A student was one day taking a walk with his teacher. As they went along, they saw a pair of old shoes lying in the path. They were a poor farmer's, who was working in the nearby field.

    The student turned to the teacher, saying: “we will hide his shoes, and hide ourselves behind those trees, and wait to see what he will do.”

    “My young friend,” answered the teacher, “we should never make fun of the poor. Why not put a coin in each shoe, and then we will hide ourselves and watch?” The student did so and they both hid themselves behind the trees. The poor man soon finished his work, and came across the field to the path where he had left his coat and shoes.

    After putting on his coat, he put his foot into one of his shoes, and felt something hard. Then he bent(弯腰) down to feel what it was, and found the coin. Surprised, he looked at the coin, turned it around and looked at it again. He then looked around, but no person was seen. He put the money into his pocket, and continued to put on the other shoe. His surprise was doubled on finding the other coin.

    He couldn't control his feelings and fell to his knees, looked up to the sky and expressed his thanks. Then he spoke of his wife, sick and helpless, and his children without bread. He said the help would save them from dying.

    The student stood there deeply moved, and his eyes were filled with tears. “Now,” said the teacher, “Are you not much happier than if you had hidden the shoes?”

    So many of us hold on to little resentments that may have stemmed from an argument, a misunderstanding, or some other painful event. Stubbornly, we wait for someone else to reach out to us―believing this is the only way we can forgive or rekindle(重新点燃) a friendship or family relationship.

    An acquaintance of mine whose health isn't very good, recently told me that she hasn't spoken to her son in almost three years. "Why not" I asked. She said that she and her son had had a disagreement about his wife and that she wouldn't speak to him again unless he called first. When I suggested that she be the one to reach out, she resisted initially and said, "I can't do that. He's the one who should apologize." She was literally(简直) willing to die before reaching out to her only son. After a little gentle encouragement, however, she did decide to be the first one to reach out. To her amazement, her son was grateful for her willingness to call and sincerely said sorry to her. As is usually the case when someone takes the chance and reaches out, everyone wins.

    Whenever we hold on to our anger we turn "small thing" into "big thing" in our minds. We start to believe that our positions are more important than our happiness. They are not. If you want to be a more peaceful person you must understand that being right is to let go, and reach out. Let other people be right. This doesn't mean that you're wrong. Everything will be fine. You'll experience the peace of letting go as well as the joy of letting others be right. You'll also notice that as you reach out and let others be "right" they will become less defensive and more loving toward you. They might even reach back. But if for some reason they don't that's okay too. You will have the inner satisfaction of knowing that you have done your part to create a more loving world and certainly you'll be more peaceful yourself.

    What's going on under Liverpool?
A Rainy Day in Liverpool

    Dark clouds appear over the River Mersey and a cold wind is blowing. A few rain drops are beginning to fall. We're in the famous city of Liverpool and we're going to spend this rainy day in the Williamson Tunnels.
  An Interesting Life Story

    Joseph Williamson was born into a poor family in 1769，but left home and went to work for a tobacco company aged 11. He began at the bottom, and finally became head of the business.

 An Unsolved Mystery

    Nobody knows why Williamson dug tunnels under most of Liverpool, but many think it was to create jobs. Perhaps half of Liverpool's population worked for him. The industry of war had made enormous amounts of money, but now Liverpool was in a terrible financial situation.

 The King of Edge Hill

    I went on a guided tour starting close to where his empire began in Edge Hill. In the tunnels, the steps leading from rooms below ground to those buildings, which no longer exist, seem particularly ghostly.

Incredible Engineering

    We go into the Double Tunnel. It's just been discovered that it's actually a triple tunnel - but nobody knows why the three tunnels were built on top of each other.

    We finish the tour and decide we'll have a coffee in the Williamson Tunnels Cafe Bar. There, I notice lots of flyers for bands and theater groups that are coming to play there.

Why Liverpool?

    Apart from the obvious attractions like the football clubs, or anything to do with the Beatles, Liverpool has a lot to offer. Princes Park and Croxteth Park were royal hunting grounds and the trees are 200 years old. Renshaw Street displays are an unusual mix of architecture styles. The nightlife is exciting. If you want to experience a part of the British Isles with a character entirely different from London, you should definitely come to Liverpool.

Plastic-Eating Worms

    Humans produce more than 300 million tons of plastic every year. Almost half of that winds up in landfills(垃圾填埋场)，and up to 12 million tons pollute the oceans. So far there is no effective way to get rid of it, but a new study suggests an answer may lie in the stomachs of some hungry worms.

    Researchers in Spain and England recently found that the worms of the greater wax moth can break down polyethylene, which accounts for 40% of plastics. The team left 100 wax worms on a commercial polyethylene shopping bag for 12 hours, and the worms consumed and broke down about 92 milligrams, or almost 3% of it. To confirm that the worms' chewing alone was not responsible for the polyethylene breakdown, the researchers made some worms into paste(糊状物) and applied it to plastic films. 14 hours later the films had lost 13% of their mass--apparently broken down by enzymes(酶)from the worms' stomachs. Their findings were published in Current Biology in 2017.

    Federica Bertocchini, co-author of the study, says the worms' ability to break down their everyday food-beeswax--also allows them to break down plastic "Wax is a complex mixture, but the basic bond in polyethylene, the carbon-carbon bond, is there as well, "she explains. "The wax worm evolved a method or system to break this bond. "

    Jennifer Debruyn, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, who was not involved in the study, says it is not surprising that such worms can break down polyethylene. But compared with previous studies, she finds the speed of breaking down in this one exciting. The next step, DeBruyn says, will be to identify the cause of the breakdown. Is it an enzyme produced by the worm itself or by its gut microbes(肠道微生物)?

    Bertocchini agrees and hopes her team's findings might one day help employ the enzyme to break down plastics in landfills. But she expects using the chemical in some kind of industrial process-not simply "millions of worms thrown on top of the plastic."

    In Kansas City, Missouri, a computer helps firefighters. The computer, which works very fast, has information about all the 350, 000 street addresses in the city. Within two or three seconds after a call is received, the computer provides necessary information for the firefighters. The information is then sent to them by radio from the computer centre in the City Hall. The exact place of the burning building and its size, type and any other details are clear to them.

    The Kansas City computer system also has a medical record of each of the city's 900 firefighters. This kind of information is especially useful when a firefighter is injured. With the information, doctors at hospital can treat the injured firefighters more quickly and easily.

    The firefighters themselves greatly appreciate the computer's help. They know about possible danger ahead of them and can prepare for it. Many times the computer information helps to save lives and property (财产). Sometimes the lives are those of firefighters themselves.

    Mike Horan, a firefighter captain, says, "I feel as if the computer is ready to help me if I get hurt."

    As Internet users become more dependent on the Internet to store information, are people remember less？If you know your computer will save information, why store it in your own personal memory, your brain？Experts are wondering if the Internet is changing what we remember and how.

    In a recent study, Professor Betsy Sparrow conducted some experiments. She and her research team wanted to know the Internet is changing memory. In the first experiment, they gave people 40 unimportant facts to type into a computer. The first group of people understood that the computer would save the information. The second group understood that the computer would not save it. Later, the second group remembered the information better. People in the first group knew they could find the information again, so they did not try to remember it.

    In another experiment, the researchers gave people facts to remember, and told them where to find the information on the Internet. The information was in a specific computer folder(文件夹). Surprisingly, people later remember the folder location better than the facts. When people use the Internet, they do not remember the information. Rather, they remember how to find it. This is called "transactive memory (交互记忆)".

    According to Sparrow, we are not becoming people with poor memories as a result of the Internet. Instead, computer users are developing stronger transactive memories; that is, people are learning how to organize huge quantities of information so that they are able to access it at a later date. This doesn't mean we are becoming either more or less intelligent, but there is no doubt that the way we use memory is changing.