What Teenagers Can Do to Earn More Respect?

    As teenagers continue to grow and develop into young adults, the transition (过渡) into adulthood has begun. With so many physical and emotional changes going on, certain manners are often forgotten and other adult traits are not yet accepted as a way of life. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} By doing the following things, you will earn more respect.

Contribute to the household

    At the very least, clean up after yourself. As a teenager, you are old enough to clean up after yourself. When you make a mess, clean it up. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} All chore (杂活) that you do help to reduce the load of the person who did them before. Now that you're old enough and capable, why shouldn't you contribute to the household? {#blank#}3{#/blank#}

Be responsible

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#} Whether they are basic things, like brushing your teeth or doing your homework, or more involved chores that contribute to the household, simply fulfill your responsibilities on time. When adults know that they can rely on you, their trust and respect for you will increase.

Solve more of your own problem without asking for help

    Instead of taking the easy approach and asking for help, make an effort to solve your problems on your own first. The “easy way” is only easy for you, but it is an extra task for the person from whom you are seeking help. Seek help only after you have made an honest effort to solve your own problems. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} When you become a good problem solver, you increase your value to the community.

A. Everyone has certain responsibilities.

B. By being aware of these manners and traits, you can manage them sooner.

C. When speaking to a group, speak loud enough.

D. The people doing the chores before will greatly appreciate the help.

E. Depending on the problem, 15 minutes of effort is usually a good guideline.

F. It will make your life more pleasant.

G. This includes, but is not limited to, your dishes and your room.

    If it really is what's on the inside that counts, then a lot of thin people might be in trouble.

    Some doctors now think that the internal(内部的) fat surrounding important organs like the heart or liver could be as dangerous as the external fat which can be noticed more easily.

    “Being thin doesn't surely mean you are not fat,” said Dr Jimmy Bell at Imperial College. Since 1994, Bell and his team have scanned nearly 800 people with MRI machines to create “fat maps” showing where people store fat.

    According to the result, people who keep their weight through diet rather than exercise are likely to have major deposits of internal fat, even if they are slim.

    Even people with normal Body Mass Index scores can have surprising levels of fat deposits inside. Of the women, as many as 45 percent of those with normal BMI scores (20 to 25) actually had too high levels of internal fat. Among men, the percentage was nearly 60 percent.

    According to Bell, people who are fat on the inside are actually on the edge of being fat. They eat too many fatty and sugary foods, but they are not eating enough to be fat. Scientists believe we naturally store fat around the belly first, but at some point, the body may start storing it elsewhere.

    Doctors are unsure about the exact dangers of internal fat, but some think it has something to do with heart disease and diabetes(糖尿病). They want to prove that internal fat damages the body's communication systems.

    The good news is that internal fat can be easily burned off through exercise or even by improving your diet. “If you want to be healthy, there is no shortcut. Exercise has to be an important part of your lifestyle.” Bell said.

    Whether you're up for a Crocodile Dundee's adventure or you'd just like a taste of the Australian sun, the beaches in and around Sydney can offer you all that and more.

Sydney Beach

    Sydney Beach is located at Sydney's northernmost tip on an extension(延伸) of land ending at Palm Beach. Before checking out the golden sand, take a quick tour of the houses of millionaires from the art and film industries.

Palm Beach

    Only about an hour from downtown Sydney, Palm Beach offers a long stretch(延伸) of clean sand and water. With parking near the center of the beach, that leaves the rest of it as a peaceful location with a sparse population, from which you can go surfing but take care — without the huge crowds of other Sydney's beaches, Palm Beach doesn't afford quite the safety level to be found elsewhere. Volunteer lifesavers are on duty only on weekends and holidays.

Bondi Beach

    For the famous beach, Bondi Beach has to be your choice. Parking is difficult to find even on slow days, so consider taking public transport to this world—known beach in the eastern Sydney suburbs. Easily reachable by taxi, bus, and rail, Bondi Beach offers sun bathing, swimming, snorkeling, and all sorts of water sports fun. If you're in the mood for a bit of exercise, two scenic coastal walks will afford you great views and sights along the shore. Take in views from Mackenzie's Point. It starts at Bondi and heads south to Bronte Beach. But don't try to swim in Mackenzie's Bay — it holds dangers such as hidden rocks.

Bronte Beach

    Your second choice for a scenic coastal walk covers a few miles and takes you from Bronte Beach to Waverly Cemetery, where many famous Australians are buried, including the poet Henry Lawson.

    French writer Frantz Fanon once said: ＂To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.＂ Since the world changes every day, so does our language.

    More than 300 new words and phrases have recently made it into the online Oxford Dictionary, and in one way or another they are all reflections of today's changing world.

    After a year that was politically unstable, it's not hard to understand the fact that people's political views are one of the main drives of our expanding vocabulary. One example is ＂clicktivism＂, a compound of ＂click＂ and ＂activism＂. It refers to ＂armchair activists＂ — people who support a political or social cause, but only show their support from behind a computer or smartphone. And ＂otherize＂ is a verb for ＂other＂ that means to alienate (使疏远)people who are different from ourselves — whether that be different skin color, religious belief or sexuality.

    Lifestyle is also changing our language. For example, ＂fitspiration＂ — a compound of fit and inspiration — refers to a person or thing that encourages one to exercise and stay fit and healthy.

    The phrase ＂climate refugee＂ — someone who is forced to leave their home due to climate change—reflects people's concern for the environment.

 According to Stevenson, social media was the main source for the new expressions. ＂People feel much freer to coin their own words these days,＂ he said.

    But still, not all newly-invented words get the chance to make their way into a mainstream (主流的) dictionary. If you want to create your own hit words, Angus Stevenson, Oxford Dictionaries head of content development, suggests that you should not only make sure that they are expressive (有表现力的) and meaningful, but also have an attractive sound so that people will enjoy saying them out loud.

    I set out to change the lives of those who need help by joining my school's newly formed Free The Children Club. Through the determination of friends, the group has grown bigger and stronger each year. Over the past two years my friend, Alex Auclair, and I have become the leaders of the club.

    Already, after only two years of fundraising, we have accumulated over three thousand dollars and almost two thousand food items through various fundraising efforts. For example, each year a 24-hour famine (饥饿) is planned resulting in absolutely no consumption (消耗) of food. By taking part in these activities, we put ourselves in the shoes of someone living in poverty.

      No money raised goes to waste. At the end of each school year, the group takes a vote to determine where our funds will be spent and donated. Last year, we bought enough desks, chairs, supplies and textbooks for every student in a Kenyan school. This year, we plan to spend our earning helping out families in Sierra Leone.

    Poverty is a worldwide issue affecting the lives of people in not only developing countries, but also first-world countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom and Japan. Living in poverty can result in hunger, many forms of disease, lack of education, and for millions, death. It does not have to be this way. You too can form a club like the Free The Children Club or you can participate in events outside of school. Get your friends, family, even your community involved in fundraising. Do what you can to change the world.

Tea is currently the world's most popular drink, only after water. However, there was a time when tea was known only to the Chinese. So, how did tea originate in China? And how did it get to conquer the world to the extent that people often describe something they really like as their "cup of tea"? 

While we know that tea drink started in China, its true origin remains something unknown. Legend has it that about 5, 000 years ago, Shennong came across tea when dried leaves blew into a pot of boiling water. Following his discovery, tea was used as medicine, included in meals and later offered as a refreshing drink to officials and noblemen. Eventually, it became a common drink enjoyed by all Chinese people. 

The love of tea inspired many people to write about it. Over the years, tea drinking became an important part of China's rich culture. The great poet Du Fu described his tea-drinking experience in poetic language. Lu Yu, a tea master, wrote The Classic of Tea, which remains the earliest and most famous detailed study on tea in the world. 

It is then not surprising that the beauty of tea was eventually spread to a wider world. Tang and Song Dynasties needed strong Tibetan horses, so the Tea Horse Road was born. Porters (脚夫) carrying back-breaking loads of tea bricks made their way through dangerous snow-covered mountain passes, to trade Sichuan and Yunnan tea for horses. Over time, the gift of tea was further delivered to Western Asia and Easten Africa. As early as the Tang Dynasty, Saicho, a Japanese monk came to study in China and took tea seeds and tea-making customs to Japan. Around the 1600s, tea was shipped to Europe from China by Portuguese and Dutch sea traders.