Do you want to get home from work knowing you have made a real difference in someone's life?

    If yes, don't care about sex or age! Come and join us, then you'll make it!

Position: Volunteer Social Care Assistant

(No Pay with Free Meals)

Place: Manchester

Hours: Part Time

    We are now looking for volunteers to support people with learning disabilities to live active lives! Only 4 days left. Don't miss the chance of lending your warm hands to help others!

Role:

    You will provide people with learning disabilities with all aspects of their daily lives. You will help them to develop new skills. You will help them to protect their rights and their safety. But your primary concern is to let them know they are valued.

Skills and Experience Required:

    You will have the right values and great listening skills. You will be honest and patient. You will have the ability to drive a car and to communicate in fluent written and spoken English since you'll have to help those people with different learning disabilities. Previous care-related experience will be a great advantage for you.

    Attention from strangers is nothing new to me. Questions about my height is the center of almost every public interaction. My friends say my height is just a physical quality and not a personality aspect. However, when I reflect on my life, I realize that, my height has shaped my character in many ways and has helped to make me who I am.

    I learned how to be kind. When I was younger, some parents in my neighborhood regarded me kind of dangerous because I was so much larger than other children my age. I had to be extra welcoming and gentle simply to play with other children. Of course, now my coaches wish I weren't quite so kind on the basketball court.

    I learned the quality of not being too proud about myself. At 7 feet tall, everyone expects me to be an amazing basketball player. They come expecting to see Dirk Nowitzki, and instead they might see a performance more like Will Ferrell(successfully starred a professional basketball player). I have learned to be modest and to work even harder than my fellows to meet their (and my) expectations.

    I developed a sense of lightheartedness. When people playfully make fun of my height, 1laugh at myself too. On my first day of high school, a girl dropped her books in a busy hallway. I got down to her level and gathered some of her notebooks. As we both stood up, her eyes widened as I kept rising over her. Astonished, she dropped her books again. Embarrassed, we both laughed and picked up the books a second time.

    All of these lessons have defined me. Looking back, I realize that through years of such experiences, I have become a confident, expressive person. Being a 7-footer is both a blessing and a curse, but in the end, accepting who you are is the first step to happiness.

    Dutch beachcomber (海滩拾荒者) Wim Kruiswijk has accumulated a collection of 1,200 messages-in-bottles over the course of nearly 4 decades and has responded to almost all of them,

    68-year-old Kruiswijk says that his unusual hobby began in 1983 when he found three drift bottles (漂流瓶) on his local beach, each containing letters and return addresses. He wrote to all three addresses and was surprised to receive responses from each one. It was this experience that aroused his interest in hunting and collecting messages in bottles, and he hasn't stopped looking for them since.

"I find my messages in bottles on the beach of Zandvoort, where I live, and on the Dutch Islands," Kruiswijk recently told Great Big Story. "Messages in bottles is slow mail. It takes you days, or weeks, or months to find a bottle. "

In the early years, Kruiswijk would find as many as 50 bottles a year, but since 2000 that has slowed to around 20-30 finds, mainly due to beach cleaning efforts. He believes that the rise of the Internet has also played a role in the diminishing number of messages in bottles, telling Dutch newssite PZC, "I used to get a response at half the bottle messages that I answered. Now that's less; many people want 'instant satisfaction'."

    Throwing a message in a bottle out into the sea is a longstanding human tradition dating back to the time of the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, about 310 BC，who used the bottles to study water currents. Scientists still apply the method to this day, as a means to help researchers develop ocean circulation maps, and to crowdsource scientific studies of ocean currents.

    In the past bottles have also been used to send distress messages from sailors in trouble. They also have been used for memorial tributes, or to send loved ones' ashes on a final journey. One of the more common uses though is just to send invitations out to prospective pen pals, a quaint notion in these modern times, but, as Kruiswijk so clearly shows, an effective one.

    To err is human. To blame the other guy is even more human.

    Common sense is not all that common.

    Why tell the truth when you can come up with a good excuse?

    These three popular misquotes(误用的引语) are meant to be jokes, and yet they tell us a lot about human nature. To err or to make mistakes, is indeed a part of being human, but it seems that most people don't want to accept the responsibility for the problem. Perhaps it is the natural thing to do. The original quote about human nature went like this, "To err is human, to forgive is divine(神圣的)."This saying mirrors an ideal: People should be forgiving of others' mistakes. Instead, we tend to do the opposite -- find someone else to pass the blame on to. However, taking responsibility for something that went wrong is a making of great maturity(成熟).

    Common sense is what we call clear thought. Having common sense means having a good general plan that will make things work well, and it also means staying with the plan. Common sense tells you that you take an umbrella out into a rainstorm, but you leave the umbrella home when you hear a weather forecast for sunshine. Common sense does not seem to be common for large organizations, because there are so many things going on that one person cannot be in charge of everything. People say that in a large company, "the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing."

    And what is wrong with a society that thinks that making up a good excuse is like creating a work of art? One of the common problems with making excuses is that people, especially young people, get the idea that it's okay not to be totally honest all the time. There is a corollary(推论) to that: If a good excuse is "good" even if it isn't honest, then where is the place of the truth?

    I ran into quite a few language problems while travelling with my family last summer. The most embarrassing(尴尬的) was when my Mom apologized(道歉) to the people we were staying with because her “pants were dirty”. They looked at her in amazement, not knowing how to react. You see, Mom had fallen over and gotten mud on her jeans. But in Britain, “pants” means underpants or knickers, not trousers as it does back home.

    Katie-From America

    I went to stay with a friend on the west coast last summer. Her flat was on the first floor of a high-rise building so I got the lift up. Then I wandered round for ages looking for her flat but couldn't find it. Fed up and tired, I finally had to go out to find a phone box. She explained that her flat was on the first floor, which for me meant the ground floor.

    David-From Britain

    When I asked for the “restroom” in a big department store, people kept directing me to a room with seats where I could sit and “rest”. It took me years to get through to someone that I only wanted the toilet!

    Tom-From America

    Last summer we went on a two-week family touring holiday, so Dad hired a car over the Internet. This was an old vehicle (汽车) and there turned out to be lots of things wrong with it. When he phoned the hire company and tried to explain that the lock on the boot was broken, they thought he was talking about footwear! He had no idea their word for “boot” was “trunk”. In the end we went to a garage and just solved the problem.

    Mary-From Britain

    Almost none of us have the time to read everything we'd like to read. Yet we lose countless hours to daily activities that bring us little joy like taking buses and waiting in line. What if we could turn these little blocks of unoccupied time into precious and rewarding moments for learning and thinking?

    Established in 2012, iReader, a micro-learning app on mobile phones, brings the biggest ideas from best-selling books through 15-minute audio (音频) and text. So far, more than 3,000 books have been included, ranging from psychology and parenting to management and economics, with new titles added every day.

    iReader is pioneering a new method of reading, with over 9 million users enjoying the benefits already. According to the Pew Research Center (PRC), the British read just 4 paper books a year and over 25% haven't read a single paper book this year, but reading isn't dying. There are now more ways for the British to read than ever before, due to the widespread use of e-books and audio books.

    The books in iReader are rewritten to ensure it is easy to remember the main content. The way the content is edited has been specifically designed to ensure it is useful in practice. Besides, the content is rewritten with related examples in real life, which means users are more likely to remember and apply what is helpful to them.

    Holger Seim, German co-founder of this app, declares, "iReader gives you the biggest ideas in the shortest possible time. It transforms great ideas into little packs you can listen to or read in just 15 minutes."