B

    Two weeks before my 12th birthday, my teacher asked me to conduct an experiment. When I mixed some powder together, they exploded. Molten liquid hit me in the face, but I felt no pain.

    I vividly remember standing there in a state of calm. I thought I was in a dream, but however hard I struggled to swim to the surface of consciousness, I couldn't wake up. I didn't understand how terrifying it was until I heard people saying, ＂Who's that?＂ That's when I knew I was unrecognizable.

    I was taken to hospital, but the doctors didn't know what to do with me. Later I was flown to Houston for surgery. Between the ages of 13 and 16, I had 40 operations. As each operation came and went, my vision would come back, then fade again. Eventually, it faded completely and I had what was left of my eyes removed for cosmetic reasons.

    Since then, I have lived in total darkness. Most blind people, even if they don't have any sight they're aware of, are still able to sense light. That gives them a sense of day and night. But not me. I absolutely lost that sense of time passing.

    For many years, I felt my sight loss darkening my life like the loss of my parents from which I would never recover. But when I was in my 40s, I realized I had to find a way to live. I trained to become a counselor, and that has helped me see my experiences in a different way. I can't fix people's broken lives — just like I can't fix my sight — but I can help them find a way to manage.

    Sometimes it feels as if all the struggles and negative experiences I've lived through were in fact a kind of preparation for helping others to make their own way towards the light.

     “ Can we go now, Momma?” little Susie asked, pulling on her mom's arm. Her mother did not answer, only stared blankly at the scene below. Crowds of people marched about with what looked like picket(警戒队) signs. Other people gathered around them, shouting angry words that she couldn't make out from this distance. This relatively small town in Missouri had never seen so much action. She and Susie were standing at the top of the only high rise building in town for Susie loved to try to find their house among the rows and rows of little boxes.

    “Momma? ” Susie said in a frightened voice, two seconds before a gun shot went off, making her scream at the top of her lungs. Her mom grabbed her and held her over her shoulder as the tears started pouring. “What was that? I'm scared, Momma!!”

    “Sh Sh Sh,” her momma whispered in a soothing tone, rubbing her daughter's hair. “It's just a bad dream, baby. She said both to herself and Susie.

    Susie looked at her with confused eyes at the same time a fight broke out among some members of each group. The little girl gasped in surprise. “Why are those ants fighting , Momma?”

    “Those aren't ants, sweetie; they're people, or, at least they're supposed to be.”

    “I don't understand what's going on! I'm scared!!” the four-year-old child clung to her momma. “It looks like they're dancing, momma.”

    “Yeah, it sort of does, doesn't it?” her mother said with an air of disbelief. How could the expression of heated anger be so beautiful? It was so wondrously unexpected that it brought soft tears to her eyes.

    “Why are you scared, Momma? It's just bugs dancing,” Susie said with an innocent smile, wiping away her mother's tears.

    In the sea there are many islands. In its warm waters there are some little ones. We call them “Coral Islands”.

    A coral island is very nice to look at. It looks like a ring of land with tress, grass, and flowers on it. One part of the ring is open to the water. There is a little round lake inside the island.

    If you look into this lake, you will see beautiful coral. You may think they are flowers.

    If you look at a piece of coral, you will see many little holes in it. In each of these holes a very small sea animal has lived . These sea animals make the coral.

    They began to build under the water. Year after year, the coral grew higher and higher.

    At last it grew out of the water.

    Then the sea brought to it small trees and something else. After some years, these things changed into earth. Sometimes the wind brought seeds to this earth. Sometimes birds flew over it and brought seeds to the island.

    The little seeds grew. In a few years there were plants all over the island. In a few more years there were trees growing there.

    So you see, these islands were built little by little. The workers were very small. Do they not teach us a lesson? Can you think what the lesson is?

    Would it surprise you to learn that, like animals, trees communicate with each other and pass on their wealth to the next generation?

    UBC Professor Simard explains how trees are much more complex than most of us ever imagined. Although Charles Darwin thought that trees are competing for survival of the fittest, Simard shows just how wrong he was. In fact, the opposite is true: trees survive through their cooperation and support, passing around necessary nutrition “depending on who needs it”.

    Nitrogen (氮) and carbon are shared through miles of underground fungi (真菌) networks, making sure that all trees in the forest ecological system give and receive just the right amount to keep them all healthy. This hidden system works in a very similar way to the networks of neurons (神经元) in our brains, and when one tree is destroyed, it affects all.
     Simard talks about “mother trees”, usually the largest and oldest plants on which all other trees depend. She explains how dying trees pass on the wealth to the next generation, transporting important minerals to young trees so they may continue to grow. When humans cut down “mother trees” with no awareness of these highly complex “tree societies” or the networks on which they feed, we are reducing the chances of survival for the entire forest
   “We didn't take any notice of it.” Simard says sadly. “Dying trees move nutrition into the young trees before dying, but we never give them chance.” If we could put across the message to the forestry industry, we could make a huge difference towards our environmental protection efforts for the future.

    You often can choose a private setting when you browse(浏览) the internet. But be forewarned: It may not afford nearly as much privacy as you expect. That's the finding of a new study.

    Major web browsers, such as Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari, often a private-browsing option. It's sometimes referred to as “incognito.” This option lets you surf the Internet browser and saves a record into its history of each page that you visited. And what sites you visit won't affect the suggestions your browser makes the next time you're filling out an online form.

Many people believe—incorrectly— that the incognito setting protects them more broadly. Most believe it even after reading a web browser's explanation of the incognito mode.

    For instance, a new study had 460 people read web browsers' descriptions of private browsing. Each person read one of 13 descriptions. Then the participants answered questions about how private they thought their browsing would be while using this tool. The volunteers didn't understand the incognito mode. This was true no matter which browser explanation they had read. The researchers reported their findings on April 26 at the 2018 World Wide Web Conference in Lyon, France.

    More than half of the volunteers thought that if they logged into a Google account through a private window, Google wouldn't keep a record of their search history. Not true. And about one in every four participants thought private browsing hid their device's IP address. That's wrong, too.

    Blase Ur was one of the study's authors. He's an expert in computer security and privacy in Illinois at the University of Chicago. Companies could clear up this confusion by giving better explanations of the incognito mode, his team says. For example, the browsers should avoid vague（模糊).The web browser Opera, for instance, promises users that “your secrets are safe.” Nope Firefox encourages users to “browse like no one's watching.” In fact, someone might be. (If you'd like to know more about the research information, please click here.)

    When I was growing up, Mother's Day was as important as Christmas.

    The energy around the house was always positive（积极的）, mostly thanks to my father who made sure that his kids appreciated their mother, We would clean the house, and Mum got breakfast in bed in the morning and didn't have to lift a finger all day. And in the evening, we went to a restaurant for a traditional Mother's Day dinner.

    What I learned from my father over the years, was that no matter what, he always put my mother before himself. He absolutely loved her and never let her forget that. And from my parents, I learned a thing or two about how to love.

    I maintain（保持） my father's Mother's Day tradition with my wife. Growing up, I learned that showing affection to the woman you love or who gave birth to you is an important part of life. You see, it goes both ways, and the love you have for your mother comes back to you again and again.

    Believing that and feeling it when you can may keep you from being lonely, even if your mum isn't close by or has passed away. There are a number of us who no longer have a mother in our lives, and truth be told, there are often times when I wish my mum were still here to comfort me. So instead, I remember the times she did just that. It makes me smile, and somehow, those memories of a more simple and loving life give me the comfort I'm looking for.

    My wife's mother is still around, however, and it's great to have that "mother energy" in my life still. Having this relationship with my mother-in-law is nice because it gives me someone to be there for on Mother's Day, and any other day of the year.

    If you are mum-less, you too should find a deserving woman in your life and celebrate Mother's Day with her. If you don't know anyone, there are plenty of lonely mums in rest homes who would enjoy your company for a couple of hours. The visit will make both of your days, and perhaps your lives, a little bit better.