Bad days happens to many of us. Something makes us sad, angry, frustrated or disappointed. But you still have to get up and go to work. Everything others say to you sounds stupid.{#blank#}1{#/blank#} . Luckily, you can do something about it. Here are some ways to turn around a bad day.

    Accept your bad mood

    Being in a bad mood is not that hard. If you're mad, be mad.{#blank#}2{#/blank#} . This does not give you license to be rude and unpleasant to others. It just means that you need to recognize and accept your bad mood to be able to do something.

    Tell others

    You can try to keep your bad mood a secret and put on your happy mask. Guess what, you're fooling nobody.{#blank#}3{#/blank#} . Simply tell them “listen guys, I'm in a really sour mood today. I'm not sure why, but it's nothing to do with what you have done. If I bite your head off, I apologize in advance.”

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#} 

    Spend a few moments to try thinking of at least one or two things that aren't all bad: Something you look forward to, such as a person you like at work or something nice that happened recently.

    Take some quiet time

    And if you're having a really bad day, it may be a good idea to withdraw a little if you can. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} . Sit and work somewhere quiet. Take a long bathroom break. Consider going home early or taking the day off.

A. Remember the good

B. It's important to get along well with others

C. Everyone seems to annoy you

D. The best thing to do is to tell the people you work closely with

E. If you're sad, be sad

F. Ask for advice

G. Take a walk in your lunch break

    Recently, I've been following a simple rule that is helping me crush procrastination(拖延症) and making it easier for me to stick to good habits at the same time. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} There are two parts to the 2-Minute Rule.

    Part 1—If it takes less than two minutes, then do it now.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#} For example, washing your dishes immediately after your meal, tossing the laundry in the washing machine, taking out the garbage, sending that email, and so on.

    If a task takes less than two minutes to complete, then follow the rule and do it right now.

    Part 2—When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.

    Can all of your goals be accomplished in less than two minutes? Obviously not. But, every goal can be started in 2 minutes or less. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    It might sound like this strategy is too basic for grand life goals, but I beg to differ. The 2-Minute Rule works for big goals as well as small goals because of the inertia(惯性)of life. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} I love the 2-Minute Rule because it embraces the idea that all sorts of good things happen once you get started.

    The most important part of any new habit is getting started—not just the first time, but each time. It's not about performance, it's about consistently taking action.

    I can't guarantee whether or not the 2-Minute Rule will work for you. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} Anyone can spare the next 120 seconds. Use this time to get one thing done. Go.

A. I call this little strategy the “2-Minute Rule”.

B. And that's the purpose behind this little rule.

C. Here's what you need to know to stop procrastinating.

D. Once you start doing something, it's easier to continue doing it.

E. But, I can guarantee that it will never work if you never try it.

F. The goal is to make it easier for you to get started on the things you should be doing.

G. It's surprising how many things we put off that we could get done in two minutes or less.

How to Overcome Challenges in Your Life

    We all face tough and difficult challenges in life. To overcome challenges you need to have that "never quit" attitude in life. If you develop it, you'll overcome quite a bit.

    Motivate yourself. Say "YES, I CAN." The challenge should bring out the best of you in this situation. Slow it down, and think that process through.{#blank#}1{#/blank#} If you develop that mindset(心态), you'll get it done.

    Stay calm and cool­headed. Remain calm when you're facing serious troubles and problems in life. You have to recollect yourself, and calm down. You can't solve problems when you're panicking. Take a deep breath, relax, and slow it down. Think things through calmly.

    Let failure and fear fuel you in a positive way. Everyone fails at times. If you fail the first, second, or third time, don't give up.{#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    Learn what made you fail and overcome these challenges. Simplify the challenge you're facing. Make the challenge easier than it is. Start by breaking it down into steps. As you get through each step, you develop more confidence and you believe you can get it done, and then you will overcome them.

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#} To overcome a challenge, you have to believe you can really do it. You have to find out all the ways you can use to overcome it, and put them to full use with all your effort. It's our own mental stability that's the difficult part. When you do it mentally, you'll actually be able to do it.

A. Stay positive and confident.

B. Most people will avoid any challenge, because they're scared of failing.

C. Develop that confidence in saying there's no way you're going to fail at this.

D. Pick yourself up, and learn from why you've failed, and move on in a positive direction.

    If there is one word to describe the progress made in the last 100 years, it's connectedness. From the telephone to the radio to the TV to the Internet, we have found ways to bring us all closer together, enabling，constant worldly access.

    I don't think I need to highlight the benefits of all this. But the downsides are also beginning to show. Beyond the current talk about privacy and data collection, there is perhaps an even more detrimental side-effect here: We now live in a world where we're connected to everything except ourselves. According to Pascal, we fear the silence of existence, and we dread boredom and instead choose aimless distraction and use the noise of the world to block out the discomfort of dealing with ourselves.

    However, we ignore the fact that never facing ourselves is why we feel lonely an anxious in spite of being so intimately connected to everything else around us.

    Fortunately, there is a solution. The only way to avoid being ruined by this is to face it. It's to let the boredom take you where it wants so you can deal with whatever it is that is really going on with your sense of self. That's when you'll hear yourself think, and learn to engage the parts of you that are masked by distraction.

    The beauty of this is that, once you cross that initial barrier, you realize that being alone isn't so bad. Boredom can provide its own stimulation.

    When you surround yourself with moments of solitude and stillness, you become intimately familiar with your environment in a way that forced stimulation doesn't allow. The world becomes richer, the layers start to peel back, and you see things for what they really are, in all their wholeness, in all their contradictions, and in all their unfamiliarity.

    You learn that there are things you are capable of paying attention to than just what makes the most noise on the surface. Just because a quiet room doesn^'t scream with excitement like the idea of immersing yourself in a movie or a TV show doesn't mean there isn't depth to explore there.

    Sometimes, the direction that this solitude leads you in can be unpleasant, especially when it comes to introspection (内省)—your thoughts and your feelings, your doubts and your hopes—but in the long term, it's far more pleasant than running away from it all without even realizing what you are.

    Being alone and connecting inwardly is a skill nobody ever teaches us. That's ironic because it^'s more important than most of the ones they do.

    Solitude may not be the solution to everything, but it certainly is a start.

New discoveries and technological breakthroughs are made every year. Yet, as the information industry moves forward, many people in society are looking back to their roots in terms of the way they eat. A "locavore" movement has emerged in the United States. The movement supports eating foods grown locally and sustainably, rather than prepackaged foods shipped from other parts of the world.

Experts hold that eating local has many merits, and is expected to become a trend featuring sustainability. Erin Barnett is the director of Local Harvest, a company that aims to help connect people to farms in their area. By eating local, she argues, people have a better and more personal understanding of the impact their food consumption has on the rest of the world. "There is a way of connecting the point, where eating locally is an act that raises our awareness of sustainable living," Barnett says.

The United States' agricultural output is one of the highest in the world, says Timothy Beach, a professor of geography and geoscience at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas. "There's just no other place on Earth where the amount of input is so productive," Beach says of American agriculture. "Nobody can cut off the food we need."

However, the US food system is not sustainable because of its dependency on fossil (化石) fuels, says Beach. Equipment used on "extremely productive" farms is quickly consuming Earth's natural resources, particularly oil. Additionally, the production of agricultural supplements (补充剂)，such as fertilizer, uses large amounts of energy.

The world has used close to half of the global oil supply, Beach says, and the second half will be consumed at an even faster rate because of the growing population and economic development. Although many businesses are experimenting with wind, solar, and biofuel, Beach says there's nothing that we see on the horizon that can replace it. "There is no way on Earth we are using fossil fuels sustainably. Then we have to reconsider the impact of eating local," he says.

Recently I read Nineteen Eighty-Four,a novel by George Orwell set in a state where even the language they use is controlled.Adjectives are forbidden and instead they use phrases such as "ungood","plus good" and "double plus good" to express emotions.As I first read this I thought how impossible it would be in our society to have such vocabulary.However,the more I thought about it,the more I realised in its own way it's already happening.I type messages to my friends and alongside each is the emoji.I often use it to emphasise something,or to not seem too serious,or because this specific GIF conveys my emotions much better than I ever could using just words.And I wonder,with our excessive use of emojis,are we losing the beauty and diversity of our vocabulary?

English has the largest vocabulary in the world,with over one million words,but who's to say what it'll be like in the future?Perhaps we will have a shorter language,full of saying "cry face" if something sad happens or using abbreviations(缩写) like LOL(laugh out loud) or BRB(be right back) instead of saying the full phrase.So does this mean our vocabulary will shrink?Is it the start of an exciting new era?Will they look back on us in the future and say this is where it all began—the new language?Or is this a classic case of the older generations saying,"Things weren't like that when I was younger.We didn't use emoticons to show our emotions"?

Yet when you look back over time,the power of image has always been there.Even in the prehistoric era they used imagery to communicate,and what's even more incredible is that we are able to analyse those drawings and understand the meaning of them thousands of years later.Pictures have the ability to transcend time and language.Images,be it cave paintings or emojis,allow us to convey a message that's not restrictive but rather universal.