英语在线读

How about one year olde

My bitthday past a couple days,and there is something what I thought.Among the main reasons for delaying in writing were poor of my English.

Age and Mind

As I was little,I would image how about was during the twentys.Life would be free,bright,and full of energy,and I would be independence,lovely woman,or anything could take control.but it’s opposite.I am disappointed in this situation for my life.

I don’t afraid get older at this moment,but I scare my mind doesnot match my age.No matter who you are,there are diverse characters to take you to act,and make you know how exactly about the life or about ourselves.I really know it isnot mature enough for me.So my age becomes a concept getting more and more special,and it’s hard to make words to express.The next year is the Chinese zodiac calendar which is the tiger,which is my year,and one cycle of my life.How to create a better cycle in my life becomes new topic.

Around me

Last weekend we,classmates of college,gathered again since graduation.What a nice gathering!Over the students’life nearly one year,some topic I always think about,just study,career,life,family,friends or even more.It’s perhaps no answers but the time.time will give the answers as long as it isnot too late.

Some changes have happened,about me,and others around.Perhaps it isnot only just by person themselves,but also by environment.and it is going on.Well,thank you everyone.Thank you for your wishes and presents.I am happy and feel warm.By the way,I take shame that I miss someones’bitthday or others else but who care about me.But I take all of these to my heart and try my best to do well.So…Thank you all the same.

i hate that everything is out of my control.

it happens as it was so right.

i was cheated by u two. forgive sounds good, but forget i think i never could.

u two totally have no idea that how much i want to forgive u.

and how much i miss u. but... when u destroyed the trust, u destroyed everything including my life.

i don't know who to trust now.

we three had so much sweet memory. and i have to learn to forget them all.now,i try to hide the hurt.

just move on. when something is wrong,i always told myself that everything would be all right.

and i could handle everythig, cause that was me, that was my life.

Once upon a time, there was an island where all the feelings lived: Happiness, Sadness, Knowledge, and all of the others, including Love. One day it was announced to the feelings that the island would sink, so all constructed boats and left. Except for Love.

Love was the only one who stayed. Love wanted to hold out until the last possible moment.

When the island had almost sunk, Love decided to ask for help.

Richness was passing by Love in a grand boat. Love said,

"Richness, can you take me with you?"

Richness answered, "No, I can't. There is a lot of gold and silver in my boat. There is no place here for you."

Love decided to ask Vanity who was also passing by in a beautiful vessel. "Vanity, please help me!"

"I can't help you, Love. You are all wet and might damage my boat," Vanity answered.

Sadness was close by so Love asked, "Sadness, let me go with you."

"Oh . . . Love, I am so sad that I need to be by myself!"

Happiness passed by Love, too, but she was so happy that she did not even hear when Love called her.

Suddenly, there was a voice, "Come, Love, I will take you." It was an elder. So blessed and overjoyed, Love even forgot to ask the elder where they were going. When they arrived at dry land, the elder went her own way. Realizing how much was owed the elder, Love asked Knowledge, another elder, "Who Helped me?"

"It was Time," Knowledge answered.

"Time?" asked Love. "But why did Time help me?"

Knowledge smiled with deep wisdom and answered, "Because only Time is capable of understanding how valuable Love is."

The picture describes a conversation between two people,one of them said： “I readabout 3 hours a day.My favorite book is Facebook.” The picture intends toinform us that the Internet has exerted an important influence on reading forthe modern citizens.

The phenomenon involves many factors,which canbe listed as the follows. To begin with,with the rapid development of scientific technology,The Internet has become indispensable in our daily life.Undoubtedly,it provides people with many advantages and makes our life morecomfortable and efficient, including the way of reading.Whats more,it is a moreadvanced way to get information needed by people,and an efficient way to search for materials.“I have hardly ever bought any books since 2003.I have been reading online in recent years.”said professor Wang from Peking University.“With the click of the mouse,any stories or information that I want at anygiven time or place,is there.”she said.This may well explain why so many people now prefer to embrace the wonders of the Internet than read print copiesof book or any other reading material.

Every coin has two sides,reading in social networking websites is no exception. Admittedly,there is false and useless information on the social networking websites, it isadvisable that we read more critically and carefully.

As Gilbert White, Darwin, and others observed long ago, all species appear to have the innate capacity to increase their numbers from generation to generation. The task for ecologists is to untangle the environmental and biological factors that hold this intrinsic capacity for population growth in check over the long run. The great variety of dynamic behaviors exhibited by different population makes this task more difficult: some populations remain roughly constant from year to year; others exhibit regular cycles of abundance and scarcity; still others vary wildly, with outbreaks and crashes that are in some cases plainly correlated with the weather, and in other cases not.

To impose some order on this kaleidoscope of patterns, one school of thought proposes dividing populations into two groups. These ecologists posit that the relatively steady populations have density-dependent growth parameters; that is, rates of birth, death, and migration which depend strongly on population density. The highly varying populations have density-independent growth parameters, with vital rates buffeted by environmental events; these rates fluctuate in a way that is wholly independent of population density.

This dichotomy has its uses, but it can cause problems if taken too literally. For one thing, no population can be driven entirely by density-independent factors all the time. No matter how severely or unpredictably birth, death, and migration rates may be fluctuating around their long-term averages, if there were no density-dependent effects, the population would, in the long run, either increase or decrease without bound . Put another way, it may be that on average 99 percent of all deaths in a population arise from density-independent causes, and only one percent from factors varying with density. The factors making up the one percent may seem unimportant, and their cause may be correspondingly hard to determine. Yet, whether recognized or not, they will usually determine the long-term average population density.

Some people prefer to stay in the same job for the same company; but others prefer to change jobs frequently.

You should use specific reasons to compare the advantages and disadvantages of both sides.

The uncritical view that is prevalent among some people at present is that people can no longer expect a job for life. This conception has its advantages, as far as I can see, especially at a time when new technologies constantly turn up. Therefore, a person will have to pursue several careers during his life, so that he will not become technologically obsolete, with skills that are no longer needed.

Furthermore, large corporations sometimes make it a policy to move their men from one job to another. This is the protean man, having several different lives and having a variety of work experiences. But the disadvantages of this frequent shifting of ones job is expending too much time and energy on renewing ones knowledge and learning new skills, and the difficulty of landing a suitable job, especially in a recession when rivalry for employment becomes severe.

In contrast to those protean men, some people will stay in the same job for the same company. This practice avoids the risk of losing ones accumulated rights, especially during a recession and the risk of joining on a last in, first out basis when they go to a new company. But what they lose is promotion because nowadays promotion is increasingly through career moves between companies.

Over the years, I never thought of my father as being very emotional, and he never was, at least not in front of me. Even though he was 68 years old and only five-foot-nine, while I was six feet and 260 pounds, he seemed huge to me. I always saw him as being that staunch disciplinarian who rarely cracked a smile. My father never told me he loved me when I was a child, and I never held it against him. I think that all I really wanted was for my dad to be proud of me. In my youth, Mom always showered me with “I love you’s” every day. So I really never thought about not hearing it from my dad. I guess deep down I knew that he loved me, he just never said it. Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever told him that I loved him, either. I never really thought about it much until I faced the reality of death.

On November 9th, 1990, I received word that my National Guard unit was being activated for Operation Desert Shield. We would convoy to Fort Ben Harrison, Indiana, and then directly to Saudi Arabia. I had been in the Guard for 10 years and never dreamed that we would be activated for a war, even though I knew it was what we trained for. I went to my father and gave him the news. I could sense he was uneasy about me going. We never discussed it much more, and eight days later I was gone.

I have several close relatives who have been in the military during war time. My father and uncle were in World War II, and two brothers and a sister served in Vietnam. While I was extremely uneasy about leaving my family to serve my country in a war zone, I knew it was what I had to do. I prayed that this would make my father proud of me. My father is very involved in the Veterans of Foreign Wars organization and has always been for a strong military. I was not eligible to join the Veterans of Foreign Wars because I had not been in a war zone—a fact that always made me feel like I didn’t measure up in my father’s eyes. But now here I was, his youngest son, being shipped off to a foreign land 9,000 miles away, to fight a war in a country we had barely heard of before.

On November 17, 1990, our convoy of military vehicles rolled out of rural Greenville, Michigan. The streets were filled with families and well-wishers to see us off. As we approached the edge of town, I looked out the window of my truck and saw my wife, Kim, my children, and Mom and Dad. They were all waving and crying, except for my father. He just stood there, almost like a stone statue. He looked incredibly old at that moment. I don’t know why, he just did.

I was gone for that Thanksgiving and missed our family’s dinner. There was always a crowd, with two of my sisters, their husbands and children, plus my wife and our family. It disturbed me greatly that I couldn’t be there. A few days after Thanksgiving I was able to call my wife, and she told me something that has made me look at my father in a different way ever since.

My wife knew how my father was about his emotions, and I could hear her voice quaver as she spoke to me. She told me that my father recited his usual Thanksgiving prayer. But this time he added one last sentence. As his voice started to crack and a tear ran down his cheek, he said, “Dear Lord, please watch over and guide my son, Rick, with your hand in his time of need as he serves his country, and bring him home to us safely.” At that point he burst into tears. I had never seen my father cry, and when I heard this, I couldn’t help but start to cry myself. My wife asked me what was wrong. After regaining my composure, I said, “I guess my father really does love me.”

One of the most interesting paradoxes in America today is that Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, is now engaged in a serious debate about what a university should be, and whether it is measuring up.

Like the Roman Catholic Church and other ancient institutions, it is asking - still in private rather than in public - whether its past assumptions about faculty, authority, admissions, courses of study, are really relevant to the problems of the 1990s.

『Should Harvard or any other university be an intellectual sanctuary, apart from the political and social revolution of the age, or should it be a laboratory for experimentation with these political and social revolutions; or even an engine of the revolution? 』This is what is being discussed privately in the big clapboard houses of faculty members around the Harvard Yard.

The issue was defined by Waiter Lippmann, a distinguished Harvard graduate, several years ago. If the universities are to do their work, he said, they must be independent and they must be disinterested They are places to which men can turn for judgements which are unbiased by partisanship and special interest. 『Obviously, the moment the universities fall under political control, or under the control of private interests, or the moment they themselves take a hand in politics and the leadership of government, their value as independent and disinterested sources of judgement is impaired.』

Citizens Financial Sells Three Insurance Agencies

Citizens Financial Group (Providence, RI) was a 'Top 25' bank insurance operation last year. That is not likely to be the case in the future.

With its announcement yesterday (March 1) that it was selling three insurance agencies to Hub International Ltd., a Chicago-based insurance brokerage, Citizens (assets: $155 billion) made clear that it sees little future in the full-line insurance brokerage business.

The agencies are Citizens Clair Insurance Group (Norristown, PA); Brewer & Lord (Norwell, MA); and Feitelberg Insurance (Fall River, MA). Collectively they have 19 offices in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Combined revenues were about $45 million last year.

The purchase price for the brokerages was $80 million (inclusive of tangible net worth), payable in cash on closing, as well as an earn-out based on future performance. The insurance agencies will continue to operate independently within the Hub International system.

The transaction was presented by the two companies more as a “strategic alliance” than an outright sale, promising “joint marketing efforts” that would bring a broader array of insurance products and services to Citizen's retail and commercial customers. Citizens Bank will continue to refer clients with insurance needs to the brokerages, presumably, even though they will now be owned by Hub and not Citizens.

“While we achieved both revenue growth and profitability in line with our strategies for the insurance brokerage business, we see a new opportunity to serve our customers by partnering with Hub International as our insurance broker of choice,” said Robert M. Mahoney, vice chairman of Citizens Financial Group. “Our strategic alliance with Hub International will expand our product offerings, locations and expertise, enhancing our competitive position.… We will be able to offer insurance products to corporate customers throughout our 13-state footprint, not just to customers in three local markets.”

In 2003, Citizens Financial, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group, purchased The Feitelberg Company, one of the largest insurance agencies in southeastern New England. With combined annual premiums of $325 million, the transaction made Citizens Bank, its operating bank, one of the largest bank/insurance brokerage operations in the United States. Citizens Clair and Brewer & Lord were acquired earlier, coming to Citizens as part of (larger) bank acquisitions.

Citizens, the eighth-largest commercial banking company in the United States ranked by deposits, was a 'Top 25' institution in Who's Who in Bank Insurance (2005 Edition).

The earn-out payments associated with the transaction will in the aggregate be at least $3 million. This will be payable over three years and, at Hub's option, in cash or a combination of cash and Hub common shares. Martin P. Hughes, HUB CEO, indicated that he expects total consideration for the transaction will be within Hub's target multiple of 5-7 times EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization). Closing of the acquisitions is expected to occur in April 2006 and is subject to the satisfaction of regulatory and other customary conditions.

You may believe me, when I assure you in the most solemn manner that, so far from seeking this employment, I have used every effort in my power to avoid it, not only from my unwillingness to part with you and the family, but from a consciousness of its being a trust too great for my capacity; and I should enjoy more real happiness in one month with you at home that I have the most distant prospect of finding abroad; if my stay were to be seven times seven years. But as it has been a kind of destiny that has thrown me upon this service, I shall hope that has my undertaking it is designed to answer some good purpose...

I shall rely confidently on that Providence which has heretofore preserved and been bountiful to me, not doubting but that I shall return safe to you in the fall. I shall feel no pain from the toil or danger of the campaign; my unhappiness will flow from the uneasiness I know you will feel from being left alone. I therefore beg that you will summon your whole fortitude, and pass your times agreeably as possible. Nothing will give me so much sincere satisfaction as to hear this, and to hear it from your own pen.

George Washington