Recently some articles claim the word “selfie” as one of the most annoying words. But I'd like to offer that maybe it isn't not so bad.

    The “selfie” is used to describe the self taken photo, often from a smart phone. Women and men alike adorn their Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts with these pictures, sometimes with puckered lips or large smiles. In fact, the selfie has become so widely known that over 31 million photos on Instagram are captioned with the selfie.

    Let's think about it. Someone takes about 10 seizes each time they do, and they only end up posting one or two of those. They pick the one that they feel makes them look the best. Isn't that beautiful? In that one picture, someone has even him or herself confidence.

    Self-image is important. In society today, we are so often consumed with what society tells us is perfect. But maybe, with that one selfie, we feel like we fit that bill. We feel handsome, beautiful, confident, smart, happy and content. For that moment, everything bad or terrible that has ever happened to us is erased, because that smile or that pucker is what gives us the determination to love ourselves.

    I saw a spoken word poem recently and the young man said: If I ask you what you love the answers will most likely roll off your tongue. You love to read. You love to write. You love birds, music, tattoos… Your mom, your brother, your sister, your daughter, your best friend, your dog. How long do you think you could go on and on before you said “I love myself”？

    That statement hit me like a ton of bricks. I've struggled with confidence all of my life. I still do. And in no way am I saying that taking a selfie is a gateway to that confidence. However, the selfie does deserve some credit for allowing individuals to express themselves. Pamela Rutledge agrees, stating, “There are many more photographs available now of real people than models.”

    It's generally believed that people act the way they do because of their personalities and attitudes. They recycle their garbage because they care about the environment. They pay $5 for a caramel brulee latte because they like expensive coffee drinks.

    It's undeniable that behavior comes from our inner dispositions（性情）, but in many instances we also draw inferences about who we are, as suggested by the social psychologist Daryl Bern, by observing our own behavior. We can be strangers to ourselves. If we knew our own minds, why should we need to guess what our preferences are from our behavior? If our minds were an open book, we would know exactly how much we care about the environment or like lattes. Actually, we often need to look to our behavior to figure out who we are.

Moreover, we don't just use our behavior to learn about our particular types of character — we infer characters that weren't there before. Our behavior is often shaped by little pressures around us, which we fail to recognize. Maybe we recycle because our wives and neighbors would disapprove if we didn't. Maybe we buy lattes in order to impress the people around us. We should not mistakenly believe that we always behave as a result of some inner disposition.

Whatever pressures there can be or inferences one can make, people become what they do, though it may not be in compliance（符合）with their true desires. Therefore, we should all bear in mind Kurt Vonnegut's advice: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

    A ten-year-old boy from Howell, Michigan America is being hailed (赞扬…为) a hero due to his persistence (坚持) that led to saving the life of an elderly neighbor. The chain of events unfolded late in the evening on Sunday, January 26^th, 2014 when Danny Dipietro was being driven home from hockey practice by his dad.

    That's when the young boy noticed an open garage and a figure that he believed was a dog outside an apartment near his house. Given the extremely cold weather, the young boy got a feeling that something was not right. But instead of dismissing (不予理会) it like most kids at his age would have, he insisted that his mother, Dawn, go to examine what was going on. Dawn tried to convince (使相信) Danny that no one would leave a dog out in such cold weather, but he refused to take no for an answer.

    Dawn finally gave in and decided to take a walk to the area with the family dog and see if there was any truth to Danny's premonition (预感). Sure enough, as she got closer to the apartment she noticed a garage that was wide open and a bent figure, waving madly. Upon getting there, she realized that it was not a dog that the young boy had seen, but Kathleen St. Onge, one of her neighbors. The 80-year-old had slipped on some ice in her garage and had been lying there for two hours, unable to get up.

    Dawn rushed home to get her husband for help and called 911. The two then returned with some blankets to cover Ms. St. Onge, while they waited for the ambulance to arrive. Though still in hospital, the elderly woman is recovering well and grateful to Danny for his premonition.

    Why do so many tourists come to Easter Island? Because it has world-famous stone statues (雕像) . These statues, whose likenesses look like humans with huge stone cylinders（柱状物）balancing on their heads like hats, have tourists coming from all over the world. The tourists come to see these works of ancient art carved by the early inhabitants of the island. They come to see the mystery that has puzzled historians for decades.

    Easter Island is located in a remote part Of the South Pacific Ocean about 2,300 miles west of Chile. Easter Island covers just 45 square miles and its Polynesian name is Rapa Nui.

    On Easter Sunday 1722, a Dutch explorer named Jacob Roggeveen was the first European to see Easter Island. The early Polynesians carved the statues within the holes of the volcano (火山) using only stone tools. Then they moved these huge statues to various destinations throughout the island. These 600 statues range in height from 10 to 40 feet. Some of them weigh as much as 50 tons. How could the early Polynesians lift hundreds of heavy statues out of the volcano? How did they move them across the island to their various locations? All of these questions, as well as many others, remain unanswered.

    The early islanders probably worshiped (崇拜) these eyeless giants until sometime around 1670. In 1680, a war broke out between two groups of islanders. The victors（胜利者）of the war and ancestors of the present inhabitants, broke down many of the statues. In most cases, they broke the necks of the statues.

    Now 15 of the statues on Easter Island have been repaired to their original positions on their stone platforms. Even today, using modern tools and machinery, putting up such large statues and balancing cylinders on top of their heads presents a challenging task.

    Arriving in Sydney on his own from India, my husband, Rashid, stayed in a hotel for a short time while looking for a house for me and our children.

    During the first week of his stay, he went out one day to do some shopping. He came back in the late afternoon to discover that his suitcase was gone. He was extremely worried as the suitcase had all his important papers, including his passport.

    He reported the case to the police and then sat there，lost and lonely in strange city, thinking of the terrible troubles of getting all the paperwork organized again from a distant country while trying to settle down in a new one.

    Late in the evening, the phone rang. It was a stranger. He was trying to pronounce my husband's name and was asking him a lot of questions. Then he said they had found a pile of papers in their trash can（垃圾桶）that had been left out on the footpath.

    My husband rushed to their home to find a kind family holding all his papers and documents. Their young daughter had gone to the trash can and found a pile of unfamiliar papers. Her parents had carefully sorted them out, although they had found mainly foreign addresses on most of the documents. At last they had seen a half-written letter in the pile in which my husband had given his new telephone number to a friend.

    That family not only restored the important documents to us that day but also restored our faith and trust in people. We still remember their kindness and often send a warm wish their way.

    Last week the British university system offered a record number of places. That sounds like good news—but do we really need more people to go to university? For that matter, does the world need more universities?

    The answer feels like it should be yes.

    Education is good, is it not? But everything has a cost.

    Education takes time. We could insist that everyone study full-time until the age of 45 but that would surely be too much. And perhaps half the population studying until they're 21 is also too much. As for universities, they consume financial and intellectual resources—perhaps those resources might be better spent elsewhere.

    My own personal opinion is strongly in favor both of going to university, and of simply having universities around.

    The main skill I learnt at university was to write about economics, and I use that skill every day of my professional life, even an abstract education seems practical to me. And I now live in Oxford, one of the world's most celebrated (著名的) university cities. Oxford's experience certainly suggests that universities have much to offer.

    The city's architecture and green spaces have been shaped—greatly for the better, on balance —by the 900-year-old institution at its heart. The beauty attracts tourists and locals too.

    But these are samples of one. Many people do not find themselves using the skills and knowledge they accumulated at university. And Oxford's dreaming spires (尖顶) aren't terribly representative of global universities as a whole.