Often in Scotland it can feel like the only difference between summer and the rest of the year is that it doesn't snow. (This isn't a guarantee!) But when the weather is good, it's a truly special place-here are some things you can do in summer when the weather is nice.

    See

    With the richest wildlife across the UK, take the chance to see some of the less common sites. On the West coast of Scotland there are lots of places where you can take a boat trip to see many kinds of whales. If you prefer dolphins, you can see the most northerly colony of bottlenose dolphins (海豚) in the world just off Inverness in the Moray Firth. Of course it's likely that you'll see seals (海豹) and many other animals on these trips too.

    Do

    The waves of Thurso right in the north of Scotland are just great. If you're not feeling brave enough to go in the water and prefer to watch from the safety of the shore then there're several major surf contests held there.

    Another very Scottish activity ideal for good weather is “Munro Bagging”. Named after Sir Hugh Munro, the 218 mountains in Scotland over 914m high are called Munros and walkers try to see how many they can climb in a set amount of time. This is not easy though-conditions can change suddenly and many of the routes are very tough (艰难的).

    Eat

    Thanks to a large Scottish-Italian population, there are too many specialist ice cream sellers. One of the most famous of them is Nardini in Largs, Ayrshire. Not only can you watch people actually make ice cream but you can sit and eat in a beautiful refurbished (翻新的) 1930s building facing the river Clyde. There's even a piano player at the weekends.

    My timing has always been a little off with Elizabeth Strout. I've read and pretty much admired everything she's written, but, for whatever reason, the books of hers I've picked to review have been the good ones, like Amy and Isabelle andThe Burgess Boys, rather than the extraordinary ones, like Olive Kitteridge, which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. Anything Is Possible is Strout's latest book and it's gorgeous. Like Olive Kitteridge, Anything Is Possible reads like a novel constructed out of linked stories. In fact, it's hard to know exactly what to call this — a novel or a short story collection. In any case, these stories are animated (栩栩如生) by Strout's signature themes: class humiliation, loneliness, spiritual and, sometimes, reawakening. When Strout is really on her game, as she is here, you feel like you've been carefully lowered into the unquiet depths of quiet lives.

    Strout began working on Anything Is Possible at the same time she was writing her novel My Name Is Lucy Barton, which was published last year. Lucy, a dirt-poor child who grows up to become a celebrated writer, floats in and out of these interlocking stories. Some characters catch a glimpse of her being interviewed on TV; one travels to see her at a bookstore. An older Lucy even appears “in the flesh” in one story when she returns home to the small town in rural Illinois where most of these tales are set to visit her troubled brother; but Anything Is Possible also stands on its own. Indeed, a few of the characters here would be ticked off if they thought their stories depended in any way on that Barton girl. Strout's writerly eye works like a 360 degree camera, so that a character or place that's on the margins of one tale takes center stage in a later one. This technique sounds contrived, but Strout carries it off lightly.

    ①One of the most powerful stories here is called “Dottie's Bed & Breakfast,” which is an establishment we readers glimpse earlier in the book. Dottie desires to be middle-class and she harbors a grudge (怨恨) against life because she's had to rent out rooms to make a living. Dottie also possesses a sensitive nose for sniffing out the lower-class origins of some of her guests.

    ②“Shoes always gave you away,” comments a woman in a story called “Cracked” about a houseguest's too-high cork wedges(坡跟鞋). And, in the final story here, called “Gift,” a once-poor man made good says, “The sense of apology did not go away, it was a tiring thing to carry.”

    ③But, back to Dottie. When an elderly doctor and his wife come to stay at her guesthouse, Dottie bonds over tea with the wife, Shelley, who shares a story about a long-ago social humiliation.

    ④At breakfast the next morning, however, Shelley obviously regrets that confidence and becomes the Doctor's wife again. She freezes Dottie out and puts her back in her place as the inn-keep.

    There's comic satisfaction in seeing Dottie secretly spitting into the breakfast jam, but the more profound rewards of this story have to do with its recognition of the many varieties of human insecurity — or, as Lucy Barton herself more bluntly puts it, the many ways “people are always looking to feel superior to someone else.”

    Other stories have to do with sexual shame, or with the tragic ways close neighbors or family members misread each other; but I'm making Anything Is Possible sound too grim when, in fact, so many of these stories end in an understated (低调的) gesture of forgiveness. Strout is in that special company of writers like Richard Ford, Stewart O'Nan and Richard Russo, who write simply about ordinary lives and, in so doing, make us readers see the beauty of both their worn and rough surfaces and what lies beneath.

    Last Saturday on the way to the mall, two children, a boy and a girl, came running towards me with bottles on their hands, asking if I wanted bottled water. It was a surprising gesture. I was wondering if they were doing fund-raising. I knelt and asked them where their parents were and how much a bottle of water cost. Then two adult women came up to me explaining what the children were doing. “We are teaching the children to give without anything in return. We are teaching people to accept without giving in return. ”

    Two mothers had bought bottled water and placed a sticker(小贴纸)on all bottles with five different quotes(引述):

    ⒈Smile at everyone. You'll never know when someone may need it.

    ⒉If Plan A does not work, there are 25 more letters in the alphabets.

    ⒊Have a thirst for life. Every day is filled with possibilities.

    ⒋In your thirst for knowledge, be sure you don't drown in all the information.

    ⒌Dig your well before you're thirsty.

    The bottle I have has quoted No.5. A sudden change of attitude opened up between me, the mothers and the children. We are no longer strangers to each other. We were having such a great time chatting and I ended up helping them give away the rest of the bottled water.

    One young lady was so thankful that she happily accepted the water and said it was the best thing that happened to her all day since she had a bad day at work. A man refused and walked away saying “No, thanks”. A couple kept on bowing to us in gratitude. When it was all done, the children and I were giving each other high-five. It was so much fun. I think I had more fun doing this than the mothers and the children.

    Living in the wild can be hard. Finding food and staying safe aren't easy. Each day, animals try to survive in their habitats. Not all animals get by on their own. Some animals form a close partnership with other kinds of animals. These pairings are called symbiotic(共生的)relationships.

    In a symbiotic relationship, the animals depend on each other. One animal helps the other meet its needs. Sounds good, right? Not always. Some animals are not very kind to their partners. In some cases, one animal meets its needs but hurts its partner. Take ticks(扁虱), for example. These insects suck blood to live. To get blood, they attach themselves to other kinds of animals. Ticks can pass germs(细菌)that cause disease instead of helping their hosts.

    In other relationships, animals don't treat their partners so poorly. Both animals benefit from living with the other animal.

    Small animals called cleaner shrimps(清洁虾)have found a way of helping fish. As their name suggests, the shrimps clean the fish. They hang out at what scientists call a cleaning station. A fish stops by. Then a shrimp climbs onto the fish and even steps into the fish's mouth. The shrimp uses its tiny claws to pick stuff off the fish's body. That can include dead skin and tiny pieces of food that can hurt the fish. The fish gets a nice cleaning. The shrimp enjoys a tasty meal of fish trash.

    Small birds called plovers(灰斑)are also in the cleaning business. They have big customers-crocodiles. Crocodiles have long noses filled with sharp teeth. Cleaning them is funny. When a crocodile opens its mouth, the plover hops right in. It lets the plover eat small, harmful animals attached to the crocodile's teeth. The plover gets an easy meal while the crocodile gets clean teeth.

    Partway through Wonder, Fifth-grader Auggie Pullman finds himself seated across from a new friend in the school cafeteria. "Have you ever thought about having plastic surgery?" the friend asks.

    "Dude, this is after plastic surgery. It takes a lot of work to look this good," Auggie says, running a hand through his hair. In other words, what could be painfully depressing turns out to hold lurking (潜藏的) reserves of humour, which is pretty much the story of Wonder.

    Auggie, played by Jacob Tremblay, was born with a facial difference, and even after multiple operations, his looks shock his classmates. As he adapts from homeschooling to a new school community, he encounters far worse than that lunchtime scene—one nasty bully (横行霸道者) says he'd kill himself if he looked like Auggie—but he never fully loses heart.

    The movie is an adaptation of the 2012 novel by R.J.Palacio, which has sold 6 million copies in North America and launched an antibullying campaign, Choose Kind. Palacio has said she got the idea for the story when her young son began crying at the sight of a girl with a facial difference in an ice cream shop. She took her kids out of the shop, but later regretted her reaction. "What I should have done is simply turned to the little girl and started up a conversation and shown my kids that there was nothing to be afraid of," she said.

    Tremblay, 11, who broke out opposite Brie Larson in the 2015 drama Room, has more than a few things in common with Auggie. "We both love Star Wars, we have awesome families, and we love our dogs." But Tremblay thinks we all can find something in common with the boy. "Everyone's like Auggie in one very important way: we want to be accepted and treated equally and with kindness."

    Julia Roberts, who plays Auggie's mother, became interested in the part because of her own children, "I read it with my kids and fell so in love with it," she says of the novel. "This book is such a beautiful and gentle introduction into all kinds of topics, including bullying and intolerance and fear, and what fear makes young people do sometimes."

    Both actors have some familiarity with the subject. "I was picked on quite a bit as a young person," Roberts says, though she won't say what for. "Even as a 50-year-old mother of three, it's not a path I like to go up and down." Tremblay reveals a bit more. "I have been picked on," he says, "because I'm kind of short for me age. I told my parents, and that's one of the best things you can do, because my mom said would never want me to carry negative thoughts on my shoulders alone."

    The most challenging parts of filming, says Tremblay, were moments in which he had to cry. Tenderhearted audience members will likely shed tears of their own—especially during scenes between Auggie and his mom, who repeatedly reassures her son that he is worthy of love. But the movie also has its fair share of hijinks (喧闹): for every tear-filled moment, there is a lightsaber battle or silly science project to lighten the mood. This mixture of pity and humor, says Roberts, "was intrinsic (固有的) in the writing in the novel." But she credits writer-director Stephen Chbosky with translating that balance into visual terms.

    As much as the movie impresses the viewer with compassion for the underdogs, it also finds a way to sympathize with the bullies. "I would say to try to take a moment to be conscious of why a person that is bullying somebody is behaving that way," says Roberts, "After all", she adds, "There's no child that's born bully."

Every profession or trade, every art, and every science has its technical vocabulary, the function of which is partly to name things, or processes which have no names in ordinary English, and partly to secure greater exactness in terminology (术语). Such special dialects are necessary in technical discussion of any kind. Being universally understood by those engaged or interested in the particular science or art, they have the accurateness of a mathematical formula (公式）. Besides，they save time in these kinds of discussions, for it is much more economical to name a process than to describe it. Thousands of these technical terms are very properly included in every large dictionary, yet, as a whole, they are rather in the suburbs of the English language.

Different occupations, however, differ widely in the character of their special vocabularies. In trades and handicrafts, and other professions, like farming and fishery, which have occupied great numbers of men from remote times, the technical vocabulary is very old. It consists largely of native words, or of borrowed words that have worked themselves into the very central part of our language. Thus, though highly technical in many particulars, these vocabularies are more familiar in sound, and more generally understood, than most other technical terms. In law, medicine, and philosophy, the special dialects have also become pretty familiar to cultivated persons and have contributed much to the popular vocabulary. Yet among these professions, each one still possesses a large body of technical terms that remain essentially foreign, even to educated speech. And the proportion has increased in the last fifty years, particularly in the various departments of natural and political science and in the mechanic arts. Here new terms are coined with the greatest freedom, and abandoned when they have served their turn. Most of the newly-invented terms are restricted to special discussions, and seldom get into general literature or conversation.

Yet no profession is nowadays, as all professions once were, a close combination. Lawyers, doctors and men of science all communicate freely with others, not in a merely professional way. Furthermore, what is called "popular science" makes everybody familiar with modem views and recent discoveries. Any important experiment, though made in a remote or provincial laboratory, is at once reported online, and everybody is soon talking about it-as in the case of AI.