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Grandparents Answer a Call

As a third generation native of Brownsville, Texas, Mildred Garza never pleased move away,. Even when her daughter and son asked her to move to San Antonio to help their children, she politely refused . Only after a year of friendly discussion did Ms Gaf finally say yes. That was four years ago. Today all three generations regard the move to a success,giving them a closer relationship than they would have had in separate cities.

 No statistics show the number of grandparents like Garza who are moving closer to the children and grandchildren. Yet there is evidence suggesting that the trend is growing. Even President Obama’s mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, has agreed to leave Chicago and into the White House to help care for her granddaughters. According to a study grandparents com. 83 percent of the people said Mrs. Robinson ‘s decision will influence the grandparents in the American family. Two-thirds believe more families will follow the example of Obama’s family.

“in the 1960s we were all a little wild and couldn’t get away from home far enough fsst enough to prove we could do it on our own,”says Christine Crosby, publisher of grate manazine for grandparents .We now realize how important family is and how important”” to be near them, especially when you’re raining children.”

      Moving is not for everyone. Almost every grandparent wants to be with his or her grandchildren and is willing to make sacrifices, but sometimes it is wiser to say no and visit frequently instead. Having your grandchildren far away is hard, especially knowing your adult child is struggling, but giving up the life you know may be harder.

Gray wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after years of heated debate. Fourteen wolves were caught in Canada and transported to the park. By last year, theYellowstonewolf population had grown to more than 170 wolves.

Gray wolves once were seen here and there in the Yellowstone area and much of the continental United States, but they were gradually displaced by human development. By the 1920s, wolves had practically disappeared from theYellowstonearea. They went farther north into the deep forests of Canada, where there were fewer humans around.

The disappearance of the wolves had many unexpected results. Deer and elk(驼鹿) populations — major food sources (来源) for the wolf – grew rapidly. These animals consumed(消耗) large amounts of vegetation (植被), which reduced plant diversity in the park. In the absence of wolves, coyote populations also grew quickly. The coyotes killed a large percentage of the park’s red foxes, and completely drove away the park’s beavers.

As early as 1966, biologists asked the government to consider reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone Park. They hoped that wolves would be able to control the elk and coyote problems. Many farmers opposed the plan because they feared that wolves would kill their farm animals or pets.

The government spent nearly 30 years coming up with a plan to reintroduce the wolves. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service carefully monitors and manages the wolf packs inYellowstone. Today, the debate continues over how well the gray wolf is fitting in atYellowstone. Elk, deer, and coyote populations are down, while beavers and red foxes have made a comeback. TheYellowstonewolf project has been a valuable experiment to help biologists decide whether to reintroduce wolves to other parts of the country as well.

I work in a nursing home and my job is to take care of the elderly.

      This year, a very sweet old lady that I cared for, Alice, had gone through a difficult time. She got dementia and so she had been in the hospital twice. In November I was finally able to get her back to her “home”.

      Alice had thought her daughter was coming to visit her on Christmas day and that they were going to have the whole family together like the old days. When she finally realized that that happy moment was not going to happen, she was very sad. Knowing that her daughter was coming after Christmas was not enough to make her feel happy, I hated the idea of her being alone on the holiday!

      On Christmas Eve, I gave her a surprise by asking if she would like to go to a candlelight service at church that night.

      Instead of taking her to my church, I took her to her old neighborhood church where all her friends were. We got there early and I got her a seat where her friends could see her as they came in. Then soon some of her friends came to the church and they rushed over to greet her and sit with her.

      The candlelight service was beautiful and Alice got a lot of love from her old and new friends there.

      The truth of the story is that I am the one who got the best gift: the smile on Alice’s face.

America is a mobile society. Friendships between Americans can be close and real, yet disappear soon if situations change. Neither side feels hurt by this. Both may exchange Christmas greetings for a year or two, perhaps a few letters for a while — then no more. If the same two people meet again by chance, even years later, they pick up the friendship. This can be quite difficult for us Chinese to understand, because friendships between us flower more slowly but then may become lifelong feelings, extending (延伸) sometimes deeply into both families.

   Americans are ready to receive us foreigners at their homes, share their holidays, and their home life. They will enjoy welcoming us and be pleased if we accept their hospitality (好客) easily.

  Another difficult point for us Chinese to understand Americans is that although they include us warmly in their personal everyday lives, they don’t show their politeness to us if it requires a great deal of time. This is usually the opposite of the practice in our country where we may be generous with our time. Sometimes, we, as hosts, will appear at airports even in the middle of the night to meet a friend. We may take days off to act as guides to our foreign friends. The Americans, however, express their welcome usually at homes, but truly can not manage the time to do a great deal with a visitor outside their daily routine. They will probably expect us to get ourselves from the airport to our own hotel by bus. And they expect that we will phone them from there. Once we arrive at their homes, the welcome will be full, warm and real. We will find ourselves treated hospitably.

  For the Americans, it is often considered more friendly to invite a friend to their homes than to go to restaurants, except for purely business matters. So accept their hospitality at home!

Pigeons may only have a brain the size of a thimble (顶针), but it appears that pigeons can categorize and name objects in the same way human children learn new words.

A new study from the University of Iowa has shown that the birds are capable of learning to categorize 128 different photographs into 16 basic categories.

Scientists taught three pigeons to sort out different kinds of dogs or types of shoes, for example by using a particular symbol in exchange for a reward. When they were shown black and white pictures of previously unseen dogs or shoes, the birds were able to correctly match these with the corresponding symbols.

The scientists behind the project say this is a similar approach taken by young children when they are first learning words for objects. However, the researchers said it took their birds around 40 days to perfect the task of learning just 16 categories.

Professor Edward Wasserman, who led the work, said: “Our birds’ rate of learning appears to have been quite slow. Would children learn faster than pigeons? Almost certainly. However, our pigeons came to the experiment with no background knowledge at all. Thus, the more relevant comparison group may be newborn babies, who indeed take 6–9 months to learn their first words.”

Writing in the journal Cognition, the researchers said their experiment was a very simple mirror of the way children are taught words — by their parents pointing to pictures and asking them to name the object.

Pigeons are known to be smarter than many birds. Professor Bob McMurray, who also took part in the study, said the results showed that human learning is not as unique as was previously believed.

He said: “Children are facing a huge task of learning thousands of words without a lot of background knowledge to go on. For a long time, people thought that such learning is special to humans. What this research shows is that the ways in which children solve this huge problem may be shared with many species.