Walk Out of the Comfort Zone and Try New Things

    For most high school students, free periods are useless. From what I have seen, few do homework, instead many are on their phones and talking, making it impossible for those who actually want to do work to complete any. As a senior next year, I think extra periods should be used to take optional subjects.

    Our school offers many classes. Now is the time to experiment in different fields of study. We will never know if we are interested or talented in a subject if we don't try it.

    In my 8th grade, I was told that I had to take an art class as a graduation requirement; so in the 9th grade I took Studio and Art. One of the projects was to build a clay pot, but I built mine incorrectly, so it broke in the kiln (窑). I found out that I have no artistic ability at all, and now I know for sure that I do not want to be an artist. However, the class was one of my favorites that year. I was able to try new activities and test my ability.

    Walk out of our comfort zone and try new things! College is when we should focus on a specific major, but high school is when we have to figure it out.

    Half of all college students change their major at some point. By doing that hundreds of dollars are wasted on classes that they would have never needed to take. So use our extra periods to find out what we want to do in college. The classes we choose can impact us in future. Taking optional subjects will enrich our mind. It will also show colleges we are diverse students.

    A study of more than five million books, both fiction and non-fiction, has found a marked decline in the use of emotional words over time. The researchers form the University of Bristol used Google Ngram Viewer, a facility for finding the frequency of terms in scanned books, to search for more than 600 particular words identified as representing anger, dislike, fear, joy, sadness and surprise.

    They found that almost all of the categories (类别) showed a drop in these “mood words” over time. Only in the category of fear was there an increase in usage.

    “It is a steady and continuous decrease,” said Dr Alberto Acerbi. He assumed that the result might be explained by a change in the position occupied by literature, in a crowded media landscape. “One thing could be that in parallel to books the 20th century saw the start of other media. Maybe these media—movies, radio, drama—had more emotional content than books.”

    Although both joy and sadness followed the general downwards trend, the research, published in the journal PLOS One, found that they also exhibited another interesting behaviour：the ratio (比率) between the two varied greatly, apparently mirroring historical events.

    During the Roaring Twenties the joy-to-sadness ratio reached a peak that would not occur again until before the recent financial crash. But the ratio plunged at the height of the Second World War. Nevertheless, the researchers held a reserved opinion about their claim that their result reflected wider social trends. In the paper, they even argue that the reverse could be true.

“It has been suggested, for example, that it was the suppression (压抑) of desire in ordinary Elizabethan English life that increased demand for writing ‘filled with romance and sex' perhaps,” they conclude, “songs and books may not reflect the real population any more than catwalk models reflect the average body.”

     (Note：Answer the questions or complete the statements in NO MORE THAN TEN WORDS.)

    [1] Nowadays the cost of a new car has fallen in real terms so that it is cheaper than ever to own one, and better road conditions have also attracted more drivers. The result is overcrowding on the road system, which is one of the problems the local governments are faced with.

     [2] When people travel to other towns, the problem might be relieved by getting them to park outside the town. Buses could be provided to take them into the centre. These Park and Ride projects are increasingly popular in the UK. At Southerton, for example, a council-funded project led to a 15% drop in city centre traffic over five months.

     [3] What the council found, though, was that the project proved somewhat unpopular with shop owners in the area outside the centre. Many of their shops relied on passing car drivers for some of their trade. As the number of people driving past dropped, so did their incomes.

     [4] Making car driving expensive is another way of ____________. Road taxes tend to mean that people use their cars less. Fining drivers who are in areas where cars have been banned can also tend to encourage them to leave their cars behind.

     [5] However, one thing has to be got right for any solution to succeed. If we expect people to give up the habit of driving, we must give them an alternative they can rely on. Constant delays, unannounced changes to the timetable and sudden cancellations all discourage people from using public transport. People will only see it as a real choice if the buses and trains are on time.

    It was a hot summer day that found me running down the street with a dollar in my sweaty hand. The closer I got to Sam & Joe's Stationery Store, the more excited I was. After all, a dollar was a tidy sum for an 11-year-old boy in 1961.

    Out of breath, I swung open the door and got a blast of cold air that instantly cooled me off. I was in a place of pure happiness. Sam & Joe's had it all—books, candy, toys, baseball cards，puzzles and games. I went directly to the bar and ordered a bottle of soda. There I sat, considering my next move.

    Books always came first. I picked out five titles. Next came the candy, rows and rows of it. I chose five candy bars, which brought my total to 75 cents. Then a bottle of cold orange juice, a bag of chips and a pack of Ted Williams baseball cards. After paying the clerk, I still had 5 cents.

    I hurried directly to my backyard, where an apple tree patiently waited for me. There, sitting in the shade against its strong trunk, I read my books, ate my candy and drank my orange juice.

    As I sat in my own personal heaven, I started thinking about having more. That's when a fantastic life—changing idea popped into head: If I could get more money, I could buy more books I liked, buy anything I wanted. That's how it all started.

    As our family are getting ready for the annual holiday of Thanksgiving, which is probably the most important holiday in the U.S because it's celebrated by people of all faiths. I think back to a cold November day more than twenty years ago. It was a day when my husband and I, married just about three months, got stuck on I -89 in Vermont when our car broke down.

    We had just visited my husband's parents in Vermont, and with a huge turkey they gave us slowly thawing (解冻）in the trunk of our old car, we were heading back to our apartment in Boston to celebrate our first Thanksgiving together. Our car broke down half an hour after we got on the highway. And it was raining. Back to then, not everyone had a cell phone, and in those days if you broke down along a lonely stretch of a highway far from the nearest emergency call box in cold November rain, it wasn't fun.

    Fortutiously for us, a van with a bunch of people coming back from a ski trip stopped andasked if we needed help. They gave us a ride to the nearest gas station, from where we could phone my father-in-law and asked him for help. My father-in-law arranged for :he car to be towed (拖引), and drove us all the way to Boston that day.

    So as we sit down to dinner and think of all the things we can be thankful for tonight, I want to say “thank you” to the strangers on I -89 some twenty years ago for giving a young couple a ride when their car with a frozen turkey in the trunk broke down.

    Never underestimate the difference you can make to the lives of others by one small act of kindness. Step forward, reach out and help. This week, reach to someone that might need a lift.

    We met a little girl seven years ago during one of my daughter's occasional hospital stays. Her name was Beth and she was my daughter's roommate for a week. My Daughter had an incurable kidney(肾) disease. Beth was a very happy girl, despite the fact that she had cancer. I was amazed at her will and determination to never give up, however sick her treatment made her. She was always concerned about my daughter and the other children with cancer.

    My daughter's hospital treatment was completed in a week and we were waiting for her final discharge orders when Beth appeared. She said “I want you to have this. I know you need a new kidney, so keep this angel pin with you till you get better. She will watch over you and make you smile. My friend, John, gave it to me to watch over me. When you get your new kidney and smile, you can give this angel to someone that needs her, too”. My daughter thanked her and the girls exchanged hugs and big smiles. Later that year, Beth passed away.

    We kept that angel for six more years. Finally, a kidney became available and she received a transplant.

    Now she felt it was time to give it to someone who needed to be watched over until he or she could smile again. She gave it to an elderly man trying to recover from a heart problem.

    How many families and hearts this angel has touched, no one knows for sure. But all that it took was a single gift of kindness. So in this Christmas season, create a tradition with your children or maybe someone you love. Give them a gift that keeps on giving. It's a gift from your heart.