Get a Thorough Understanding of Oneself

    In all one's life time it is oneself that one spends the most time being with or dealing with. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    When you are going upwards in life you tend to overestimate(高估) yourself. It seems that everything you seek for is within your reach.{#blank#}2{#/blank#}It's likely that you think it wise for yourself to stay away from the outer world. Actually, to get a thorough understanding of oneself, you may as well keep the following tips in mind.

    Gain a correct view of oneself. You may look forward hopefully to the future but be sure not to expect too much, for dreams can never be fully realized. You may be courageous to meet challenges but it should be clear to you where to direct your efforts.{#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    Self-appreciate. Whether you compare yourself to a towering tree or a blade of grass, a high mountain or a small stone, you represent a state of nature.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}If you earnestly admire yourself you'll have a real sense of self-appreciation.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#}In time of anger, do yourself a favor by releasing it in a quiet place so that you won't be hurt by its flames; in time of sadness, do yourself a favor by sharing it with your friends so as to change a bad mood into a cheerful one; in time of tiredness, do yourself a favor by getting a good sleep.

    Get a full control of one's life. Then one will find one's life full of color1 and flavor.

A. But it is precisely oneself that one has the least understanding of.

B. As long as you have a perfect knowledge of yourself, there won't be difficulties you can't overcome.

C. When you are going downhill you tend to underestimate yourself for your own incompetence.

D. It has its own value.

E. Especially if it is well within your reach, you are just too blind to see it.

F. Do oneself a favor when it's needed.

G. Do yourself a favor when you resist the attack of illness.

    A 60-year-old homeless woman named Smokie has been sleeping outside in the dirt a few doors down from a man named Elvis Summers.

    Most mornings, she stops by Elvis's Los Angeles apartment and asks if he has any recyclable materials for her. Through these conversations, they struck up a friendship.

    One morning, Elvis saw a news article about man in Oakland who has been making tiny houses out of deserted materials. He was inspired to put off paying a few bills so he could buy the wood and hardware to make Smokie a brand new shelter. It took him five days to build it, and now, for the first time in ten years, Smokie has a place to hang the sign “Home Sweet Home”.

    “I had nowhere to really build it, so I just built it in the street outside of my apartment,” Elvis told Good News Network. “The local LAPD police have been super cool, and have told me they support it—as long as we move it to a different spot every 72 hours.”

    He made this pretty time-lapse(延时的) video showing how he did it. The materials, including two locks on the front door and strong wheels for moving it around, cost him about $500.

    “I've met so many homeless people, good people,” Elvis said in an email, “Since I built Smokie's , I've had several people asking me to make them a tiny home and it's turned into much more than just the one house I wanted to build.”

Although he runs an online retail store that sells EDM clothes, he has decided to launch an ambitious project to fund more shelters. He plants to get lighter and cheaper materials—without sacrificing the strength of the house—for the next round. Rick Sassen, a branch manager, kindly donated the roof shingles and cedar supporting Smokie's house, final items Elvis couldn't afford on his own. Sassen has promised to work out a deal on future building materials for the same cause.

    The year is 2094. It has been announced that a comet (彗星) is heading towards the Earth. Most of it will miss our planet, but two pieces will probably hit the southern half of the Earth.

    On 17 July, a piece four kilometers wide enters the Earth's atmosphere with a massive explosion. About half of the piece is destroyed, but the remaining part hits the South Atlantic at 200 times the speed of sound. The sea boils and a huge hole is made in the sea bed.  Huge waves are created and spread outwards from the hole. The wall of water, a kilometer high, rushes towards southern Africa at 800 kilometers an hour. Cities on the African coast are totally destroyed and millions of people are drowned.

    Before the waves reach South America, the second piece of the comet lands in Argentina. Earthquakes and volcanoes are set off in the Andes Mountains. The shock waves move north into California and all around the Pacific Ocean. The cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Tokyo are completely destroyed by earthquakes. Millions of people in the southern half of the earth are already dead, but the north won't escape for long. Because of the explosions, the sun is hidden by clouds of dust, temperatures around the world fall to almost zero. Crops are ruined. The sun won't be seen again for many years. Wars break out as countries fight for food. A year later, no more than 10 million people remain alive.

    Could it really happen? In fact, it has already happened more than once in the history of the Earth. The dinosaurs were on the Earth for over 160 million years. Then 65 million years ago they suddenly disappeared. Many scientists believe that the Earth was hit by a piece of object in space. The dinosaurs couldn't live through the cold climate that followed and they died out. Will we meet the same end?

    Happy, angry, amazed—these are some of the emotions we like to express these days when we're sending a message on our smart phones. That's why many of us now add little pictures to our texts to brighten up someone's mobile screen but we're also using them as a quick way of telling someone how we're feeling. Yes, emojis have become a vital tool for communication.

    Let's clear one thing up first—there are emojis and emoticons (表情符号). The latter are little images made using normal keys on a keyboard. For example, a colon, two dots, followed by the curved line of a close brackets is a “smiley face”.

    The emoji was first invented in Japan in the late 1990s and the word “emoji” comes from the Japanese words for “picture” and “character”. The number of different images has dramatically increased since then and now we have a picture for every mood or situation.

    So now we have the option to give this new creation the visual “thumbs-up” but have you thought why we've become so addicted to using emojis? Professor Vyv Evans who has written a book called The Emoji Code says, “What we're finding is that digital communication is taking over from certain aspects of face-to-face interaction…One of the reasons emojis are so interesting is that they really do enable us to express our emotional selves much more effectively.”

    Another advantage of emojis is that they are an international language—they don't use words but tell a message in pictorial form so they can be easily interpreted whatever your native language.

    Emojis are a good way for showing empathy (共鸣)—they are a virtual hug or an adorable tease. But as linguist Neil Cohn says, “To many, emojis are an exciting evolution of the way we communicate while to others, they are linguistic (语言学的) Armageddon.” It does show there is a lot more to our communication than words alone but does this mean the decline in traditional writing?

    Your local grocery store is a psychological minefield (布雷区), where even the bananas are ripe with mystery.

    ⒈Southpaws (左撇子) have an invisible advantage

    You've probably seen that stores keep go-to items produce, meats, dairy on the outer edge. But did you notice that most of them are set up to make you run counterclockwise (逆时针)? Ninety percent of us are right-handed, so we buy more when it's counterclockwise. You'll also often find the dairy section in the back-left corner: Because dairy is likely on your list, stores make sure you take the longest route to get there. In fairness, it's also a more convenient place to put a fridge.

    ⒉Everything is in its place

    It's safe to say that nothing you see on a shelf is there by chance. The cookies on sale at the end of a passage are likely the result of smart product placement. More expensive items are usually placed at an adult's eye level, while colorful treats and other products for kids are positioned lower to catch the attention of children.

    ⒊Time goes by so slowly

    Stores rarely have windows or clocks. With no reference to the outside world, customers can easily lose track of how long they've been there so that they can buy more. Grocery stores may use another trick to control your sense of time: small floor tiles (瓷砖).

    Time flies, but the tracks of time remain in books and museums. This is what made a recent tragedy in Brazil even more terrible.

    On Sept.2, a big fire ripped through the National Museum of Brazil.“ Two hundred years of work, research and knowledge were lost,” Brazilian President Michel Temer wrote on Twitter after the fire. “It's a sad day for all Brazilians.”

    Most of the 20 million pieces of history are believed to have been destroyed. Only as little as 10 percent of the collection may have survived, Time reported. Among all the items, there were Egyptian mummies, the bones of uniquely Brazilian creatures such as the long－necked dinosaur Maxakalisaurus, and an 11,500－year－old skull called Luzia, which was considered one of South America's oldest human fossils.

    Besides these, Brazil's indigenous(本土的，土著的) knowledge also suffered. The museum housed world－famous collections of indigenous objects, as well as many audio recordings of local languages from all over Brazil. Some of these recordings, now lost, were of languages that are no longer spoken.

    “The tragedy this Sunday is a sort of national suicide, a crime against our past and future generations,” Bernard Mello Franco, one of Brazil's best－known columnists, wrote on the O Globo newspaper site.

    The cause of the fire is still unknown, as BBC News reported on Sept. 3. After the fire burned out, crowds protested outside the museum to show their anger at the loss of the irreplaceable items of historical value.

    According to Emilio Bruna, an ecologist at the University of Florida, museums are living, breathing stores of who we are and where we've come from, and the world around us.

    Just as underwater grass floats on the surface if it loses its roots, a nation is lost without its memories. The fire at the National Museum of Brazil teaches the world an important lesson: We should never neglect history.