My high school life has been filled with many ups and downs, whether it was social or academic. Even though my current high school was not my first choice, I never regretted attending Southside High School. “Since you have chosen it, then it is the best for you,” said my parents.

    Up until the junior year I did not realize my capabilities (能力) as a student. Being in the IB Program, I was told that my junior year would be the toughest in all the years of high school. With this “little” piece of information, I walked into my junior year, scared of my grades. As weeks went by, I started to believe that the junior year was not as hard as everyone had said, but I was wrong. My grades were rapidly declining(下降) and by the end of the first term I had five Cs in seven of my classes! I could not believe it — I did not want to believe it. I tried my best to get my grades up myself without any help from anyone, but my pride just made my grades worse. And I had to miss out on one of the most important speech and debate competitions all year: States. I was heartbroken. I realized that I could not survive my junior year on my own, so I had to get help fast.

    Once I got a tutor, my grades went from Cs, Ds, and even some Fs, to nothing but As and Bs. I slowly started to gain my confidence back in all of my classes and even myself. By the time the third and fourth quarter came around, I had been on the honor roll twice, and I was receiving awards from speeches and debates, tennis and school.

    Southside has taught me to always keep my head up and never give up on myself no matter what life throws at me. I am proud to be a Southside Tiger.

    In the United States and several other countries , 2.5 million children play baseball in an organization called Little League . They play on teams in their hometowns . Their parents and other adults in the community coach or instruct them and serve as umpires（裁判员）to make sure that everyone follows the rules . Local businesses give money for the ball fields and the uniforms . Local teams compete against each other and the winners get to play teams that are more distant . Eventually , the top teams go to the Little League World Series .

    One hundred years after Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown , New York , in 1839 , Little League got started in Pennsylvania . Three men started the game for neighborhood boys with a smaller playing field and fewer innings（局）than adult baseball . Little League became popular after World War II when the game spread across the United States . By 1955 it was played throughout North America and within five years it had spread to Europe. Children's baseball really caught on in Japan and Taiwan of China and teams from those areas won the World Series seven out of eight years . After this , the organization tried banning foreign teams from the World Series , but the ban came to an end after one year .

    At first , Little League was only for boys aged nine to twelve . However , in 1974 , the parents of girl baseball players brought a law suit . The courts ruled that Little League had to include both boys and girls . Later Little League added on softball and other games for teenagers up to age eighteen . Occasionally , a Little Leaguer becomes a professional player . For example , Gary Carter went from Little League to play nineteen seasons in the Major Leagues , ten of them as an All-Star player . By and large , youngsters play baseball for fun , but their parents are pround of them .

    I was at my parent's dinner table. Before me was a worn journal of thin and discolored pages. It was my grandfather's journal and now belonged to my father. My grandfather had passed away in the months leading up to my birth. I never got to visit the places he had frequently and people who had been a part of his life's journey.

    I was now about to enter his world, through the words he had left behind. Within minutes, I was attracted by the power of the written words. In the magical script before me, I was transported to another age when food was an everyday art, planned, prepared and enjoyed in the company of others, and a time when people had the heart to pause，their own lives to embrace (拥抱）each other's struggles. All this was conveyed to me in the beauty of the words that flowed together to connect with the writer's mind and understand the world they lived in.

    That kind of writing seems to be lost on us today. We have gotten used to writing in bite-sized pieces for a public looking for entertainment, and hungry for information. No wonder, there are nearly 200 million bloggers on the Internet and a new blog is created somewhere in the world every half a second. Instead of adding to our collective wisdom, most of these writings reflect the superficiality (肤浅)and impatience of our day and age.

    This not only robs us of the skill of writing impressive essays, it also prevents us from exploring what is truly important. Writing humbles us in a way that is vital for our character growth, by reminding us about the limits of the self and our appropriate place in the vast flow of life. Writing frees us by helping us explore the unknown so that we truly open up to the magic of the world around us. I saw all of this in the writing s of my grandfather. And I've seen it again and again in the writings of the greatest thinkers of humanity. Their writings reflect deep thought on issues of human importance.

    We are naturally drawn to friends and colleagues with familiar voices, scientists have found. People prefer those who have a similar accent, intonation and tone of voice to themselves, they discovered.

    Previous research has focused on how male or female a voice sounds. Men with deeper voices and women with slightly higher voices were thought to sound more attractive, because they suggest a bigger or a smaller body.

    But the new study, published by a linguistics expert in Canada, suggests there is a more complex mechanism (机制) at play. Dr Molly Babel, from the University of British Columbia in Canada, said, “The voice is an amazingly flexible tool that we use to construct our identity. Very few things in our voices are changeless, so we felt that our preferences had to be about more than a person's shape and size.”

    She recorded 30 volunteers' voices and asked each to rate the others' attractiveness on a range from one to nine. Each participant was from western America, with similar accents. The people we assessed were all in the same dialect group, but they showed that dialect to different degrees.

     “We seem to like people who sound like we sound, and we like people who fit within what we know,” Dr Babel said. She also found that breathy voices in women—typified by the famous American actress Marilyn Monroe-were seen as more attractive.

    The breathy tone, caused by younger and thinner vocal cords (声带), implied youthfulness and health. A creaky (咯吱作响的) voice, suggesting a person has a cold, is tired or smokes, was seen as unattractive. The participants preferred men who spoke with a shorter average word length and deeper voices.

    Have you ever made your life look a little more charming than it actually is by posting truths on social media? If so, you may be damaging your mental health.

    The posts we make on social media platforms allow us to look back and see what we did on a given day. But what happens when, in an effort to impress our online friends, photos and videos we post become beautified versions of the things we did?

    A young girl named Sophia went out to a romantic anniversary dinner with her boyfriend, had a near relationship-ending fight during dessert, then came home and posted, "Had the best time out with the love of my life!"—even with a photo of the meal. No surprise, but according to a new study, Sophia was by no means unique. Two-thirds of users admit lying about their lives on social media with 20 percent of young people between the ages of 18 and 24 stating that they edit their own stories by frequently lying about relationships and promotions.

    By beautifying our online stories, we are harming our memories. We start believing the stories we tell rather than remembering what really happened. Soon, the real experience is lost and all that remains is the beautified version of history.

    Scientists fear that these edited stories will end up changing our memories. It's well confirmed through research that our own memories are often unreliable and can be easily controlled. Writing down one's life in the form of a journal, or even on social media can help us keep our memories undamaged, but only if we tell the truth. So recording our experiences through whatever medium, to later recall lessons we learned, is not only acceptable but desirable. In fact, looking back at our own past—however embarrassing or uncomfortable - is not just healthy but can be enjoyable.