One day, a young soldier walked up to a much decorated senior officer in the army and asked him: “Sir, what is the secret of your success in the army? I want to be an officer too.”

The officer looked at the young soldier steadily (一动不动地) for about three minutes and gave him a threatening (带有威胁的) order. He gave the young soldier a cup full of water and told him to walk round the training field five times. He clearly told him that his life depended on it, and if a drop of water fell from the cup, another soldier would shoot him on the head. Four soldiers were strategically (战略上的) positioned to shoot him down once a drop of water fell from the cup.

Seeing how serious the whole thing turned out, he took the cup full of water and went out to complete his task. The young soldier carefully walked round the training field five times without letting a drop fall from the cup. On completion of the task, he returned the full cup to the senior officer.

When the officer saw what he did to protect his life by not allowing a drop of water out of the cup, he asked him the following questions:

“Did you see those beautiful girls dancing at the nearby market?"

The young soldier replied, “No.”

“Did you see those soldiers playing football in the field?”

The young soldier replied, “No.”

“What about those people fighting across the other side of the field?”

The young soldier replied, “No.”

Then, the officer looked at him and said, “If you focus on your task, you will succeed and protect your life too.”

At last, the young soldier left happily.

It's natural to think about what goes into producing the food in your daily lunch bag. But have you ever stopped to consider the production techniques behind the bag itself? At the center of it is a woman named Margaret Knight.

From her earliest years, Knight was a restless creator. In the article titled " The Evolution of the Grocery Bag", its writer mentions a few of her childhood projects. She was “famous for her kites", and "her sleds were the envy of the town’s boys.”

To support her mother, she took a job at a cotton factory when she was 12. That same year she invented a shuttle system which helped to prevent injury. At the time, she had no concept of patenting(得到……的专利权) her idea. What strengthened her place in history was her working experience at the Columbia Paper Bag Company. Here, instead of folding every paper bag by hand, Knight wondered if she might be able to make them cleanly and rapidly via an automated machine. The result was a working model of her elegant paper-folding machine. But this time: she wanted to go to the extra step and secure a patent on her creation, a brave move for a woman in the 19th century, when an extremely small percentage of patents were held by women.

Not only did Knight file for a patent, she bravely defended her owner ship of the bag machine idea. A man named Charles Annan said the creation was his own, arguing no woman could be able to design such a machine. Knight fought a legal battle against him and handed Anna a courtroom(法庭)defeat by presenting her detailed hand-drawn blueprints. Finally，Knight received her rightful patent in 1871.

After making the machine, she continued to invent many other things like a paper feeding machine and a skirt protector. Knight, at the age of seventy, worked twenty hours a day on 89th invention.

Washington is home to lots of trees—it is the Evergreen State, after all—and lots of fireplaces and wood-burning stoves too. But what if you lived there and couldn’t chop wood or couldn’t afford to pay someone to do it? Luckily, Shane McDaniel and his twin sons, Harrison and Henry McDaniel, 21, are happy to lend an ax. The three men chop truckloads of wood—then donate it to those in need. “I want people who are burning cardboard because they’ve got nothing,” shane explained to heraldnet.com. “Or because they’ve got nothing,” Shane explained to heraldnet.com. “Or someone with no money who has a broken shoulder and can’t cut wood.”

The idea started as a father-son bonding project he told msn.com. “I had to cut wood with my dad. He just loved doing it,” says Shane. He wanted to pass along that feeling, so he and the twins spent the summer of 2018 like a clan of Paul Bunyans. The result was a great wall of wood piled up around their house.

It was too much for the McDaniels to use themselves, and when the weather turned cold that November, Shane started thinking of others. He posted on Facebook: “IF YOU ARE IN NEED OF FIREWOOD AND CANNOT AFFORD IT, PLEASE PM [personal message] ME!... Please help me and my boys make sure NO ONE GOES COLD.”

Single mom Katelyn Ticer, 29, and her four-year-old daughter rely on wood-burning stove as their only source of heat, so it was a relief to receive a truckload of firewood from the McDaniels before the holidays. “To get that much wood brought me to tears,” told msn.com. “So much stress and anxiety is off my shoulders. I couldn’t be more thankful.”

Shane is OK with that. “Giving is the reward,” he says. “It has nothing to do with how well it’s received, it’s about how much it’s needed.”