It was Mother's Day morning last year and I was doing my shopping at our local supermarket with my five-year-old son, Tenyson. As we were leaving, we found that only minutes earlier an elderly woman had fallen over at the entrance and had hit her head on the concrete. Her husband was with her, but there was blood everywhere and the woman was embarrassed and clearly in shock.

    Walking towards the scene, Tenyson became very upset about what had happened to the couple. He said to me, “Mum, it's not much fun falling over in front of everyone.”

    At the front of the supermarket a charity(慈善) group had set up a stand selling cooked sausages and flowers to raise funds. Tenyson suggested that we should buy the lady a flower. “It will make her feel better,” he said. I was amazed that he'd come up with such a sweet idea. So we went over to the flower seller and asked her if we could buy a flower for the lady to cheer her up. “Just take it,” she replied. “I can't take your money for such a wonderful gesture.”

    By now paramedics（救援人员）had arrived, and were attending the injured woman. As we walked up to her, my son became intimidated by all the blood and medical equipment. He said he was just too scared to go up to her. Instead I gave the flower to the woman's husband and told him, “ My son was very upset for your wife and wanted to give her this flower to make her feel better.”

    At that, the old man started crying and said, “Thank you so much, you have a wonderful son. Happy Mother's Day to you.”

    The man then bent down and gave his wife the flower, telling her who it was from. Though badly hurt and shaken, the old lady looked up at Tenyson with love in her eyes and gave him a little smile.

    Holiday makers wanting to get away from the pressure of modern life might consider staying at a wooden hut in Sweden.

    The Kolarbyn Eco-Lodge Hotel is not for everyone. If you can't even understand the idea of living without electricity, running water, or a modern toilet, then the charm of this place will probably not appeal to you. But for anyone trying to escape the pressure and busy life of the big city or take a break from the Internet and other modern devices, this place is a paradise(乐园). Located 1 km south of Skarsjon Beach, in the middle of a pristine Swedish forest, Kolarbyn Eco-Lodge consists of 12 wooden huts with nothing but two sheepskin-covered wooden beds, and a wood stove that uses wood cut by the guests themselves.

    Self-catering breakfast, lunch and dinner consist of items like spaghetti（通心粉）, tomato sauce, bread, fruit and eggs that tourists have to cook themselves over an outside fire; there is no shower, only a nearby spring and as for toilet, visitors are encouraged to go behind a tree, or visit one of the two sheds（棚子）.

    Adding to the charm of this place is the long coal-making tradition of Kolarbyn. Locals have been building these huts from wood and mud for over 400 years, and a few of them came up with the idea of recreating a few of them in the woods as an eco-lodge to keep tradition alive in the area.

    “People visit Kolarbyn lodges because they want to experience the nature and to test sleeping in the historical huts. They want to get away from the normal life,” the owner Andreas Ahlsen said. “The huts themselves are relatively small, as if they are too big , it will destroy the nature experience.”

    Mother's Day is a time of memory and celebration for Mom. The earliest Mother's Day celebrations date back to ancient Greece in honour of Rhea, the Mother of Gods. During the 1600s, England celebrated a day called “mothering Sunday”. Celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Lent(四旬斋)，“mothering Sunday” honoured the mothers England.

    During the time many of the England's poor worked as servants for the wealthy.AS most jobs were located far from their homes, the servants would live at the houses of their employers. On Mothering Sunday, the servants would have the day off and were encouraged to return home and spend the day with their mothers. A special cake, called the mothering cake, was often brought along.

As Christianity(基督教) spread throughout Europe, the celebration changed to honour the “Mother Church”—the spiritual power that gave them life and protected them from harm. Over time the church festival combined with mothering Sunday celebration. People began honouring their mothers as well as the church.

    In the United States Mother's Day was first suggested in 1872 by Julia Ward Howe as a day devoted to peace. Then in 1907 Ana Jarvis, from Philadelphia, began a campaign(运动) to establish a national Mother's Day. Ms Jarvis persuaded her mother's church in Grafton, Virginia to celebrate Mother's Day on the second anniversary of her mother's death, the 2nd day Sunday of May. By the next year Mother's Day was also celebrated in Philadelphia.

    Ms Jarvis and her supporters began to write to ministers, businessmen, and politicians demanding to establish a national Mother's Day. It was successful as by 1911 Mother's Day was celebrated in almost every state. President Woodrow Wilson, in 1914, made the official announcement that Mother's Day was a national holiday and it was to be held each year on the 2nd Sunday of May.

    While many countries of the world celebrate their own Mother's Day at different times throughout the year, there are some countries such as Denmark, Finland, Italy, Turkey, Australia, and Belgium which also celebrate Mother's Day on the 2nd Sunday of May.

    The purpose of a map is to express graphically the relations of points and features on the earth's surface to each other. These are determined by distance and direction. In early times distance was often expressed in units of time, for example “so many hours' march” or “a day's journey by river”, but such measurements gave more information about the relative ease of crossing the local terrain than they did about actual distance. The other element is direction, but for the ordinary traveller, whose main concern was “Where do I go from here?” and “How far away is it?”, the accurate representation of direction was not of primary importance. Partly for this reason, written itineraries (行程) for a long time rivaled maps. Even today, certain types of maps, for example, those showing railway systems, may make little attempt to show true directions. Similarly, obvious landmarks along a route were at first indicated by signs, realistic or conventional (惯常的), and varied in size to indicate their importance. Clearly the conventions employed varied with the purpose of the map, and also from place to place, so that in studying early maps the first essential is to understand the particular convention employed.

    The history of cartography (制图) is largely that of the increase in the accuracy with which these elements of distance and direction are determined and in the comprehensiveness of the map content. In this development, cartography has called in other sciences to its aid. For example, instead of determining direction by observing the position of a shadow at midday, or of a constellation (星座) in the night sky, or even of a steady wind, use was made of terrestrial magnetism (地磁学) through the magnetic compass, and instruments were evolved which enabled horizontal angles to be calculated with great accuracy.

    The application of astronomical concepts, and the extension of the knowledge of the world through exploration, encouraged attempts to map the known world. Then astronomers discovered that the earth is not a perfect sphere, but is flattened slightly at the poles, which introduced further refinements into the mapping of large areas. Meanwhile, the demands being made of the map maker were shifting significantly. The traveller or the merchant ceased to be the sole user of maps. The soldier, especially after the introduction of artillery, and the problems of range, field of fire, and dead ground which it raised, demanded an accurate representation of the surface features, in place of the earlier conventional or pictorial delineation (描绘), and a solution in any degree satisfactory was not reached until the contour (等高线) was invented.

Dear Miss Hanff,

    You will be glad to know that the two boxes of eggs and the tins of tongue have all arrived safely and once again we all wish to thank you most sincerely for your extreme generosity. Mr. Martin, one of the older members of our staff, has been on the sick list for some time and we therefore let him have the lion's share of the eggs, one whole boxful in fact, and of course he was delighted to get them. The tins of tongue look very inviting and will be a welcome addition to our larders (食物橱) and in my case will be put on one side for a special occasion.

    I enquired at all the local music shops but was unable to get the Messiah or Bach's St. Matthew Passion in stiff covers in clean, secondhand copies, and then I found they were available from the publisher in new editions. Their prices seemed a bit high, but I thought I had better get them and they have been sent by Book Post a few days ago, so should arrive any day now. Our invoice, total $4.20, is enclosed with the books.

    We are sending you a little gift for Christmas. We do hope you will not have to pay any duty on it. We will mark it "Christmas Gift" and keep our fingers crossed. Anyway, we hope you will like it and accept it with our sincere best wishes for Christmas and the coming year.

    My name is certainly not of Welsh origin. As it is pronounced to rhyme with the French word "Noel", I think there may be a possibility that it originated in France.

Yours sincerely,

Frank Doel

    Carrie Gracie is knowledgeable about China and its affairs. She also has a reputation as a generous colleague. She has resigned from her job as China editor because her employers will not pay her at the same rate as they pay the handful of men who do a similarly challenging and important job.

    She has resigned because she refused to go on colluding (共谋) with the BBC's dishonesty about its failure to give women and men equal pay for equal work.

    Gracie was recruited to the job, because she had all the talent and skills the BBC needed to cover the difficult international and domestic story of the rise of China. One of the conditions she set for taking it was equal pay with the BBC's other international editors, familiar names including Jon Sopel in Washington and Jeremy Bowen in the Middle East.

    Last summer, the government forced the BBC to publish which of the familiar names on radio and TV earned over ￡150, 000. The results exposed an astonishing pay gap. They also showed Gracie that her employers had misled her.

    Gracie sets out all her efforts to get her bosses to do what they had originally promised her, but they fail to respond adequately. Instead, they prevaricate (搪塞) and offer her a pay rise that still would not have delivered equality. They thought they could buy her off; they thought that the reputational hazard she was running would scare her away from the fight.

    The BBC is wrong this time! Gracie has chosen to resign rather than give in because she thinks that it is her responsibility to stop the BBC doing something stupid. She is fighting for women's legal rights.

    Gracie said she hoped she wouldn't be remembered as the woman who complained about money, but as a great journalist. She is proving that they are two sides of the same invaluable coin.

    Carrie Gracie's dispute with the BBC isn't about money—it's about dignity!