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 struggled to find a place to sleep on the street. But she overcame these terrible setbacks to win a highly competitive scholarship and gain entry to Harvard University. And her amazing story has inspired a movie, "Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story" shown in late April.

    Liz Murray, a 22.year-old American girl, has been writing a real-life story of willpower and determination. Liz grew up in the shadow of 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, 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 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 to come away with the idea that changing your life is "as simple as making a decision".

    In modern society there is a great deal of argument about competition. Some value it highly, believing that it is responsible for social progress and prosperity （繁荣）. Others say that competition is bad; that it sets one person against another; that it leads to unfriendly relationship between people.

    I have taught many children who held the belief that their self-worth relied on how well they performed at tennis and other skills. For them, playing well and winning are often life-and-death affairs. In their single-minded pursuit（追求）of success, the development of many other human qualities is sadly forgotten.

    However, while some seem to be lost in the desire to succeed, others take an opposite attitude. In a culture In modern society there is a great deal of argument which only values the winner and pays no attention to the ordinary players, they strongly blame competition. Among the most vocal are youngsters who have suffer under competitive pressures from their parents or society. Teaching these young people, I often observe in them a desire to fail. They seem to seek failure by not trying to win or achieve success. By not trying, they always have an excuse: “I may have lost, but it doesn't matter because I really didn't try.” What is not usually admitted by them is the belief that if they had really tried and lost, that would mean a lot. Such a loss would be a measure of their worth. Clearly, this belief is the same as that of true competitors who try to prove themselves. Both are based on the mistaken belief that one's self-respect relies on how well one performs in comparison with others. Both are afraid of not being valued. Only when this basic and often troublesome fear begins to disappear(缓解) can we discover a new meaning in competition.

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    Both are so much related to each other. And both are so dissimilar! What are the differences between friendship and love? Is platonic (理想的) friendship possible between persons of opposite sex? Let us try and understand.

    What is friendship? Why do we call a person our friend? When do we call someone a very good friend? If we care for a person, if we are always ready to help that person and if we share most of our thoughts with a person, they are our good friends. We can always count upon our good friends in an emergency. We are always sure that our friend will understand why we acted in a certain way. We need not explain anything to our very good friends. The friendship is so deep and the relationship is so close.

    What about love? In a relationship of deep love, all the sharing that we discussed above are taken for granted. But love transcends (胜过) all this. During love, we are attached with a particular person, while in friendship, one may have many friends. A loving relationship makes one so much attached to the other, that one gets pained if his/her beloved is hurt! Love also involves a physical element. Friendship does not have that. This is a vital difference. Nature gives us love but does not give us friendship.

    Your heart beats will never increase in expectation of meeting your friend. You will not lie awake at night thinking about your friend. You will not feel totally lost, if you don't meet your friend for a few days. You will not have dreams in your eyes thinking about your friend. But in love, you will do all this and much more. Indeed, there is no comparison between love and friendship.

    Chinese high school students have the longest study hours compared to their peers (同龄人) in Japan, the US and the Republic of Korea, a survey conducted by the four countries said.

    The survey, released by the China Youth and Children Research Center (CYCRC) on Monday, was jointly conducted with institutions in the four countries in September—October of 2008. It covers nearly 4, 000 students in senior high schools and vocational high schools in the four countries.

    About 78.3 percent of Chinese students said they spend more than eight hours at school and 56.7 percent said they study at least two more hours each day at home. By contrast, only 24.7 percent of their peers in the US, 20.5 percent in Japan and 15.4 percent in Korea study more than two hours after school.

    Around 60 percent of all students surveyed said their burden for studies was the heaviest; however, the Japanese felt their burden was the worst with respondents (应答者) reaching 79.2 percent.

    Among the five biggest headaches for young people in the four countries were: over—scheduling ranked first, followed by a boring leisure life, unsatisfied appearance, little time for exercise and making friends, and no spare money.

    "Moderate (适度的) study pressure can better drive students to develop, however, too much will squeeze (挤) their development space, and can even cause harm to their physical and psychological health," the survey said.

    "Balancing their studies and all-round development is a very important task," it said.

    Mr. King lived with six hundred wild animals on the Greek Island of Kyklos. Ever since he left school, he had traveled all over the world collecting animals for his own zoo. He hoped to collect two examples of every kind of animal on his island. But he was afraid that people would find him someday.

    He wrote books about his travels and about his animals that he collected. The money from the books helped to pay for all the food those animals ate.

    One day, when Mr. King was out looking for drinking water, he found oil. He needed money for his travels and for his zoo, and a little oil would buy enough water for what he needed all his life, but he knew that if he told anyone else about it, it would be the end of his zoo and his life's work. So he decided not to tell anyone else about what he had found, because oil and water couldn't mix.

If any New Yorker of Asian descent( 血统) needs a safe way to get around, Madeline Park has got their back. Park created an Instagram account called “Cafemaddycab” amid a wave of anti-Asian hate crimes across the US. The account has one goal: to pay the Uber or Lyft fee for any woman or elderly individual of Asian descent in New York in order to help them get to their destinations safely if they feel “unsafe taking the train in NYC".

Park, who had spent a majority of her decade in New York as a “broke student”, knew all too well what it was like to have to take the train or walk home rather than calling a cab because it was too expensive.

Now, she's using money from her own pocket, as well as from other donors, to make sure the cost isn't preventing anyone else from getting a ride. She decided to do so after fearing for her own safety just the other week.

“That's it. I took the train to work last week and every minute of the ride I was stressed," Park said in an Instagram post.“I was afraid that someone was going to walk up and start attacking me.”

One incident still on Park's mind was when “someone set a 29 year -old Asian woman's backpack on fire in the train around Ktown". Park said she was done taking the train while these hate crimes were going on and so should you.

Park started out with $ 2,000 of her own money, which she used to help reimburse(报销) any Lyft or Uber ride up to $ 40 per person. Within two days, donors collectively poured in over $ 100, 000 to help with her efforts. Park started accepting more donations and she expected other cities to start their own cab initiative(倡议).However, it's no small task.

“You have to have the TIME to commit to this and preferably a few people you trust to work with you, and a big heart for our community # StopAsianHate,” Park wrote in an Instagram post.