Mark Twain, as you know, was famous in his day as a public speaker. In his public speeches, he not only liked to tell funny stories, but also liked to play jokes on his friends.

One day, at a railway station, one of his friends lost his wallet and asked Mark Twain to pay the train fare for him.

“Sorry, I don’t have enough money to pay both your fare and mine,” Mark Twain said. The friend did not know what to do.

“We can do this,” Mark Twain said after a while. “You can get on the train and when the conductor comes to check the tickets, you can hide under my seat.”

Later, however, when the conductor came to check the tickets, Mark Twain gave him two tickets — one for his friend and the other for himself. Then he explained in a loud voice, “My friend here is a strange man. When he travels in the train, he does not like to sit on the seat, and he prefers to lie on the floor under the seat.” Of course, everyone in the compartment looked at the poor man under the seat and laughed at him loudly.

Do you ever feel sick of your life? Then why not sell it? This is exactly what one man is attempting to do following the breakdown of his marriage.

Ian Usher, a 44-year-old British man living in Australia, is using the online auction site eBay to sell not only his belongings, but his entire life. Up for grabs (供选购的) are his house and everything that’s in it: his car, his jetski (水上摩托车 ), his parachuting gear, even his pots and pans. But what makes the auction unique is that the package also includes a two-week trial run(试验)at his job as an assistant in a drug store, and even an introduction to his friends in the local area.

The lovelorn Mr Usher said he no longer wanted to be reminded of the life he shared with his ex-wife, and hopes the sale will raise money for a life-changing adventure. He said that once the sale has gone through, he plans to “walk out of his front door with his wallet in one pocket and his passport in the other,” and see where the next plane takes him.

Bidding(竞标)opened on Sunday, and by Monday morning had already reached the staggering figure (高额数字) of 13 million yuan (2 million Australian dollars). Unfortunately for Mr Usher most of the high bids turned out to be fake, as he had not activated a registration system (登记系统) that would have only let genuine (真的) bids through. After removing the bogus bids the value of his “life” stood at 2 million yuan, though he hopes the final figure will be over 3 million yuan.

Whatever the final price he receives, he is by no means the first person to try to sell something unusual online. A fighter jet, a piece of Britney Spears’ chewing gum, and even some toenail clippings have all been sold on eBay.

In 1997, a group of twenty British women made history. Working in five teams with four women in each team, they walked to the North Pole. Apart from one experienced female guide, the other women were all ordinary people who had never done anything like this in their lives before. They managed to survive in an environment which had defeated several very experienced men during the same period.

Once on the ice, each woman had to ski along while dragging a sledge(雪橇) weighing over 50 kilos. This would not have been too bad on a smooth surface, but for long stretches (一片地域), the Arctic ice is pushed up into huge piles two or three meters high and the sledges had to be pulled up on side and carefully let down the other so that they didn't crash. The temperature was always below freezing point and sometimes strong winds made walking while pulling so much weight almost impossible. It was also very difficult to put up their tents when they stopped each night.

In such conditions the women were making good progress if they covered fourteen or fifteen kilometers a day. But there was another problem. Part of the journey was across a frozen sea with moving water underneath the ice and at some points the team would drift (漂流) back more than five kilometers during the night. That meant that after walking in these very terrible conditions for ten hours on one day, they had to spend part of the next day covering the same ground again. Furthermore, each day it would take three hours from waking up to setting off and another three hours every evening to set up the camp and prepare the evening meal.

So, how did they manage to succeed? They realized that they were part of a team. If anyone of them didn't pull her sledge or get her job done, she would endanger the success of the whole expedition (远征探险).Any form of selfishness could result in the efforts of everyone else being completely wasted, so personal feelings had to be put to one side. At the end of their journey, the women agreed that it was mental effort far more than physical fitness that got them to the North Pole.