Nothing stays the same for long： things and people change.

I grew up on u small farm, where a flock of sheep wandered around the surrounding mountains. My father was not highly educated, but he wan smart. He was u man made of leather and chewing tobacco who rarely tried to talk with my brother or me. He was quiet and distant, I might say. 【小题1】

One day I came home and his car was already there. 【小题2】 In fact , when he came home, he went to the barn (粮仓）to labour even more. I still remembered hiding around the corner and stealing a look at my father lying bitterly on the bed that day. Multiple myeloma, I learned, is a type of blood cancer. 【小题3】 For the last year of my father’s life, his entire day consisted of rising from his bed and walking to his chair to sit and think alone.

He was predictably in that chair on his own when I came in. 【小题4】 He told me about his life, his heartbreaks and his loves, it was as if a pipe had burst, his inner self rushing out to me in a great flood. He had been speaking for maybe an hour or more when I realized that he was doing more than telling. He was asking to be understood in a way that he had never done before.

【小题5】 I realize, though, that if he hadn’t I might never have come to know him and love him.

Everyone can benefit from making an effort to practice gratitude (感激) every day. The following three steps can help you start feeling more grateful, and appreciative of the good things in your life:

Notice the Good Things in Your Life

【小题1】Pay attention to the small everyday details of your life-nature, people, community, shelter, creature comforts like a warm bed or a good meal. And then start a gratitude journal. Making a commitment to writing down good things each day makes it more likely that we will notice good things as they happen.

Enjoy the Feeling of Gratitude

There are moments when you naturally, right then and there, feel filled with gratitude. These are moments when you say to yourself, "Oh, wow, this is amazing!" or "How great is this!"Pause.【小题2】Let it sink in. Enjoy your blessings in the moment they happen.

Express Gratitude

Expressing gratitude is more than being polite.【小题3】Show your appreciation to someone who really did something nice. Say: “It was really kind of you to…,” “You did me a big favor when...,” or “Thank you for being there when...”.【小题4】Hold the door open for the person behind you, even if it means waiting a little longer than you normally would.

True gratitude doesn't leave you feeling like you owe other people something-after all, if you've done someone a favor, you probably don't want the person to feel like you expect something back in return.【小题5】

Aristotle thought the face was a window onto a person’s mind. Cicero agreed. Two thousand years passed, and facial expressions are still commonly thought to be a universally valid way to judge other people’s feelings, irrespective of age, sex and culture. A raised eyebrow suggests confusion. A smile indicates happiness.

Or do they? An analysis of hundreds of research papers that examined the relationship between facial expressions and underlying emotions has uncovered a surprising conclusion: there is no good scientific evidence to suggest that there are such things as recognizable facial expressions for basic emotions which are universal across cultures. Just because a person is not smiling, the researchers found, does not mean that person is unhappy.

This may raise questions about the efforts of information-technology companies to develop artificial-intelligence algorithms (算法) which can recognize facial expressions and work out a person’s underlying emotional state. Microsoft, for example, claims its “Emotion API” is able to detect what people are feeling by examining video footage of them. Another of the study’s authors, however, expressed scepticism. Aleix Martinez, a computer engineer at Ohio State University, said that companies attempting to obtain emotions from images of faces have failed to understand the importance of context.

For a start, facial expression is but one of a number of non-verbal ways，such as body posture, that people use to communicate with each other. Machine recognition of emotion needs to take account of these as well. But context can reach further than that. Dr Martinez mentioned an experiment in which participants were shown a close-up picture of a man’s face, which was bright red with his mouth open in a scream. Based on this alone, most participants said the man was extremely angry. Then the whole picture was shown. It was a football player with his arms outstretched, celebrating a goal. His angry-looking face was, in fact, a show of pure joy.

Given that people cannot guess each other’s emotional states most of the time, Dr Martinez sees no reason computers would be able to. “There are companies right now claiming to be able to do that and apply this to places I find really scary and dangerous, for example, in hiring people,” he says. “Some companies require you to present a video resume, which is analyzed by a machine-learning system. And depending on your facial expressions, they hire you or not, which I find really shocking.”