First, I want to tell you how proud we are. Getting into Columbia shows what a great well-rounded student you are. Your academic, artistic, and social skills have truly blossomed（开花）in the last few years. You have become a talented and accomplished young woman. You should be as proud of yourself as we are.

    College will be the most important years in your life. It is in college that you will truly discover what learning is about. I want to tell you: “education is what you have left after all that is taught is forgotten”. What I mean by that is the materials taught isn't as important as you gaining the ability to learn a new subject, and the ability to analyze a new problem. That is really what learning in college is about—this will be the period where you go from teacher-taught to master-inspired, after which you must become self-learner.

    Follow your passion in college. Take courses you think you will enjoy. Steve Jobs says when you are in college, your passion will create many dots, and later in your life you will connect them. In his great speech given at Stanford, he gave the great example where he took calligraphy（书法）, and a decade later, it became the basis of the beautiful letters in Microsoft Word. So don't worry too much about what job you will have, and don't be too utilitarian（功利的）, and if you like Japanese or Korean, go for it! Enjoy picking your dots, and be assured one day you will find your calling, and connect a beautiful curve through the dots.

    Most importantly, make friends and be happy. College friends are often the best in life, because during college you are closer to them physically than to your mom and I. Pick a few friends and become really close to them-pick the ones who are honest and sincere to you. Don't worry about their hobbies, grades, looks, or even personalities. You have developed some real friendships in high school in your last two years, so trust your instinct, and make new friends.

    College is the four years where you have the greatest amount of free time, the first chance to be independent, the most possibilities to change and the lowest risk for making mistakes. So please treasure your college years! May Columbia become the happiest four years in your life, and may you blossom into just what you dream to be.

    Your next car could have two seats, three wheels — two in front and one in the back and a top speed of more than 100 miles per hour. Elio Motors plans to make such a tiny car named the Elio. Its two seats sit front and back instead of side by side. The driver is positioned in the center with the passenger directly behind.

    The starting price for the car is just $6,800. It has only one door, on the left side, which cuts a few hundred dollars off the manufacturing costs. Having three wheels also makes it cheaper. It has air conditioning, power windows and door locks and an AM/FM radio. More features can be ordered through Elio's long list of suppliers. Elio will also sell the cars directly through its own stores and not through franchised dealers (特约经销商).

    Paul Elio dreamed as a kid that he would one day own a car company called Elio Motors. In 2008, tired of high gas prices, he started working on a car that burns gas in a more effective way. Equally important to him was creating U.S. manufacturing jobs and making the car inexpensive enough to attract buyers who might otherwise be stuck in their old, unreliable cars. “Whatever matters to you, this can move the needle on it,” he said.

    Already, more than 27,000 people have reserved (预订) one. Paul hopes to make 250,000 cars a year by 2016. So far, reservation holders are those who will use the Elio as a second or third car for work. Finally, though, he believes the car will interest high school and college students as well as used-car drivers who want something newer and more reliable.

    Youth volunteers from Beijing University visited Song tang Hospital, a care clinic for the aged and dying patients, during the second Global Youth Service Day on April 21．

    Thirty student volunteers from the university's School of International Studies sat at the beds of the patients in their specially decorated “care huts”. They talked with them and gave massages （按摩）to patients kept in their beds.

    I felt sorry that I could not offer more to these people than talking with them and trying to cheer them up, said Deng Yetao, 20, a third - year student. “But it occurred to me that they need more care and love than babies. They are afraid of the coming death. Their loneliness is worse than physical pains.”

    “Even though they are suffering a lot, the majority of the elderly people want to talk to us. Each of them has a lot of life experiences and philosophies to share. Instead of doing them a favor, I felt I was gaining a valuable lesson. Said Mao Xiaohua, another third - year student.

    Mao talked with two elderly patients for a whole afternoon. The fact that most of the patients in the 80 - room clinic are aged people with diseases which will lead to death soon made the volunteers' hearts heavy.

    Ninety - one percent of the patients will spend the last days of their lives in the clinic, according to a survey by the hospital.

    Daily visits and services by social workers and youth volunteers are a very important part of their programmer. A total of 330, 000 Beijing students from 119 universities and colleges have visited the hospital. Many continue to offer services in their spare time. Some of them volunteer to hold the hands of dying patients during the last minutes of their lives.

    Yin Hang, a student from Beijing Medical College, said he felt“ the glory of life” as he saw the fading smile on the face of the old man who passed into a deep unconsciousness（昏迷）while he was holding his hands.

    The 67th Miss Universe beauty pageant (选美比赛) will take place December 16 in Bangkok, Thailand. The competition will include young women from around the world representing their countries. But one South American country, Chile, will not be represented by a native Chilean. Instead, Andrea Diaz, a native of Venezuela (委内瑞拉) will have that honor.

    Diaz grew up in Valencia, Venezuela. She began training as a model at age 12 at a school there. At 19, she won a pageant organized by her town's baseball team. As Diaz moved along her career path, she also moved away from home. She went first to Panama, and later to Mexico, for modeling jobs. In 2015, she settled in Chile, where most of her family members now live. The 27-year-old woman told the reporter, “I represent the new Chile. This is an inclusive (包容的) country where immigrants come in search of opportunities.”

    Thousands of people leave Venezuela each day to escape a lack of food and medicine in the country. Its economic crisis (危机) has created an almost 1 million percent inflation (通货膨胀) rate. Many beauty pageant hopefuls have left Venezuela and have found work in modeling and media fields. Diaz is one of several Venezuelan beauty pageant competitors representing countries other than their homeland.

    A recent Miss Earth pageant had two Venezuelan models who competed for other countries, including Jessica Russo. Russo represented Peru just one year after moving to the country. She said, “My dream of being a beauty queen is not going to stop just because I arrived in a new country.” The 22-year-old competitor did not make it into the Miss Earth finals. But she is not giving up. She says she hopes to one day win a competition for Peru, the country where her mother was born.

    Life in the summertime is often full of pests. Like most Long Island homeowners, I want to ensure my suburban life with pest-free living. So it was with wide-eyed wonder that I greeted the smiling exterminator (灭虫者) who rang my bell.

    “We'll be serving your neighbors, Mike and Sarah (I'm not familiar with either one by name),” he waved in the other direction. “Since we'll have a team here tomorrow, we're offering a discount.” He came out with numbers beginning from $299 then in seconds to $89.

    “You've probably been seeing the ant hills around.” he moved toward my front walkway and lawn. “And have you seen the bees that dig nests in the ground?” he continued with his head shaking up and down pushing me to do the same.

    “What we do is spray three feet out from your foundation and three feet up.” As he was talking, and without breaking eye contact, he opened his iPad cover and began operating at the screen to show me frightening images. “It also kills other pests, like spiders. It is the best pesticide (杀虫剂),” he said, pausing for effect.

    He then went into soft talk to close the deal, correctly foreseeing that I would be concerned about safety and the environmental impact on my vegetable garden, plants and our little patch of planet here on Long Island. “The products are environmentally responsible, safe with children and pets,” he said.

    I'm unkind when it comes to unwanted visitors entering on my out-of-doors moments. Any insect found in my house or on my deck is bound to be poisoned or pancaked.

    Unfortunately for the exterminator, just as I was considering making an appointment, Billy, my fearless husband, pulled into our driveway, which made me ask for a business card out of politeness instead.

Born in France, but raised in Spain,linguistics and literature professor Juan José Ciruela Alférez from the University of Granada is passionate about Chinese literature and has been doing some research about it. With painstaking effort, his Spanish translation of a Chinese classic was published last year. 

Ciruela said translating the novel was an interesting challenge. In recent years, many Chinese works have been introduced to Spain. However, as most of them had been translated first into English and then from that language into Spanish, much of the originality,was lost. For this reason, when the Spanish publishing house Kailas contacted Ciruela to translate it directly from Chinese, he accepted the mission immediately, even if it presented difficulties like a heavy workload within a short time limit.  

"I encountered various difficulties, especially at the beginning of the task," said Ciruela in an interview. "This novel, in particular, needs a prior reading process in which the translator gets into the plot and the characters, since at first it is difficult to enter the world that the novel constantly raises. So I read the novel first in Chinese, paying attention to all those details and how all of that could be translated in a way that the Spanish readers would understand."

For Ciruela, the most important criterion when translating is fidelity(忠诚) to the original text. While it is true that one cannot always be strictly faithful, he believes translators should not be too far from original texts. For example, the translation of culturemes (expressions of culture in language) is quite complicated due to the cultural gap between Spanish and Chinese. Ciruela believes that these must always be appropriate to the specific function they perform within the text, in each specific case and moment.