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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    The Swedish Academy's mid-October announcement regarding literature seldom fails to cause second-guessing.

    Bob Dylan was awarded the big prize this morning, and my social media has been alive with indignation ever since. The Nobel did not go to those excellent novelists but to a songwriter. Some of those same people are still protesting that last year it was warded to Svetlana Alexievich, a “journalist”. They have decided, for whatever reasons, that song lyrics(歌词) are not literature.

    And people are upset because Bob Dylan is the voice of some generation other than theirs, because he works in a popular style, because he does not work in this minute's popular style, because he appeared on a car commercial that aired during the Super Bowl, because his songwriting skills dropped off — he was famous long ago, after all.

    You may not think of Dylan as a poet, but Dylan created a climate in which lyrics were taken seriously. And Dylan accomplished something that few novelists or poets or for that matter songwriters have managed to do in our time: he changed the time he lived. Through words, with music, he affected the opinions and ambitions of hundreds of millions of people all over the world. The Nobel Prize in Literature cannot ever be all things to all people, and while this year's award failed to accomplish various possible objectives, it was not in any way misapplied.

    When men get together, they seldom talk about their feelings or inner thoughts. However, they talk about a lot, like their newest computer, how to repair their car, or even business.

    Talk might move to the best place to find fish or women, jump to computer games, then continue to the sport of the season. They also like to tell jokes each other and spend a fair amount of time playing one up and boasting (吹牛). Men seldom call each other to chat.

    When a man meets a woman, he usually wants to make a good impression. Many single men try hard to carry on amusing, fun, and pleasant conversations. They use conversation to discover her interests and feelings in order to learn how to be attractive to her.

    Some men, either out of nervousness or ignorance, spend most of the time talking about themselves, often appearing to brag about their achievements or talk endlessly about their problems or work. Even the quietest man talks to his woman when love is new.

    When women get together, they talk about feelings and relationships, their work and their family. They enjoy talking but also want the give and lake of a talk, then listen. Women often call each other to chat. Conversation is an important part of most women's lives.

    As relationships progress, however, many a man turns on the television and forgets how to talk. This raises anger and cry from his woman partner who says. “You never talk to me anymore.'' Some men start talking. Many, however, mainly discuss their own achievements and problems.

    When the woman starts talking about her favorite subjects: feelings, family，relationships, friends and her work, many men lose interest or bring the conversation back to themselves. Pretty soon, the man is back to staring at the television each night, wondering where his relationship has gone. The woman is talking to her friends, mom, sister, or neighbor, often about that very relationship and how she is hurting.

    To save as much language diversity as possible in the face of its rapidly dying out, researchers suggest using “evolutionary trees”, a tool from conservation biology.

    One of the world's 7,000 languages disappears every other week, and half might not survive the 21st century, experts say.

    When setting conservation goals, ecologists use evolutionary trees—diagrams that show how biological species are related to one another—to identify species that have few close relatives. Such species are said to be evolutionarily distinct. Similarly, recent advances in the construction of language trees make it possible to measure how unique a language is.

    “Evolutionary trees have transformed our understanding of how life has evolved and helped us to decide which species most need conserving,” says Jonathan Davies, senior author of the new study.

    “The rapid rate of language loss, as well as limited resources for preservation（保护）, means that we must choose carefully where to focus our efforts,” adds Max Farrell, a PhD student in Davies' lab. “The more isolated (孤立的) a language in its family tree, the more unique information it contains and eventually contributes to language diversity.”

    As a case study, they used this approach to rank 350 Austronesian languages, spoken in islands spread across Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean.

    For each of these languages, the researchers combined measures of evolutionary distinctiveness (ED) and global endangerment (GE) to produce an “EDGE” score. The language with the highest score, which means it is extremely distinct（不同的） yet nearly dying out, was Kavalan, a language native to Tai Wan. The next-highest scores went to Tanibili, an endangered language in the Solomon Islands.

    By building trees for other language groups, language specialists could target preservation efforts and help reduce the loss of language diversity in the future, the researchers say.

    My First Marathon

    Three weeks before my first marathon, one of my ankles was injured and this meant not running for two weeks, leaving me only one week to train. Yet, I was determined to go ahead.

    I remember back to my 7th year in school. In my first P.E. class, the teacher required us to run laps and then hit a softball. My performance was really terrible. He later informed me that I was "not athletic".

    The idea that I was "not athletic" stuck with me for years. When I started running in my 30s, I realized running was a battle against myself, not about competition or whether or not I was athletic. It was all about the battle against my own body and mind. A test of wills!

    The night before my marathon, I dreamt that I couldn't even find the finish line. I woke up sweating and nervous, but I was ready to prove something to myself.

Shortly after crossing the start line, my shoe laces became untied. So I stopped to readjust. Not the start I wanted!

    At mile 3, I passed a sign: "GO FOR IT, RUNNERS!"

    By mile 17, I became out of breath and the once injured ankle hurt badly. Despite the pain, I stayed the course walking a bit and then running again.

    By mile 21, I was starving!

    As I approached mile 23, I could see my wife waving a sign. She is my biggest fan. She never minded the alarm clock sounding at 4 a.m. or questioned my expenses on running.

    I was one of the final runners to finish. But I finished! And I got a medal. In fact, I got the same medal as the one that the guy who came in first place had.

Determined to be myself and move forward, free of shame and worldly labels(世俗标签), I can now call myself a "marathon winner".

    More than one billion young people risk damaging their hearing through the overuse of smartphones and other audio devices, the UN warned Tuesday, proposing new safety standards for safe volume levels.

    Currently, about five percent of the global population, or some 466 million people, including 34 million children, suffer from disabling hearing loss. Young people are particularly likely to develop such risky listening habits. Around half of those between the ages of 12 and 35, or 1.1 billion people, are at risk due to "long and severe exposure to loud sounds, including music they listen to through personal audio devices," the UN health agency said.

    In a bid to safeguard hearing, the World Health Organization and International Telecommunications Union issued an international standard for the manufacture and use of audio devices. WHO considers a volume above 85 decibels for eight hours or 100 decibels for 15 minutes as unsafe. The safe listening devices and systems standard calls for a "sound allowance" software to be included in all audio devices, to track the volume level and duration of a user's exposure to sound, and to evaluate the risk posed to their hearing. This system could alert a user if they have dangerous listening habits.

    WHO is also calling for parental as well as automatic volume controls on audio devices to prevent dangerous use. While some smartphones and other audio devices already offer some of these features, the UN would like to see a uniform standard used to help protect against disabling hearing loss.

    "Think of it like driving on a highway, but without a speedometer in your car or a speed limit," Shelly Chadha of the WHO told reporters in Geneva. "What we've proposed is that your smartphones come fitted with a speedometer, with a measurement system which tells you how much sound you're getting and tells you if you are going over the limit".