Remembering names is an important social skill. Here are some ways to master it.

●Recite and repeat in conversation.

   When you hear a person’s name, repeat it. Immediately say it to yourself several times without moving your lips. You could also repeat the name in a way that does not sound forced or artificial.

●Ask the other person to recite and repeat.

  You can let other people help you remember their names. After you’ve been introduced to someone, ask that person to spell the name and pronounce it correctly for you. Most people will be pleased by the effort you’re making to learn their names.

●Admit you don’t know.

  Admitting that you can’t remember someone’s name can actually make people relaxed. Most of them will feel sympathy if you say. “I’m working to remember names better. Yours is right on the tip of my tongue. What is it again?”

●Use associations.

   Link each person you meet with one thing you find interesting or unusual. For example, you could make a mental note: “Vicki Cheng－tall, black hair.” To reinforceyour associations, write them on a small card as soon as possible.

●Limit the number of new names you learn at one time.

   When meeting a group of people, concentrate on remembering just two or three names. Free yourself from remembering every one. Few of the people in mass introductions expect you to remember their names. Another way is to limit yourself to learning first names. Last names can come later.

●Go early.

Consider going early to conferences, parties and classes. Sometime just a few people show up on time. There’re fewer names for you to remember. And as more people arrive, you can hear them being introduced to others --- an automatic review for you.

     D

We have a crisis on our hands. You mean global warming? The world economy? No, the decline of reading. People are just not doing it anymore, especially the young. Who's responsible? Actually, it's more like, What is responsible? The Internet, of course, and everything that comes with it ─Facebook, Twitter. You can write your own list.

There's been a warning about the imminent death of literate civilization for a long time. In the 20th century, first it was the movies, then radio, then television that seemed to spell doom for the written world. None did. Reading survived; in fact it not only survived, it has flourished. The world is more literate than ever before ─ there are more and more readers, and more and more books.

The fact that we often get our reading material online today is not something we should worry over. The electronic and digital revolution of the last two decades has arguably shown the way forward for reading and for writing. Take the arrival of e-book readers as an example. Devices like Kindle make reading more convenient and are a lot more environmentally friendly than the traditional paper book.

As technology makes new ways of writing possible, new ways of reading are possible. Interconnectivity allows for the possibility of a reading experience that was barely imaginable before. Where traditional books had to make do with photographs and illustrations, an e-book can provide readers with an unlimited number of links: to texts, pictures, and videos. In the future, the way people write novels, history, and philosophy will resemble nothing seen in the past.

On the other hand, there is the danger of trivialization. One Twitter group is offering its followers single-sentence-long “digests” of the great novels. War and Peace in a sentence? You must be joking. We should fear the fragmentation of reading. There is the danger that the high-speed connectivity of the Internet will reduce our attention span ─ that we will be incapable of reading anything of length or which requires deep concentration.

In such a fast-changing world, in which reality seems to be remade each day, we need the ability to focus and understand what is happening to us. This has always been the function of literature and we should be careful not to let it disappear. Our society needs to be able to imagine the possibility of someone utterly in tune with modern technology but also able to make sense of a dynamic, confusing world.

In the 15th century, Johannes Guttenberg's invention of the printing press in Europe had a huge impact on civilization. Once upon a time the physical book was a challenging thing. We should remember this before we assume that technology is out to destroy traditional culture.

D

    Scientists are trying to make the deserts into good land again. They want to bring water to the deserts，so people can live and grow food. They are learning a lot about the deserts. But more and more of the earth is becoming deserts all the time. Scientists may not be able to change the deserts. Scientists think that people make deserts. People are doing bad things to the earth.

    Some places on the earth don't get much rain. But they still don't become desert. This is because some green plants are growing there. Small green plants and grass are very helpful to dry places. Plants don't let the hot sun make the earth even drier. Plants don't let the wind blow the earth away. When a little bit of rain falls，the plants hold the water. Without the plants，the land can become a desert much more easily.

       Home to me means a sense of familiarity and nostalgia（怀旧）. It’s fun to come home. It looks the same. It smells the same. You’ll realize what’s changed is you. Home is where we can remember pain, love and some other experiences: We parted here; My parents met here; I won three championships here.

       If I close my eyes, I can still have a clear picture in mind of my first home. I walk in the door and see a brown sofa surrounding a low glass-top wooden table. To the right of the living room is my first bedroom. It’s empty, but it’s where my earliest memories are.

       There is the dining room table where I celebrated birthdays and where I cried on Halloween---when I didn’t want to wear the skirt my mother made for me. I always liked standing on that table because it made me feel tall and strong. If I sit at this table, I can see my favorite room in the house, my parents’ room. It is simple: a brown wooden dresser lines the right side of the wall next to a television and a couple of photos of my grandparents on each side. Their bed is my safe zone. I can jump on it anytime---waking up my parents if I am scared or if I have an important announcement that cannot wait until the morning.

I’m lucky because I know my first home still exists. It exists in my mind and heart, on a physical property（住宅）on West 64th street on the western edge of Los Angeles. It is proof I lived, I grew, and I learned.

Sometimes when I feel lost, I lie down and shut my eyes, and I go home. I know it’s where I’ll find my family, my dogs, and my belongings. I purposely leave the window open at night because I know I’ll be blamed by Mom. But I don’t mind, because I want to hear her say my name, which reminds me I’m home.

B

A teacher decided to let her class play a game. She told each child to bring along a few potatoes in plastic bags. Each potato would be written a name of a person that the child hated, so the number of potatoes that a child would carry would depend on the number of people the child hated. When the day came, every child brought some potatoes. Some had two; some three and some up to five.

The teacher then told the children to carry the bags wherever they went, even to the toilet, for two weeks. As day after day passed, the children started to complain of the unpleasant smell of the rotten potatoes.

    Those children having five potatoes began to feel the weight of the bags. After two weeks, the children were happy to hear that the game was finally ended. The teacher asked, “How did you feel while carrying the potatoes with you for two weeks?” The children started complaining of the trouble that they had had.

Then the teacher told them the hidden meaning behind the game. She said, “This is exactly the situation when you carry your hatred(憎恨) for somebody inside your heart. The unpleasant smell of hatred will pollute your heart and you will carry an unnecessary burden with you wherever you go. If you can’t tolerate the smell of rotten potatoes for just two weeks, can you imagine what a burden it would be to have the hatred in your heart for your lifetime? So throw away any hatred from your heart. Forgiving others is the best attitude to take.”

You never see him, but they're with you every time you fly. They record where you are going, how fast you're traveling and whether everything on your airplane is functioning normally. Their ability to withstand almost any disaster makes them seem like something out of a comic book. They're known as the black box.

   When planes fall from the sky, as a Yemeni airliner did on its way to Comoros Islands in  the India ocean June 30, 2009, the black box is the best bet for identifying what went wrong. So when a French submarine detected the device's homing signal five days later, the discovery marked a huge step toward determining the cause of a tragedy in which 152 passengers were killed.

   In 1958, Australian scientist David Warren developed a flight-memory recorder that would track basic information like altitude and direction. That was the first mode for a black box, which became a requirement on all U.S. commercial flights by 1960. Early models often failed to withstand crashes, however, so in 1965 the device was completely redesigned and moved to the rear of the plane – the area least subject to impact – from its original position in the landing wells (起落架舱). The same year, the Federal Aviation Authority required that the boxes, which were never actually black, be painted orange or yellow to aid visibility.

   Modern airplanes have two black boxes: a voice recorder, which tracks pilots' conversations, and a flight-data recorder, which monitors fuel levels, engine noises and other operating functions that help investigators reconstruct the aircraft's final moments. Placed in an insulated ( 隔绝的) case and surrounded by a quarter-inch-thick panels of stainless steel, the boxes can withstand massive force and temperatures up to 2,000 ℉. When submerged, they're also able to emit signals from depths of 20,000 ft. Experts believe the boxes from Air France Flight 447, which crashed near Brazil on June 1,2009, are in water nearly that deep, but statistics say they're still likely to turn up. In the approximately 20 deep-sea crashes over the past 30 years, only one plane's black boxes were never recovered.

After a serious disease，Raghu Makwana lost his legs. He had to walk with the support of his hands. A long time back, Raghu and a few friends took a walk on the street with the inspiration to do a small act of kindness. One of his kind behaviors is the Tulsi Project. Whenever he learns of a family with some arguments or even violent abuse(辱骂), Raghu courageously walks in to spread good cheer and gifts them a tulsi plant. Most of these are complete strangers. Sometimes he’ll recite a prayer, sometimes he’ll share stories. To start 2011, When he lived out on the streets，he often felt deeply moved by others on the streets who had even less than him, and Raghu gave birth to such an idea, of course, which was also his first dream.

     He made a promise to himself that he would return to serve them one day, and that day had arrived for him. He put together a team of five everyday folks, (one of whom is blind), who would make small sacrifices in their own lives to support delivery of hand­-cooked meals for some of the absolutely neglected people on the streets. They appropriately named it “Tyaag Nu Tiffin”(Food of Sacrifice)．Every day at 12∶30 PM and at 7∶30 PM，Raghu starts off on his hand tricycle to deliver the food. It’s the same food he himself eats，but he won’t eat it until he has finished his round of offerings. In a recent feature in The Times of India，Raghu notes：“I’m not doing anything great. I’m not on a mission to change the world. God has been very kind to me in my struggle to survive. Now it is my turn to repay the kindness by helping other needy human beings.”

Though Malala Yousafzai is 17, she does not use Facebook or even a mobile phone so that she can’t lose focus on her studies. She spent her summer vacation flying to Nigeria to campaign for the release(释放) of girls caught by the extremist Islamist group Boko Haram, but also worrying about her grades, which recently took a worrisome dip. She confronted President Obama about American drone policy(无人机政策) in a meeting last year, but finds it difficult to make friends with her fellow students in Birmingham, England.

“I want to have fun, but I don’t quite know how,” she wrote in the edition of her autobiography for young readers.

On Friday, Ms. Yousafzai became the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and she was called out of her chemistry class to hear the news.

Ms. Yousafzai began campaigning for girls’ education at the age of 11, three years before she was shot by the Taliban. The prize she received on Friday accepts what she has taken on, but also shows the expectations to her: Can she truly influence the culture of her home country of Pakistan, which she cannot even visit because of threats to her safety, and where many people see her as a tool of the West?

And in an interview last August, Ms. Yousafzai said that she rarely watches television and deleted the Candy Crush game from her iPad to prevent a growing addiction(成瘾). As a child in Pakistan, she had access to only a handful of books, she said, but one was a biography of Dr. King, giving her an early sense of what one activist could accomplish.

In a brief speech in Birmingham on Friday, she called the prize “an encouragement for me to go forward and believe in myself.”