Few of us haven't read Cinderella, the story of a young woman living in poverty who meets the prince of her dreams. Some might not want to admit it, but there is a hidden Cinderella in everyone's heart—we all wish we could achieve recognition or success after a period of obscurity or neglect.

    Mary Santiago has that secret dream, too. Her story is featured in Another Cinderella Story, a film set in a US high school.

    Mary is shy but loves to dance. Compared with other girls, she is invisible. However, her world changes completely when a famous teenager pop singer, Joey Parker, appears.

    Joey is everything that the rest of the boys in her class are not — kind, handsome and desirable. Mary and Joey's paths cross at a ball. They meet and fall in love with each other. But when Mary has to rush back home, she leaves behind her MP3 player, which becomes the only clue Joey has to find the girl of his dreams. Of course, there is a wicked(邪恶的) stepmother, who turns out to be Dominique Blatt and she takes in Mary after her dancer mother dies. Dominique treats Mary like a maid and does everything she can to make sure Mary doesn't get into the top dance school. Her two daughters are equally determined to stop Joey falling for Mary, even if that means embarrassing her.

    The story, though it mostly follows Cinderella, does add a few modern day twists to the classic fairy tale. Refreshingly, the film, unlike many high school films, does not focus on looks, although the actors are all beautiful. There is also a lot less materialism in Another Cinderella Story than in many similar movies.

    “The movie takes the Cinderella fairytale as its jumping off point,” writes the movie critic Amber Wilkinson. “The focus is firmly on following your dream.”

    Sometimes known as “The Big Apple” or “the City That Never Sleeps”, New York is both the most populous city in the USA and a leading center of business, commerce, finance and media. The city is often referred to as “New York City”, in order to distinguish it from the state it is in. The city is part of a large metropolitan（大都市的）area, and the combined city population exceeds 18.7 million.

    New York City is made up of five boroughs（行政区）and hence another nickname of the city is “The Five Boroughs”. The five boroughs are: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island.

    There are many famous buildings and sights in New York, especially in Manhattan. These include the Empire State Building, the Flatiron Building and the United Nations Building. When you visit New York, make sure you see Central Park, Times Square, Chinatown, Little Italy and of course the Statue of Liberty. Additionally, there are many wonderful museums in New York, some truly excellent shops, some of the world's best theaters in the Broadway area, and the neighborhoods of Greenwich Village and SoHo which are well-known for the artists who reside there.

    Getting around New York City is simple—the city's subway network is one of the most comprehensive in the world, connecting all parts of Manhattan in rapid time.

    However, the best way to see New York is undoubtedly on foot. Central Park is an ideal place to start a walking tour of New York City—843 acres of shining ponds and lush greenery attract locals and tourists. And apart from offering breathtaking scenery, it is a centre for recreation. Visitors can listen to music groups, watch performers, walk along the trails and even take a romantic ride in a horse carriage.

    Good health is the most valuable thing in the world. When you've got it, you never think about it. When you haven't got it, you think about it all the time. Our biggest enemies are not terrible diseases and so on. We are our own biggest enemies because we sometimes destroy our own good health. Some of us eat too much, drink too much and smoke too much. And though our reason tells us we should control ourselves, we find it difficult. The fact is that most human beings need stimulation (刺激). Who doesn't enjoy a drink after a busy day? Only a smoker knows the pleasure of a cigarette with a cup of coffee.

    The danger is when these innocent pleasures run our lives and so destroy our health. When you find yourself eating between meals or eating too much rich food, when you can only keep yourself going by taking frequent drinks or by smoking one cigarette after another, then it's time to stop and think what you might be doing to yourself. The funny thing is that when we don't control ourselves, simple pleasures are no longer simple pleasures.

    All right, I know what you're thinking. You're probably saying, “It's easy to say, but I can't help myself. I need that extra bit of food, that extra drink, that extra cigarette. Life has so many pleasures that I can't do without them.” But I'm saying you can help yourself. Not only that, you must help yourself. Because if you don't help yourself, no one else can. So be your own best friend.

    “He almost didn't see the old lady, stranded(困在) on the side of the road, but even in the dim light of day, he could see she needed help. So he pulled up in front her Mercedes and got out.

    Even with the smile on his face, she was worried. No one had stopped to help for the last hour or so. Was he going to hurt her? He didn't look safe; he looked poor and hungry. He could see that she was frightened, standing out there in the cold. He knew how she felt.

    He said, “I am here to help you, ma'am. Why don't you wait in the car where it's warm? By the way, my name is Bryan Anderson.”

    Well, all she had was a flat tire, but for an old lady, that was bad enough. Bryan crawled under the car looking for a place to put the jack, skinning his knuckles a time or two. Soon he was able to change the tire. But he had to get dirty and his hands hurt.

    As he was tightening up the lug nuts, she rolled down the window and began to talk to him. She told him that she was from St. Louis and was just passing through. She couldn't thank him enough for coming to her aid.

    Bryan just smiled as he closed her trunk. The lady asked how much she owed him. Any amount would have been all right with her. She already imagined all the awful things that could have happened, had he not stopped. Bryan never thought twice about being paid. This was not a job to him. This was helping someone in need, and God knows there were many people who had given him a hand in the past. He had lived his whole life that way, and it never occurred to him to act any other way.

    He told her that if she really wanted to pay him back, the next time she saw someone who needed help, she could give that person the assistance they needed, and Bryan added, “And think of me.”

    He waited until she started her car and drove off. It had been a cold and depressing day, but he felt good as he headed for home, disappearing into the twilight.

    In beautiful rural Montana lies the town of Livingston. Around half the students in the Livingston School District qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, according to local educator Rachael Jones, known as "Farmer Jones". She is the director of the Livingston Farm to School program, which uses the district's two greenhouses and four gardens to grow food that supplements school meals while offering kids hands-on lessons. Jones said, "In many places around the country, if you can't pay for your school meal, you don't eat. Well, here, we don't turn anyone away."

    The town's school district and community members started the program eight years ago. It's part of the National Farm to School Network, which aims to increase access to local food and nutrition education across the country. Jones, who attended public school in Livingston as a kid, has headed up the local program since 2014. Farm to School enriches curriculums in all of the schools through garden lessons, cafeteria and kitchen lessons, and classroom lessons.

    Research has shown that healthy school meals can enhance academic performance, including improved test scores. Though the Farm to School program is not aimed solely at lower-income students, Jones said, "Such kids are more likely to eat lunch provided by the school. Eventually she wants to get healthy, affordable meals on the plate of every child in Livingston.

    It is important for kids to understand where their food comes from. That's a life changing experience for them. Jones said," When I grew up a big force in my life was my grandma Ethel. She taught me from a really early age the value of growing my own food. I worked in her gardens with her and somehow, through all of those experiences —eating her tomatoes and canning pickles with her —it really built up my trust and knowledge in food systems. I'm so thankful for her!"

Research spanning several decades demonstrates that you are more likely to think the information that is repeated to be true than the information you hear only once. You usually assume that if people put in effort to repeat a statement, this reflects the truth of the statement. This tendency-also called the truth effect-is a bias （偏见） that can lead you to draw incorrect conclusions. 

To what degree are people aware of the truth effect? This question was addressed in a paper in the journal Cognition early this year. 

In the critical study in this paper, participants did two sessions. In one session, they read about a hypothetical （虚构的） study in which they were exposed to some statements and then were asked whether both statements they had heard before as well as these new statements were true. They were asked to predict the proportion （比例） of each statement that would be judged as true. They did this both as a prediction of other people's performance as well as a prediction of how they would do in this study. 

At another session a few days later, participants actually performed this study, reading a set of 20 statements in the hypothetical study again and then judging the truth of altogether 40 statements, half of which were from the hypothetical study and the other half of which were new. 

This study did replicate the well known truth effect. People were more likely to judge statements they had seen before as true than statements that were new. Two interesting findings emerged from the prediction. First, participants tended to underestimate the size of the truth effect for everyone. T hat is, while they did expect some difference in judgments between the statements seen before and those that were new, they thought this difference would be smaller than it actually was. Second, participants more significantly underpredicted the truth effect for themselves compared to that for other people. 

This study is particularly important in light of the amount of misinformation present in social media. Many people have the power to influence public opinion about important matters. Flooding social media feeds with misinformation will lead people to believe this information is true just because it is stated. Recognizing that we are all susceptible to this influence of repeated information should lead us to mistrust our intuition （直觉） about what is true and to look up important information prior to using it to make important judgments and decisions.