Jack threw the papers on my desk. “Next time you want to change anything, ask me first,” he said. I had changed a long sentence and corrected its grammar — something I thought I was paid to do.

    Several days later, he made me angry again. I went to his office, prepared to lose my job if need be, but not before I let the man know how I felt. “What?” he said nervously. Suddenly I knew what I had to do. “Jack, the way you've been treating me is wrong. And it's wrong for me to allow it to continue,” I said. “I want to make you a promise. I will be a friend.” The next day I brought some cakes to Jack's office. Every time I saw Jack in the hall, I smiled at him. After all, that's what friends do.

    One year after our talk, I was told that I had breast cancer (乳腺癌). When I was in hospital, my friends tried to find the right words to say, but no one could. The last day of my hospital stay, the door opened and Jack walked over to my bed. “Tulips (郁金香),” he placed some bulbs (球茎) beside me and said, “If you plant them when you get home, you'll be there to see them when they come up.” Tears filled my eyes. In a moment when I prayed for just the right words, a man with few words said the right thing. After all, that's what friends do. Now, I have seen those tulips push through the soil every spring for over ten years.

    Average humans can consume 15 or more drinks in plastic bottles a month. If you were born after 1978, and live until 80 years old, you will leave behind a minimum of 14,400 plastic bottles on this planet. These bottles take hundreds of years to break down into tiny pieces of plastic, never to completely disappear. Most of the waste is consumed by fish and birds, which has shortened their lifetime greatly.

The Plastic Bottle Village is just a great idea that might finally save us from being buried in plastic. It's a community in Panama that is going to be made of used bottles. The design process begins with building steel frames, which are then filled with these bottles. Once this step is complete, and electrical and plumbing (管道装置) lines are put inside, the plastic walls are covered by concrete—both inside and outside. So no one will actually be able to tell that the walls are made of plastic. Besides, the material will keep the house 17℃ cooler than the outside, which is the biggest benefit to people living inside.

    The village is the brainchild (主意) of Robert Bezeau with the intention of setting up several environmental projects. Having started a recycling program four years ago, during which a number of plastic bottles were collected, he started to think of how they could be put to use. Soon enough, he decided to use them to build houses, and came up with a basic idea for the construction process.

    The project hopes to make people conscious of the waste that these bottles create so that they can do more to protect the environment. The village will also create an education center that will teach individuals from the world how to reuse plastic bottles as construction materials for shelter. Recycled bottles could neutralize the negative effect of your passage on this planet, and move closer to leaving only your “footprints”.

    Exploit your parking space

    An unused parking space or garage can make money. If you live near a city center or an airport, you could make anything up to £200 or £300 a week. Put an advertisement for free on Letpark or Atmyhousepark.

    Rent a room

    Spare room? Not only will a lodger（房客）earn you an income, but also, thanks to the government-backed “rent a room” program, you won't have to pay any tax on the first £4500 you make per year. Try advertising your room on Roomspare or Roommateeasy.

    Make money during special events. Don't want a full-time lodger? Then rent on a short-term basis. If you live in the capital, renting a room out during the Olympics or other big events could bring in money. Grashpadder can advertise your space.

    Live on set

    Renting your home out as a “film set” could earn you hundreds of pounds a day, depending on the film production company and how long your home is needed. A quick search on the Internet will bring up dozens of online companies that allow you to register your home for free—but you will be charged if your home gets picked.

    Use your roof

    You need the right kind of roof, but some energy companies pay the cost of fixing solar equipment(around￡14,000), and let you use the energy produced for nothing. In return, they get paid for unused energy fed back into the National Grid. However, you have to sign a 25-year agreement with the supplier, which could prevent you from changing the roof.

    "It can't be done." Boyan Slat heard this over and over when he first proposed a way to clean up millions of tons of plastic polluting our oceans. Almost anyone else would have given up in frustration and despair. But 20-year-old Slat hasn't: been discouraged but committed to his dream. "Human history is basically a list of things that couldn't be done, and then were done," he says. Today, slat and his team at The Ocean Cleanup are well on their way to proving the critics wrong. Good news for the planet.

    ⑴_______.

    Slat, who grew up in the city of Delft in the Netherlands, was on a diving trip in Greece three years ago when he was deeply impressed by plastic, "There were more plastic bags than fish," he says. "That moment I realized it was a huge issue and that environmental issues are really the biggest problems my generation will face."

That fall, Slat, then 17, decided to study plastic pollution as part of a high school project. Soon, Slat learned that no one had yet come up with practical way to clean up this massive garbage patches. Most proposed solutions involved "fishing" up the plastic using ships equipped with nets﹣which, as Slat discovered, would likely take more than 1,000 years, cost too much, let off too much sea life along with the trash.

    Slat proposed an alternative that mostly avoided these problems﹣a solar﹣powered system using a floating plastic tube which will go around the garbage and trap it is 600 meters long, A big screen hangs down from it, about three metres into the water. Wind, waves and ocean currents will push the trash toward the tube. （Fish can swim under the screen） A ship will pick up the trash and take it back to the shore to sort and recycle it into oil and other products. Best of all, Slat predicted his system could clean up the North Pacific Garbage Patch between California and Hawaii where a lot of floating garbage exists, within five to 10 years.

    ⑵________.

    The following, Slat entered the aerospace engineering program at the Delft University of Technology and officially announced his ocean cleanup concept at TEDx Delft. But nothing much moved forward,

    Slat found himself continually absent﹣minded in classes, looking for ways to improve his concept. "It wouldn't let go. I finally decided to put both university and my social life on hold to focus all my time on developing this idea. I wasn't sure if it would succeed, but considering the scale of problem I thought it was important to at least try." He says.

    With this family's blessing, Slat began in earnest organizing a team of volunteers and employees for The Ocean Cleanup, which now numbers about 100.

    ⑶_______.

    In answer to opposition, Slat and his team raised ＄100,000 from a crowd funding campaign and began testing a 40﹣meter collecting barrier near the Azores Islands last March. In June, they released a 500+ page possibility study.

Over the next three to four years, Slat will push toward a fully operational large﹣scale project by testing a series of longer and longer barriers. He's currently seeking to crowd fund ＄2 million to finance it. Incidentally, The Ocean Cleanup is also working on a plan to stop plastic from washing into the oceans in the first place. "It's just the other problem that is equally important." Slat says. "It's something everyone is able to help with, and we also have some technologies in the pipeline."

    As for school, Slat doesn't miss it﹣except maybe for the social﹣part, which he hopes to （恢复） a bit once his team takes on more of the workload. "I don't have time for things like that right now, but I really can't complain. I can imagine doing something more fun than being able to have an idea and then actually making it into a reality." he says.

    I attended a party one night. During the dinner a man told a humorous story based on the quotation: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will."

    The storyteller mentioned that the quotation was from the Bible. I knew he was wrong. There couldn't be the slightest doubt about it. To get a feeling of importance and display my superiority, I appointed myself as an unwelcome committee member to correct him. He stuck to his guns. "What? From Shakespeare? Impossible! Absurd! That quotation was from the Bible." And he knew it.

    The storyteller was sitting on my right; and Frank Gammond, an old friend of mine, was seated on my left. Mr. Gammond had devoted years to the study of Shakespeare. So the storyteller and I agreed to submit the question to Mr. Gammond. Mr. Gammond listened, kicked me under the table, and then said, "Dale, you are wrong. The gentleman is right. It is from the Bible."

    On our way home that night, I said to Mr. Gammond, "Frank, you knew that quotation was from Shakespeare. "Yes, of course," he replied, "Hamlet, Act Five, Scene Two. But we were guests at a happy time, my dear Dale. Why argue with the storyteller? Why prove to him he is wrong? Why not let him save his face? Always avoid your sharp angle." I learned a lesson I'll never forget. I not only had made the storyteller uncomfortable, but also had put my friend in an embarrassing situation. How much better it would have been had I not become argumentative.

    Nine times out of ten, an argument ends with each of the contestants more firmly convinced than ever that he is absolutely right. You can't win an argument. You can't because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it

    One day when I was 5, my mother scolded (责骂) me for not finishing my rice and I got angry. I wanted to play outside and not to be made to finish eating my old rice. When angrily opening the screen door with my foot, I kicked back about a 12-inch part of the lower left hand corner of the new screen door. But I had no remorse, for I was happy to be playing in the backyard with my toys.

    Today, I know if my child had done what I did, I would have scolded my child, and told him about how expensive this new screen door was, and I would have delivered a spanking (打屁股) for it. They never said a word. They left the corner of the screen door pushed out, creating an opening, a breach (裂缝) in the defense against unwanted insects.

    For years, every time I saw that corner of the screen, it would constantly make me think about my mistake. For years, I knew that everyone in my family would see that hole and remember who did it. For years, every time I saw a fly buzzing (嗡嗡) in the kitchen, I would wonder if it came in through the hole that I had created with my angry foot. I would wonder if my family members were thinking the same thing, silently blaming me every time a flying insect entered our home, making life more terrible for us all. My parents taught me a valuable lesson, one that a spanking or stern (严厉的) words perhaps could not deliver. Their silent punishment for what I had done delivered a hundred stern messages to me. Above all, it has helped me become a more patient person and not burst out so easily.