I travel a lot in my work, and what I dislike about my job is eating alone. It always makes me feel lonely to see others laughing and talking. So, room service for several nights was a better choice for me.

    After having room service three nights at a hotel in Houston, however, I needed to get out of my room. Although the restaurant opened at 6:30, I arrived at 6:25. The waiter at the front desk made a comment(评论) about my “being there really early”. I explained my dislike of eating alone in restaurants. He then seated me at a lovely table and asked me whether I would mind if he sat down with me for a while.

    I was glad! He sat and talked with me about his career goals and the difficulty of being at work on nights, weekends and holidays. He said he hadn't enough time to be with his family. After 15 minutes, he saw some customers at the front desk and excused himself. I noticed that before he went to the front desk, he stopped in the kitchen for a moment.

    Then another waiter came out of the kitchen and had a wonderful chat with me. Before I left that night, some other waiters, even the cook, had come out of the kitchen and sat with me!

    When I asked for my bill about one hour later, all the people who had sat down with me came over in a big group to my table, and presented me with a red rose. And I cried! What had begun as a lonely night ended as a beautiful experience.

    People from all over the world visit Disneyland to have fun, not to get sick. But last week， an outbreak of measles（麻疹）spread from the Southern California theme park. As of Monday, January 19, at least 52 people have got the easily spread illness.

    The majority of the reported cases of measles are from people who visited the park before. According to the California Department of Public Health, these people were exposed to the illness at Disneyland from December 17-20.

    Officials believe the cause is likely someone who caught measles abroad and visited Disneyland, but this has yet to be proved. However, in 2014, California had its highest measles infection rate in nearly twenty years. There were 66 cases of measles reported in the state―23 of them in Orange County, where Disneyland is located.

    Measles spreads very easily. It can be caught from coughing and sneezing. Crowded areas like theme parks are especially suitable for its spread.

    The illness starts with a fever and develops into symptoms including a cough， runny nose, red eyes and so on. About three out of ten people infected with measles will develop another health problem, including an ear infection or pneumonia(肺炎).

    The best way to guard against measles is to get vaccinated(打疫苗). An unvaccinated person is 35 times more likely to catch measles than someone who received a vaccination.

    There is an old saying about volunteer work that goes like this: “ No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.”

    Today, many people volunteer their time and energy to help others. There are a lot of ways to meet other people's needs. For example, some volunteers provide help after a disaster. Others are happy to get dirty while repairing homes or planting trees or flowers in poor neighborhoods. Young people see suffering and loneliness around them and find ways to help. And history lovers help archeologists(考古学家) search for ancient objects to help deepen our knowledge of the past.

    Volunteers work in many areas around the world, including Haiti. More than four years have passed since a 7.0 earthquake shook the nation. The exact number of people who died may never be known. Thousands of survivors of the Haitian earthquakes still live in temporary shelters. Last year, former American President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn joined five hundred volunteers in the town of Leogane to build houses.

    Organizations do not have to be large to get volunteers. An activist group in Dharamsala, India is a good example, Jodie Underhill from England arrived in northern India several years ago. She planned to volunteer for an environmental project. She could almost not believe how much rubbish was ruining some of the area's most beautiful sights. Jodie Underhill learned about how to deal with the rubbish while taking part in other volunteer projects. But soon enough she formed her own group, Mountain Cleaners. Jodie Underhill says the work is very hard. But she praises the group's efforts as a wonderful experience. The young Englishwoman says the Indian media started calling her “Garbage Girl”. And she says she was pleased with the name.

    American teenagers also volunteer in many ways .

Whenever the sun dropped and the blue sky came up, my father and I used to climb the mountain near my house. Walking together, my father and I used to have a lot of conversations through which I learned lessons from his experiences. He always told me, "You should have goals like climbing the mountain. " without the mountain-climbing that we both enjoyed, we couldn't have enough time to spend together because my father was very busy. I really got a lot from mountain-climbing. It gave me time to talk with my father and to be in deep thought as well as develop my patience.

Once we climbed a very high mountain. It was so challenging for me because I was only ten years old. During the first few hours of climbing, I enjoyed the flowers and trees, and the birds'singing, but as time passed, I got a pain in both of my legs. I wanted to quit climbing. In fact, I hated it at that mountain, but my father said to me, "You can always see a beautiful sky at the top of the mountain, but you can't see it before you reach the top. Only there at the top can you see all of the nice things, just like in life. "

    At that time, I was too young to understand his words. But later after that, I got new hope and confidence. I found myself standing at the top of the sky, which was as clear as crystal.

    Hundreds of villages in rural India are using clean energy powered by the sun.

    This month, 61 households in the village of Baripatha in eastern India were given two solar lamps. Villagers had been using kerosene lamps at night. Kerosene produces pollution and can lead to fires.

    The Indian government wants to increase the use of solar energy by 500 percent in the next seven years. If it is to reach that goal, 100 gigawatts of power must come from solar by 2022.Now,just 4 gigawatts of power created in the country come from the sun.

    Officials say they want to slow the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. India is now the third largest producer of this gas. The gas contributes to climate change.

    Arunabha Ghosh is the head of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a policy research group in New Delhi.

    He says“in terms of the share of electricity capacity that Germany achieved through renewables, that transition took about 22 years for Germany. In India's case, which is a much poorer economy, India is planning to have a similar shift towards renewable energy and non-fossil energy” within 15 years.

    India's goal may be helped by the decreased cost of developing solar energy. The government says it wants investors to spend $ 100 billion over seven years in solar power. It is reducing taxes for some solar-related investments. And it is permitting non-Indians to invest.

    This week, Germany said it would spend more than $ 2 billion on solar projects in India. SunEdison, an American renewable-energy company, says it wants to invest $ 15 billion. SoftBank, a Japanese company, has announced it will partner with companies in India and China to spend up to $20 billion on solar energy projects. Trina Solar, a Chinese company, plans to spend $500 million to make solar panels.

    Some people in India are worried that there is not enough land for some of these projects. Many of the projects need large plots of land.

    Inderpreet Wadhwa created a company called Azure Power. It was one of the earliest investors in solar projects. He said most of them are being built in dry areas of the country, on land that cannot be farmed.

    FROM dogs and cats to pandas and penguins, lists of adorable animals can be very varied. However, when it comes to scary animals, the answers are often more or less the same­snakes and spiders are among the most dreadful ones for the majority of us.

    However, most of us have never been bitten by a snake or a spider. So does this mean we are born with a fear of certain things?

    Scientists have been actively looking into it for a long time. For example, studies have suggested that babies find live animals much more interesting than stuffed （毛绒填充的） ones. This interest continues even if those animals are snakes and spiders.

    A study published in Psychological Science in 2008seemed to show that snakes did have a different impact on babies. When scientists presented babies with animal videos along with random sounds of happy or frightened human voices, hey found that babies looked at snakes for longer than any other animal however the voices sounded.

    Now, a team from Rutgers University in New Jersey, US has tried to challenge the idea that babies are born with a fear of snakes and spiders. According to the BBC, the researchers measured babies' physiological （生理的） responses as they watched videos of snakes and elephants paired with both fearful and happy voices.

    Scientists then set out to surprise the babies to see how they would react. They presented them with an unexpected bright flash of light as they watched a video. As the BBC explained, a surprise like this would be more intense （强烈的） if the babies were already scared, just like when we watch scary films and jump more if we are already scared.

    However, according to their findings, published recently in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, babies 'surprised responses were not bigger when watching a video of a snake, even when it was shown with a fearful voice. Their heart response was also lower, which also made it seem that babies were not scared.

    "Children do not have an innate fear of snakes," concluded the study. Even if previous studies had suggested that babies have different responses to snakes, it isn't necessarily related to fear. "It's possible that paying more attention to something might make fear learning easier later on. It leads to fear learning," said research co­author Vanessa LoBue. She further explained that it was a good thing that humans didn't have an inborn fear of snakes because it would make a young infant's desire to explore new things less strong.

    Instead, we have evolved to quickly learn to be afraid of something if it turns out to be dangerous.