In choosing a friend, one should be very careful. A good friend can help you study. You can have fun together and make each other happy. Sometimes you will meet fair­weather friends. They will be with you as long as you have money or luck，but when you are down, they will run away. How do I know when I have found a good friend? I look for certain qualities of character，especially understanding, honesty and reliability(信任)．

    Above all else, I look for understanding in a friend. A good friend tries to understand how another person is feeling. He is not quick to judge. Instead, he tries to learn from others. He puts himself in the other person's place, and he tries to think of ways to be helpful. He is also a good listener.

    At the same time, however, a good friend is honest. He does not look for faults in others. He notices their good points. In short, a friend will try to understand me and accept me.

    Another quality of a friend is reliability. I can always depend on a good friend. If he tells me he will meet me somewhere at a certain time, I can be sure that he will be there. If I need a favor，he will do his best to help me. If I am in trouble, he will not run away from me.

    There is a fourth quality that makes a friend special. A special friend is someone with whom we can have fun. We should enjoy our lives, and we would enjoy our friendship. That is why I especially like friends who are fun to be with. A good friend likes the same things I like. We share experience and learn from each other. A good friend has a good sense of humor too. He likes to laugh with me. That is how we share in the joy of being friends. And I know that he is looking for the same quality in me.

    When I meet someone who is reliable, honest, and understanding，I know I've found a friend!

    If you are given only 1 yuan, could you live in a city for one day? It seems this may be a little difficult. But students from Xi'an did it.

    On April 10, more than 60 students from the Middle School Attached to Northwestern Polytechnic University took part in the One Yuan Metropolis Survival. The charitable organization for teenagers called Imperceptible Education held this activity. Students not only have to live, but they also have to deal with a lot of hard tasks. It has happened in eight cities and is going to four others, including Beijing, in June.

    To make money, many students looked for part-time jobs and saw how hard life was. Zhang Queue, 14, asked more than 10 restaurants for a job and finally got one chance. “We were sad when they said no. But gradually (逐渐地), we got used to it,” he said. After being a waiter for an hour, he got 25 yuan.

    Some made use of their talents by singing and dancing in parks or shopping malls. Many people who walked by took notice and helped them. Zhao Jincheng, 14, drew pictures and made paper crafts(手工). “This showed it's important to learn a special skill,” he said.

    Living was hard, but finishing the tasks wasn't any easier. They went to different places to finish tasks in a short time. The most amazing one was when they had to exchange things worth thousands yuan with only a piece of paper in half an hour. “We learned how to persuade others. From a balloon to a cake to a bottle of yogurt (酸乳) … after almost 20 tries, we got an expensive necklace,” he said. They will give all of the money they made to poor schools in Tibet.

    Conflict resolution is a peaceful way of trying to solve a conflict with resolution. Both sides in the conflict explain what they feel happened to cause the conflict. The person who listens to both sides is called the mediator（调解人）.

    After both sides state what they think happened to cause the conflict, they discuss ways to solve the conflict. They try to come up with a "resolution" that both sides agree to.

    Communication throughout the entire conflict resolution process is always exchanged in a calm manner without anger. Everyone attempts to use good listening and attending skills while people are talking.

    If voices get too loud or it appears that someone is angry, the mediator's role is to address this and have the people treat each other with respect.

    After various suggestions are shared in how to mediate the conflict, discussion centers on the best   solution. Conflict resolution is used in many environments to help solve disagreements in a peaceful way. This is an example of how conflict resolution works in a school playground setting:

    Someone says that a student pushed them on the soccer field.

    The person accused as the "pusher" claims it was an accident.

    The mediator takes the two people who are upset somewhere in a quieter spot and talk.

    Each person describes what happened, and the mediator makes the matter clear to everyone by repeating what he heard.

    The mediator asks for ideas to solve the problem and the two individuals（个体）offer solutions.

    The individuals discuss the solutions and come to some agreement on the solution.

    Conflict resolution can work in many settings and it can work with several individuals at once. In any event, it is worth trying to get at the heart of the matter by involving the individuals who have a concern. It encourages them to analyze what really happened, to share their feelings about the conflict, and to work together peacefully to solve the problem. Conflict resolution gives those involved a structure（框架）to use with a mediator to help reach an agreement. That is to say, it allows people to see a workable framework.

    While the start of a new school year is always exciting, this year was even more so for some elementary school students in Auckland, New Zealand. They became the world's first kids to be" taught" by a digital teacher, Will. Will is just an avatar(用户头像)that appears on the student's desktop, tablet, or smartphone screen, not a human-like robot walking around the classroom.

    Auckland energy company Vector and AI company Soul Machines worked together to develop Will, which has been modeled after the human brain and nervous system, allowing it to perform human-like behavior. The digital teacher is currently assigned to teach Vector's" Be sustainable with energy, "a free program for Auckland elementary schools.

    Just like the humans it replaced, Will is able to instantly react to the students' responses to the topic. Thanks to a webcam(网络摄像头)and microphone, the avatar not only responds to questions the kids may have, but also picks up non-verbal cues(非口头提示).For instance, if a student smiles at Will, he responds by smiling back. This two-way interaction not only helps capture the students' attention, but also allows the program's developers to monitor their engagement, and make changes if needed.

    Vector's Chief Digital Officer, Nikhil Ravishankar says," What was fascinating to me was the reaction of the children to Will. The way they look at the world is so creative and different, and Will really captured their attention."

    Will, in place since August 2018,has been a great success thus far. However, regardless of how popular it becomes, Will is unlikely to replace human educators any time soon .For one, the avatar's knowledge base is severely restricted. But more importantly, even the smartest digital avatars could never predict and react to all the unexpected situations that educators have to deal with on a daily basis. However, it could come in handy as a" personal tutor", providing kids with one-on-one help on specific subjects or even topics.

    The fence was long and high. He put the brush into the whitewash and moved it along the top of the fence. He repeated the operation. He felt he could not continue and sat down.

    He knew that his friends would arrive soon with all kinds of interesting plans for the day. They would walk past him and laugh. They would make jokes about his having to work on a beautiful summer Saturday. The thought burned him like fire.

    He put his hand into his pockets and took out all that he owned. Perhaps he could find some way to pay someone to do the whitewashing for him. But there was nothing of value in his pockets-nothing that could buy even half an hour of freedom. So he put the bits of toys back into his pockets and gave up the idea.

    At this dark and hopeless moment, a wonderful idea came to him. It filled his mind with a great, bright light. Calmly he picked up the brush and started again to whitewash.

    While Tom was working, Ben Rogers appeared. Ben was eating an apple as he walked along the street. As he walked along it, he was making noises like the sound of a riverboat. First he shouted loudly, like a boat captain. Then he said "Ding—Dong-Dong", "Ding—Dong— Dong" again and again, like the bell of a riverboat. And he made other strange noises. When he came close to Tom, he stopped.

    Tom went on whitewashing. He did not look at Ben. Ben stared a moment and then said: "Hello! I'm going swimming, but you can't go, can you? "

    No answer. Tom moved his brush carefully along the fence and looked at the result with the eye of an artist. Ben came nearer. Tom's mouth watered for the apple, but he kept on working.

    Ben said, "Hello, old fellow, you've got to work, hey?"

    Tom turned suddenly and said, "Why, it's you, Ben! I wasn't noticing."

    "Say—I'm going swimming. Don't you wish you could? But of course you'd rather work—wouldn't you? Of course you would."

    Tom looked at the boy a bit, and said, "What do you call work?"

    "Why, isn't that work?"

    Tom went back to his whitewashing, and answered carelessly.

    "Well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. All I know is, it suits Tom Sawyer."

    "Oh come, now, you don't mean to say that you like it?

    The brush continued to move.

    "Like it? Well, I don't see why I shouldn't like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?"

    Ben stopped eating his apple. Tom moved his brush back and forth, stepped back to look at the result, added a touch here and there, and stepped back again. Ben watched every move and got more and more interested. Soon he said, "Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little."

    Tom thought for a moment, and was about to agree, but he changed his mind.

    "No-no-it won't do, Ben. You see, Aunt Polly wants this fence to be perfect. It has got to be done very carefully. I don't think there is one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it well enough."

    "No——is that so? Oh come, now——let me just try. Only just a little."

    "Ben, I'd like to, but if it isn't done right, I'm afraid Aunt Polly …"

    "Oh, I'll be careful. Now let me try. Say—I'll give you the core of my apple."

    "Well, here—No, Ben, now don't. I'm afraid …"

    "I'll give you all of it."

    Tom gave up the brush with unwillingness on his face, but joy in his heart. And while Ben worked at the fence in the hot sun, Tom sat under a tree, eating the apple, and planning how to get more help. There were enough boys. Each one came to laugh, but remained to whitewash. By the time Ben was tired, Tom sold the next chance to Billy for a kite; and when Billy was tired, Johnny bought it for a dead rat——and so on, hour after hour. And when the middle of the afternoon came, Tom had won many treasures.

    And he had not worked. He had had a nice idle time all the time, with plenty of company, and the fence had been whitewashed three times. If he hadn't run out of whitewash, Tom would have owned everything belonging to his friends.

    He had discovered a great law of human action, namely, that in order to make a man or a boy want a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to get.

    A good modern newspaper is an extraordinary piece of reading. It is remarkable first for what it contains: the range of news from local crime to international politics, from sports to business to fashion to science, and the range of comment and special features as well, from editorial page to feature articles and interviews to criticism of books, art, theatre, and music.

    A newspaper is even more remarkable for the way one reads it: never completely, never straight through, but always by jumping from here to there, in and out, glancing at one piece, reading another article all the way through, reading just a few paragraphs of the next. A good modern newspaper offers a variety to attract many different readers, but far more than any one reader is interested in. What brings this variety together in one place is its topicality(时事性), its immediate relation to what is happening in your world and your locality now. But immediacy and the speed of production that goes with it mean also that much of what appears in a newspaper has no more than transient value.

    For all these reasons, no two people really read the same paper: what each person does is to put together, out of the pages of that day's paper, his own selection and sequence, his own newspaper. For all these reasons, reading newspapers efficiently, which means getting what you want from them without missing things you need but without wasting time, demands skill and self-awareness as you modify and apply the techniques of reading.