Make A Difference Day is the largest national day of community service in the USA, which takes place on the fourth Saturday of October.

    Who takes part in Make A Difference Day?

    Anyone! Young and old, individuals and groups, anyone can carry out a volunteer project that helps others. It might be as ambitious as collecting truckloads of clothing for the homeless, or as personal as spending an afternoon helping an elderly neighbor or relative. USA WEEKEND covers volunteers and their projects in articles and photos.

    How do I get started?

    Look around your community. Are people hungry, homeless or ill? Are parks or schools dirty or neglected? No matter where you live, there's a need nearby. And on Make A Difference Day, millions of Americans are expected to roll up their sleeves to help others. You can act alone or enlist your friends, family and co-workers. You can also call the Make A Difference Day Hot Line, 1-800-416-3824, for information. Or use the ideas on this website for inspiration.

    What do I do after I've selected a project?

    Tell others what you're doing and enlist help. Several weeks before the day, tell us about your plans in the Make A Difference DAYtaBANK, a national listing of local projects that will be viewed by interested volunteers, other people looking for good project ideas and news media looking for good stories to tell. It will only take a few minutes to post your plans in the DAYtaBANK hosted by HandsOn Network.

    Do it!

    Carry out your plans to help others on Make A Difference Day. Be sure to take lots of pictures and share them on the Make A Difference Day Photo Album.

    What is success?I am not going to try to define success.I think a precise definition is impossible!Is it winning a Gold Medal at the Olympic Games or winning Wimbledon,or being awarded a Nobel Prize?What else?I believe personal success could be anything at all—it does not have to involve public recognition.Who is more successful?A millionaire who is unhappy,or an unnoticed person,who has led a simple,quiet,sincere and happy life?The simplest definition of success,I think,is "to set out to do something and to succeed in doing it".

    The first step on the road to success starts with belief.Believe you can succeed and you will.Achieving success in whatever endeavor（努力）you choose may be the goal of life;because it gives you freedom from worry.Could that be?

Success means different things to every one of us.Some people believe it is measured in financial terms,others believe it is helping others rather than helping themselves.However,most people are motivated to a great extent by public recognition.How many people are really happy?How many people are really doing what they want to with their lives?Incidentally,the ability to imagine makes us different from animals.

    Most important of all,I believe success is a matter of personal growth.If every day you are developing or growing just a millimeter,I believe one is successful.Just being a slightly better person each day for me is success. I've got a very long way to go then!

    Finally,always remember success is a process and is not simply a matter of arriving at a destination.It's the journey that really matters.Success is what you become in the often very difficult and dangerous journey down the river of life.

    Research finds out why some people are constantly under attack from the bloodsucking insects while others walk free.

    For those unfortunate enough to feature highly on the mosquito hit list, summer nights can be synonymous with mosquito bites. Yet others hardly ever get bitten. So how do the bloodthirsty insects select their victims?

    The insects' tastes may seem arbitrary. However, research shows that when mosquitoes make their choices between potential victims, it all comes down to scent (气味).

    “Mosquitoes are attracted by carbon dioxide and heat, which everyone gives off. But mosquitoes are also attracted by certain scents,” says Karl-Martin Vagn Jensen, the head of research at the Department of Agricultural Science at Arhus University.

    According to Jensen, it has not yet been confirmed exactly what the scents in question are. But research does indicate that some scents are more attractive to mosquitoes than others.

    “All the lab employees rubbed petri dishes (培养皿) against their stomachs. In that way, their scents were put on the dishes, which were then put in a container full of mosquitoes,” he says. “The mosquitoes repeatedly landed on some of the petri dishes, but didn't go anywhere near the others.”

    Perhaps taking inspiration from popular fiction, there are also those who consider garlic as an excellent repellent (驱虫剂) against the winged bloodsuckers. According to the researcher, this strategy may not be entirely fruitless. “As far as I know, there is no scientific proof that eating garlic works. But there may be something to the theory that it's possible to mask scent with garlic,” he says. The only reliable method of protection against mosquitoes is to use repellents that are sold over the counter. It contains some smells that can confuse the mosquitoes. When the mosquito comes closer, it uses smell, heat and carbon dioxide to decide whether to bite. But if it is confused by a repellent, it will never get that far.

    In my memory, winters always used to be really unpleasant. You had to dress like a bear just to keep warm when you went outside. You were often cold, wet and no more than one step away from the thin ice on the lake. If you worked over time and went home in the dark, you would arrive home to an ice-cold house. And that would mean turning on the heating and waiting.

    Fortunately, things don't have to be so challenging any more. Technology, engineering and design have developed, giving us new solutions to old problems. It means dealing with winter needn't be like skating on thin ice.

    With a smart thermostat(恒温器), our homes can be toasty when we need them to be. Many models go with smartphone APPs that allow you to regulate temperature from a distance, so we can warm up the house before we arrive home. According to techradar.com, a large technology news and reviews website, Tado's model has a voice control function, while the Nest “learns” your habits and heats the house for you.

    Clothes have been given an upgrade, too. Electronic heated jackets and trousers heat up when you turn them on. What better way to keep warm in the dead of winter? At the touch of a button, or through an APP on our phones, the clothes produce heat from materials placed inside. Many models offer three levels of heating which stay warm for over 12 hours.

    Finally, there is the headgear(头部装备) - Hats that have speakers which are included in the cloth using Bluetooth technology, so we can listen to our favourite music or, in some cases, have a phone call using the in-built microphone. All while keeping the head warm and avoiding coldness.

    For many, the thought of winter used to be enough to make their blood run cold. But using technology, life needn't freeze up. There's no reason why winter can't be really, really cool.

    Babies have an astonishing talent that adults entirely lose. By the age of one, they can recognise the significant noises around them and group them into a language. When we have lost this capacity as adults, it becomes enormously difficult to distinguish between sounds that are glaringly different to a native speaker. It all sounds Greek to us. This is because the range of possible sounds that humans use to convey meaning may be as high as 2,000, but few languages use more than 100 and even then the significant noises－the phonemes (音素) of a language－each cover a range of sounds and so vague distinctions which would change the meaning of a word in other languages.

    But where do these phonemes come from and why do they shift over time? New research suggests that the apparently arbitrary distribution of some sounds around the world may be partially explained by diet. This is unexpected. We'd rather think of language as product of our thought  rather than of the arrangement of our teeth. In reality, though, any given language must be both.

    Hunter gatherer languages very seldom use the sounds known as labiodentals (唇齿音)－those such as f and v－that are made by touching the lower lip with the upper teeth. Only two of the hundreds of Australian aboriginal languages use them, for example. But in cultures that have discovered farming, these consonants (辅音) are much more common. The argument goes that farmers eat more cooked food and more dairy than hunter gatherers. Either way, they need to chew mush less, and to bite less with their front teeth. So farmers grew up with smaller lower jaws and more of an overbite than their ancestors who had to bite through harder foods. It became easier for them to make the labiodental consonants instead of purely labial (唇音) ones: one example is that f come to take the place of p. Romans said "pater" but English speakers (unless they're Rees－Moggs) say "father".

    Beyond these particular changes, the story highlights the way in which everything distinctively human is both material and spiritual: speech must combine sound and meaning, and the meaning can't exist or be transmitted without a real object. But neither can it be reduced to the purely physical, as our inability to understand or even to recognise foreign languages makes clear. The food we eat shapes our jaws, and our jaws in turn shape the sounds of our language. The ease with which we eat probably shapes our thought too, as anyone who has suffered toothache could testify. What we eat may have shaped the sounds of our language, but how we eat changes how we feel and what we use language to express. A family meal is very different from a sandwich at the office desk, even if the calorie is the same. Food has purposes and meanings far beyond keeping us alive and pleasing the Palate (味觉).

    Is there anything more important than health? I don't think so. "Health is the greatest wealth (财富)," wise people say. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    If you have a headache, toothache, backache, earache or bad pain in the stomach, if you complain of a bad cough, if you run a high temperature and have a bad cold, or if you suffer from high or low blood pressure, I think you should go to the doctor.

    The doctor will examine your throat, feel your pulse, test your blood pressure, take your temperature, sound your heart and lungs, test your eyes, check your teeth or have your chest X－rayed. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} The only thing you have to do is follow his advice. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    An old gentleman came to see the doctor. The man was very ill. He told the doctor about his weakness, memory loss and serious problems with his heart and lungs. The doctor examined him and said there was no medicine for his disease. He told his patient to go to a quiet place for a month and have a good rest. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} In other words, the doctor advised him to follow the rule: "Eat at pleasure, drink with measure and enjoy life as it is." The doctor also said that if the man wanted to be well again, he shouldn't smoke more than one cigarette a day.

    A month later the gentleman came into the doctor's office. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} He thanked the doctor and said that he had never felt a healthier man.

    "But you know, doctor," he said, "it's not easy to begin smoking at my age."