As you grow rapidly through your teenage years, you will experience a lot of changes. The changes may seem difficult. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Don't panic! You will deal successfully with them! You are a young adult now!

    With more responsibility, you will find more freedom to make your own choices. This is a time to be well informed about making choices. In this way you can make healthy balanced decisions. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}You may already know your career path or you may have no idea at all what you want to do. Both situations are fine! Work hard and the right opportunity will present itself to you.

    Young adulthood means greater freedom and more choices. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}But try not to shut your family out of your life. You should learn to think of others even though you are old enough to look after yourself.

    It is also perfectly natural at this time for you to spend more time with your friends than your family. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} A true friend will stand by you no matter what happens.

    This period is a part of the life cycle. There are some people who will be with you throughout life's journey. There will be some people with whom you part and go separate way. Leaving school can be hard. The reality is that you may not even see all of your classmates again.

    You are a young adult. It is your life. No one can live it for you. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} So making the right choices will be important to you. Life is for living. Enjoy your life wisely!

A. Choose your friends wisely

B. They will help shape the future

C. They may seem to happen quickly

D. You will probably want to be independent

E. You may appreciate what you have in your own life

F. The choices that you make from now on will be your choices

G. Your family has been with you since you came into this world

    The Americans believe that anybody can become president of the United States. In a recent Hollywood comedy, that is exactly what happens.

    Dave Kovic, played by Kevin Kline, is a kind-hearted man who runs a business that finds people jobs. He leads a typical American way of life, except for one thing－he looks exactly like the president, Bill Mitchell. In fact, the only thing that makes him different from the nation's leader is that he is very nice!

    The president has started using look-alikes during some public appearances. Dave is offered a chance to “serve his country” by becoming one. However, things go wrong. The president becomes very ill and Dave ends up acting as the president forever.

    Director Ivan Reitman, who made the popular and successful comedies like Twins, Ghostbusters and Legal Eagles, could have gone for easy laughs by making fun of the American government. Instead, Dave is an attractive comedy about an ordinary man in extraordinary situations. Kevin Kline gives a double performance as Dave and the president, and Sigourney Weaver is at her best as his First Lady. The love story that develops between her role and Dave is a real classic.

    The film is 100% American. However, if you've ever felt that anybody could do a better job running the country than the people in power, then you'll enjoy Dave!

    The past ages of man have all been carefully labeled by anthropologists (人类学家). Descriptions like "Palaeolithic (旧石器时代的) Man". "Neolithic (新石器时代的) Man",etc. neatly sum up whole periods. When the time comes for anthropologists to turn their attention to the twentieth century, they will surely choose the label "Legless Man". Histories of the time will go something like this: "in the twentieth century, people forgot how to use their legs. Men and women moved about in cars, buses and trains from a very early age. There were lifts in all large buildings to prevent people from walking. And the surprising thing is that they didn't use their legs even when they went on holiday."

    The future history books might also record that we were deprived (剥夺) of the use of our eyes. In our hurry to get from one place to another, we failed to see anything on the way. Air travel gives you a bird's-eye view of the world. When you travel by car or train, an unclear picture of the countryside constantly smears the windows. Car drivers, especially, are mixed with the urge to go on and on: they never want to stop. The typical twentieth-century traveler is the man who always says "I've been there." You mention the remotest, and someone is bound to say "I've been there"-meaning, "I drove through it at100 miles an hour on the way to somewhere else."

    When you travel at high speeds, the present means nothing: you live mainly in the future because you spend most of your time looking forward to arriving at some other place. But actual arrival, when it is achieved, is meaningless. You want to move on again. By traveling like this, you suspend all experience. The traveler on foot, on the other hand, lives constantly in the present. For him traveling and arriving are one and the same thing: he arrives somewhere with every step he makes. He experiences the present moment with his eyes, his ears and the whole of his body. At the end of his journey he feels a delicious physical tiredness. He knows that sound, satisfying sleep will be his: the just reward of all true travelers.

Fear of missing out

    It's Friday night. While many of your friends may celebrate by going to the movies or checking out a restaurant that's just opened, you've decided to spend this highly cherished night of the week by yourself. The night is yours to enjoy. If you think this sounds relaxing, you're not alone. At least for a little while until you start wondering if you've made the right choice. A doubt begins sinking in as you imagine the fun your friends are having in your absence. Suddenly, the quiet evening you planned for yourself begins to lose its initial appeal, and you find your excitement quickly turns to anxiety.

    Fear of missing out, or FOMO, is a common feeling. A recent study defined FOMO as “the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling that you're missing out — your peers are doing or in possession of more or something better than you.

    Fear of missing out often develops as a result of deeper unhappiness. Research has found that those with low levels of general life satisfaction are more likely to experience FOMO. Further worsening the all- too-common feeling is the rise of social media use. Active users of social media have a higher probability of comparing their achievements with others'. Rather than finding happiness through their own experiences, they begin worrying that theirs aren't objectively better than anyone else's.

    The consequences of FOMO are significant and far-reaching. One study conducted with first-year university students found that fear of missing out was associated with fatigue(疲劳), stress, and sleep problems. Furthermore, in a 2018 study of 1,045 Americans aged 18-34, nearly 40% of participants admitted going into debt just to keep up with their friends' lifestyles, often through increased spending on food, travel, clothes, and electronics.

    So how can you overcome the fear? Begin with gratitude. By reflecting on what you already have, you're less likely to put valuable mental energy in worrying about what you don't. Another alternative?

    Embrace(欣然接受) JOMO, or the joy of missing out. JOMO allows you to shift your focus to what you really want at any given moment, without feeling concerned about what those around you may be doing. So, turn off your phones and tablets, and engage in something you enjoy while resisting the urge to upload and share it. While this may take practice and perseverance(坚持不懈), the results are well worth the effort.

    By embracing the joy of missing out, you make room for all the benefits that come from spending time with yourself and the inner wholeness you contain; you create space to keep up with the things you wish you had more time for — gardening, reading, resting, exercising, cooking, learning, or simply being; and you see yourself in new ways and unearth the talents, fears, joys and quirks that lie beneath the surface.

    Studying the DNA of 300 mice has flagged up genes which have been linked to hereditary (遗传的) sight loss for the first time. Researchers say because mice's genes are so similar to humans', their findings could lead to the treatment of more genetic diseases.

    Scientists at the University of California, Davis studied information from a data bank of mice's genetic material. They found 347 genes linked to eye problems, with just 86 of them having been studied in the past.

    Only around 50 to 75 percent of hereditary eye diseases in human can be explained with present science. The researchers believe these hundreds of new genes found in mice could be a key to explaining-and therefore being able to treat the other 25-50 percent.

    "This is extremely valuable for people with hereditary eye disease," said researcher Professor Ala Moshiri. "All researchers are going to start using these data. In the past, we knew the problem was there but we didn't know where to look. Now eye centers can call back patients and screen them for these new genes. We expected that more and more of these genetic diseases will be treatable." Also, the fact is that more than 60 percent of eye problems at birth are ones resulting from the baby's parents!

    Thanks to data from the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium (IMPC), which is trying to work out what every single gene in a mouse is responsible for, with the aim of translating it to humans, scientists are moving closer to figuring out all genetic causes of blindness. To do this, scientists separate a single gene from other ones at a time and then observe what effect it has on the mouse for a long time. This has so far been done more than 7,000 times and has achieved great success. Researchers are now working alongside eye care centers in Texas and Iowa in order to compare the mice's genes to those of patients.

    What's the one thing every child wants in school? More breaks! And that is exactly what some schools are giving students, which turns out to be beneficial for everyone. Eagle Mountain Elementary School in Fort Worth, Texas, is one of four public schools carrying out the LiiNK program, a project that increases breaks per day to improve creativity, develop character, and heighten school success.

    LiiNK was inspired by Scandinavian approaches to learning based on the simple concept （观念）of giving children more outside playtime and less time spent indoors. In Finland, where the system has been in place for decades, students have some of the highest scores on global assessment tests. Instead of spending increasing amounts of time inside the classroom, they're putting more and more focus on physical activity. Finnish kids get to enjoy 15 minutes of playtime for every hour of class.

    After spending six weeks in Finland in 2016, Debbie Rhea, the creator of LiiNK and professor at Texas Christian University, discovered that the additional breaks of "outdoor play" actually helped students improve their performance inside the classroom. "You start putting 15 minutes into these kids every so often and it gives the platform for them to be able to function at their best level," she says.

    Other studies have shown that outdoor playtime decreases restlessness, anxiety, and has a whole other benefits such as improved motor skills, physical fitness, and social development. Rhea started carrying out the program in private schools in 2017, and has since expanded her program to districts in Texas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Utah and the children in these schools are all the happier for it. It just goes to show that the best way to raise happy and successful children, is to simply let them be kids every once in a while.