Whether you admit it or not, people's love for Christmas Jumper（毛衣）around Christmas has increased over recent years. And while you may be less willing to get involved in the Christmas jumper trend, Christmas Jumper Day now enables you to do more with your jumper than build up sweat in an incredibly warm office.

The origin of the Christmas jumper can date back to the late 19th century in the USA. Americans in the 1930s knitted（编织）for Christmas to create an item of clothing to keep them “warm” during the Great Depression（大萧条）when people led a poor and miserable life. They copied the jumpers they saw their favorite stars wearing on the big screen. From the 1950s, it was common to see American families wearing festive jumpers as they sat down to eat their Christmas dinner.

Now, alongside wearing a festive jumper for the fun of it, there are other positive outcomes. Christmas Jumper Day has been set up to stimulate people to make the world better and raise funds for save the Children by wearing a Christmas jumper and making a minimum donation of £1. Ladbrokes, a company in the UK, is running a competition in which all you have to do is to take a selfie（自拍）outside of one of their shops while wearing a jumper—the winner will win a good prize and for every submission（提交作品）, Ladbrokes will donate £5 to St. Luke's Hospice charity. For you, it's a win-win situation.

If you're still unconvinced that it's about time you bought yourself a Christmas jumper, then maybe the fact that Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber and Snoop Dogg have all been spotted wearing Christmas jumpers will raise your enthusiasm. Retailer（零售商）such as Topshop, Burberry and H&M have also become devoted to Christmas Jumper Day and have their very own types of Christmas jumpers.

There is a very long list of rules for the New York City subway. Don’t put your feet on a seat, don’t carry open cups of coffee or soda, don’t take more than one seat... Those are just a few of the rules. There are hundreds more.

With so many rules, why is it still unpleasant to ride the subway?

Some people think that the problem is that no one enforces the rules. Other passengers sometimes try to enforce rules. But you can’t rely on them because New Yorkers have unwritten rules against talking to strangers and making eye contact with strangers. How can you tell someone to take her shopping bags off the seat and throw away her Coke without talking to her or looking at her? It is difficult.

There are other New Yorkers who think that the subway is unpleasant because there are not enough rules. One rider wrote a letter to The New York Times a couple of weeks ago suggesting a few more subway rules. Here are some of the rules that she would like to see:

—Don’t lean on the poles. You prevent other people from holding on. They can fall down.

—Talk quietly. The trains are already too noisy.

—Give your seat to elderly passengers or to parents with small children.

If those unwritten rules of etiquette are written down, will the rude people be more likely to follow them? It doesn’t make sense to make more rules that no one will enforce.

The real problem is that we are forgetting how to be nice to each other. It is embarrassing that we need a rule to tell us to give our seat to elderly passengers. Nobody should need to be reminded to do that.

I say we stop talking about the rules and try to remember our manners. Let’s be nice to each other not because a police officer might tell us to get off the train, but because it is the right thing to do. Then New York City would be more civilized —both above ground and below.

Teenagers who drink alcohol are at higher risk of becoming victims of violence, a Cardiff University study has found.

A team from the School of Dentistry' s Violence Research Group studied drinking habits inchildren aged | 1-16 in England. They found not only a link between drink and violence but also that children who drank were more likely to be hit, even if they weren' t violent themselves.

The researchers are now calling for measures to prevent alcohol misuse to reduce injury risk. Current policy focuses on reducing aggression but this research shows that there should be equal effort to reduce victimization(受害).

More than 4,000 children were surveyed at 13 schools at four local authorities in the North, the Midlands, London, and the South. The study found that 25% of 1 l-year-olds were drinking monthly and 3.6% daily, with 12.8% admitting to getting drunk 3 to 5 times a year. By the age of 16, 40% were drinking weekly and 6.2% were drinking every day. The research also showed 22.6% of 16-year-olds were getting drunk more than 21 times a year.

The study, which has just been published in the Journal of Adolescence, found a strong link between frequency of drinking and frequency of hitting other people.

However, children who reported drinking monthly were also three times more likely to be hit. Adolescents(青少年) who drank but didn't get into fights were more likely to be hit than those who did fight.

Professor Jonathan Shepherd, who led the research, said a lot of previous alcohol-related violence work had focused on the offenders rather than the victims. His team is calling for more pre-vention work from parents and teachers in the first two years of secondary school by taking advantage of the "teachable moment", that is, immediately after a student has missed school because of drunkenness.

Previous work by Professor Jonathan Shepherd has shown drinkers may be more at risk of vio-lence because of reduced physical co-ordinatlon ( 配合), poor decision-making in threatening situa-tions and isolation while out late at night.

He said,"This new study seems to be the first to show a direct link between alcohol misuses and victimization. There now needs to be much more effort put into reducing alcohol misuse in order to reduce injury. "