You may not  have heard of Ashoka,  but for the past 27 years,this association, founded by Bill Drayton, has fought  poverty (贫穷)and sickness, promoted education and  encouraged small businesses. To support these worthy causes, Ashoka provides money for the world's most  promising "changemakers" seeking to solve (解决) urgent problems and would like to create a  world in which every citizen is a changemaker.

    Drayton believes that anyone can become an agent for change. The important thing is to simply give yourself permission. If you see a problem that you care about, you can help solve it. The young in particular are willing to accept this concept because at heart every child wants to grow into a happy, healthy,  contributing adult. In fact It is many young people's ambition to set up programmes or businesses that improve social conditions. An excellent example is an Ashoka project started in 1995 in Dhaka, which handled the rubbish problem facing the city ,helped local farmers and provided an income for poor people there .

When Masqsood and Iftekhar began to study the problem of all the uncollected rubbish that lay in Dhaka's streets, Attracting tats and disease , they discovered that 80% of it was natural waste . So they educated the poor people in the city to compost (把……制成堆粪)this waste . They knew that they would have a market for the end product because local farmers were struggling with chemical ferntilisers (化肥) which were expensive and had reduced the natural minerals in the soil over the years . At first , they were refused ,but once they were able to persuade them that there was money to be made , the project took off. In 2009 sales were $14,000.

    Drayton is optimistic that in ten years Ashoka will be making really serious ,practical progress in bringing about social change by changing the way we look at economic development.

    It isn't often that zookeepers call on craftsman for help. But cold weather at the Wildlife SOS Elephant Conservation and Care Center in northern India was putting elephants at risk. So the center's staff joined forces with locals to find a creative way to keep the animals warm. Now the elephants are stepping out in style, thanks to volunteers who made use of their crafting talents to knit (编织) enormous sweaters to protect the animals.

    Wildlife SOS is a conservation group that has been taking action against animal cruelty and saving wildlife in danger since 1995. Their Elephant Conservation and Care Center is devoted to rescuing the large animals from abuse in circuses, illegal dealing, and other circumstances where they have been ignored or treated with extreme cruelty. There are currently 20 elephants living at the center, and the staff hope to take in 50 more of the creatures this year.

    Because most of the elephants housed at the center are recovering from injuries or are elderly and weak, they are particularly vulnerable to cold temperatures. When the staff reported near-freezing nighttime temperatures in the winter, volunteers from surrounding villages began knitting enormous sweaters to keep the elephants warm. The monumental sweaters are large enough to cover the elephants' backs, bellies, and legs.

    Making the sweaters is a big undertaking—each one takes approximately four weeks to create, with volunteers working together on the enormous clothes. Local villagers have already made sweaters for three of the 23 elephants on their own, each with a unique pattern and color.

    If you're also looking for something happy and heartwarming, this is it. The elephants usually wear blankets to keep warm during colder months and you can purchase a blanket for an elephant on the Wildlife SOS website.

    Women are friendly. They often share with others. But men are more competitive. They are trying to improve their social status. Why? Researchers have found it's all due to the hormone oxytocin (荷尔蒙催生素). Although known as the love hormone, it affects the sexes differently.

    Generally, people believe that the hormone oxytocin is let out in our body in various social situations and our body creates a large amount of it when falling in love or giving birth.

    But in a former experiment Professor Ryan found that the hormone is also let out in our body during a negative situation such as envy (嫉妒).

    Further researches showed that in men the hormone oxytocin improves the ability to recognize competitive relations, but in women it raises the ability to recognize friendship.

    Professor Ryan's recent experiment used 62 men and women aged 20 to 37.

    Half of the participants (参与者) received oxytocin. The other half received placebo (安慰剂).

    After a week, the two groups switched with participants. They went through the same steps with the other material.

    Following each treatment, they were shown some video pictures with different social behavior. Then they were asked to analyze the relations by answering some questions. The questions were about telling friendship from competition. And their answers should be based on gestures, body language and facial expressions.

    The results showed that, after treatment with oxytocin, men's ability to correctly recognize competitive relations improved, but in women it was the ability to correctly recognize friendship that got better.

    Professor Ryan thus concluded, “Our experiment proves that the hormone oxytocin can raise people's abilities to better tell apart different social behaviors.”

    Billie Holiday was an American jazz singer and songwriter. Nicknamed Lady Day by her loyal friend and musical partner, Lester Young, Holiday had a great influence on jazz and pop singing. Her voiced style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of controlling tempo (节奏). Above all, she was admired for her deeply personal and direct approach to singing.

    She co-wrote a few songs, and several of them have become jazz standards, notably God Bless the Child, Don't Explain, and Lady Sings the Blues. She also became famous for singing jazz standards written by others, including Easy Living and Strange Fruit.

    Her early career is hard to track down with accuracy. But she later gained work singing in local jazz clubs before being spotted by a talent scout (星探), John Hammond in 1933.

    Her voice and recordings were loved for the depth of emotion and intensity she could bring to classic standards. Her range of voice was not the greatest, but her extraordinary low rough voice was soon to become very famous and influential.

    She was an important icon (偶像) of the jazz era and influential in the development of jazz singing. In the late 1930s, she began singing a civil rights song called Strange Fruit, a song which told the tale of a lynching (用私刑处死) of a black man in the Deep South. It was very controversial for that period and it was not played on radios. It was recorded for Commodore Records and she performed it many times over the next 20 years.

    Billie Holiday had a difficult upbringing which influenced her attitude toward life. She experienced many violent relationships. She also became increasingly dependent on various drugs which contributed to her early death in 1959, aged just 44.

    I was with a group of businessmen, and we were dealing with a question — what is a good person?

    At a certain point during the discussion, one of the students, a young man of about 30, described an event that happened at Christmas. He and his five-year-old son were decorating the Christmas tree, and a little boy came to the front door begging. If you ever visit Mexico, you will see that the people there take begging as nothing to get upset about and nothing to get embarrassed by.

    So, this little boy came to the door, a boy about the same age as my student's son. The father and the son went to the front door, and the father went back with his five-year-old son and said to him, “Give him one of your toys.” At the words, the little boy quickly picked up one toy, and his father said to him, “No, no, give him your favorite toy.”

    And the little boy, like a little tiger, said, “No way!” He cried; he refused. But the father, like a big tiger in a way, insisted gently, “No, you must give him one of your favorite toys.”

    And finally the boy, with his head down, picked up a toy he had just gotten. The father waited in the living room, and the boy walked to the front door with the toy in his hand. The father waited and waited.

    What do you think happened?

    After a couple of minutes, his son came running back into the living room, his face lighted up. “Daddy,” he said, “can I do that again?” I think I have got the answer to the question.

    Stephen Hawking is one of the most famous scientists in this century. He was born in 1942. He's world well-known on space and time. Stephen was searching some very big questions, such as "How did the universe begin? How will it end?"

    Stephen was a student at Oxford University. He studied math and science. Then, at the age of twenty, he became sick. He was so young, but the doctors said to his family, "He has only two more years to live." As a matter of fact, the doctors were wrong – he didn't die. He can't walk but he uses a wheelchair. He can't feed himself and get in or out of bed himself. But he refused to give in to the condition. He talks with the help of a computer. After Oxford, Stephen went to Cambridge University. Three years later, in 1965, he became a doctor of philosophy(哲学).

    Because of his serious health problems, it was difficult for him to draw or to write. So he started to think in pictures. With this new way of thinking, he became one of the most famous scientists in the world. In 1981, he met the Pope(教皇) in Rome. They talked about his ideas. Then in 1988, he wrote his first important book, A Brief History of Time. It sold more than 5.5 million copies in 33 different languages. He was once invited to China, he impressed us with his self-confidence, humorous and witty(风趣的) conversation.(谈话)