NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

Last year, the National Park Service (NPS) marked its 100th anniversary with a year-long celebration.

【小题1】. It recognized the preservation and protection of the 417 park service units. Now that those festivities have wrapped up, it’s time to look toward what the next 100 years might look like for the nation’s parks. Here’s a look at some of the major issues facing the nation s parks now and over the next century.

【小题2】. For example, at Shenandoah National Park, park officials note that rising temperatures in streams have already impacted native fish. They are also concerned that climate change will lead to more droughts, floods and wildfires. At Golden Gate National Recreation Area in California, park officials are predicting heat waves, coastal flooding and habitat destruction in response to climate change.

Visitors behave badly. Today, visitors still aim to make their mark on the natural and cultural resources.

【小题3】. But the NPS now has its own branch of law enforcement (执法) officials who are tasked with protecting those resources for and often from park visitors.

There is maintenance backlog (积压).【小题4】. But the donations may drop sharply and raise the possibility of handing the parks over to private corporations. With budget shortfalls and maintenance at all-time highs, it’s likely that these sorts of partnerships will only become more likely in the future.

Despite some major concerns, the future of the NPS looks promising. With a renewed level of interest, and the help of some corporate donations, the parks will be protected for the next century.【小题5】.

An 18-year-old US girl gained unexpected appreciation and a surprise after she gave “extra help” to an elderly man in the restaurant she was working.

It's social media that made her seemingly small action go viral and brought her appreciation from hundreds of thousands of strangers and a scholarship to Texas Southern University.

The heroine Evoni Williams has reportedly been working full-time to earn money for further study in a restaurant in La Marque, Texas, the United States. It was last week when an old man named Adrian Charpentier asked for help to chop his ham for his hands were weak because of illness. On that busy morning when she had loads of work on shoulder, Williams helped the man without hesitation. The moment she was leaning over the counter and cutting the ham was shot by a customer known as Laura Wolf.

Wolf posted the picture on the Internet and wrote, “I'm thankful to have seen this act of kindness and caring at the start of my day while everything in this world seems so negative. If we could all be like this waitress and take time to offer a helping hand. . . ” According to local reports, Wolf didn't know Williams, neither did Williams know her act was shot and shared on the web. However, the small act of kindness soon accumulated its own power on and outside the Internet.

Besides praise from netizens and media reports across the United States, a 16000-dollar scholarship to Texas Southern University was recently granted to Williams to support her study plan on business management.

“We wanted to reward Evoni's act of kindness and let her know that good deeds do not go unnoticed,” said Melinda Spaulding, an administrator at Texas Southern University.

In modern society there is a great deal of argument about competition. Some value it highly, believing that it is responsible for social progress and prosperity. Others say that competition is bad; that it sets one person against another; that it leads to unfriendly relationship between people.

I have taught many children who held the belief that their self-worth relied on how well they performed at tennis and other skills. For them, playing well and winning are often life-or-death matters. In their single-minded pursuit (追求) of success, the development of many other human qualities is sadly forgotten.

However, while some seem to be lost in the desire to succeed, others take an opposite attitude. In a culture which values only the winner and pays no attention to the ordinary players, they strongly blame competition. Among the most vocal are youngsters who have suffered under competitive pressures from their parents or society. Teaching these young people, I often observe in them a desire to fail. They seem to seek failure by not trying to win or achieve success. By not trying, they always have an excuse: “I may have lost, but it doesn’t matter because I really didn’t try.” What is not usually admitted by them is the belief that if they had really tried and lost, that would mean a lot. Such a loss would be a measure of their worth. Clearly, this belief is the same as that of the true competitors who try to prove themselves. Both are based on the mistaken belief that one’s self-respect relies on how well one performs in comparison with others. Both are afraid of not being valued. Only as this basic and often troublesome fear begins to dissolve can we discover (缓解) can new meaning in competition.