I was very disappointed not to be able to go to the jazz concert last Friday. The advertisement in the paper said that you could buy tickets at the theatre box in Richland Hills any day between 10:00 and 4:00. Since I work from 9:00 to 5:30, the only time I could go to the theatre was during my 45-minute lunch break.

    Unfortunately, the theatre is on theother side of the town, and the bus service between my office and Richland Hills is not very good. Butif you are lucky, you can make the round trip in 45 minutes. Last Monday, Istood at the bus stop for 15 minutes waiting for the bus, By the time I saw onecome around the corner, there was not enough time left to make the trip.

     So I gave up and went back to the office. The same thing happened on Tuesday, and again next day. On Thursday, my luck changed. I got on a bus right away and arrived at the theatre in exactly 20 minutes. When I got there, however, I found along line of people at the box office, I heard one man say he had been waitingin line for over an hour. Realizing I would not have enough timeto wait in line. I caught the next bus and headed back across the town.

    By Friday I realized my only hope was tomake the trip by taxi, it was expensive, but I felt it would be worth it tohear the concert. The trip by taxi only took 10 minutes, but felt like an hour to me. When I got to the theatre, I was relieved to see that nobody was waiting in line. The reason, however, I quickly discovered, was that they had already sold all the tickets.

    When I was younger, I thought that boys and grown men should not cry. The tears were signs of being weak and a sissy(胆小鬼), which a man is not supposed to be. This was even strengthened in my young mind when the song, Boys Don't Cry, came out in the early 1980s.

    But just this June, I discovered that courage is not all about trying to keep all the pain inside in check. Courage is not all about trying to hide the tears. It is the opposite — the tears strengthen the heart's courage. And I saw this in my father. That day my father cried.

    My 18-year-old sister eloped (私奔) and from it I saw how weak my father's heart was. My sister and I were used to seeing him as an iron-willed figure and authoritarian father.

    For three days after my sister eloped, he would not talk. He would just sit quietly outside our house in the dark. On the fourth night, I sat beside him and asked him to tell me what he felt about everything.

    It has been years since I have laid my hand on my father's shoulder as we have drifted apart (疏远) farther and farther while I was growing up. That night，though, I sensed my father trying to control his pain and I wanted him to be able to let it out. We have all cried over what happened except him. All of us except him.

    The simple touch and my words, "Dad, it is not your fault.", broke my father's dam.

    In the darkness, he began to cry. I felt his shoulders shaking as he whispered, "Where did

    I go wrong? All I ever wanted was for my children to grow up right. Why couldn't your sister wait?"

    I understood then why he preferred to be in the dark. By being there, he hoped to spare his family of a father's pain. His tears, though we did not see them before that night, were there all the same. I saw his courage, that night when my father cried with my hand on his shoulder, and understood his pain.

    Your local grocery store is a psychological minefield (布雷区), where even the bananas are ripe with mystery.

    ⒈Southpaws (左撇子) have an invisible (看不见的) advantage

    You've probably seen that stores keep go-to items—produce, meats, dairy—on the outer edge. But did you notice that most of them are set up to make you run counterclockwise (逆时针)? Ninety percent of us are right-handed, so we buy more when it's counterclockwise. You'll also often find the dairy section in the back left corner：Because dairy is likely on your list, stores make sure you take the longest route to get there. In fairness, it's also a more convenient place to put a fridge.

    ⒉Everything is in its place

    It's safe to say that nothing you see on a shelf is there by chance. The cookies on sale at the end of a passage are likely the result of smart product placement. More expensive items are usually placed at an adult's eye level, while colorful treats and other products for kids are positioned lower—to catch the attention of children.

    ⒊Time goes by so slowly

    Stores rarely have windows or clocks. With no reference to the outside world, customers can easily lose track of how long they've been there so that they can buy more. Grocery stores may use another trick to control your sense of time: small floor tiles (瓷砖).

    Learning is so complex that there are many different psychological theories to explain how people learn. A psychologist named Albert Bandura suggested a social learning theory which shows that observation, imitation (模仿), and modeling play a primary role in this process.

    In Albert Bandura's opinion, people can learn through observation. Observational learning doesn't even necessarily require watching another person join in an activity. We can also learn by reading, hearing, or watching the actions of characters in books and films. However, just observing someone else's actions isn't always enough to lead to learning. Your own mental state also plays an important role in determining whether a behavior is learned or not. In addition, though in many cases, learning can be seen immediately when the new behavior is displayed, yet sometimes we can learn things even though that learning might not be immediately obvious, which means people can learn new information without showing new behaviors.

    Not all observed behaviors are effectively learned. Certain requirements need to be related to the observational learning process. For example, you need to be paying attention. Also your retention is an important part of observational learning as you need to pull up information later and act on it during the process. Once you've paid attention to the model and kept the information, it's time to actually perform the behavior you observed. Further practice of the learned behavior leads to improvement. Finally, you have to be motivated to imitate the behavior that has been modeled.

    Social learning theory have many real-world applications. For example, researchers employ it to look into and understand ways that positive role models can be used to encourage desirable behaviors. Besides, it's also applied in the field of education, and today, both teachers and parents recognize how important it is to model appropriate behaviors.

    Finland is the happiest place on Earth, according to the 2018 World Happiness Report of 156 nations.

    The report, released Wednesday by the United Nations'Sustainable Development Solutions Network, ranks the countries of the world based on six different categories of well-being: income, freedom, trust, life expectancy, generosity and social support. This year's report also pays special attention to the happiness of each country's immigrants.

    The U.S. dropped four spots from 2017 and landed in 18th place, and last year's winner, Norway, came in second place — followed by Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland.

    “The top five countries all have almost equally high values for the six factors found to support happiness, and four of these countries—Denmark, Switzerland, Norway and now Finland — have been in first place in the six World Happiness Report rankings since the first report" in 2012, "co-editor John Helliwell told CNN. “In a division with such excellent teams, changes in the top spot are to be expected."

    Rounding out the top 10 happiest countries was Canada in sixth place, then New Zealand, Sweden and Australia. The order of the top 10 nations changed from the 2017 list but the countries did not, according to the report. They were also 10 of the 11 top spots in the immigrant happiness category (including Mexico — 24th overall, but 10th in immigration).

    "The most striking finding of the report is the remarkable consistency between the happiness of immigrants and the locally born," Helliwell said in a statement. "Although immigrants come from countries with very different levels of happiness, their reported life evaluations resemble those of other residents in their new countries. Those who move to happier countries gain, while those who move to less happy countries lose."

    Other major world powers placed in significantly low spots on the list. Germany came in 15th, the UK was 19th — followed by Japan in 54th place, Russia in 59th and China in 86th.

    The report, based on surveys completed by citizen volunteers, came just under a week before World Happiness Day on March 20, when the UN declared to recognize "the relevance of happiness and well-being as universal goals and aspirations in the lives of human beings around the world and the importance of their recognition in public policy objectives"

Inventor, physicist, surveyor, astronomer, biologist, artist... Robert Hooke was all these and more. Some say he was the greatest experimental scientist of the 17th century. In the course of his work, he cooperated with famous men of science like Isaac Newton, and the great architect, Christopher Wren.

Hooke's early education began at home, under the guidance of his father. He entered Westminster School at the age of 13, and from there went to Oxford, where he came in contact with some of the best scientists in England. Hooke impressed them with his skills at designing experiments and inventing instruments. In 1662, at the age of 28, he was named Curator of Experiments at the newly formed Royal Society of London — meaning that he was responsible for demonstrating new experiments at the society's weekly meeting. Hooke accepted the job, even though he knew that the society had no money to pay him!

Watching living things through a microscope was one of his favourite pastimes. He invented a compound microscope for this purpose. One day while observing a cork under a microscope, he saw honeycomb­like structures. There were cells — the smallest units of life. In fact, it was Hooke who invented the term "cell" as the box­like cells of the cork reminded him of the cells of a monastery．

Another achievement of Hooke's was his book Micrographia, which introduced the enormous potential of the microscope. It contains fascinating drawings of the thing he saw under the microscope. The book also includes, among other things, ideas on gravity, light and burning that may have helped scientists like Newton when they were developing their own theories on these phenomena.

Hooke made a valuable contribution to astronomy too. A crater on the moon is named after him in honour of his services to this branch of science.