jeep carrying food, water and medicine. No doctor. Nothing! Just a bike and a very, very long road.

    The journey was lonely and desperate at times. He also had to fight his way across deserts, through jungles and over mountains. He cycled through heavy rains and temperatures of up to 45 degrees, all to help people in need. There were other dangers along the road. In Iran, he was chased by armed robbers and was lucky to escape with his life and the little money he had. The worst thing that happened to him was having to cycle into a headwind on a road that crosses the south of Australia. For 1, 000 kilometres he battled against the wind that was constantly pushing him. This part of the trip was slow, hard work and depressing, but he made it in the end. Now Mr. White is back and intends to write a book about his adventures.

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