As children begin to head back to school, there are several things that you can do to make sure that your child stays healthy and performs at their peak potential during the school year.

    1). Make sure your child is up to date on their immunizations(免疫). The summer is a good time to schedule visits to the doctor's as your child is not in school, and the visit won't require that your child miss school days.

    2).Encourage proper nutrition. America faces childhood obesity(肥胖). This means that the percentage of overweight children is increasing each year, and this will place your child at risk of developing a variety of diseases when they are middle age or even young adults. You can start helping your child to become healthier by offering fruits and vegetables at home instead of calorie heavy potato chips and candy.

    3). Get your child involved in sports activities. Activities in high school such as track and cross-country are important for socialization for your child, as well as helping to improve their health. You can get your child interested in wholesome activities by discussing with them how you enjoyed similar activities in high school.

    4). Have the birds and the bees conversation with your child. Many children become sexually active in junior school and senior high school, and the sooner you discuss sex with your child the sooner they will be prepared. Tell your child that there is always the possibility of infecting a sexual disease when two people have sex; and discuss with your child the use of condoms. The sooner you start having this embarrassing situation the better.

    5). Know your child's friends. You can do this by inviting your child to bring their friends over to your house for a pizza night, or by chatting with them when they stop by your house. If you find your child's friend has a bad reputation, then you could consider introducing your child to a different network of people, such as through the girl/boy scouts. Forbidding your child from seeing a certain person may only lead them to rebel and become closer to that person.

    6). Discuss with your child the seriousness of drug use and abuse. Your child may not realize that using drugs can have serious consequences. Your child may get the false impression that drug use is his right. Explain to a child that saying no to drugs is their right, and that anybody offering them drugs is not their friend.

    7). Help your child to avoid a life long smoking addiction by discussing with them the consequences of smoking. The sad fact is that most smokers became addicted when they were in their teenage years, and are unable to quit for long periods of time and often die many years earlier due to their smoking habit which increases the risk of lung cancer, heart disease, and a variety of medical conditions. Even if you are a smoker yourself, you can discuss with your child about how damaging smoking can be on a person's health.

    8). Impress upon your child the importance of traffic rules. Tell them that it is OK to wear a seat belt in anyone's car, because it may save their life one day. If your child rides a bicycle or a skateboard, then discuss with them the importance of always wearing a helmet. As you child becomes qualified for driver's permit, you should discuss with them the importance of prevention from drinking and driving.

    9). Be cautious about signs of depression in childhood. A surprisingly large number of children may become depressed, and a small number of teenagers and children commit suicide(自杀) each year. Realize that any signs of unusual depressed mood, angry outbursts, suicidal comments, feelings of hopelessness, and loss of enjoyment of activities with friends may be signs of depression.

    Throughout the history of the arts, the nature of creativity has remained constant to artists. No matter what objects they select, artists are to bring forth new forces and forms that cause change—to find poetry where no one has ever seen or experienced it before.

    Landscape is another unchanging element (元素) of art. It can be found from ancient times through the 17th­century Dutch painters to the 19th­century romanticists (浪漫主义艺术家 ) and impressionists. In the 1970s Alfred Leslie, one of the new American realists, continued this practice. Leslie sought out the same place where Thomas Cole, a romanticist, had produced paintings of the same scene a century and a half before. Unlike Cole who insists on a feeling of loneliness and the idea of finding peace in nature, Leslie paints what he actually sees. In his paintings, there is no particular change in emotions and he includes ordinary things like the highway in the background. He also takes advantage of the latest developments of color photography to help both the eyes and the memory when he improves his painting back in his workroom.

Besides, all art begs the age­old question: What is real? Each generation of artists has shown their understanding of reality in one form or another. The impressionists saw reality in brief emotional effects, the realists in everyday subjects and in forest scenes, and the Cro­Magnon cave people in their naturalistic drawings of the animals in the ancient forests. To sum up, understanding reality is a necessary struggle for artists of all periods.

    Over thousands of years the function of the arts has remained relatively constant. Past or present, Eastern or Western, the arts are a basic part of our immediate experience. Many and different are the faces of art, and together they express the basic need and hope of human beings.

    A. High tech with traditional life at Green Bank.

    Over millions of years, penguins（企鹅）have developed a keen sense of where to find food. Once they're old enough, they set off from the shores on which they were hatched for the first time and swim long distances in search of tasty fish like anchovies and sardines. But they don't search directly for the fish themselves.

    For example, when young African penguins head out to sea, they look for areas with low surface temperatures and high chlorophyll(叶绿素) because those conditions signal the presence of phytoplankton（浮游植物）. And lots of phytoplankton means lots of plankton（浮游动物）, which in turn means lots of their favorite fish. Well, that's what it used to mean.

    Climate change plus overfishing have made the penguin feeding grounds a mirage(海市蜃楼). The habitat is indeed plankton-rich—but now it's fish-poor. Researchers call this an “ecological trap.”

    “It's a situation where you have a signal that previously pointed an animal towards good quality habitat. That habitat's been changed, usually by human pressures. The signal stays, but the quality in the environment deteriorates.”

    Richard Sherley, a zoologist at the University of Exeter and his team used satellite imaging to track the African penguins from eight sites along southern Africa. Historically, the birds benefited from tons of fish off the coasts of Angola, Namibia and western South Africa, but now they're going hungry.

    “I was really hoping we'd see them going east, and finding areas where the fish had moved to but it ends up being quite a sad story for the penguins.” said Richard.

    The researchers calculate that by falling into this ecological trap, African penguin populations on South Africa's Western Cape have declined by around 80 percent.

    Some research groups are exploring the idea of moving chicks to a place where they can't get trapped, like the Eastern Cape. But Sherley thinks that a longer-term solution means making and carrying out rules to create more sustainable(可持续的) fishing industry, something that he says needs public support.

    "You're going to do WHAT?" I asked my best friend, Julie, in alarm.

    "I'm going to try out for the cheerleading squad (啦啦队)," she said, eyes fixed on the ground. We had been best friends since second grade and we did everything together. We had made many plans about what we would do this year, but now she was going off on her own. I was sure that if she joined the cheerleading squad, she would become best friends with someone else and I couldn't stand the thought.

    "Why are you doing this? Do you really want to hang around with those girls instead of me?" I cried, my voice filled with anger.

    "It's not about the girls," Julie said. "It's about the sport. I want to be on the squad at the high school level because they win scholarships (奖学金) at state competitions, and I have a better chance if I'm on the squad here," she explained. "Besides," she added, "it's not like I'm leaving the country or something."

    "Goodbye," I marched off, leaving Julie standing with a sad look on her face.

The rest of that week I was unhappy, and I avoided Julie in the hall. I planned to watch the first game and ignore Julie. Instead, I was amazed by the enthusiasm and skill of Julie's cheering. Although she was the youngest member of the team, Julie enthusiastically led cheer after cheer. I saw how her face lit up with joy. I was stunned (目瞪口呆) as I realized that she loved the sport. Trying out for the team had nothing to do with me—maybe it was just something she wanted to do.

    I approached her shyly, but Julie smiled immediately. "Hey, you were really great." I began, and then added quickly, "I'm so sorry I've been rude to you about your joining the squad."

    Julie smiled and replied, "A group of us are going for ice cream. Why don't you come along?"

    Julie's quick forgiveness made my eyes burn, but I smiled in return. As I walked toward the cheerleaders, I realized there was room in Julie's life for all of us. We could save the competition for the game.

    Not long ago, a good friend of mine asked me to help him in a halfway house in Nashville. I agreed and made my way there one evening.

    When I got there, I sat with my friend and talked about how he ended up there. As we talked, another man came up, lighting up his cigarette as he sat down. He had dark, leather skin, and looked like he had endured the sun, the rain, and the wind for long, long time. I couldn't tell how old he was, but I was sure that he was younger than he looked.

    Through a bit of conversation, I found out that he had been on the streets for many, many years.

    Without my asking, he started describing life as a homeless man. How he got food; how he stayed warm; how he got money. And he told me something that caught my attention.

    He said, "You want to know how I keep my stuff safe at night?"

    "Sure," I replied.

    "I put it up in the trees."

    "Why is it safe in the trees?" I asked.

"The homeless are always looking for treasure on the ground— coins, something someone's dropped, half-smoked cigarettes. I know if I put my stuff in the trees, they'll never find it because they never look up. Never. "

    Profound words from an unexpected place. And his message is for all of us.

We all have our particular search. We're looking for treasure on this earth. But what we are REALLY looking for is right there above us. There's really nothing we need on the ground.

    In fact, it's surrounding us.

    Moments before I could lift my case to put it in the plane's overhead locker ahead of our recent holiday to Europe, my father gently urged me to stop. He held the thick handles of the case and lifted it with his thin arms, pushing it into place with a sigh. “You should relax and be the lady, and let me do the heavy tasks,” he said seriously. “In the future, someone special will come into your life and take over such tasks from me, but that will never happen if you do everything yourself.”

    I was stunned into silence. This was not the father I remembered from childhood, who trained me to study hard at school, asked me to earn my own pocket money as a teenager at a local coffee shop, and even taught me household chores so that my life alone in London wouldn't turn into a mess. But then, eight years after I left home and started a new life in the UK, I realized for the first time that my dad still has expectations for me to be like a princess and to stay dependent and delicate, which were considered necessary qualities of women in traditional China.

    Well, that came a little late. Little did Dad know that over the three years of my university life, I moved flats five times all by myself, dragging suitcases of books and clothes, and waiting for the taxi in the rain while holding tight onto cardboard boxes. Meanwhile, living in the UK – a country currently led by a female prime minister – I have never thought there is anything girls cannot do. Most of my female friends are professionals working in the City of London, and after work, we frequently go down to the pub for a drink, just like the guys do – something my mother never did.

    I wondered how I might make Dad understand the new world his little girl has entered. Perhaps one day, he will realize the “someone special” in my life will appreciate my confidence and independence above dependence, and admit that times have changed.