It was a hot day, and my brother Walt and I had decided that the only way to survive it would be to go swimming in a deep swimming hole across Mr. Blickez's Pasture（牧场）and through some woods.

    The only problem with our plan was that this pasture was guarded by a huge, mean Hereford bull（公牛）. Mr. Blickez had told us that Elsie was the meanest bull in the town, maybe even in the county, and we believed him. But the hotter it got, the more we thought there was something fishy about his words. For one thing, we remembered Mr. Blickez liked telling tall tales; for another, Elsie seemed like a strange name for a bull.

    Finally, I talked Mom into asking permission for us to walk through the pasture, but then another problem surfaced. Mom said she would talk to Mr. Blickez if we would take our cousin Joanie along with us. Joanie was almost two years older than me and a head taller. If her teasing ever got around my grade school, it would be all over for me. In fact, I still had a headache from a quarrel with her that morning. “I'm not going swimming with that silly girl cousin,” I told my mom.

    “Either Joanie goes with, or you stay home alone,” Mom said in her serious tone（语气）. I gave in and we set out. On your way across the pasture, Walt yelled suddenly. Elsie had approached him quietly and was licking（舔）his back. Joanie and I dove under the wire fence, but while I was on the ground I looked up and saw that Elsie wasn't a big mean bull after all. She was going to keep licking my brother's back as long as he stood still.

    We had many good days growing up and visiting our secret swimming hole guarded by the so-called “big mean bull”. And as it turned out, for a girl cousin, Joanie hasn't been too bad. She's been one of my best friends over the years.

    When other nine-year-old kids were playing games, she was working at a petrol station. When other teens were studying or going out, she fought to find a place to sleep on the street. But she beat these terrible setbacks（挫折） to win a highly competitive scholarship and gain entry （录入）into Harvard University. And her amazing story has inspired a movie, “Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story”.

    Liz Murray, a 22-year-old American girl, has been writing a real-life story of willpower and determination. Liz grew up with two drug-addicted parents. There was never enough food or warm clothes in the house. Liz was the only member of the family who had a job. Her mother had AIDS and died when Liz was just l5 years old. The effect of that loss became a turning point in her life. Connecting the environment in which she had grown up with how her mother had died. She decided to do something about it.

    Liz went back to school. She threw herself into her studies, never telling her teachers that she was homeless. At night, she lived on the streets. “What drove me to live on had something to do with understanding, and by understanding that there was a whole other way of being. I had only experienced a small part of the society,” she wrote in her book Breaking Night.

    She admitted that she used envy （妒忌）to drive herself on. She used the benefits that come easily to others, such as a safe living environment, to encourage herself that “next to nothing could hold me down”. She finished high school in just two years and won a full scholarship to study at Harvard University. But Liz decided to leave her top university a couple of months earlier this year in order to take care of her father, who has also developed AIDS. “I love my parents so much. They are drug addicts. But I never forget that they love me all the time. ”

    Liz wants moviegoers（常看电影的人） to come away with the idea that changing your life is “as simple as making a decision”.

    Some people love eating food right after it is cooked. I prefer food just taken out from the freezer. Fruit, candies, nuts, chocolate, cake with buttercream frosting(糖霜), even peas, all of them taste delicious when frozen. In fact, I often eat them that way.

    I was a kid when I picked up the habit. In my family, lots of things were thrown into the freezer — finally, two freezers — to prevent them from going bad. Among them were some of the candies my sisters and I had collected on Halloween.

    If we eat when they are still warm, we'll find ourselves taking the cookies more than we should. It's better if we can put them into the freezer and wait. That way we'll eat less and enjoy them more because they are hard and chewing becomes a slower, more patient effort. That's the point about frozen buttercream frosting. Put it in your mouth at room temperature, and it's gone very quickly. But when it's frozen, you can enjoy the taste much longer as it melts(融化) in your mouth.

    The freezer treats a lot of fruit kindly. Take frozen grapes for example, I keep a bowl of grapes in my freezer. They become a little icy, and somehow their sweetness is improved. They are perfect and healthy dessert(点心). This is the same with oranges, apples, bananas…You might think bananas would get super­hard when frozen. Wrong! They become cool, creamy and sweet. If you have wisely covered some or all of the bananas with melted chocolate before putting them into the freeze, they will have a double taste.

    As long as you aren't eating anything that truly has to be hot, go ahead and experiment.

    It seems that no one can live a happy life without friendship. While a great number of people expect others to be their friends, they don't give friendship back. That is why some friendships don't last long. To have a friend, you must learn to be one. You must learn to treat your friend the way you want your friend to treat you. Learning to be a good friend means learning three rules: be honest; be generous; be understanding.

    Honesty is where a good friendship starts. Friends must be able to trust one another. If you do not tell the truth, people usually find out. If a friend finds out that you haven't been honest, you may lose your friend's trust. Good friends always depend on one another to speak and act honestly.

    Generosity means sharing and sharing makes a friendship grow. You do not have to give your lunch money or your clothes. Naturally you will want to share your ideas and feelings. These can be very valuable to a friend. They tell your friend what is important to you. By sharing them, you help your friend know better.

    Sooner or later everyone needs understanding and help with each other. Something may go wrong at school. Talking about the problem can make it easier to solve. Turning to a friend can be a first step in solving the problem. So to be a friend you must listen and understand. You must try to put yourself in your friend's place so that you can understand the problem better.

    No two friendships are exactly alike. But all true friendships have three things in common. If you plan to keep your friends, you must practice honesty, generosity and understanding.

    Do women make BETTER astronauts? Russia locks an all-female crew in space simulator (太空模拟器) for eight days to find out. Six Russian women have been sent into a spaceship to begin a unique experiment testing how an all- female crew would relate to others on a trip to the Moon and back.

    "It's interesting for us to see what is special about the way a female crew communicates," said Sergei Ponomaryov, the experiment's leader." it will be particularly interesting in terms of psychology," said the institute's director Igor Ushakov. "I'd like to wish you a lack of conflicts, even though they say that in one kitchen, two housewives find it hard to live together," he added.

    The volunteers include scientific researchers, a doctor and a psychologist. The test period simulates (模仿) a flight to the Moon and back, with the women carrying out 10 experiments covering psychology and human biology. Russia sent the first woman into space, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963 but has fallen behind since. Last year, it sent its fourth female astronaut into space, Yelena Serova. Serava complained of a great deal of media interest in how she would wash her hair aboard the International Space Station, pointing out that male astronauts did not face the same line of questioning.

    The women found themselves fielding questions at a press conference about how they would act without men or makeup for eight days, "We are very beautiful without makeup," said participant Darya Komissarova. Her colleague Anna Kussmaul was more direct: "We are doing work. When you're doing your work, you don't think about men and women." They plan to spend their 11/2 hours per day of free time watching films, reading and playing board games. Team leader Yelena Luchnitskaya said she expected the women to deal with any conflict.

    Throughout much of human history, man has been the measure of many, if not all, things. Lengths were divided up into feet and smaller units from the human hand. Other measures were equally characteristic. Mediterranean traders for centuries used the weight of grains of wheat to define (定义) their units of mass. The Romans used libra, forerunner of the pound, by referring to the weight of a carob (角豆树) seed.

    The sizes of similarly named units could also differ. The king's foot, used in France for nearly

    1,000 years after its introduction by Charlemagne in around 790 AD, was, at 32.5cm,around a centimeter shorter than the Belgic foot, used in England until 1300.Greek,Egyptian and Babylonian versions of water in a fixed container varied from one another by a few kilos, Nor was there agreement on such things within countries. In France, where there was no unified (统一的) measurement system at the national level, the situation was particularly terrible. The lieue (former measure of distance), for example, varied from just over 3 km in the north to nearly 6 km in the south.

    Although John Wilkins, an Englishman, first put forward a decimal system (十进制) of measurement in 1668,it was the French who in 1799 made it law. The Système International d'Unités (SI, or the metric system, as it is better known) developed from it and became the official measurement in all countries except Myanmar, Liberia and the United States. Now the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris is set to give the metric system its biggest shake-up yet.

    At a meeting in Versailles, France, on November 16th,2018,the world's measurement bodies are almost certain to approve a decision that will mean four out of the seven base SI units, including the kilogram, will follow the other three, including the metre, in being redefined in terms of the values of physical constants (物理常数).Each of the chosen constants has been measured incredibly precisely, which would mean that from May 20^th 2019 the constants will themselves be fixed at their current values for ever. Any laboratory in the world will then be able to measure, for example, the mass of an object as precisely as the accuracy of their equipment will allow.