"So, Mr. Albert, you've told us about your strengths but what about your weaknesses?" It's a common interview question. To which a classic humblebrag (谦虚自夸) reply is, "Well. I must admit that I'm a bit of a perfectionist." After all, what company wouldn't want to employ somebody who seeks perfection? But it turns out that there is a profound difference between high-achievers and perfectionists. In a cruel irony, the perfectionist traits could actually prevent someone from achieving their full potential.

The roots of perfectionism actually lie in a deep desire to feel perfect. Most often a perfectionist personality is formed in reaction to some form of childhood trauma. For example, following her parents' divorce, a young girl might strive to always be good, to always be perfect because at some level she believes that it must have been her fault that her parents separated. So as long as she is perfect, nothing so terrible would happen again. 

Given such origins, it appears that the thinking and emotional styles associated with perfectionism are particularly dangerous to mental health. Think of the harshest and merciless perfectionists you know. They always, always, always find fault. Their cognitive (认知) styles include all-or-nothing thinking, where only perfection is seen as an acceptable result; fear of failure, where a perfectionist is driven by fear rather than pulled by the prospect of success in their endeavors; defensiveness in the face of constructive criticism. All of these seem to be linked to a wide range of psychological problems including eating disorders, anxiety and depression, and even suicide. 

Changing this mindset is the key to treating the condition when it becomes a disorder but it is difficult to achieve. Perfectionists are essentially in an abusive relationship with themselves. It's hard enough to withdraw from abusive relationships with others. How much harder is it when you yourself are the abuser? So perhaps a better answer to the interview question posed at the start of this article would be, "I used to be a perfectionist but now I'm well on the road to recovery."

Mickey, Minnie, Donald Duck, Pinocchio, and more Disney characters all have some-thing in common-gloves. Although there are many surprising facts about Disney's characters, putting gloves on them is actually a reasonable move.

The short answer as to why so many characters wear gloves is that animation(动画制作)is a difficult process. It takes time and efforts to create the characters you know and love. Animators wanted to make their job easier and faster with a few techniques. One of these techniques was using round edges(边) instead of angles. So this also meant making some parts simple, such as hands, to make the amination process quicker.

Still, in the age of black-and-white cartoons, separating characters' round-edged hands from their black bodies was hard. Gloves were an easy way to make their hands stand out. In fact, Walt Disney might have been the first to put gloves on his characters. Once animation moved away from black and white, Mickey and his friends kept their white gloves.

Besides keeping the animation simple, Walt Disney told his biographer, Bob Thomas, that the gloves existed for another reason: to make the mouse more like a human. "We didn't want him to have mouse hands because he was supposed to be more human, "Disney told Thomas in 1957. "So we gave him gloves. Five fingers seemed like too much on such a little figure, so we took away one. That was just one less finger to animate. "All this Disney's talk makes us want to go back and look at photos of Mickey Mouse.

Compared with the obvious environmental issues we hear about every day, littering often takes a backseat-but it's more pressing than we may think.

Some may say that a banana peel out of your car along the motorway would be a harmless action. Actually，they are wrong. A banana peel can take up to two years to decompose (分解), and with a third of motorists admitting to littering while driving, that's a whole lot of discarded banana peels, or much worse. An orange peel and a cigarette butt has a similar biodegrading (生物降解)term to that of a banana, but tin and aluminum cans last up to 100 years; and plastic bottles last forever, so do glass bottles and plastic bags.

Despite the fact that longer-lasting materials will serve to damage the environment and its animals for longer, we can't only measure the severity of a certain type of rubbish by its lifetime. For example, despite having a fairly short biodegrading span, more than 120 tons of cigarette-related litter is thrown away in the UK every day. Similarly, our regular littering here and there has caused the UK's mouse population to increase by 60 million. This suddenly isn't so mysterious when you consider that since the 1960s our annual littering has increased by an amazing 500 per cent.

It's not a cheap habit either: UK taxpayers spent £500 million on keeping the streets clean.

So, it's not surprising that if caught fly-tipping, you could face a f20, 000 fine. Regardless of how severe the punishment might seem, however, among the reported cases only 2, 000 were punished out of 825, 000, so we still have some way to go in making sure people observe the rules.

To take back our beautiful cities, we need to do more than simply not leaving rubbish where it ought not to be. We need to care more about the world around us.