If you have a chance to go to Finland, you will probably be surprised to find how “foolish” the Finnish people are.

    Take the taxi drivers for example. Taxis in Finland are mostly high-class Benz with a fare of two US dollars a kilometer. You can go anywhere in one, tell the driver to drop you at any place, say that you have some business to attend to, and then walk off without paying your fare. The driver would not show the least sign of anxiety.

    The dining rooms in all big hotels not only serve their guests, but also serve outside diners. Hotel guests have their meals free, so they naturally go to the free dining rooms to have their meals. The most they would do to show their good faith is to wave their registration card to the waiter. With such a loose check, you can easily use any old registration card to take a couple of friends to dine free of charge.

    The Finnish workers are paid by the hour. They are very much on their own as soon as they have agreed with the boss on the rate(价钱). From then on, they just say how many hours they have worked and they will be paid accordingly(相应地).

    With so many loopholes(漏洞) in everyday life, surely Finland must be a heaven to those who love to take “petty advantages”. But the strange thing is, all the taxi passengers would always come back to pay their fare after they have attended to their business; not a single outsider has ever been found in the free hotel dining rooms. And workers always give an honest account of the exact hours they put in. As the Finns always act on good faith in everything they do, living in such a society has turned everyone into a real “gentleman”.

    In a society of such high moral practice, what need is there for people to be on guard against others?

    On Sept. 15, TripAdvisor, one of the world's largest travel review websites, named the world's top 25 museums in its Travelers' Choice Award according to the reviews and opinions of travelers worldwide. Now let's take a look at the top four museums which are ranked as follows by the popularity around the world.

    Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

    It is the largest museum in the Western Hemisphere, with a collection of 2 million items from more than 5,000 years of world culture. The iconic museum includes important collections from ancient Egypt and medieval Europe as well as ancient Greece and Rome. Here, visitors can get lost in different centuries: They can see the Temple of Dendur from early Egypt, Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh's Wheatfield With Cypresses an US pop Andy Warhol's Souper Dress, all in one place.

    Muse d'Orsay, Paris

    Located in the center of Paris on the bank of the River Seine, the Musee d'Orsay houses the world's most amazing collections of impressionist and post-impressionist art. It offers the chance to view major works from greats like Van Gogh and Claude Monet. The museum is famous for being home to Starry Night over the Rhone, an oil painting by Van Gogh that is often praised along with his masterpiece Starry Night.

    Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois

    It was named the world's best museum in 2014. The world-famous Windy City museum houses nearly 300,000 works, including one of the largest collections of modern art, including pieces such as Spanish painter Pablo Picasso's The Old Guitarist, US artist Georgia O'Keeffe's Black Cross and French artist Henri Matisse's Bathers by a River. A TripAdvisor reviewer commented, “No matter how many times I visit, it never gets old. Paintings from every era, works from every great artist.”

    Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

    Nowhere is able to present the entire history of Spanish art like the Museo Nacional del Prado.

    Here, visitors can enjoy a detailed view of the Spanish school of the Modem Age. Outstanding masterpieces by artists such as Diego Velazquez, Francisco Goya and Joaquiin Sorolla make up an internationally-famous collection. The Italian school is another highlight of the museum's collection, as it includes the 15^th century masterpieces such as The Annunciation by Fra Angelico, The Death of the Virgin by Andrea Mantegna and The Dead Christ Supported by Angels by Antonello da Messina.

    Writing it down

    Unlike some other European languages, English is a little tricky when it comes to writing. How a word is pronounced and how it is actually spelt can be very different things.

    Same spelling, different meanings

Imagine, then, a situation where two words are spelt and pronounced exactly the same way, but have completely different meanings. Welcome to the world of homonyms（同形同音异义词）. Take, for example, the word "fair"—it can be a kind of festival, an adjective to describe the colour of your hair or how you should play a game. Or "leg", which can be attached to a person, or a table and can also be a distance you travel, or a part of a competition.

Don't take it literally（字面意思）

So how do you know which meaning someone is referring to? You don't, except by the context. Obviously, if someone asks you to "give them a hand", they don't want you to remove what is at the end of your arm.

What's in a name?

    Sometimes even the context doesn't help much—the result can be amusing. These sentences play with the double meaning of a noun:

    Sentence 1: I used to be a banker, but I lost interest.

Sentence 2: A small boy swallowed some coins and had to go to hospital. When his grandmother phoned to ask how he was, the nurse said: "No change yet".

    More ambiguity（歧义）

    Sentence 3 plays with the different meanings of a verb:

    Sentence 3: I wondered why the ball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.

Double trouble

    And sometimes a word can be a noun and a verb, but have different meanings. Can you work this one out?

    Sentence 4: Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

    If you like these homonyms, you will be pleased to know that English has plenty more!

    When I got home after dropping out of college in my junior year because of depression, I didn't want to get out of bed. But my parents wanted me to, so I just transferred myself to the couch in the living room. Sometimes I would turn on the TV and watch marathons of Chopped, but mostly I just sat there, lost in thought.

    One day when I was lying on the couch, not knowing what to do, I wondered since I had been out of school for a long time, I might as well do something productive with my life. I looked at my options. I could attend some kind of online college class, go to in-person events just to get out of the house, or take up a hobby. But none of these things made me happy, and my depression seemed to keep me drowning under the waves.

    There was something that was my thing—entrepreneurship. No matter what kind of day I'm having now, the mere mention of start-ups still perks me up. I have been starting business in some kinds of forms ever since I was a kid, and despite everything, this passion has never changed.

    So I started thinking of ideas, seeing which one could become practical business. I spent my days glued to a wide purple notebook, a pen in hand, sometimes moving from the couch to the table on our back porch in the mornings. If I got up early enough, I'd watch the sun come up. It was there, in the still mornings, that I learned about life and started to look back on mine.

    With time going on, the depression started to lift. I was making more progress in my recovery, and the good days were more frequent than the bad. I started a couple of different businesses, eventually settling on a web design business, and did a lot of experiments and changed my ideas, and after a while, things started to work.

    It is rightly said one can share any secret with a true friend. He may know your deepest fears and weaknesses and yet will never take advantage of you. However, keeping a friend's secrets to yourself and not telling the world is what makes the bond grow strong and last forever. You need to develop trust and mutual (互相的) understanding before you start sharing secrets with each other. With friends, secret talks never seem to end and it can get really amusing to know what has been going on in your friend's mind.

    There is a certain time in life especially from the teenage years when one starts having a personal periphery (界限) in life and parents are excluded (排斥) from it. It is because there are certain things that they can't understand and we can't discuss with them. That is when friends become the best secret sharers. They are the ones to whom one reveals one's feelings and best kept secrets.

    It is a general belief that only girls share secrets. But boys have their own secrets that they discuss with only closest friends. The secret talks can range (变化) from relationships, talks about fights with parents, secret activities and anything that is not supposed to be known to others! If you think secrets are limited to only teenagers, get your facts right! Secrets can be shared at any age and there is no hard and fast rule that secrets are shared only among youngsters.

    Sharing secrets with a friend is not just fun, but it also helps to develop a lasting trust in one another. Sometimes, sharing secrets will tell you more about the person. You will come to know whether your friend is reliable and trustworthy and whether it is worth sharing your secrets with them. You can call it a test of friendship.

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