I watched from a distance as the homeless man quarreled with those who did not leave money for him – the majority.I walked up to him and right on queue he asked me for a quarter. “I’ll give you a quarter if you tell me your story.” He laughed, “You’ll give me a quarter for my story?” I lay the quarter in front of him and corrected myself – “Nah, here’s the quarter but it would be nice to hear your story.” I followed his eyes to the quarter and for a brief moment I saw a glimmer of reflection. I sat down next to him and waited.

    “I was in the army,” he said. “I was a sniper(狙击手)and was supposed to shoot down the enemy from the distance.” I listened carefully to his grizzly voice as he went deeper into the story. He wore dirty old torn clothes and smelled like a dead rat left in a mouse trap. He told me how he used to hunt with his family and was really good at it. He had his own way of respecting animals by not wasting what he killed for food and not killing more than he needed. When the army came knocking on his door, he felt pride and joined up. All those years of polishing his hunting skills could now serve a larger purpose—to defend us from the bad guys. He set out to fight in Iraq.
    It wasn’t long before he realized his ideals and expectations were just a shadow of the truth. He became disillusioned with the killings, which he felt were of innocent people. “I was a sniper but I never really killed anyone,” he said. “One day I had to do it. They asked me to shoot this lady from the distance. I saw kids near that lady and my hands were on the trigger (扳机). Man, I was tearing up ... I couldn’t do it. She wasn’t doing anything to anyone and she was with the kids—I couldn’t see through my tears. It just didn’t make any sense to me.”

The story goes on as he describes eventually being put into prison for 180 days for refusing to follow orders. He told me how he was black listed so that he couldn’t get a job. All the rights we take for granted were taken away from him. Why? Here was a man who was being punished—and for what? For refusing to kill the lady?  For being a hero?  “I have no regrets,” the homeless man said. “I may be homeless now, but I never killed that lady. I never killed anyone in the army. It didn’t feel right. I didn’t go there to do that. I went there to save people.” He continued, “I can live with being homeless—that’s okay. But I wouldn’t be able to live with killing innocent people.”

On that lonely Friday night, I met a hero. It just never occurred to me that a hero could be a smelly old man left on streets.

The popular TV program Readers has prompted more people in China to practice reading aloud in booths(亭) set up in big cities across the country.

As the latest TV show to help peopleˈs love for literature recover, CCTV program Readers invites people from all walks of life to read aloud their favorite poems, essays and books, or even personal letters they wrote to their loved ones. Just as the weekly show has been well-received, its reading booths, equipped with professional recording devices and cameras, have become instant hits.

A crowd of more than 200 people were pictured lining up outside the Shanghai Library at 11 am on March 4 – the first day of the boothˈs opening to the public in Shanghai. The deadline for registrations was brought forward to 2 pm instead of the scheduled 5:30 pm, as the number of waiting readers continued to grow. Some waited more than nine hours for a try-out in the booth, according to library management.

"There is an old photo in the late 1970s capturing people lining up outside the Shanghai Library before it opens. If that was a spring of reading in Shanghai, now I think another spring has arrived again," library manager Zhou Deming, told the Shanghai-based The Paper.

The reading booth is the only one of its kind in the city of economic center at the moment, but more are expected to be put into use in the coming months, according to the libraryˈs website.

The Readers program has also led to booths in other cities including Beijing, Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Xiˈan to appeal to more people to read and share their life stories.

With the recent boom of culture-themed TV shows such as Readers and Chinese Poetry Competition, some are optimistic that this will help the country love literature and reading again in general.

People and animals often enjoy loving relationships with each other. When people adopt domesticated（家养的）animals into their families as pets, animals give humans the blessings of companionship and fun in return. In the wild, animals sometimes carry out dramatic rescues of people in dangerous situations, miraculously（奇迹般地）sensing human needs and jumping in without fear to help.

    In 2000, a 6-year-old boy named Elian Gonzalez left Cuba on a boat bound for Florida in the United States, but the boat sank and everyone aboard drowned except for Elian and two adults. Elian and the other two survivors held onto inner tubes for 48 hours to try to stay afloat in the sea. After a while, however, Elian began to lose strength, slipping under the water and then grabbing the tube again as he fought to stay alive.

    A small group of dolphins noticed Elian struggling and swam over to him to help. The dolphins formed a circle around the inner tube and took turns using their noses to lift Elian up whenever he started to slip off the tube. For hours, the dolphins kept working together to help Elian until fishermen working in the area discovered and rescued Elian and the two adults who floated nearby. The fishermen reported that, when they discovered Elian, he was repeating a prayer that his mother had taught him before drowning, asking guardian angels to protect him.

    Miraculously, the dolphins knew that a child would need more help than adults, so they focused on Elian—and they figured out exactly what needed to be done and cooperated to carry out that plan successfully. They made it!

During the Second World War, I met a housewifefromChicago who told me how she discovered for herself that “the cure for worry is to get completely occupied doing something constructive.” I met this woman and her husband in the diningcarwhile I was traveling from New York to my farm in Missouri.

This couple told me that their son had joined the armed forces the day after Pearl Harbour. The woman told me that she had almost ruined her health worrying over that only son. Where was he? Was he safe? Or in action? Would he be wounded? Killed?

When I askedherhow she overcame her worry,she replied: “I got busy." She told me that at first she had dismissed her maid and tried to keep busy by doing all her housework herself. But thatdidnˈt help much. “The trouble was,” she said, “that I could do my housework almost mechanically. So I kept on worrying. While making the beds and washing the dishes, I realized I needed some new kind of work that would keep me busy both mentally and physically. So I took ajobas a saleswoman in a store.”

“Thatdidit,” she said. “I immediately found myself in a lot of activities: customers crowding around me, asking for prices, sizes, colors. Never a second tothinkof anything except my immediate duty; And when night came, I could think of nothing except getting off my aching feet. As soon as Iatedinner，I fell into bed and instantly(immediately)became unconscious. I had neither the time nor the energy to worry.”

Can you figure out someone's name just by looking at him or her?

    The answer may not be a definite "yes", but a study by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, found that you would at least have a clue, since people with certain names tend to share similar facial appearances.

    For example, if someone is named Bob, he's likely to have a round and joyful face, while someone named Tim tends to have a narrower face and a more serious look.

    People have long been associating names with certain cultural expectations, which may be responsible for the study's results. For example, a woman named Katherine is usually considered to be more reliable than a girl named Bonnie. Previous studies also found that people with traditionally African-American names such as DeShawn and Jamal are more likely to be seen as dangerous and violent by their teachers and are less likely to be hired in jobs.

    These stereotypes(固定模式) have become so widespread that they've even affected how people look at themselves. In fact, people tend to subconsciously(下意识地) change their own personalities to fit into these stereotypes—Katherines may try hard to be trustworthy and Bonnies may care less about the mistakes they make.

    "We develop the personality that other people expect us to exhibit," said lead researcher Youat Zwebner, according to The Telegraph. In other words, it's not that names change people, but people try to live up to their names.

    And our faces may even change over time, based on these stereotypes.

    "Usually, we think that faces are very fixed but now we show that they're not," the study's co-author Ruth Mayo told UK's iNews.

    According to Mayo, the use of different facial expressions can allow people to develop different looks. "If you smile a lot, you have different wrinkles around your eyes and your mouth from if you frown(皱眉)a lot, " she said.

a．A boy name Tim tends to be cautious.

b．A boy named Jamal tends to be violent.

c．A boy named DeShawn appears dangerous.

d．A girl named Bonnie is likely to be seen as joyful.

e．A girl named katherine is usually considered trustworthy.

Dear Alcohol,

You’ve been around forever. I can remember all the pain you’ve caused me.

Several times my daughter had telephoned to say, "Mum, you must come and see the daffodils(水仙花) before they are over."

"But who has done this?" I asked Carolyn. "Itˈs just one woman," Carolyn answered. Thatˈs her home. "Carolyn pointed to a well-kept A-frame house that looked small and modest in the midst of all that glory. We walked up to the house. On the patio(露台), we saw a poster. “Answers to the Questions I Know You Are Asking" was the headline.  The first answer was a simple one. "50,000 bulbs(鳞茎)" it read. The second answer was, "One at a time, by one woman." The third answer was, "Began in 1958." 

I thought of this woman whom I had never met, who, more than fifty years before, had begun—one bulb at a time—to bring beauty and joy to this remote mountain top. Just planting one bulb at a time, year after year, had changed the world where she lived and created something of magnificence, beauty, and inspiration.

When we multiply tiny pieces of time with small amounts of daily effort, we too can accomplish great things. Everyone can do something to change the world.