When she looked ahead，Florence Chadwick saw nothing but a solid wall of fog.Her body was numb (麻木的)．She had been swimming for nearly sixteen hours.

    Already she was the first woman to swim the English Channel in both directions.Now，at age 34，her goal was to become the first woman to swim from Catalina Island to the California coast.

    On the morning of July 4th，1952，the sea was like an ice bath and the fog was so thick that she could hardly see her support boats.The wind was strong and it was raining heavily.Against the cold water of the sea，she struggled on—hour after hour.Millions of people at home were watching her in front of the television.

    In one of the boats，her mother and her trainer tried their best to encourage her.They told her it wasn't much farther.But all she could see was fog.They urged her not to give up.She never had...until then.With only a half mile to go，she asked to be pulled out.

    After thawing her cold body several hours later，she told a reporter，“Look，I'm not excusing myself，but if I could have seen land I might have made it.” It was not tiredness or even the cold water that defeated her.It was the fog.She was unable to see her goal.

    Two months later，she tried again.This time，despite the same thick fog，she swam with all her strength and her goal clearly pictured in her mind.She knew that somewhere behind that fog was land and this time she made it! Florence Chadwick became the first woman to swim the Catalina Channel!  

    Anxiety has now surpassed depression as the most common mental health disease among college students, though depression, too, is on the rise. More than half of students visiting campus clinics cite anxiety as a health concern, according to a recent study of more than 100,000 students nationwide by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State. Nearly one in six college students has been diagnosed with or treated for anxiety within the last 12 months, according to the annual national survey by the American College Health Association.

    The causes range widely, experts say, from mounting academic pressure at earlier ages to overprotective parents to engagement with social media. Anxiety has always played a role in the development of a student's life, but now more students experience anxiety so acute that they are seeking professional help. Like many college clinics, the Center for Counseling and Psychological Services at the University of Central Florida (UCF)— one of the country's largest and fastest-growing universities, has seen sharp increases in the number of clients: 15.2 percent over last year alone.

    Anxiety has become characteristic of the current generation of college students, said Dan Jones, the director of Counseling and Psychological Services at Appalachian State University in Boone, N. C. Because of increasingly pressures during high school, he and other experts say, students arrive at college preloaded with stress. Accustomed to extreme parental oversight, many seem unable to govern themselves. And with parents so accessible, students have had less incentive to develop life skills. “They can't tolerate discomfort or having to struggle,” Dr Jones said.

    More often, anxiety is mild and temporary, the indication of a student under the control of a normal developmental issue-learning time management, for example, or how to handle rejection from a sorority. Mild anxiety is often treatable with early, modest interventions. But to care for rising numbers of severely troubled students, many counseling centers have moved to triage protocols (分诊措施). That means that students with less urgent needs may wait several weeks for first appointments.

    Like many college counseling centers, UCF has designed a variety of daily workshops and therapy groups that implicitly and explicitly address anxiety, depression and their triggers. Next fall the center will test a new app for treating anxiety with a seven-module cognitive behavioral program, accessible through a student's phone and augmented with brief videoconferences with a therapist. It also offers semester-long, 90-minute weekly therapy groups, such as “Keeping Calm and in Control”, “Mindfulness for Depression” and “Building Social Confidence” -for students struggling with social anxiety.

    Why not consider spending the holiday at Harvard if you are a high school student who will have a holiday in this coming summer?

    About the program

    This is a five-week program^ from July 16 to August 17, 2018, which is designed to help high school students to pave the way for a successful college experience. We have 200-plus courses, such as film, philosophy, creative writing, and computer science. Besides, we offer you two types of credit courses—4-credil course and 8-credit course. You can earn college credit here. Whether you choose to sign up for one or two courses, you will still have some flexibility (灵活性) to schedule your days'.

    Tuition and Fees

    Application fee (the application period opens in December): $50

    Tuition: $3,300 for 4-credit course;

    $6,600 for 8-credit course

    Housing (room and board) fee: $5, 700

    Health insurance fee: $200

    Financial Aid(援助)

    Financial aid is a scholarship award. It is available to Secondary School Program students with excellent academic records who give evidence of financial need. It does not have to be paid back. Awards cover only a part of the program cost. Families should expect to contribute to the remaining part. Award amounts are determined by many sides, including family finances, availability of fund (基金), and whether students are resident. ... Local students may be eligible (有资格的) for additional funding towards room and board.

    People say that text messages and e-mails lack emotion compared to phone or face-to-face conversations. But one thing seems to improve it – the emoticon(表情符).

    These little symbols – whether it's a wink(眨眼); -), a smiley : -) or a sad face : -) - always add a little something to whatever you are sending out, making it more expressive than cold words on a screen.

    To be sure, emoticons have changed the way that we communicate with each other. But there is more: a new study found that they are even changing how our brains work – we now react to emoticons in the same way as we would to real human faces, reported Live Science.

    It's actually amazing when you start to think about it: what an emoticon consists of is simply three punctuation marks(标点符号) – on their own, they carry no meaning as a pair of eyes, a nose or a mouth, but after they were first put together as symbols for faces in 1982, they began to appear more and more in our written materials.

    Owen Churches, a scientist at Flinders University in Australia, wanted to find out what people see in emoticons that make them so popular. So he showed 20 participants images of real faces, a smiley emoticon and a series of meaningless characters while their brain activities were monitored.

    Previous studies have already shown that our brains process human faces differently than they do other objects – they analyze the position of the mouth relative to the nose and the eyes to “read” for emotions. As a result, certain parts of our brain, such as the occipital-temporal cortex, are activated(激活).

    When Churches compared participants' brain activities, he was surprised to find that the brain areas that were activated when people looked at smiley emoticons were the same as when they were shown pictures of real faces.

    According to Churches, this is a good example of how culture is shaping our brains. “Emoticons are a new form of language that we're producing,” Churches told ABC Science. “Before 1982 there would be no reason that ':-)' would activate face-sensitive areas of the cortex, but now it does because we've learnt that this represents a face.”

    Next time you chat with your friends online, try to use emoticons where they are needed. It'll be almost like you're smiling or winking at them yourself.

Humans aren't the only animals that move to music. Parrots have been known to do it. And now rats have been observed bopping their heads in time with the tunes of Mozart, Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson and others, according to a new paper from the University of Tokyo. What's more, the rats seems to respond to the same beats that get humans' feet tapping (轻跺). 

The researchers played a sonata by Mozart for lab rats at different variations of the original speed. Wireless sensors on the rats' bodies tracked their movements. Meanwhile, 20 human participants were involved and listened to the same music through headphones equipped with motion sensors. 

It was observed that the rats' head movements were the most obvious when the music played at its normal speed, which was around 132bpm (beats per minute). The same was true for human participants. The researchers then changed to some pop songs such as Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" and Michael Jackson's "Beat It". As with Mozart's, rats moved their heads along the rhythm of pop songs, similar to how people do, at about 120 to 140bpm. 

The study showed that both rats and humans moved their heads along to the beat in a similar rhythm. The level of head bopping from both humans and rats decreased as the music sped up. The study suggests that there is something similar about the way human and rat brains respond to rhythms, but rats do not match their motions to the beat like humans do. Humans can predict the timing of a beat and move predictably to it. 

Aniruddh Patel, a psychologist who studies brain response to music, says humans and parrots respond to beats with big, voluntary movements such as head shaking, dancing or foot tapping. Patel also stresses that this study does not show that rats have the same emotional associations with music as humans do. Yet he believes it could help reveal how humans and some other animals developed a sense of rhythm. 

My mother has always been one of those rare people that sees the good in everyone and does good things "just because". Life hasn't always been kind to her; she lost my oldest sister to leukemia (白血病) in 1963 and my father in 2007 after nearly 51 years of marriage.

She's had her ups and downs but has always 1 a positive, sunny outlook on life and been very 2 to people.

One day, my little sister fell and hurt her ankle, desperately needing a 3 to the hospital emergency room. My mother immediately 4 into crisis mode, packed my sister into the car, and drove to our local hospital. In such a 5 , my mother didn't call to tell my father. When she got to the hospital, she realized she needed to 6 with my father immediately.

While waiting for my sister to be examined, my mother 7 her way to the pay phone to place her call. She put her coin in, called my father and told him everything. After she hung up, the phone 8 several additional coins that Mom wasn't owed.

Realizing that the phone was 9 , my mother decided to leave the 10 coins by the phone. She told us that in a crisis, people might not remember to bring 11 with them to make that emergency call.

I've often thought about her 12 from an adult's perspective I realize that someone seeing the money by he phone may have 13 taken it because not everyone was as 14 as my mother. But I like to believe that my mother's faith was 15 and that someone who needed them found the coins waiting there.