One of the most important things in the world is friendship. In order to have friends, you have to be a friend. You have to be with them in both good and bad times. In return, they will be there for you. But how can you be a good friend?

    Listen. Listen when they are talking. Keep eye contact. Don't say anything unless they ask you a question. Sometimes you're not required to have anything to say; they just need someone to talk to about their feelings.

    Help them. If your friends are ever in need of something, be there to help them. You should try to put them first, but make sure you don't become their slave (奴隶). Try to take an extra pencil or pen with you to classes as they may forget to take one. Have a few extra dollars in your pocket in case they forget something they need.

    Be there for them. Try to make something for your friends to help make them feel better in hard times. Making cards and baking things are among the nicest things you can do for a friend when they are in hard times. Marilyn Monroe once said, "I'm selfish, impatient (急躁的) and a little insecure. I make mistakes, and I am out of control and at times hard to deal with. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you surely don't deserve (值得) me at my best. " Always remember this! If you don't want to deal with your friends when they're depressed, then you don't deserve to be with them during those parties where you have a good time!

    Try to make plans with your friends. Go shopping, go for an ice cream, have a party, go to a movie and so on. Make time to know each other even better by doing something you both enjoy. These are the things you'll remember once you're all long graduated when looking back on your life!

    Reading can be a social activity. Think of the people who belong to book groups. They choose books to read and then meet to discuss them. Now the website BookCrossing.com turns the page on the traditional idea of a book group.

    Members go on the site and register the books they own and would like to share. BookCrossing provides an identification number to stick inside the book. Then the person leaves it in a public place, hoping that the book will have an adventure, traveling far and wide with each new reader who finds it.

Bruce Pederson, the managing director of BookCrossing, says, “The two things that change your life are the people you meet and books you read. BookCrossing combines both.”

    Members leave books on park benches and buses, in train stations and coffee shops. Whoever finds their book will go to the site and record where they found it.

    People who find a book can also leave a journal entry describing what they thought of it. E-mails are then sent to the BookCrossers to keep them updated about where their books have been found. Bruce Peterson says the idea is for people not to be selfish by keeping a book to gather dust on a shelf at home.

BookCrossing is part of a trend among people who want to get back to the “real” and not the virtual(虚拟). The site now has more than one million members in more than one hundred thirty-five countries.

    Yesterday night, over a dinner with my elder brother's family, a topic of happiness came up. My wife, Marla, a psychologist, was sharing Csikszentmihalyi's concept of “flow” with us. Marla explained that according to the research on flow, people are happiest when they are absorbed in a task that is just challenging enough for them to experience a sense of mastery(熟练).

    A few moments later my brother, Yuri, offered the following opinion: “The first and only, necessary and sufficient factor for happiness is to stop associating happiness with pleasure. The two — happiness and pleasure — have nothing to do with each other.” This morning, with my cup of coffee, I searched through a pile of books on my bedside table and—at the bottom—found a book by Bertrand Russell, I started reading but didn't finish. In it, I found the following thought:

    “The human animal, like others, is adapted to a certain amount of struggle for life, and when by means of great wealth homo sapiens can gratify all his whims (突发奇想) without effort, the mere absence of effort from his life removes an essential ingredient of happiness.”

    The conversation came full circle: people are happiest when they are in a state of flow (Csikszentmihalyi's language )…which is the effortful devotion in a moment…which has nothing to do with pleasure.

    Indeed, as Yuri insisted : happiness–as–pleasure is a myth; the association between happiness and pleasure is nothing but a semantic(语义的) habit; psychologically, the two—happiness and pleasure—are arguably different; and breaking up this association between pleasure and happiness might, in fact, be a powerfully first step in pursuit of happiness.

    As I look back on that exchange, I recall that there was an effort, a struggle to find a common understanding about this seemingly difficult idea—a struggle that made me happy.

    In cooperation with German experts, several scientists from the University of Bradford believe that they finally solved a mystery that has been confusing millions of people: why our hair turns gray with age.

    The researchers came up with their results by examining native hair and cells from human hair follicles（毛囊）. They say the secret turns out to be hidden in catalase（过氧化氢酶）, which is causing hair to turn gray.

    Catalase production goes down with age and stress, allowing hydrogen peroxide（过氧化氢） in the hair to do its favorite job—making hair gray, and then white, by blocking the normal production of melanin（黑色素）. Melanin is our hair's natural pigment that is responsible for the color of hair. It also determines the color of our eyes and skin.

    Dr. Gerald Weizmann, an editor of a journal, says," All of our hair cells make a tiny bit of hydrogen peroxide, but as we get older, this little bit becomes quite a lot, and our hair turns gray and then white."

    The new study brings hope for millions of people who have to color their hair: to finally obtain some shampoo that will decrease levels of hydrogen peroxide and therefore restore gray or white hair to its natural color or even prevent it from turning gray.

    The researchers are already conducting an experiment with such a drug on a few volunteers with gray hair and expect to get the results in the next two to three months. If everything works out, millions of people will choose between this drug and other previously used expensive dyes. However, even if the drug works, it will take at least several years before it can be brought to the market.

    Since we are social beings, the quality of our lives depends in large measure on our interpersonal relationships. One strength of the human conditions is our possibility to give and receive support from one another under stressful(有压力的) conditions. Social support makes up of the exchange of resources among people based on their interpersonal ties. Those of us with strong support systems appear better able to deal with major life changes and daily problems. People with strong social ties live longer and have better health than those without such ties. Studies over types of illnesses, from depression to heart disease, show that the presence of social support helps people defend themselves against illness, and the absence of such support makes poor health more likely.

    Social support cushions stress in a number of ways. First, friends, relatives and co-workers may let us know that they value us. Our self-respect is strengthened when we feel accepted by others in spite of our faults and difficulties. Second, other people often provide us with informational support. They help us to define and understand our problems and find solutions to them. Third, we typically find social companionship supportive. Taking part in free-time activities with others helps us to meet our social needs while at the same time distracting (转移注意力) us from our worries and troubles. Finally, other people may give us instrumental support — money aid, material resources, and needed services — that reduces stress by helping us resolve and deal with our problems.

    Recently, the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED, added about 1,000 words and new definitions to its website. The changes are to help users understand a mix of terms, some dating back many centuries. The additions include words such as "brencheese", "deathshildy" and "hip-pop".

    The new entries are part of the company's update to oed.com, its searchable online dictionary for paid members. The OED makes changes to the website four times each year. But the latest print version has been in process since the year 2000, and may not be ready for 10 more years. That information comes from Katherine Connor Martin, who heads the company's dictionary operations in the United States.

    Usually, the OED watches usage of a word for at least 10 years before deciding whether to add a new entry, new definition or word related to an existing entry, she said. This general rule, however, is sometimes not followed. That is what happened with "tweet", a word that the OED added far before the 10-year mark. Other times, the company adds words that are very old, but were not included in the dictionary in the past.

    “It's funny because we talk about new words, but many of the words we add are already obsolete. It's just that they were never in the dictionary before," Martin told the Associated Press.

    That is the reality, she said, of a historical dictionary trying to put more than 1,000 years of English into books that already have over 855,000 entries. So, you get "brencheese", a rarely used term for when bread and cheese are eaten together. The word dates back to the year 1665. The word "deathshildy" is from Old English. It means someone who is guilty of a serious crime and condemned to death.

    The website defines the term "hip-pop" for music that combines parts of hip-hop and popular music. The OED discovered the term “hip-hip pop” was used in a 1985 story from a Pennsylvania newspaper. It noted that the term "hip-pop" appeared in a 1991 U. S. newspaper report about the rap artist M.C. Hammer.

    The website has added several other terms related to modern culture. They include three popular terms: "binge-watching", "spoiler alert" and "microaggression".

    Here are a few other new entries if you long to read on.