Have your parents ever inspected your room to see if you cleaned it properly? Imagine having your entire houses, garage, and yard inspected at any time -- with no warning. Inspections were a regular part of lighthouse (灯塔) living, and a keeper's reputation depended on results. A few times each year, an inspector arrived to look over the entire light station.  The inspections were supposed to be a surprise, but keeper sometimes had advance notice.
           Once lighthouses had telephones, keepers would call each other to warn that the inspector was approaching. After boats began flying special flags nothing the inspector aboard, the keeper's family made it a game to see who could notice the boat first. As soon as someone spotted the boat, everyone would do last-minute tidying and change into fancy clothes. The keeper then scurried to put on his dress uniform and cap. Children of keepers remember inspectors wearing white gloves to run their fingers over door frames and  windowsills looking for dust.
           Despite the serious nature of inspections, they resulted in some funny moments. Betty Byrnes remembered when her mother did not have
 time to wash all the dishes before an inspection. At the time, people did not have dishwashers in their homes. In an effort to clean up quickly, Mrs. Byrnes tossed all the dishes into a big bread pan, covered them with a cloth and stuck them in the oven. If the inspector opened the oven door, it would look like bread was baking. he never did.
          One day, Glenn Furst's mother put oil on the kitchen floor just before the inspector entered their house. Like floor wax, the oil made the
 floors shiny and helped protect the wood. This time, though, she used a little too much oil. When the inspector extended his hand to
greet Glenn's mother, he slipped on the freshly oiled surface. "He came across that floor waving his arms like a young bird attempting
its first flight," Glenn late wrote. After he steadied himself, he shook Glenn's mother's hand, and the inspection continued as though
 nothing had happened.

    Those who are used to looking through thousands of books in big bookstores may find Japan's Morioka Shoten a little strange. That's because this tiny bookstore that is located in Ginza, Tokyo sells only a single book at a time.

    Opened in May 2015, Morioka Shoten is the brainchild of Yoshiyuki Morioka. The experienced bookseller began his career as a bookstore clerk in Tokyo's Kanda district before branching out to open his own store. It was here while organizing book readings that he realized that customers usually came into the store with one title in mind. Morioka began to wonder if a store could exist by selling many copies of just one single book. In November 2014, he partnered with his two friends, to establish a unique bookstore with the idea of “A Single Room, A Single Book.”

    Like its offering, the bookstore is simple. The selections that are picked by Morioka change weekly and vary widely to attract customers with different interests. Recent choices include The True Deceiver, an award-winning Swedish novel by Tove Jansson, Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales, and a collection of artist Karl Blossfeldt's photography of plants. Morioka has also chosen books written by famous Japanese authors Mimei Ogawa and Akito Akagi.

    To highlight his only offering, Morioka often uses clever methods. For example，when selling a book about flowers, he decorated his shop with the ones that had been mentioned in the book. He also encourages authors to hold talks and discussions so they can connect with customers. Morioka says his goal is for the customers to experience being inside a book, not just a bookstore!

    Risky as the idea might seem, things appear to be going well. Morioka says he has sold over 2,100 books since he opened it. Things can get better considering that his bookstore is becoming increasingly popular not just among the locals but also visitors from other countries.

    In the United States, when one becomes rich, he wants people to know it. And even if he does not become very rich, he wants people to think that he is. That is what “keeping up with the Joneses” is about. It is the story of someone who tried to look as rich as his neighbors.

    The expression was first used in 1913 by a young American called Arthur Momand. He told this story about himself. He began earning $ 125 a week at the age of 23. That was a lot of money in those days. He got married and moved with his wife to a very wealthy neighborhood outside New York City. When he saw that rich people rode horses, Momand went horseback riding every day. When he saw that rich people had servants, Momand and his wife also hired a servant and gave big parties for their new neighbors.

    It was like a race, but one could never finish his race because one was always trying to keep up. The race ended for Momand and his wife when they could no longer pay for their new way of life. They moved back to an apartment in New York City.

    Momand looked around him and noticed that many people do things just to keep up with rich lifestyle of their neighbors. He saw the funny side of it and started to write a series of short stories. He called it “Keeping up with the Joneses” because “Jones” is a very common name in the United States. “Keeping up with the Joneses” came to mean keeping up with rich lifestyle of the people around you. Momand's series appeared in different newspapers across the country for over 28 years.

    People never seem to get tired of keeping up with the Joneses. And there are “Joneses” in every city of the world. But one must get tired of trying to keep up with the Joneses because no matter what one does, Mr. Jones always seems to be ahead.

    Tulou, the special residential architecture of Fujian Province was included on the UNESCO's World Heritage List during the 32nd session of the World Heritage Committee in Quebec, Canada.

    In the fourth century, Han Chinese living in the Central Plains area began to migrate south, gradually gathering in Fujian and forming the Hakka communities. As a defence against enemies, the Hakkas chose to live in compact (紧凑的) communities, and the tulou was their preferred houses. Tens of thousands of such earthen structures were constructed in Fujian Province.

    Most tulous are to be found in the valleys, surrounded by high mountains, and some are in the depths of the great mountains. Most are three to four storeys high, and look like circular blockhouses (堡垒). Rooms on the first floor are used as kitchens, rooms on the second floor are used as barns (谷仓), and rooms on the third and fourth floors are for bedrooms and living rooms. For defensive purposes, the rooms on the first floor have no windows.

    Raw materials for the tulou were obtained locally. Their main building material was a mixture of clay, sand, lime and water, and egg whites, brown sugar and rice water were added as adhesive agents (粘合剂). It was then mixed to form the walls. Once they dried, the walls were so hard that driving a nail into them would have been difficult. Fir branches, which are extremely strong and do not rot, were used to strengthen them, and many centuries later they have remained their original look.

    Tulous are located in a region where earthquakes happen frequently, and their circular construction helps them resist the regular shocks.

    The proven design even inspired one famous Peruvian architect, who paid several visits to Yongding, to build a tulou back home. Not long after, an earthquake struck only 10 kilometers away, and while all the houses around the earthen building fell down, his tulou remained.

    In colleges around the country, most students are also workers. The reality of college can be pretty different from the images presented in movies and television. Instead of the students who wake up late, party all the time, and study only before exams, many colleges are full of students with pressing schedules of not just classes and activities, but real jobs, too.

    This isn't a temporary phenomenon. The share of working students has been on the rise since the 1970s, and one-fifth of students work year round. About one-quarter of those who work while attending school have both a full-course load and a full-time job. The arrangement can help pay for tuition (学费) and living costs, obviously. And there's value in it beyond the direct cause: such jobs can also be critical for developing important professional and social skills that make it easier to land a job after graduation. With many employers looking for students with already-developed skill sets, on-the-job training while in college can be the best way to ensure a job later on.

    But it's not all upside. Even full-time work may not completely cover the cost of tuition and living expenses. The study notes that if a student worked a full-time job at the federal minimum wage, they would earn just over $15,000 each year, certainly not enough to pay for tuition, room, and board at many colleges without some serious financial aid. That means that though they're sacrificing time away from the classroom, many working students will still graduate with at least some debt. And working full time can reduce the chance that students will graduate at all, by cutting into the time available for studying and attending classes.

    There is little reward for attending but not finishing college. Students who end up leaving school because of difficulty in managing work and class are likely to find themselves stuck in some of the same jobs they might have gotten if they hadn't gone at all. The difficulty of working too much while in school can create a cycle that pushes students further into debt without receiving any of the financial or career benefits.

    In order to increase their job chances after college, Chinese students are turning to a special practice—Eiffel Tower nose jobs (鼻整形手术). The latest trend in plastic surgery promises to create a nose that is similar to the curve of the Eiffel Tower.

    Surgeon Wang Xuming said:  “We are influenced by the beauty of the Eiffel Tower. We are not content to just add something to the nose; we reconstruct it.” The surgery costs about US$ 10,000 and involves the enlarging of the nose using tissue from the forehead.

    Hundreds of posters advertising the procedure are put up all over Chongqing city, where surgeon Xuming runs his private practice. They show a western-looking woman with an almost-to o-perfect nose, against an outline of the Eiffel Tower.

    Interestingly, many young women in China are eager to achieve a western appearance, as they believe it will give them an advantage in the highly competitive job market. “Some students face a lot of employment pressure after graduation. If their facial features are good, they'll have more chances of finding a job,” said surgeon Xuming. “We've had students getting the Eiffel Tower nose; it's helped them a lot.”

    Apparently, Chinese employers are quite particular about appearances and prefer attractive candidates. Some of them even go as far as putting height and weight requirements in their employment ads. Plastic surgeons across the country are reporting an increase in the number of students choosing beauty “improvement”.

    According to a Mr. Li, hospital manager at surgeon Xuming's clinic, most of their customers are female and the bill is taken care of by the family. “They usually come in with their mothers, and tend to be from well-off backgrounds.” he said.

    Personally, I don't think it so important to “improve” our appearance as long as we are skilled at our jobs. We can't decide how we look, but we can decide how well we live and work.