I have just one picture left of my mother. In it, she(seat) slightly hunched, elbows touching knees, and her arms are carrying the weight of her back. I know about her life when it was taken; my only clue is written in orange marker on the back. It reads: Me on 6th St. 1971.

The picture tells me that she was a serious-looking teenager. Her lips are pressed together in thought, (offer) a grimace for the camera. Framing her face, her hair dangles in beautiful wisps of black, smoke-like curls. And her eyes, my favourite part, shine like two dark marbles,movements are frozen in time forever.

I've studied each feature, committing them to memory for my trips to the mirror,let my own wavy hair tumble down. I stand and trace similarities with the tip of my finger through the curve of each line in my face, starting with our eyes. Each pair offers the same small, rounded shape, only my mother's brown, I have Grandma's rich yellow-green.we share some features, I know I'm not as pretty as she was at my age.

In my years with nowhere  (live), behind the locked bathroom doors in different friends' apartments, I've secretly played this game in the mirror throughout all hours of the night. I stand there fantasizing the first blue hints of dawn strain through the frosted bathroom glass and birds announce themselves, chirping their morning songs. I travel quietly across their waking apartments to my resting spot. I never get too comfortable with my accommodations,I'm not sure if I will sleep in the same place tomorrow.

I've always viewed life as an opportunity. That might be to explore or to learn. I'm never more excited than when I find a new thing to be excited about. That might be something as simple as table tennis-but if I get excited about table tennis, I want to become really good at table tennis! There's no midpoint with me. I'm always searching for new ways to develop myself. I like my drive.

My generation had an unhealthy relationship with drugs. This is going to sound like real old-man story, but regarding the young generation, I don't worry about them doing that. I worry about how much time they spend in front of computers and phones. I worry that living in the moment has been lost.

Relationships fascinate me. You learn so much from them. You could go live in a cave in the Himalayas and spend 50 years standing on one leg in a tree pose, meditating, trying to find yourself. Or you could get married.

I've been up and down about the band so many times. I've thought "Can we continue without repeating ourselves?" or "I don't want to do it any more, I want to grow, I don't want to be held prisoner by money, fame or power." Then we'll play a great show or write a song that has me tingling with excitement and I' m completely in love with it again.

There is great joy in obsession. But I'm not sure it's healthy for me. Why do I get obsessed? Is it anger or fear, or a yearning to be understood? To connect with the divine and find the beautiful things in life? I think my story lies in trying to understand that about myself.

You can grow from pain if you don't run from it. My book is part of the process of coming to terms with me. Things that people did in my childhood that were very painful. Things I didn't like about myself. There are times in my life where I think I might have been disrespectful. It's easy to justify behaviour like that. It's a survival mechanism.

My favourite writers have a style. I thought my style was feverish wild, but while I think there's a time and a place for that, the best writing is enjoyable to read, too. Patti Smith helped me a lot. She told me," Flea, it's like making music. Sometimes you have to play an ensemble(合奏) part. Sometimes you play a solo. All those skills can be applied to writing." When I understood the parallels between the two artforms, I started to find my voice.

Acid for the Children, Flea's autobiography, is published by Headline at ￡ 10. 99. Buy it for￡ 9. 61 at guardianbookshop.com.

每个人都渴望成功，你觉得成功有没有秘诀呢？简要描述某人的成功事例，并谈谈事例对你的启发。

There are plenty of animals that seem, at first glance, to be evolutionary mistakes; that appear to have evolved obviously1features. Yet on closer inspection, it often turns out that2is cleverer than you are.

Take the Australian night parrot as an example. As the3indicates, it is active at night, which you might think would mean it can see well in the dark. However, in June 2020, Vera Weisbecker at the University of Queensland, Australia, reported that its eye sockets were smaller than those of other parrots, as were its optic nerves. The study's accompanying press release said the bird "may not be much better at seeing in the dark than other parrots active during the day".

That may4look like an evolutionary mistake. However, Weisbecker's team doesn't5anything of the kin. The researchers only had access to a skull (头骨), so they couldn't examine the bird's actual eyes, which might have got6to the dark. "What they suggest, based on the information they do have, is that its visual system is a kind of compromise ( 妥协) between7to low light and also visual keenness," says Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill at the University of Essex, UK. That isn't a mistake -it is evolution8two competing problems.

Similarly, there is a9idea that big spiders like the Goliath bird-eater, the largest in the world by mass, will "explode" if they fall even a few feet. This isn't only exaggerated; it is a10of how such spiders live.

Species like the Goliath bird-eater are indeed vulnerable to11"If a large tarantula drops itself from a12if it is unlucky enough to land upside down or with great13the exoskeleton could break open and the spider could bleed to death quite quickly, "says Paula Cushing at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science in Colorado. However, she says that exploding and shattering are misleading descriptions.

More to the point, in14, these spiders are rarely at risk of falling any distance at all, says Brent Hendrixson at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. "They're15predators and probably rarely venture to locations that would result in a fatal fall."

Raising children in the city is stressful. For the first time ever, a majority of humans (including children) live in urban areas. Even dense metropoles are filling with kids. These cities were designed by men who didn't do childcare, and it shows.

The single thing that did most to deprive this generation of children and parents of their freedom is the car. In 1970about 80 percent of British eight-year-olds walked to school unaccompanied. By 1990, only 9 percent did. What changed in the intervening period was that British car use doubled.

That means parents now spend most evenings and weekends with their kids. Sometimes my children kick a football around the breakfast table.But it's even more frustrating for them. My daughter, aged 11, does not cross the busy road in front of our house alone. The kids are our prisoners, and we are theirs.

Throw into this mix another lethal piece of tech: the iPad, the robot babysitter. Instead of spending your afternoon chivvying your kids, you can now just let them zone out to the video game Clash Royale.That's a common event in London.

Happily, the car-kid balance is now shifting in many cities. Bike lanes, shared cars, and eventually driverless vehicles mean that fewer urbanites need to own cars. That frees up parking spaces. In the space now occupied by an empty car, you could install a ping-pong table, slide or vegetable garden.One day urban kids will be freed from captivity. Then they and adults will share the city fairly (which means that kids won't be allowed to run laps around restaurant tables). It just won't happen in time for my generation of parents.

Being a Successful English Learner

International standard state schools use English in doing their learning process, and many private schools utilize it so that the students might be able to use it in their daily activity. In the study of English, some students can understand easily and get successful. However, others may find it very hard to. study English well. It seems that learning English brings not only pleasure, but also trouble for students.

As a result, what we have to do is to find out several keys to be a successful learner of English. One of the keys is that we need to surround ourselves with English. This means that we have to use English whenever and wherever we are, especially when we have short or long conversation with friends in class. In addition, if we can apply it at home even in our environment, that's much better in order to enhance our opportunity to be fluent in speaking English. Another key is to be confident in learning English. This attitude extremely helps us to defeat our shyness in applying English in our daily life.

A research has shown that one of obstacles which hampers students to learn English well is unconfident. Sometimes they are unconfident to speak English owing to the fact that they are afraid of having incorrect pronunciation. Thus, in order to get accustomed to English, we are expected to practice this language confidently any when and anywhere. In addition, we have to learn it earnestly. The prophet of Muhammad said, "Someone who does something earnestly then he or she will get successful." From this utterance, we obtain a strong conclusion that it is essential for us to cultivate a strict style and create a good habit of learning.

Once we decide to learn English, we must persist in doing it. Consequently, everything which we do must relate to English such as keeping a diary in English, doing a bit of reading in the spare time, and improving vocabulary every day. In a nutshell, it is inevitable that the way we learn determines fully the success which we will achieve. These are some of the important keys which every student has to own to be a successful English learner. Hopefully, we can implement them in our learning system so that we can reach our goal.