There are so many expressions in American English that sound pleasant but are not.

    “Face the music” is a good example. When someone says they have to face the music, it does not mean they are going to a musical performance or concert. To face the music means to accept the unpleasant results of an action.

    Imagine a friend asks you to take care of her beautiful red sports car. She gives you the keys and says, “Thanks so much for watching my car while I'm away. But please do not drive it. It is an extremely fast car.” But you do not listen. You want to show off and pretend the car is yours. So, you drive it around town. As bad luck would have it, you lose control of the car and drive it into a stop sign. The damage is serious. When your friend returns, you must tell her what you have done and “face the music”. That could mean losing her friendship or paying for repairs to her sports car or both. Whatever the music is, you must face it.

    There are other American expressions that mean the same as “face the music”.

    To “take your medicine” means to accept the results from something bad you have done. And if someone says, “You made your bed. Now lie in it.” He means you created a bad situation and now you will experience the results, or as we say in American spoken English, you must deal with it!

    “Pay the piper” also means the same as “face the music”. But, that expression has its own very interesting beginning. We will talk about that on another Words and Their Stories.

    Sometimes just when we need the power of miracles to change our beliefs, they materialize in the places we'd least expect. They can come to us as a great change in our physical reality or as a simple coincidence in our lives. Sometimes they're big and can't be missed. Other times they're so subtle that if we aren't aware, we may miss them altogether. They can come from the lips of a stranger we suddenly and mysteriously meet at just the right instant. If we listen carefully, we'll always hear the right words, at the right time, to dazzle (目眩) us into a realization of something that we may have failed to notice only moments before.

    On a cold January afternoon in 1989, I was hiking up the trail that leads to the top of Egypt's Mt. Horeb. I'd spent the day at St. Catherine's Monastery and wanted to get to the peak by sunset to see the valley below. As I was winding up the narrow path, I'd occasionally see other hikers who were coming down from a day on the mountain. While they would generally pass with simply a nod or a greeting in another language, there was one man that day who did neither.

    I saw him coming from the last switchback on the trail that led to the backside of the mountain. As he got closer, I could see that he was dressed differently from the other hikers I'd seen. Rather than the high-tech fabrics and styles that had been the norm, this man was wearing traditional Egyptian clothing. He wore a tattered, rust-colored galabia and obviously old and thick-soled sandals that were covered in dust. What made his appearance so odd, though, was that the man didn't even appear to be Egyptian! He was a small-framed Asian man, had very little hair, and was wearing round, wire-rimmed glasses.

    As we neared one another, I was the first to speak, "Hello," I said, stopping on the trail for a moment to catch my breath. Not a sound came from the man as he walked closer. I thought that maybe he hadn't heard me or the wind had carried my voice away from him in another direction. Suddenly he stopped directly in front of me on the high side of the trail, looked up from the ground, and spoke a single sentence to me in English, "Sometimes you don't know what you have lost until you've lost it." As I took in what I had just heard, he simply stepped around me and continued his going down the trail.

    That moment in my life was a small miracle. The reason is less about what the man said and more about the timing and the context. The year was 1989, and the Cold War was drawing to a close. what the man on the trail couldn't have known is that it was during my Egyptian pilgrimage (朝圣), and specifically during my hike to the top of Moses's mountain, that I'd set the time aside to make decisions that would affect my career in the defense industry, my friends, my family, and, ultimately, my life.

    I had to ask myself what the chances were of an Asian man dressed in an Egyptian galabia coming down from the top of this historic mountain just when I was walking up, stopping before me, and offering his wisdom, seemingly from out of nowhere. My answer to my own question was easy: the odds were slim to none! In a meet that lasted less than two minutes on a mountain halfway around the world from my home, a total stranger had brought clarity and the hint of a warning, regarding the huge changes that I would make within a matter of days. In my way of thinking, that's a miracle.

    I suspect that we all experience small miracles in our lives every day. Sometimes we have the wisdom and the courage to recognize them for what they are In the moments when we don't, that's okay as well. It seems that our miracles have a way of coming back to us again and again. And each time they do, they become a little less subtle, until we can't possibly miss the message that they bring to our lives!

    The key is that they're everywhere and occur every day for different reasons, in response to the different needs that we may have in the moment. Our job may be less about questioning the extraordinary things that happen in our daily lives and more about accepting the gifts they bring.

    We all love bank holidays. In the UK, we only get eight bank holidays in one year, and at least five of those occur around Christmas time and Easter time! A bank holiday is a British English term. This is an official day that is decided by the government, when banks, shops and offices close for the day even though it's a weekday—usually a Monday, and a lot of people have a day off work.

    Bank holidays are different in Colombia -firstly, they are called "festivos". There are twenty festivos for the whole country in one year! In Britain, people get more holiday allowances(津贴)than Colombians but fewer bank holidays. There can be even more festivos in Colombia, depending on which region of Colombia you live in. This is because different regions have their own holidays. For example, some regions have a patron saint(守护神), so they have an extra festivo to celebrate that saint.

    However, there are some days that are national holidays for historical reasons. There is an Independence Day celebration on July 20 every year. This is just like Bastille Day in France on July 14, or Independence Day in the United States on July4. Other important festivos in Colombia are: Labour Day, on May 1, and Columbus Day on October 12. Columbus Day is a historical bank holiday that almost every county on the continent of America celebrates. This includes Colombia, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Mexico and the United States. It is memorialization of the day when the Italian sailor, Christopher Columbus, first reached land on the continent in the year 1492. Many people criticize this day and say it is not something to celebrate because of the way Columbus and his team treated the people that were already living there.

POETRY CHALLENGE

Write a poem about how courage, determination, and strength have helped you face challenges in your life.

Prizes

Grand Prizes: Trip to Washington, D. C. for each of three winners, a parent and one other person of the winner's choice. Trip includes round﹣trip air tickets, hotel stay for two nights, and tours of the National Air and Space Museum and the office of National Geographic World.

6 First Prizes: The book Sky Pioneer: A Photobiography of Amelia Earhart signed by author Corinne Szabo and pilot Linda Finch.

50 Honorable Mentions: Judges will choose up to 50 honorable mention winners, who will each receive a T﹣shirt in memory of Earhart's final flight.

Rules

Follow all rules carefully to prevent disqualification.

■Write a poem using 100 words or fewer. Your poem can be any format, any number of lines.

■Write by hand or type on a single sheet of paper. You may use both the front and back of the paper.

■On the same sheet of paper, write or type your name, address, telephone number, and birth date.

■Mail your entry to us by October 31 this year.

Economically speaking, are we better off than we were ten years ago? Twenty years ago?

In their thirst for evidence on this issue, commentators seized on the recent report by the Census Bureau, which found that average household income rose by 5.2% in 2015. Unfortunately, that conclusion puts too much weight on a useful, but flawed and incomplete, statistic. Among the more significant problems with the Census's measure are that: 1) it excludes taxes, transfers, and compensation like employer-provided health insurance; and 2) it is based on surveys rather than data. Even if precisely measured, income data exclude important determinants of economic wellbeing, such as the hours of work needed to earn that income.

While thinking about the question, we came across a recently published article by Charles Jones and Peter Klenow, which proposes an interesting new measure of economic welfare. While by no means perfect, it is considerably more comprehensive than average income, taking into account not only growth in consumption per person but also changes in working time, life expectancy, and inequality. Moreover, it can be used to assess economic performance both across countries and over time.

The Jones-Klenow method can be illustrated by a cross-country example. Suppose we want to compare the economic welfare of citizens of the U.S. and France in 2005.

In 2005, as the authors observe: real consumption per person in France was only 60% as high as the U.S., making it appear that Americans were economically much better off than the French on average. However, that comparison omits other relevant factors: leisure time, life expectancy, and economic inequality. The French take longer vacations and retire earlier, so typically work fewer hours; they enjoy a higher life expectancy, presumably reflecting advantages with respect to health care, diet, lifestyle, and the like; and income and consumption are somewhat more equally distributed there than in the U.S. Because of these differences, comparing France's consumption with the U.S.'s overstates the gap in economic welfare.

Similar calculations can be used to compare the U.S. and other countries. For example, this calculation puts economic welfare in the United Kingdom at 97 % of U.S. levels, but estimates Mexican well-being at 22%. The Jones-Klenow measure can also assess an economy's performance over time. According to this measure, as of the early-to-mid-2000s, the U.S. had the highest economic welfare of any large country. Since 2007, economic welfare in the U.S. has continued to improve. However, the pace of improvement has slowed markedly.

Methodologically, the lesson from the Jones-Klenow research is that economic welfare is multi-dimensional. Their approach is flexible enough that in principle other important quality-of-life changes could be incorporated—for example, decreases in total emissions of pollutants and declines in crime rates.

Three grade 11 students from Harbour View High School, Canada, wanted to convey their message of fighting climate change to a younger audience. So, they wrote a children's book named Keeping It Cool as part of a project.

Upon receiving their first order of 12 copies, Claire Malco, the illustrator of the book, vividly recalls the moment when the realization struck. "I just sat there with my mouth open and was like, wow, this is actually happening," Malco told CBC News.

Coauthored by Joanna Jackson and Olivia Jordan, the book employs age-appropriate analogies (类比), coupled with vibrant illustrations, to promote actions kids can take against climate change. To explain the concept of the atmosphere, for example, the young authors drew a bubble(气泡) around Earth throughout the story. They also call for actions, such as planting trees and vegetable gardens – explaining how plants absorb CO2 from the "bubble" atmosphere just like a vacuum cleaner (真空吸尘器). The book also tells kids how they can avoid polluting the bubble by trying to walk, bike or scoot instead of taking a car or bus.

"The entire second half of the book is just things kids can do without needing their parents' support … We wanted it to be something that every kid could finish," Jordan explained to CBC News.

On Earth Day, the students visited a local elementary school where they read their stories and facilitated discussions about the text with every grade 5 class. They spread awareness that, regardless of age, anybody can help make a positive impact on Earth's climate."Educating students was the intention when writing this book. Having the opportunity to present to 10 different classes helped us gain insight on how to better our presentation and content, as well as see the impact this book will have on students," the students told Our Canada Project.