Mark Twain, the famous American writer and a great master of humor, liked to play jokes on others. But once a joke was played on him. One day Mark Twain was invited to give a talk in a small town. At lunch he met a young man, one of his friends.

    The young man said that he had an uncle with him. He told Mark Twain that his uncle never laughed or smiled, and that nobody and nothing was able to make his uncle smile or laugh.

    "You bring your uncle to my talk this evening," said Mark Twain. "I'm sure I can make him laugh."

    That evening the young man and his uncle sat in the front. Mark Twain began to speak. He told several funny stories and made everyone in the room laugh. But the man never even smiled. Mark Twain told more funny stories, but the old man still kept quiet. Mark Twain continued to tell his funny stories. Finally he stopped. He was tired and quite disappointed.

    Some days later, Mark Twain told another friend what had happened." Oh," said his friend, "I know that man. He's been deaf for years."

    It's very hard to write your own resume because a resume is a macro view of your life, but you live your life at the micro level. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} After all, spending money on a resume writer is one of the few payouts that will have good return right away.

    But some of you will be able to do a proper job rewriting your resume on your own. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} You need to rethink the goals and rethink the rules of a resume in order to approach the project like the best of the resume professionals.

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#} A resume is not your life story. No one cares. The only things that should be on your resume are achievements. Anyone can do their job, but only a small percentage of the population can do their job well, wherever they go. The best way to show that you did your job well is from achievements. The best achievement is a promotion. It is an objective way to show that you impress the people you will work for. Presenting clearly your achievements is enough and also necessary. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}

    Don't make your resume a moral statement. It's a marketing document. Think about when a company announced the launch of their product. You need to take the same approach with your resume, because a resume is a marketing document. The best marketing documents show the product in the best light, which is to use whatever possible means to make you look good. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

    Do you love traveling? If the answer is yes, then have you ever thought about why? You may argue that traveling can help you enrich your knowledge, especially geographical and historical learning. It will provide more chances for you to enjoy food and try on clothes that you otherwise cannot possible have. A famous English author Francis Bacon (1561-1626) makes a point when he says that, “Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.”

    Evidence of leisure travel can be traced as far back as ancient Babylon. This year, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council, the 1 billionth tourist will cross an international boundary before the end of this month. That means that one in seven people on the planet traveled this year, something that would not have been possible a few decades ago. Around 20 years ago only the rich could travel.

    While the US and France remain the two largest destinations for world travel, experts say much of the explosive growth in tourism has been to countries like Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and the Ivory Coast, which weren't even on the world tourism map a decade ago. The top five destinations in the world, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, are Paris, London, New York, the Mediterranean, Turkey.

    Several factors have led to the boom in world travel. The prosperity (富裕) of people in Asia is one factor. People in Asian developing countries have lifted their incomes above middle-class levels in the past few years. And a lot of them have used their new wealth to travel. In addition, travel costs have been reduced thanks to the rapid development of transportation, and competition between airlines to give customers the best prices.

C

Plastic-Eating Worms

    Humans produce more than 300 million tons of plastic every year. Almost half of that winds up in landfills(垃圾填埋场), and up to 12 million tons pollute the oceans. So far there is no effective way to get rid of it, but a new study suggests an answer may lie in the stomachs of some hungry worms.

    Researchers in Spain and England recently found that the worms of the greater wax moth can break down polyethylene, which accounts for 40% of plastics. The team left 100 wax worms on a commercial polyethylene shopping bag for 12 hours, and the worms consumed and broke down about 92 milligrams, or almost 3% of it. To confirm that the worms' chewing alone was not responsible for the polyethylene breakdown, the researchers made some worms into paste(糊状物) and applied it to plastic films. 14 hours later the films had lost 13% of their mass — apparently broken down by enzymes (酶) from the worms' stomachs. Their findings were published in Current Biology in 2017.

    Federica Bertocchini, co-author of the study, says the worms' ability to break down their everyday food — beeswax — also allows them to break down plastic. ＂Wax is a complex mixture, but the basic bond in polyethylene, the carbon-carbon bond, is there as well, ＂she explains, ＂The wax worm evolved a method or system to break this bond. ＂

    Jennifer DeBruyn, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, who was not involved in the study, says it is not surprising that such worms can break down polyethylene. But compared with previous studies, she finds the speed of breaking down in this one exciting. The next step, DeBruyn says, will be to identify the cause of the breakdown. Is it an enzyme produced by the worm itself or by its gut microbes(肠道微生物)?

    Bertocchini agrees and hopes her team's findings might one day help employ the enzyme to break down plastics in landfills. But she expects using the chemical in some kind of industrial process — not simply ＂millions of worms thrown on top of the plastic.＂

    Do you know the proverb "no pains, no gains"? It gives the impression that we ought to be suffering while we study. It seems that the only way to know if we're putting in enough work is how much hardship we bear. We are totally taken up with study, shutting ourselves away for a big exam. Is that necessarily true?

    When we haven't taken the time to come up with another idea, we just shut ourselves in a room with a book. It's no surprise that we find revision boring and difficult. Just as children learn from playing, we can learn from doing, or at least from study techniques that interest us, rather than make us switch off. Shutting ourselves away can make us learn to hate studying, leading to a situation where, instead of being able to concentrate on our work, we are troubled by how unfair it is that we must study. This can be part of a vicious(恶性的)cycle that traps us into ineffective revision, or poor progress fueling further annoyance.

    Thankfully, working in the company of other people really helps fight against that. We just need to learn how to deal with distractions(分心). It's not necessary to avoid all company, just lazy company. They constantly try to keep others in conversation. While studying in the same room with someone who is ironing or working out is perfectly possible. Of course, it's also a good idea to avoid the company of people involved in activities where you would rather be playing than studying. Working while sitting next to someone playing video games is most likely to end with a new high score games rather than productive revision.

    If being around others means working in a noisy environment, a pair of headphones and some background music can block out noises. They also act as a psychological barrier, so that people think twice before interrupting you. Besides, we should know friends and family can lessen feelings of isolation. And connecting with other people makes us happy, so it's important not to give that up and to make sure that we take the time to socialize.

    Attitudes toward new technologies often fall along generational lines. That is, generally, younger people tend to outnumber older people in face of a technological shift.

    It is not always the case, though. When you look at attitudes toward driverless cars, there doesn't seem to be a clear generational divide. The public overall disagree on whether they'd like to use a driverless car. In a study last year, of all people surveyed, 48 percent said they wanted to ride in one, while 50 percent did not.

    The fact that attitudes toward self-driving cars appear to be so steady across generations suggests how transformative the shift to driverless cars could be. Not everyone wants a driverless car now——and no one can get one yet ——but among those who are open to them, every age group is similarly engaged.

    When it comes to driverless cars, differences in attitude are obvious based on factors not related to age. College graduates, for example, are particularly interested in driverless cars compared with those who have less education: 59 percent of college graduates said they would like to use a driverless car compared with 38 percent of those with a high-school diploma or less.

    Where a person lives matters, too. More people who lived in cities and suburbs said they wanted to try driverless car than those who lived in rural areas.

    While there's reason to believe that interest in self-driving cars is going up, a person's age will have little to do with how self-driving cars can become mainstream. Once driverless cars are actually available for sale, the early adopters will be the people who can afford to buy them.