Acting is the activity of performing in plays or films. It’s about living an alternative reality. It lets you explore all kinds of possibilities of what you could be. Just being your own self can be boring sometimes, and acting gives you an opportunity to be someone else for a while. It is voluntarily entering the psyche (心灵) of another personality and thinking according to a different set of values and constraints (约束). It lets you explore many parts of you, which you thought never existed. It lets you deeply explore what it means to be a human being.

One of the best ways to begin your own acting studies is to start reading some good plays. Choose your favorite role from one of your favorite plays and prepare to act it out in front of the audience. To learn to act, you must act. Here are some tips on how to become an actor with no experience:

To play a role, you must understand the character that you are going to play with open arms. Understand the plot of the play, as well as the psyche of your character. Understand the conditions in which your character lives. Try to understand why your character behaves in that way. So you must learn the lines or dialogues thoroughly and explore the thought behind every sentence. This will help you picture the circumstances in which the character finds himself/herself. Some actors go as far as “living” as that person for a while, to understand him or her. The idea is to go as close as possible to being that person. More importantly, only through practice can you get close to actually being that person. So seize every chance and perform as frequently as you can. This will help you develop confidence and overcome stage fright.

As a student of acting, you need to always be a sponge (海绵), ready to absorb, learn, and observe the performances of great actors, to learn the slight differences of the art. While you watch movies, plays and any other performance, study the differences of a role played by any actors, especially the masters. By just keeping your eyes open, you can pick up a lot of things.

Why do you want to act? Is it for money, fame, or genuine love for the art? Would you do it if you were not paid for it? If the answer and y our motivation is love for acting, you are sure to eventually succeed.

Happy Graduation, Seniors! Congratulations! What’s next? Below is some sociologically-inspired, out-of-the-box advice on work, love, family, friendship, and the meaning of life. For new grads from the two of us!

Don’t Worry About Making Your Dreams Come True

College graduates are often told: “follow your passion,” do “what you love,” what you were “meant to do,” or “make your dreams come true.” Two-thirds think they’re going find a job that allows them to change the world, half within five years. Yikes.

This sets young people up to fail. The truth is that most of us will not be employed in a job that is both our lifelong passion and a world-changer; that’s just not the way our global economy is. So it’s ok to set your sights just a tad below occupational ecstasy. Just find a job that you like. Use that job to help you have a full life with lots of good things and pleasure and helping others and stuff. A great life is pretty good, even if it’s not perfect.

 Make Friends

Americans emphasize finding Mr. or Ms. Right and getting married. We think this will bring us happiness. In fact, however, both psychological well-being and health are more strongly related to friendship. If you have good friends, you’ll be less likely to get the common cold, less likely to die from cancer, recover better from the loss of a spouse, and keep your mental acuity as you age. You’ll also be able to face life’s challenges, be less likely to feed depressed, and be happier in old age.   

Having happy friends increases your chance of being happy as much as an extra $ 145,500 a year does. So, make friends!

 Don’t Worry about Being Single

Single people, especially women, are stigmatized in our society: we’re all familiar with the image of a sad, lonely woman eating ice cream with her cats in her pajamas on Saturday night. But about 45% of U.S. adults aren’t married and around 1 in 7 lives alone.

This might be you. Research shows that young people’s expectations about their marital status (e.g., the desire to be married by 30 and have kids by 32) have little or no relationship to what actually happens to people. So, go with the flow.

And, if you’re single, you’re in good company. Single people spend more time with friends, volunteer more, and are more involved in their communities than married people. Never-married and divorced women are happier, on average, than married women. So, don’t buy into the myth of the miserable singleton.

 Don’t Take Your Ideas about Gender and Marriage Too Seriously

If you do get married, be both principled and flexible. Relationship satisfaction, financial security, and happy kids are more strongly related to the ability to adapt in the face of life’s challenges than any particular way of organizing families. The most functional families are ones that can bend. So partnering with someone who thinks that one partner should support their families and the other should take responsibility for the house and children is a recipe for disaster. So is being equally rigid about non-traditional divisions of labor. It’s okay to have ideas about how to organize your family – and, for the love of god, please talk about both your ideals and fallback positions on this – but your best bet for happiness is to be flexible.

 Think Hard About Whether to Buy a House

Our current image of the American Dream revolves around homeownership, and buying a home is often considered as a stage on the path to full-fledge adulthood. But the ideal of universal home ownership was born in the 1950s. It’s a rather new idea.

With such a short history, it’s funny that people often insist that buying a house is a fool-proof investment and the best way to secure retirement. In fact, buying a house may not be the best choice for you. The mortgage may be less than rent, but there are also taxes, insurance, and the increasingly common Home Owners Association (HOA) fees. You may someday sell the house for more than you bought it but, if you paid interest on a mortgage, you also paid far more than the sale price. You have freedom from a landlord, but may discover your HOA is just as controlling, or worse. And then there’s the headache: renting makes you avoid the stress of being responsible for repairs. It also offers a freedom of movement that you might cherish.

So, think carefully about whether buying or renting is a better fit for your finances, lifestyle, and future goals. This New York Times rent vs. buy calculator is a good start.

While there is no widely accepted definition of MOOCs, their key features are open access：they are currently free to participants, no entry qualifications are required, they support an unlimited number of participants and as yet, very few include any form of accreditation (认证).

       Currently offered by some famous universities, MOOCs are attractive to people who do not have the financial resources to meet the growing costs of university education, or who do not have formal qualifications. They also allow participants to study at their own pace.

       The potential for MOOCs to deliver education is obviously vast—they could be considered as a huge step forwards in widening participation. They also have the potential to provide a unique window on universities that offer popular and valuable courses, they may attract some participants to register for formal fee-paying programmes at the same or other universities and are likely to promote new ways of on-line education.

       However, it is still very early days for MOOCs. The quality of the education provision is highly variable, with many courses offering only recordings of lectures, and delivery is particularly difficult in some special fields that require practical classes, research projects or extensive library access. Besides, wider engagement with participants re quires very considerable resource. Even limited feedback or examination becomes a major task if there are several thousand students in the class.

       Considering the challenges, some people argue MOOCs will soon evaporate (蒸发). But they certainly provide good opportunity for widening higher education, are a means of raising awareness of universities to audiences of tens or hundreds of thousands, and are well worthy of serious consideration. 

Intense physical exercise is not the only way to better health. Studies show that walking several times a week can lower the risk of many diseases. They include heart disease, stroke, diabetes, bone loss, arthritis (关节炎), and depression. Walking also can help you lose weight.

Fast walking is good for the heart. It lowers the blood pressure. It raises the amount of good cholesterol(胆固醇) in the blood. Researchers say walking can sharply reduce the risk of suffering a heart attack.

Studies have also shown that walking for 30 minutes a day can delay and possibly prevent the development of diabetes. People who are overweight have an especially high risk to develop this disease.

Walking strengthens the muscles and builds up the bones that they are attached to. Studies show that walking could decrease the risk of developing osteoporosis (骨质疏松症). Walking can also help ease the pain of arthritis in areas where bones are joined. This is because walking strengthens the muscles around the bones.

Experts say walking is one of the safest ways to exercise. There is a low risk of injuries. So it is good for people who are starting an exercise program for the first time and for older people.

A walking program is easy to start. You should wear loose clothes and good shoes. There are shoes that are designed especially for lots of walking.

How fast should you walk? For the best effect, doctors say you should walk fast enough to cause you to breathe hard. Yet you should still be able to talk. Let your arms move freely while you walk.

There are no rules to starting a walking program. You might walk short distances. Or you might walk up hills to strengthen your leg muscles. Health experts say you can gain the most from a walking program if you walk at about five kilometers an hour for 30 minutes a day. You should do this about five times a week.

Walking to (71) ______ fit
(72) ______ of walking	Superiorities to other exercises	Tips to walkers
Reducing the risk of a heart attack • lowering the blood pressure • raising good cholesterol	Being (75) ______ than many other ways of exercise, especially for beginners or (76) ______	Wear loose clothes and good shoes.
		Walk fast enough to cause you to breathe with (78) ______ but still able to talk.
Controlling the development of diabetes • helping you (73) ______ weight		Walk with your arms (79) ______ freely.
Decreasing the risk of osteoporosis and arthritis • strengthening the muscles • (74) ___

Are you a recent graduate looking for ways to be successful in your career? Try thinking of yourself as a product and find ways to “upgrade”（升级）yourself every year.

   Companies spend time every year listening to their customers’ needs and then they work on upgrading and improving their products. Why? So they can sell more of their products and services in the marketplace. You can use this business process of continual product improvement to make yourself more valuable as an employee as you progress through your career.

Determine how you can “upgrade” yourself, and be creative. Improvement doesn’t necessarily cost much. For example, what would happen if you picked one topic each year? Let’t say you chose. the topic of project management. Then you went to the library and each month you checked out or downloaded and read a different book about project management. How much of an expert on this topic could you become after one year? If you started this practice now, just think about how many topics you could learn about and become an expert in over the next 10-20 years.

Learning shouldn’t stop after graduating from high school or college. Continuously seeking knowledge should be a lifelong pursuit（追求）. Consider all the inspiring stores about women who go back to college later in life and pursue a completely new career path after having raised their children. Or, the real life stories of men and women who were laid off(fired) due to company downsizing, obtained additional training and successfully changed careers. Wonderful stories can be found all around the world and the foundation for the person’s accomplishment is almost always their willingness and openness to learn new things.

The best way to improve yourself and increase your value as an employee may be to always keep learning and growing. As Jim Rohn, a business philosopher, once said, “Never wish life were easier, wish that you were better.”

If You Get In, Make College Count

Here is an unfortunate truth: For far too many incoming freshmen, college－any college－is not worth it. Year after year, students fail to get the full value of their tuition.

Many critics blame this cost/value problem on the universities, though each critic might point to a different reason: teachers always think of difficult research, the high costs of athletics, or the popularity of majors that are supposedly not suited to the new job market, to name some of their favorites.

But these are symptoms and not the illness itself. In our experience, the source of the wasted university experience begins with the student. Too often, students make bad choices or, frankly, just not enough great choices.

Too often we meet students who are so exhausted by the business of getting into college that they don’t work hard once they arrive－one of the most common wastes of time and tuition. A poorly constructed transcript (成绩单) can be destructive to a student’s education. Failure to engage and build professional working relationships with professors in office hours (which may lead to continued study, internships and more) also hurts the student’s experience. Another mistake is failing to make use of the many support networks on today’s college campuses. It’s almost embarrassing how many good offerings are rolled into each tuition dollar, but most students don’t know they exist.

Another common point of failure is filling the schedule with too many extracurricular activities as students once did in high school, rather than getting intensely involved in one or two at most. The same can be said of overburdened course loads.

The final great failure we frequently see is the approach students (and their parents) take to selecting a major and accurately seeing its impact on a future career. University systems are not vocational schools. While critics nowadays complain about the attraction of useless majors – and some do exist – more frequently we see too many students pursue a course of study that is not their strength, simply because it seems to have obvious connections to a potential job after graduation.

Rather than perform poorly in a “practical” major and be of little interest as a future job candidate, we say it is better to major in a subject where a student would do well and master the tools of communication and analysis. Students who choose a unique major should complement (使完美) that with some well-chosen skill courses, internships and other co-curricular activities that help with career opportunities after college.

So, is college worth it? It can be. Studies show that college graduates have many advantages – material, social and emotional – that can lead to greater success later in life.

To get the full value out of college, students must be as diligent and creative about getting out of college as they were about getting in. After all, the most beautiful, Olympic saltwater pool does you no good if you don’t know how to swim.

    Persistence means keeping going in spite of difficulties or challenges and continuing moving forward no matter what happens. Persistence is a powerful force that can be used to achieve your success. As you know, success just doesn’t fall into your lap; you have to take action, and like climbing a ladder, it takes positive action one step at a time.

       Abraham Lincoln is a good example of persistence in action. Known as one of the greatest presidents in history, Lincoln failed to win 8 elections before he finally became the 16^th President of the United States. He also lost his business twice and could have considered himself as a loser, but he didn’t. He was persistent and believed he could realize his dream.

       Another great example is the wonderful children’s writer, Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. His book, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street”, was rejected buy over 43 publishers before finally getting a yes. Many people would have given up after a handful of rejections but he didn’t grow disheartened and he made a greater effort. Dr. Seuss went on to become one of the best-selling children’s writers, selling more than 200 million copies of his books.

       Do you have a passion? Did you once have a passionate interest in something, but have now put it on the back burner because things weren’t going as fast as you’d like? If you’re passionate about something, chances are you’re persistent in moving toward it. Do you have a goal of becoming a famous author? Then you’ll have to be determined and be able to persist even after you get 10 or 100 rejection letters for your article or book. I’ve read about plenty of professional athletes, artists, and business owners, who were faced with plenty of difficulties but succeeded through a combination of passion and persistence.

       Now that you understand that persistence is powerful and necessary, you might be wondering how you can include it in your life. It’s not as difficult as you might think.

       Have you come to a stop in your progress? Talk to someone else who has been there, and get some advice. Are you extremely upset or have you given up/ Come on, try to look on the bright side. Sometimes all it takes is sharing your problems with someone else to gain fresh ideas.

Family structure is the core of any culture. A major function of the family is to socialize new members of a culture. As children are raised in a family setting, they learn to become members of the family as well as members of the larger culture. The family provides the model for all other relationships in society. Through the observations and modeling of the behavior of other family members, children learn about the family and society including the values of the culture. Family structure and their inherent relationships and obligations are a major source of cultural difference.

   The family is the center of most traditional Asians’ lives. Many people worry about their families’ welfare, reputation, and honor. Asian families are often extended, including several generations related by blood or marriage living in the same home. An Asian person’s misdeeds are not blamed just on the individual but also on the family—including the dead ancestors.

    Traditional Chinese, among many other Asians, respect their elders and feel a deep sense of duty toward them. Children repay their parents’ sacrifices by being successful and supporting them in old age. This is accepted as a natural part of life in China. In contrast, taking care of aged parents is often viewed as tremendous burden in the United States, where aging and family support are not honored highly.

The Vietnamese family consists of people currently alive as well as the spirits of the dead and of the as-yet unborn. Any decisions or actions are done from family considerations, not individual desires. People’s behavior is judged on whether it brings shame or pride to the family. Vietnamese children are trained to rely on their families, to honor elderly people, and to fear foreigners. Many Vietnamese think that their actions in this life will influence their status in the next life.

Fathers in traditional Japanese families are typically strict and distant. Japanese college students in one study said they would tell their fathers just about as much as they would tell a total stranger. The emotional and communication barrier between children and fathers in Japan appears very strong after children have reached a certain age.

Although there has been much talk about “family values” in the United States, the family is not a usual frame of reference for decisions in U.S. mainstream culture. Family connections are not so important to most people. Dropping the names of wealthy or famous people the family knows is done in the United States, but it is not viewed positively. More important is a person’s own individual “track record” of personal achievement.

Thus, many cultural differences exist in family structures and values. In some cultures, the family is the center of life and the main frame of reference for decisions. In other cultures, the individuals, not the family, is primary. In some cultures, the family’s reputation and honor depend on each person’s actions; in other cultures, individuals can act without permanently affecting the family life. Some cultures value old people, while other cultures look down on them.

(Adapted from R. L. Oxford & R. C. Scarcella, “A Few Family Structures and Values Around the Globe”)

A best friend is someone you can trust with your deepest secrets, depend on in case of emergency and celebrate meaningful life events with. But developing the skills in being your own best friend means you can depend on your own judgment and be your own source of comfort when you need advice or support. Being your own best friend can also be a great way to work through feelings of loneliness and insecurity in your life. By cultivating(培养) a productive and positive self, you can learn to trust yourself on a continuous basis.

   There are two effective ways that can help you be your own best friend, one of which is to create a healthy relationship with yourself. For this, you need to spend time getting to know yourself. Think about what drives and motivates you, what you like and dislike, and what you are good at or need to improve. The more you understand yourself on an honest and real level, the easier itˈll be to like and respect yourself for who you are.

   In addition, thinking about your relationships with other people in your life c an also help you create a healthy relationship with yourself because good relationships in your life can serve as models for how to be your own best friend. You can write down the names of the people you

consider important in your life, and why they are important to you. Think about questions like,

"why am 1 grateful to have these persons in my life?"

   The other effective way is enjoying your own company. To achieve this, you can take a trip to a foreign country or place alone. This trip is a great way to develop strong independence and self-reliance as well as openness to different attitudes and customs of others. Cultivating a hobby

you can enjoy alone or taking up an activity that involves just you are also good ways to get used to your own company and like it. With the upset of someone else sitting across from you, you may find you pay less attention to the movie or the band, or that you are less aware of your own opinions on the environment around you.

More importantly. when you do something youˈre proud of, praise yourself for it. By admitting your self-worth and cultivating inner value, youˈre taking control of what makes you feel good. However, rather than try to make your choices and decisions into what someone else defines(界定)as successful or powerful. turn inward(向内心或灵魂) and admit that you have value ad meaning in the world. Donˈt wait for someone else to recognize your self-worth.

To make our digestive (消化的) system work well, we should avoid doing some things after having a meal, for example, drinking water. It is true that a person should drink 8 glasses of water every day to stay healthy. However, drinking water right after eating or even during a meal may disrupt (扰乱) digestion（消化）. It might affect the natural levels of acid and bile (酸和胆汁) that are necessary for proper digestion. What’s more, drinking cold water after eating might slow down（减慢）digestion. So try to avoid drinking water at least an hour after a meal, and avoid drinking it while eating.

Though walking after eating is healthy, doing it immediately after a meal is not. Doing so will make it difficult for the digestive system to take in nutrients (营养) from the food. Besides, the blood will flow towards other parts of the body, like legs, hands, etc., which will make the digestive tract not have enough amount of blood flow that is needed for proper digestion. So we should wait for at least 2 hours after eating, and then begin exercising.

Sleeping should also be avoided right after eating. This is because going to bed right after a meal will lead to improper digestion. What’s more, such a habit will also make you put on a lot of weight. Therefore, wait for an hour or two, and then go to sleep.

Many of us have the habit of drinking tea just after lunch or dinner, which is really unhealthy. The tea leaves are rich in（富含）acid which prevents the protein in the food from digesting. The best time to drink tea is at least one hour after eating.

Eating fruits right after a meal may fill the stomach with air and cause discomfort. They will also take time to reach the digestive tract, disturbing the entire process of digestion. To protect your stomach from digestive problems, eat fruits before or after 1-2 hours of a meal.

In a word, if you avoid doing all the above things after eating, you will surely make your digestion easy, and you will be less likely to have digestive problems.