My school stood in a big square playground in southeastern South Dakota. One teacher taught all grades, first through eighth. Most grades had only two or three students.

    Our school day started with the flag pledge(宣誓). Then the teacher called one grade at a time to the recitation bench beside her desk. She'd check our work, explain the new lesson, and dismiss us to go back to our own desks and do our new work, all in less than ten minutes per grade.

    At noon we ate lunches we had brought. Our lunches consisted of homemade sandwiches and if we were lucky, dessert. My favorite dessert was a fresh pear, and a piece of Mom's delicious sour cream chocolate cake.

    The annual Christmas program was the most exciting part of the year. We hurried through our lessons during December to allow time to practise poems, songs, and plays.

    A few days before the performance, the school board members borrowed equipment from the town and set up a stage across one side of the classroom. We hung bed sheets for curtains.

    On the evening of the performance, petrol lanterns hanging along the walls cast a warm, though not very bright, light over the gathering crowd. We could hardly contain our excitement as we looked from behind the curtains to wave at our parents.

    On a spring Sunday in a new term, just before the last day of the school term, everyone in the neighborhood gathered for a picnic. Our moms set fried chicken, bowls of salads, and desserts on the teacher's desk and the library table. After the dinner, we played games. One of the school board members brought big buckets of ice cream in the afternoon to top off the picnic. How we looked forward to that treat!

    I was just nineteen years old when I started my first teaching position in a country school with thirteen students. I felt excited, nervous and happy as I prepared my lunch bucket the first morning of the term. I can't remember what kind of sandwiches I packed, but I do remember I put in a fresh pear and a piece of chocolate cake for dessert!

    This year, Facebook, the social media website, announced that it would cooperate with several news organizations —including The New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC —to place news stories directly into users' personal Facebook webpage. Stories published using Facebook Instant will load more quickly and keep the style of the original publisher, who will keep all the advertising income the stories earn —at least for now. The deal shows how important social media has become to news organizations, and it is a clear sign of how the world of news is changing —and has been for a while.

    Many thought of it as the death of the newspaper, when Google News began in 2002. It had no human editor. Instead, Google used, and still uses, a secret computer program that selects and displays news stories according to the reader's personal interests. More recently, Associated Press and Yahoo have been punishing computer-written articles. Both use special software to automatically produce stories about company financial results and sports reports —areas where the quality of writing is felt to be of secondary importance to the accuracy of the data.

    I think we should be concerned about such developments. One concern is that Facebook, Google and other social media websites see journalism as a sideline(副业), a way of putting people in front of advertisements. It isn't their primary function —so if it stops making them lots of money, they're likely to stop doing it.

    There's another concern that computer-written articles are not actually journalism at all, because what a human news team produces is actually quite complex. A well-written news story puts information in context, offers a voice to each side of an argument and brings the public new knowledge.

    Though economics and speed of delivery mean readers will probably choose a computer-written story over a carefully shaped article — at least for daily news —I don't think the computers will be writing any in-depth articles for a while yet.

    For thousands of years comets have been a mystery to man. They travel across the sky very fast and have a bright “tail” of burning gas. The comet Tempel 1 has an orbit（轨道） far outside the orbit of the furthest planet in our solar system, Pluto. It has been there for 4.6 billion years, 133 million kilometers from Earth. Last week a little American spacecraft crashed into Tempel 1. The spacecraft had a camera and it took a photograph of the comet every minute before it finally crashed into its surface.

    The space mission to Tempel 1 cost $335 million and was called Deep Impact. The spacecraft was travelling at 37,000 kilometers per hour when it hit the comet and the crash completely destroyed the spacecraft. But before it hit the comet, the spacecraft took some amazing photographs. The last one was a close-up picture which the spacecraft took just 3 seconds before it crashed into the comet.

    “Right now we have lost one spacecraft,” said a delighted NASA engineer. Deep Impact was like a American Independence Day fireworks display. It took many years to plan and ended in an enormous explosion. 

    The spacecraft which crashed into the comet was made of copper and was the size of a washing machine. It was dropped from a mothership into the path of the comet and the mothership then photographed the cloud of ice, dust and organic chemicals that rose from the surface of the comet after the crash.

    The crash completely destroyed the spacecraft but nothing really happened to the comet: experts believe that the crash slowed the comet down by no more than 1/10,000 of a millimeter a second.The aim of the mission was to study for the first time the interior of a comet.

    The mothership was 480 km from the explosion and observed the crash and the explosion with instruments for 800 seconds. Seven satellites, including the Hubble space telescope, watched the moment of drama, and over the next day and night about 50 telescopes on Earth were watching the distant comet.

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    If you want to disturb the car industry, you'd better have a few billion dollars: Mom-and-pop carmakers are unlikely to beat the biggest car companies. But in agriculture, small farmers can get the best of the major players. By connecting directly with customers, and by responding quickly to changes in the markets as well as in the ecosystems(生态系统）, small farmers can keep one step ahead of the big guys. As the co-founder of the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC, 美国青年农会）and a family farmer myself. I have a front-row seat to the innovations among small farmers that are transforming the industry.

    For example, take the Quick Cut Greens Harvester, a tool developed just a couple of years ago by a young farmer, Jonathan Dysinger, in Tennessee, with a small loan from a local Slow Money group. It enables small-scale farmers to harvest 175 pounds of green vegetables per hour—a huge improvement over harvesting just a few dozen pounds by hand—suddenly making it possible for the little guys to compete with large farms of California. Before the tool came out, small farmers couldn't touch the price per pound offered by California farms. But now, with the combination of a better price point and a generally fresher product, they can stay in business.

    The sustainable success of small farmers, though, won't happen without fundamental changes to the industry. One crucial factor is secure access to land. Competition from investors, developers, and established large farmers makes owning one's own land unattainable for many new farmers. From 2004 to 2013, agricultural land values doubled, and they continue to rise in many regions.

    Another challenge for more than a million of the most qualified farm workers and managers is a non-existent path to citizenship — the greatest barrier to building a farm of their own. With farmers over the age of 65 outnumbering(多于）farmers younger than 35 by six to one, and with two-thirds of the nation's farmland in need of a new farmer, we must clear the path for talented people willing to grow the nation's food.

    There are solutions that could light a path toward a more sustainable and fair farm economy, but farmers can't clumsily put them together before us. We at the NYFC need broad support as we urge Congress to increase farmland conservation, as we push for immigration reform, and as we seek policies that will ensure the success of a diverse and ambitious next generation of farms from all backgrounds. With a new farm bill to be debated in Congress, consumers must take a stand with young farmers.

    It's common for children to grow up being told to minimize daydreaming, and instead to focus on lessons and class work. Historically, daydreaming students who go off on their own thoughts, rather than focusing on the teachers, the blackboard, or their class work, are often encouraged to stop allowing their attention to wander and to bring themselves back into the present moment. They're described as uninterested in school work and their future. Traditionally, daydreaming is seen as a practice that results in bad consequences.

    But recent studies are beginning to renounce those common beliefs by pointing out the potential benefits that daydreaming may provide. PsychCentral reports that Mary Smith, a psychological scientist and researcher, recently examined scientific writings and studies to gain a better understanding of the role of a reflective brain. These studies have shown that the brain has a network that is active when a person is daydreaming and that brain network can help memory and learning.

    Though paying attention in school is important, these results suggest that there should be time for students to daydream, too. Giving them the chance to reflect and daydream can help improve learning and development. Research also indicates that when students are permitted to daydream, they experience less anxiety and become more motivated. On the other hand, if students are warned against daydreaming, their knowledge of themselves and the world around them may suffer.

    As a result, educators are encouraged to promote a balance between outward and inward attention. A little bit of daydreaming to break up the hard focus on school activities can be beneficial, and it may help students become better, active learners.

    As for students, the lesson here is not to be afraid of doing some daydreaming. Sure, you want to pay attention to the vital information conveyed to you during your classes, but don't get discouraged if your mind wanders. A little bit of daydreaming is healthy.

A healthy lifestyle includes many choices. Among them, choosing a balanced diet or healthy eating plan is of the greatest importance. But how do you choose a healthy eating plan? Let's begin by explaining what a healthy eating plan is.

A healthy eating plan that helps you manage your weight includes different kinds of foods you may not have considered. If "healthy eating" makes you think about the foods you can't have, try refocusing on all the new foods you can eat.

Fresh, Frozen, or Canned Fruits -- don't think about just apples or bananas. All fresh, frozen, or canned fruits are great choices. Be sure to try some fruits from other countries, too. How about a mango, a juicy pineapple or kiwi fruit? What you should pay attention to about canned fruits is that they may contain added sugars. You'd better choose canned fruits packed in water or in their own juice.

Fresh, Frozen, or Canned Vegetables – try something new. Don't eat the same kinds of vegetables all the time. You can try to eat different kinds of vegetables, which is important for a good diet. When trying canned vegetables, look for vegetables without added salt or butter. You can go to the produce department(果蔬部) and try a new vegetable each week.

Calcium(钙)-rich foods -- you may firstly think of a glass of low-fat or fat-free milk when someone says "Eat more dairy products " But what about low-fat and fat-free yogurts without added sugars? There is a wide variety of flavors and they can be a great dessert instead of those with a sweet tooth.

What's more, you don't need to give up your favorite comfort food. You can enjoy your favorite foods even if they are high in calories, fat or added sugars. The key is eating them only once in a while, and balancing them out with healthier foods and more physical activity.

The point is that you can figure out how to include almost any food in your healthy eating plan in a way that still helps you lose weight or maintain a healthy weight.