Once, when I was a teenager, my father and I were standing in line to buy tickets for the circus. Finally, there was only one family between us and the ticket counter.

     This family made a big impression on me. There were eight children, all probably under the age of twelve. You could tell they didn't have a lot of money.

     Their clothes were not expensive, but they were clean. The children were well-behaved, all of them standing in line, two-by-two behind their parents, holding hands. They were excitedly talking about the clowns, elephants, and other acts they would see that night with their brothers or sisters in a low voice.

One could sense they had never been to the circus before. It promised to be highlight of their young lives. The father and mother were at the head of the pack, standing proud as could be. The mother was holding her husband's hand, looking up at him as if to say, "You are my knight in shining armor."

He was smiling and responding in pride, looking back at her as if to say, "You got that right." The ticket lady asked the father how many tickets he wanted. He proudly responded, "Please let me buy eight children's tickets and two adult tickets so I can take my family to the circus."

The ticket lady gave the price. The man's wife let go of his hand, her head dropped, and his lips began to shake. The father leaned a little closer and asked, "How much did you say?"

     The ticket lady again quoted the price. The man didn't have enough money.

     How was he supposed to turn and tell his eight children that he didn't have enough money to take them to the circus?

     Actually we were not wealthy in any sense. So I understand how the kids would feel. I felt sorry for them.

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Seeing what was going on, my dad put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a $20 bill and dropped it on the ground.

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That day my father and I went back to our car and drove home without any tickets.

    A study of more than five million books, both fiction and non-fiction, has found a marked decline in the use of emotional words over time. The researchers form the University of Bristol used Google Ngram Viewer, a facility for finding the frequency of terms in scanned books, to search for more than 600 particular words identified as representing anger, dislike, fear, joy, sadness and surprise.

    They found that almost all of the categories (类别) showed a drop in these “mood words” over time. Only in the category of fear was there an increase in usage.

    “It is a steady and continuous decrease,” said Dr Alberto Acerbi. He assumed that the result might be explained by a change in the position occupied by literature, in a crowded media landscape. “One thing could be that in parallel to books the 20th century saw the start of other media. Maybe these media—movies, radio, drama—had more emotional content than books.”

    Although both joy and sadness followed the general downwards trend, the research, published in the journal PLOS One, found that they also exhibited another interesting behaviour：the ratio (比率) between the two varied greatly, apparently mirroring historical events.

    During the Roaring Twenties the joy-to-sadness ratio reached a peak that would not occur again until before the recent financial crash. But the ratio plunged at the height of the Second World War. Nevertheless, the researchers held a reserved opinion about their claim that their result reflected wider social trends. In the paper, they even argue that the reverse could be true.

“It has been suggested, for example, that it was the suppression (压抑) of desire in ordinary Elizabethan English life that increased demand for writing ‘filled with romance and sex' perhaps,” they conclude, “songs and books may not reflect the real population any more than catwalk models reflect the average body.”

     (Note：Answer the questions or complete the statements in NO MORE THAN TEN WORDS.)

A nurse of 78 this weekend celebrates 60 years of walking the wards - and she has no plans to retire.

Jackie Reid was 18 when she started work in 1953 - when the National Health Service (NHS) was just five years old - and is believed to be the oldest nurse in Britain.

The diabetes(糖尿病) specialist had to retire at 65 but returned as a nurse within two weeks and still does up to four seven-and-a-half hour shifts(轮班）each week.

Mrs. Reid said: "Nursing is hard if you do it correctly but I love my job. Working for the NHS has been my life. I have no other hobbies because I have worked all my life.

Jackie has worked at a number of different hospitals--including one in Scotland.

Her specialist field has been diabetes for the past 40 years. She retrained after her 12-year-old daughter Michelle developed the disease. She currently works at Southend Hospital, Essex.

    Over the last 60years she has treated tens of thousands of patients.

    Jackie believes nursing should be protected from government cuts. She said: "There're lots of things I would say to the government. If you are going to get good care you have to have the resources(资源), you can't do it without enough money. They shouldn't need the cuts that there are in the NHS. It's hard now because there's a shortage of staff."

Jackie has lived alone in Grays, Essex, since her husband did three years ago.

    The couple have two daughters Michelle, 50, and Karen, 54. Jackie added: "My youngest daughter worried about me - she doesn't think I should work as much as I do. I constantly say 'don't worry about me, I'm fine', but she never believes me. I don't like the thought of giving it up and will try to keep going forever."

    Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, was born in Kingfish, Oklahoma on March 29, 1918. He was raised in Missouri where he worked in his father's store while attending school. This was his first retailing (零售业) experience and he really enjoyed it. After graduation, he began his own career as a retail merchant.

    He soon opened his first Wal-Mart store in 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas. Wal-Mart specialized in name brands at low prices and Sam Walton was surprised at the success. Soon a chain of Wal-Mart stores sprang up across rural America. Walton's management style was popular with employees and he founded some of the basic concepts of management that are still in use today.

After taking the company public in 1970, Walton introduced his “profit sharing plan”. The profit sharing plan was a plan for Wal-Mart employees to improve their income dependent on the profits of the store. Sam Walton believed that “individuals don't win, teams do”. Employees at Wal-Mart stores were offered stock options (认股权) and store discounts. These benefits are commonplace today, but Walton was among the first to implement (实现) them. Walton believed that a happy employee meant happy customers and more sales. He also believed that by giving employees a part of the company and making their success dependent on the company's success, they would care about the company.

    By the 1980s, Wal-Mart had sales of over one billion dollars and over three hundred stores across North America. Wal-Mart's unique decentralized (分散的) distribution system, also Walton's idea, created the edge needed to further encourage growth in the 1980s during growing complaints that the “superstore” was stopping smaller and traditional stores from developing. By 1991, Wal-Mart was the largest US retailer with 1,700 stores. Walton remained active in managing the company, as president and CEO until 1988 and chairman until his death. He was awarded the Medal of Freedom shortly before his death.

    When you're sitting at your computer, do you work all day without a break? Or do you allow yourself to become distracted (分心）now and again ... to open a few extra tabs, check social media, read a bit of news, keep up with the latest fashion trends, and maybe catch up on some celebrity gossip.

    Stop! You're 'cyberloafing'. This word is a combination of cyber which means 'related to computers', and 'loafing', which means ' relaxing in a lazy way ' .We do it, and we do it a lot. A study from the University of Texas suggests we are guilty of this form of procrastination (拖延）for 14% of our working day. On a Friday afternoon, I expect it's more than that.

    I'll admit to losing myself in cyberloafing. In fact, I've already done it in the course of writing this story. Okay, more than once. It can damage your productivity and even your career because according to the University of Texas research, each time a worker gets distracted by the Internet, it takes an average of 23 minutes to get back to work.

    More than that, cyberloafing has a dark side, according to a report published in The Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace. It argues that cyberloafing is connected to several negative personality qualities. People who cyberloaf are more likely to be selfish and tricky.

    Why do we do it? For some, it's most likely an escape from what they're supposed to be doing. Others might get a feeling of satisfaction from finding a great deal online.

    When you have the whole world of the Internet at your fingertips, it's hard to resist.

    How do we solve this problem? If you can truly ask yourself why you are cyberloafing, then that can help identify the base problem. And if that sounds like too much hard work, you could just switch off the Internet for a couple of hours!

    So, in the meantime, let me just close those extra tabs.

    What kind of house will you buy in the future? Would you like to live in a house where your plants can call your phone to tell you that they need to be watered? Or a house that helps you cut your energy bill by turning off the lights when you leave a room? It may sound like science fiction, but it already exists! Come and visit the Smart Home at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Illinois. It will show how you can live a green lifestyle by making use of advanced technology throughout the home that makes your life easier and simpler.

    The Smart Home uses green technology to record the energy it uses, including electricity, water and gas. The house's energy dashboard (仪表盘) lets you know your energy use through your television and computer. The house greets you with the new information when you walk in the door. It is able to record when you enter and leave rooms, and can switch the lights, television and music off                    .

    The Smart Home is made entirely of recyclable and renewable materials. The furniture is made from used light bulbs, plastic bottles and other renewable materials, but you can't tell from just looking at them. The kitchen countertops (工作台面) are made of recycled glass.

    The entire house is designed to control the use of energy. The roof of the Smart Home has a sustainable vegetable garden, which does little harm to nature. Even the personal computer is green: it uses less power than a 60-watt light bulb. The house can raise and lower the window shades by itself.