An old gentleman whose eyesight (视力) was falling came to stay in a hotel room with a bottle of wine (酒) in each hand. On the wall there was a fly which he took for a nail (钉子). So as soon as he hung them on, the bottles fell broken and the wine split all over the floor.

    When a waitress discovered what had happened, she felt really sorry for him and wanted to give him a hand.

    So the next morning when he was out taking a walk in the garden, she put a nail on the wall exactly where the fly had stayed.

    Now the old man entered his room. The smell of the split wine reminded him of the accident. When he looked up at the wall, he found the fly was there again! He walked to it carefully and hit it with all his strength.

    On hearing a loud cry, the waitress rushed in. To her great surprise, the poor man was there sitting on the floor, his face was pale and a lot of blood was running on his right hand.

    A baby giraffe is born 10 feet high and usually lands on its back. Bringing a giraffe into the world is a tall order. In his book, A View from the Zoo, Gary Richmond describes how a new-born giraffe learns its first lesson.

    The mother giraffe lowers her head long enough to take a quick look. Then she puts herself directly over her child. She waits for about a minute, and then she does the most unreasonable thing. She throws her long leg and kicks her baby, so that it's sent sprawling (四脚朝天).

    When it doesn't get up, what the mother has done is repeated again and again. The struggle (挣扎) to rise is important. As the baby giraffe grows tired, the mother kicks it again. Finally, it stands for the first time. Then the mother giraffe kicks it off again. Why? She wants it to remember how it can get up. In the wild, a baby giraffe must be able to get up as quickly as possible to stay with its group, where there's safety.

    Another writer named Irving Stone understood this. He spent a lifetime studying great people, writing stories about such men as Michelangelo, Vincent van Gogh, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin.

    Stone was once asked if he had found something unusual about these great people. He said, “I write about people who sometime in their life have a dream of something. They're beaten over the head, knocked down and for years they get nowhere. But every time they stand up again. And at the end of their lives they've realized some small parts of what they set out (着手) to do.”

    I'm a girl, Rosie. Racing on the 1,500-meter track (跑道), I'm so tired. I want to stop but a voice is repeating in my head, "No one knows what the result will be. Everything is still possible." Today, I have to fight with myself.

    Nine years ago, when I was a 6-year-old girl, my mother took me on a trip. We went to the foot of a high mountain which she told me that we would climb. I had never done this before and the thought of it made me very happy.

    At the beginning, I was so excited, and climbed fast. But half an hour later, when I was thirsty and tired, I just stopped and sat on the ground, completely silent. My mom came and sat next to me.

She said, "Get up and go on!"

    Crying, I almost shouted, "Never! It's too tiring and I am thirsty. I want to go back home now."

    Patiently she explained, "Listen, my dear. If you try your best, anything is possible. If you don't try, your dream will never come true. You will never know how beautiful the sights look unless you reach the top of the mountain."

    Hearing her words, I stopped crying and started to climb again. Finally I did reach the top of the mountain and enjoyed the fantastic view.

    Today I'm on the racing track. I'm going to keep running because I know it's always valuable. And in the end I made it — I got through the finish line.

    Although it was really difficult and I did not win, I did finish it. "Never stop fighting until you arrive at your destined (命定的) place."

A grandmother, dressed in hanfu, impressed(使印象深刻) hundreds of thousands of people with her beauty and love for life.

Her grandson Liu Haochen made the first short video and the video received 1.76 million likes on the Internet within a month. Now known as vlogger(视频博主) "Hanfu Grandma" with more than 550,000 fans, she has tried on many different costumes. Liu, also a lover of hanfu, said he wanted to share happy memories with his grandma and to record her life at an old age. And he found she is quite suitable for the clothing.

The grandma said she agreed Liu to shoot a video for her. "I don't really know what it was about at the time. I thought it would be good to spend some time with Chenchen," she said, as Liu had been busy working far from home.

She once took part in a fashion (时尚) show in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, with performers much younger than her. When the show began, it was raining, but she said she quite enjoyed it. "When I was on the stage, the audience(观众) kept shouting my name. I was very cheerful," she said.

Most of her videos are filmed outdoors, with some at scenic spots in different cities, often with other young hanfu lovers. For her, it's more like travelling than filming. Along with videos about hanfu, she also shares her daily life —shopping, drinking milk tea and playing with cats. She said life has become more interesting compared with before, and she is as energetic as a young person.

Dear Nancy,

You asked me about places {#blank#}1{#/blank#} (go) and things to do in my town. The Downtown Mall is always fun. It's a {#blank#}2{#/blank#} (shop) place in the oldest part of town. There are some good stores and restaurants there, for example, Trendy Clothing Store. It's a fun place to shop, and it has the {#blank#}3{#/blank#} (good) quality(质量) clothes. The shop assistants are {#blank#}4{#/blank#} (friend) to people.

My favorite restaurant in the town is Nick's Restaurant. It is close {#blank#}5{#/blank#} my house. It's cheap and the hamburgers there are great. I like Dragon City Restaurant, {#blank#}6{#/blank#}. You can eat wonderful noodles there and the beef noodles are the most delicious! You must try the dumplings there, too! But it's more expensive {#blank#}7{#/blank#} Nick's Restaurant. The Big Cinema is the best cinema in my town. It {#blank#}8{#/blank#} (have) the biggest screens and the most comfortable seats. The Del Ray Complex is also a good place to see {#blank#}9{#/blank#} (movie). It doesn't have the newest movies, but the tickets are the cheapest.

Anyway, there are lots of things to do and to see here. Come for {#blank#}10{#/blank#} visit soon.

Yours,

Linda