How to Overcome Depression

    Suffering from depression means more than just dealing with a bad week or even a bad month. Depression is a weakening condition that can make it impossible for you to enjoy your daily existence. To overcome your depression, you have to first determine if what you're feeling are the symptoms of depression.{#blank#}1{#/blank#}While medications can help relieve symptoms, it is still important for depressed persons to understand the disorder and develop healthier strategies for coping with it.

    Keep yourself busy. Fill your schedule with events and activities you love. Keeping a busy schedule will force you to stay active, focused, and thinking about the next thing on your plate. You can draw up a schedule for each day at the start of the week, or simply plan out each day the night before.{#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    Improve your diet{#blank#}3{#/blank#}Even if you're losing your appetite, you need to be determined to eat three meals a day. You don't need to try to lose weight or be incredibly healthy-conscious when you're dealing with your depression, but eating healthier food regularly will improve your mental and physical state.

    Think positively. Being a more positive thinker will help you look at your life and world in a way that fills you with hope instead of despair. To think more positively, you should learn how to recognize your negative thoughts and to fight them with stronger positive thoughts whenever you can. For a jump start, find at least five things to be grateful for{#blank#}4{#/blank#}

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} Neglecting personal hygiene (卫生) is a common side effect of depression. While you will not beat your depression by transforming your looks, if you take time to maintain your appearance and hygiene every day, you will feel better about yourself. Shower daily, brush your teeth and wash your hair.

A. Control your emotions.

B. Improve your appearance.

C Most importantly be happy about every single day.

D. Whichever method you choose, make a goal of sticking to it.

E. However, not everyone knows depression has a positive side.

F. Eating a healthy, balanced diet can also help you beat depression.

G. If you are feeling sad, lonely, or worthless, you may be suffering from depression.

Five ways to improve creativity

    Creativity is the ability to go beyond traditionally rules, ideas or relationships and create something new through imagination or progressiveness. There are many ways to improve your creative mind.

    Exercise the mind. Exercising your mind is an ideal way to boost creativity. Like the body, the mind needs exercise to work the creative muscles and make them stronger. Exercise your brain by learning new subjects, getting into a debate about politics and talking to other creative and intelligent people. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    Be Passionate. One aspect of creativity is passion. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} Find you internal motivation and follow your passion to improve your creativity.

    Change your routine. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} To boost your creativity, consider changing one to two elements of your daily routine. If you are working on a certain project, consider stopping one project to work on another project at regular interval throughout the day or week.

    Read. While reading provides many intellectual benefits, reading is also beneficial for boosting creativity, exercising your brain and provide creative inspiration. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}Consider reading about subjects that were previously uninteresting to you. This change in the norm might spark your creative interest.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#}. Our packed schedules have no room for creative thinking. Take a certain amount of time every day to quiet, refresh and clear the mind while relaxing the body. This quiet .time can consist of a yoga workout, meditation or simply sitting still in a dark and quiet room, in a peaceful garden or on a beautiful beach.

A. Schedule quiet time.

B. It can become weak due to stresses.

C. Creativity is a natural quality.

D. Often, creativity is blocked due to a too-familiar routine.

E. These activities will encourage a flow of creativity.

F. Read as much as possible about several different subjects

G. Typically, students will do well in subjects they are interested in.

    There's a contradiction in the way many of us behave online: we know we're being watched all the time, and disapprove of the monitor by Google and the government. But the bounds of what's considered too personal to be uploaded or shared online seems to shrink by the day.

    I complain about the lack of privacy, for example, and yet I willingly and routinely trade it for convenience. I no longer run the risk of unforeseen delays on public transport; Google Maps will inform me of the fastest route to my destination; I no longer need to remember my friends' birthdays; Facebook will urge me, and invariably appeal to me to post an update to remind people I exist. All I have to do is make my location, habits and beliefs transparent to their parent companies whenever they choose to check in on me.

    So what's going on? “Visibility is a trap,” explained the French philosopher Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison(1975). Allowing oneself to be watched, and learning to watch others, is both attractive and dangerous. He took for example “Panopticon”, a prison where prisoners were observed from a tower manned by an invisible occupant. The prisoners would believe in the presence of the mysterious watchman, whether or not anyone was actually inside, and behave themselves.
    According to Foucault, the dynamics of the Panopticon are similar to how generally people self-monitor in society. In the presence of ever-watching witness, people police themselves. They don't know what the observers are looking for, or what the punishments are for disobedience (不顺从). But they willingly accept and follow this invisible discipline.
    Foucault claimed that such monitoring is worrisome, not just because of what companies and states might do with our data, but because the act of watching is itself a terrible exercise of power, which may influence behavior without our fully realizing it.
    But something's not right here. Why does the self-display continue when we are sure that we are watched from everywhere and nowhere?
    Social media provides a public space that often operates more like a private one, where many people hold the belief that there they won't suffer the consequences of what they say online, as if protected by technology.
    Plato would be alarmed by the lack of shame online. His point about moral knowledge is this: we already know the right way to live a just and fulfilling life, but are constantly distracted(转移) from that noble aim. For him, then, shame helps us be true to ourselves and to pay attention to the moral knowledge within. A man without shame, Plato says, is a slave to desire — for material goods, power, fame, respect. Such desire, by its nature, cannot be satisfied.

    Earth is home to around 7, 000 languages, around half of which are expected to disappear by 2100.

    Languages disappear for many reasons. Sometimes younger generations stop learning a language because parents want children to fit in.{#blank#}1{#/blank#} Native American children of the late﹣19th century were required to attend boarding schools where educators forbade them from speaking their native languages.

    The United Nations ranks endangered languages according to their risk level. For example, a "critically endangered" language is one that even grandparents don't speak often. New York's Onondaga language is an example with only 50 speakers left. An "extinct" language has no speakers. It is gone forever. Alaska's Eyak language is one example.{#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#} In the same way, different languages contribute to cultural diversity. Saving these languages benefits our understanding of other cultures. Languages can show how a society looks at the world and what it values. A language may describe something in a way that is funny, too. In Welsh, it rains not cats and dogs, but old wives and walking sticks.

    The Endangered Language Alliance wants to save languages from disappearing.{#blank#}4{#/blank#} However, its efforts are limited. If an endangered language is going to make a real comeback, it'll probably get its start in schools. For nearly 100 years, public schools in Hawaii did not teach the Hawaiian language. Now students can keep learning in Hawaiian from elementary schools to college and beyond.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} At least one did. In 1881, a Jewish linguist named Eliezer Ben﹣Yehuda brought the 3,000-year-old language Hebrew back to life. Today it is one of the official languages of the country of Israel, with more than 4million speakers.

A. The last person who spoke it died in 2008.

B. Why should we save endangered languages.

C. Various animals and plants benefit our environment.

D. With just 5 speakers left, it is absolutely endangered.

E. Can a language with zero native speakers come back to life.

F. Sometimes societies force minorities to give up their language.

G. The non-profit group finds native speakers and records their stories.

    The environmental group Heal the Bay organized a beach clean-up. And I was one of the volunteers. We went to Venice Beach to clean up the trash.

    At first glance, the beach didn't look dirty at all. But then I saw a Styrofoam(泡沫)cup half buried in the sand on the beach. I pulled hard and finally got it out. As we moved farther, we found pieces of Styrofoam spread all over the sand. The Heal the Bay representative had told us that these little pieces of Styrofoam and other small pieces of plastic are what actually harm sea life most. Sea animals eat the plastic. After eating it, they think they are full. As a result, they can die of starvation as they are cheated by their feeling and don't think they need to eat any food.

    We kept on picking up the trash. Then I saw someone with a full Heal the Bay trash bag and I went to see what was inside. When I opened the trash bag, I found everything from a pair of old jeans and a brown belt to headphones and some plastic bags. It made me very angry with the people who left their things behind without thinking what effects they might have on the ocean.

    It is really important to protect the ocean. The ocean covers 70 percent of the Earth's surface. A clean ocean not only helps animals in the ocean survive but also helps us survive.

    By noon, the sun was shining and the temperature was rising. The volunteers that had spread out across Venice Beach were coming back to throw the trash they had collected into the truck. I could not believe how much trash there was. All together we collected more than 135 bags of trash. I do hope that next time people go to the beach, they will stop littering.