Hello, everyone! I'm Mike and I'm 12 years old. I live in Beijing with my parents. I'm looking forward to the weekend. All the students in our class are going to Tian'anmen Square to watch the flag- raising ceremony（升旗仪式） on Saturday morning .We're going to meet at five o'clock at the school gate. We're going there by underground(地铁). After watching the ceremony，we are going to visit the Railway museum（铁路博物馆）. I hope the weather is fine. In the afternoon we are going to watch a basketball match in the sports hall. In the evening we're going to watch a movie. On Sunday morning, I'm going to Beihai Park with my friends. We're going to take a walk in the park and collect litter there.

    What an interesting weekend!

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    Have you ever counted the number of digits (数字) in your mobile phone number? Your number has 11 digits. You may sometimes find it hard to remember your number. That's because China has the longest mobile phone numbers in the world. Why is that?

    The 11 digits can be divided into three parts. Each part has a different meaning. The first three numbers tell you which mobile phone service company it is. For example, 135 is for China Mobile Communications

    Corporation and 188 is for China Unicom. The fourth to the seventh digits tell you where the number is registered (注册). And the last four digits are random (随机的).

    The main reason for using 11 digits is that we have the largest population in the world. We once had 10 numbers. But as our population grew, there were not enough numbers for us to use. So we began to use 11 digits starting from 1999. Eleven digits can be used to make tens of billions of mobile phone numbers. That's enough for each person to have seven or eight phone numbers to use in China.

    And mobile phone numbers can be recycled. Usually, the service company will reuse a canceled number after three to six months. If you call a number that you haven't contacted for a long time, you may find that its owner has changed.

    Besides China, Britain and Japan also use 11-digit mobile phone numbers. But their numbers always start with 0. So they cannot create as many numbers as we can. Countries like the United States, Australia and India use phone numbers with 10 digits. Canada's mobile phone numbers are perhaps the shortest in the world: they use seven digits.

    Li Yaotang is considered to be one of the most important and widely-read Chinese writers in the 20th century. He wrote under the pen name of Ba Jin. Ba Jin started writing his first work in the late 1920s. Li was born in Chengdu. He was born in a rich family of officials. As a child, Li was taught to read and write first by his mother. In 1920, Li entered Chengdu Foreign Language School to study English. Three years later, Li moved to Shanghai and then studied there. In 1927, he went to Paris with his friend for further study. After returning to Shanghai in 1928, Ba Jin continued writing and working on translation. His first novel came out in 1929. Then he wrote a lot of famous novels during ten years. Most of Ba Jin's works could be easily understood by anyone with high school education, which made him one of the easiest modern Chinese writers. Ba Jin died of cancer in Shanghai at the age of 101. His death marked the end of a century for Chinese literature. He was one of the masters of language like Lao She.

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