At thirteen, I was diagnosed（诊断） with kind of attention disorder. It made school difficult for me. When everyone else in the class was focusing on tasks, I could not.

    In my first literature class, Mrs. Smith asked us to read a story and then write on it, all within 45 minutes. I raised my hand right away and said, “Mrs. Smith, you see, the doctor said I have attention problems. I might not be able to do it.”

    She glanced down at me through her glasses, “You are not different from your classmates, young man.”

    I tried, but I didn't finish the reading when the bell rang. I had to take it home. In the quietness of my bedroom, the story suddenly all became clear to me. It was about a blind person, Louis Braille. He lived in a time when the blind couldn't get much education. But Louis didn't give up. Instead, he invented a reading system of raised dots（点）, which opened up a whole new world of knowledge to the blind.

    Wasn't I the “blind” in my class, being made to learn like the “sighted” students? My thoughts spilled out and my pen started to dance. I completed the task within 40 minutes. Indeed, I was no different from others; I just needed a quieter place. If Louis could find his way out of his problems, why should I ever give up?

    I didn't expect anything when I handled in my paper to Mrs. Smith, so it was quite a surprise when it came back to me the next day- with an “A” on it. At the bottom of the paper were these words: “See what you can do when you keep trying?”

    Many animals recognize their food because they see it. So do humans. When you see an apple or apiece of chocolate you know that these are things you can eat. You can also use other senses when you choose your food. You may like it because it smells good or because it tastes good. You may dislike some types of food because they do not look, smell or taste very nice. Different animals use different senses to find and choose their food. A few animals depend on only one of their senses, while most animals use more than one sense.

    Although there are many different types of food, some animals spend their lives eating only one type. The giant panda eats only one particular type of bamboo. Other animals eat only one type of food even when given the choice. A land of white butterfly will stay on the leaves of a cabbage, even though there are plenty of other vegetables in the garden. However, most animals have a more varied diet. The bear eats fruits and fish. The fox eats small animals, birds and fruits. The diet of these animals will be different depending on the season.

    Humans have a very varied diet. We often eat food because we like it and not because it is good for us. In countries such as France and Britain, people eat foods with too much sugar. This makes them overweight, which is bad for their health. Eating too much red meat and animal products, such as butter, can also be bad for the health Choosing the right food, therefore, has become an area of study in modern life.

    A mother stared down at her son who was dying of terminal leukemia (白血病). Like any parent she wanted her son to grow up and realize all his dreams. She took her son's hand and asked, "Bopsy, did you ever think about what you wanted to be when you grew up?"

    "Mommy, I always wanted to be a fireman when I grew up."

    Mom smiled back and said, "Let's see if we can make your wish come true." Later that day she went to her local fire department in Phoenix, Arizona, where she met Fireman Bob. She explained her son's final wish and asked if it might be possible to give her six-year-old son a ride around the block on a fire engine. Fireman Bob said, "Look, we can do better than that. If you'll have your son ready at seven o'clock Wednesday morning, well make him an honorary fireman for the whole day, He can come down to the fire station; eat with us, go out on all the fire calls, the whole nine yards! And, if you'll give us his sizes, we'll get a real fire uniform made for him."

    Three days later Fireman Bob picked up Bopsy, dressed him in his fire uniform and escorted（护送）him from his hospital bed to the waiting hook and ladder truck. Bopsy got to sit up on the back of the truck and help steer it back to the fire station. He was in heaven.

    There were three fire calls in Phoenix that day and Bopsy got to go out on all three calls. He rode in the different fire engines and even the fire chief's car. Having his dream come true, with all the love and attention that was lavished（慷慨给予）upon him, Bopsy lived three months longer than any doctor thought possible.

    One night all of his vital signs began to drop and the head nurse began to call the family members to the hospital. Then she remembered the day Bopsy bad spent as a fireman, so she called the fire chief and asked if it would be possible to send a fireman in uniform to the hospital to be with Bopsy as he made his transition. The chief replied, "We can do better than that. We'll be there in five minutes. Will you please do me a favor? When you hear the sirens（警报器）screaming and see the lights flashing, will you announce over the PA system that it's just the fire department coming to see one of its finest members one more time? And will you open the window to his room? Thanks?"

    About five minutes later a hook and ladder truck arrived at the hospital, extended its ladder up to Bopsy's third floor open window and 14 firemen and two fire-women climbed up the ladder into Bopsy's room. With his mother's permission, they hugged him and held him and told him how much they loved him. With his dying breath, Bopsy looked up at the fire chief and said, "Chief, am I really a fireman now?"

    "Bopsy, you are," the chief said. With those words, Bopsy smiled and closed his eyes for the last time.

    When Chris moved in across the hall from Norma Cook four years ago in a Los Angeles-area apartment complex, the 31-year-old actor waved to his 85-year-old neighbor for a few weeks before finally knocking on her door and introducing himself. “The day I entered her apartment and spoke with her face to face was the day my life was changed forever,” Chris said.

    He learned that Cook had no family living in California and that she suffered from a long list of illnesses, including leukemia (白血病). The pair quickly became close friends, as Chris took her to doctor's appointments, cooked with her and they ran errands (差事) together. He shared their adventures on social media. But recently, Cook's health declined and she was in and out of the hospital several times. She once spent weeks in the hospital fighting pneumonia and breathing issues.  Eventually Cook was told by one of her doctors that she could no longer live at home unless she had 24-hour care. Because Cook had no money saved to pay her health care costs, Chris started a Go Fund Me account to help cover her bills.

    But caretakers are expensive and Cook quickly ran out of the $34,445 they raised. Knowing her days at home were limited, Chris invited Cook to move in with him to save money.“ She loves it! I do most of my work at home so I am here most of the time to care for her. It only made sense to both of us.” Chris wrote. “She is my adopted grandmother after all and I am her grandson she never had.”

    “Cook still has weekly hospice health care visits and regular visits from caregivers, so any funds raised cover those expenses,” he wrote. Though doctors say Cook's days are very limited, the pair are enjoying spending time together drinking champagne and snuggling with her cat, Hermes, who also made a move.

    “She does not want to change,” Chris told Today. “My apartment was the only place she would have moved. She has strong opinions about where she wants to carry out the rest of her days, and she wants to stay here.” Chris says he feels like the relationship was fate. “Moving her in....it feels as though it was meant to be all along, ” he said. “It's really fulfilling to be there for her.”

    Metropolis Book Club

    Membership:

    All you need to do is fill out the order form at the bottom of the page, select your first order from our book list and then post the completed form back to us.

    Special offers for new members:

    As a special offer, you may choose any reduced-price books from our new members' book list, to the value of 100 yuan in total.

    Tick the box on your form to order a free watch.

    Join before the end of this month and you receive another free book carefully chosen by our staff.

    Order an audio-book from the many on offer, at half the recommended retail price.

    When you've joined:

    As a member you get around 50% off the publisher's price of every book you buy, and what's more, they come straight to your door. Your free club magazine arrives once a month to keep you up to date with the latest best-sellers we've added to our list. On the Internet, you can find all our titles for the year at our exclusive members' website. Our website also has a book swap service where members can request or offer books for exchange.

    Being a member:

    All you have to do is order four books during your first year. After that, you can decide on the number of books you wish to take.

    In each of your monthly club magazines, our experienced staff choose a "Book of the Month" for you, which is offered at an extra-special price. If you do not want this book, just say so in the space provided on the form and send it back to us. We always send the book if we do not receive this form.

    Once we receive your order, your books are delivered within one week. And remember, you have up to a fortnight to decide if you wish to keep the books you have ordered. If they aren't what you expected just send them back!

    The problem of robocalls has gotten so bad that many people now refuse to pick up calls from numbers they don't know. By next year, half of the calls we receive will be scams(欺诈). We are finally waking up to the severity of the problem by supporting and developing a group of tools, apps and approaches intended to prevent scammers from getting through. Unfortunately, it's too little, too late. By the time these "solutions" become widely available, scammers will have moved onto cleverer means. In the near future, it's not just going to be the number you see on your screen that will be in doubt. Soon you will also question whether the voice you're hearing is actually real.

    That's because there are a number of powerful voice manipulation (处理) and automation technologies that are about to become widely available for anyone to use. At this year's I/O Conference, a company showed a new voice technology able to produce such a convincing human-sounding voice that it was able to speak to a receptionist and book a reservation without detection.

    These developments are likely to make our current problems with robocalls much worse. The reason that robocalls are a headache has less to do with amount than precision. A decade of data breaches(数据侵入)of personal information has led to a situation where scammers can easily learn your mother's name, and far more. Armed with this knowledge, they're able to carry out individually targeted campaigns to cheat people. This means, for example, that a scammer could call you from what looks to be a familiar number and talk to you using a voice that sounds exactly like your bank teller's, tricking you into "confirming" your address, mother's name, and card number. Scammers follow money, so companies will be the worst hit. A lot of business is still done over the phone, and much of it is based on trust and existing relationships. Voice manipulation technologies may weaken that gradually.

    We need to deal with the insecure nature of our telecom networks. Phone carriers and consumers need to work together to find ways of determining and communicating what is real. That might mean either developing a uniform way to mark videos and images, showing when and who they were made by, or abandoning phone calls altogether and moving towards data-based communications — using apps like FaceTime or WhatsApp, which can be tied to your identity.

    Credibility is hard to earn but easy to lose, and the problem is only going to get harder from here on out.