A young man is sitting by the road eating something. A policeman is coming over. At once, the man gets up quickly and runs down the road. The policeman runs after him. The man runs very fast. But the policeman runs faster. After a few minutes, the policeman catches him. ‘Where are you going?' says the policeman. ‘You must be a criminal (罪犯) if you run like that when you see a policeman.' ‘No, no,' says the man, ‘I'm not a criminal. I'm just too fat, you see. The doctor says to me that I must always run fast after eating.' ‘I see,' says the policeman, ‘You are running to help to lose some weight (重量).'

    One story about Jack, an Irishman（爱尔兰人）, who was not allowed into Heaven because he was stingy（吝啬） with his money. So he was sent to hell地狱. But down there he played tricks on the Devil (Satan) （魔鬼撒旦）, so he was kicked out of Hell and made to walk the earth forever carrying a lantern.

    Well, Irish children made Jack's lanterns on October 31st from a large potato or turnip（萝卜）, hollowed out with the sides having holes and lit by little candles inside. And Irish children would carry them as they went from house to house begging for food for the village Halloween festival that honored the Druid god Muck Olla（督伊德神）. The Irish name for these lanterns was "Jack with the lantern" or "Jack of the lantern," abbreviated as " Jack-o'-lantern" and now spelled "jack-o-lantern."

    The traditional Halloween you can read about in most books was just children's fun night. Halloween celebrations would start in October in every elementary（小学校） school. Children would make Halloween decorations, all kinds of orange-paper jack-o-lanterns. we went together to neighbors' houses, ringing their doorbell and yelling, "Trick or treat!" meaning, "Give us a treat (something to eat) or we'll play a trick on you!"

    The people inside were supposed to come to the door and comment（评价） on our costumes. Oh! here's a ghost. Oh, there's a witch. Oh, here's an old lady. Sometimes they would play along with us and pretend to be scared by some ghost or witch. But they would always have some candy and maybe an apple to put in our "trick or treat bags." But what if no one come to the door, or if someone chased us away?

    Then we'd play a trick on them, usually taking a piece of soap and make marks on their windows. And afterwards we would go home and count who got the most candy. One popular teen-agers' Halloween trick was to unroll a roll of toilet paper and throw it high into a tree again and again until the tree was all wrapped in the white paper. The paper would often stay in the tree for weeks until a heavy snow or rain washed it off.

    No real harm done, but it made a big mess of both the tree and the yard under it. One kind of Halloween mischief.

    Can you write down a Chinese word being read to you? Sometimes it can be difficult when you find the word is not included in most dictionaries.

    Lu Jialei, 14, from Hangzhou Foreign Language School, won the CCTV Chinese Character (汉字) Spelling Contest on Oct 18^th, 2013. About 160 people competed. The host read a word to the contestant, explained its meaning and gave sample sentences. The contestant was required to write down the word.

    Winning the contest was a “surprise” to Lu. “I was not the smartest one,” she said. “But I paid attention to details.” To prepare for the contest, she and her teammates studied the Modern Chinese Dictionary for 10 days. There are more than 56,000 entries (词条) including characters, words and phrases in it. She also had a secret weapon. She studied how Chinese characters were formed.

    “When others paid attention to the plot of a story, she looked at how authors use words and sentences to express themselves,” said Su Yunsheng, Lu's Chinese teacher. Su is happy to see students like Lu find the beauty of Chinese language.

    “Besides using something Chinese and having Chinese traditional festivals, learning to write Chinese characters is also an important part of inheriting (传承) Chinese culture,” said Su.

    Jack thought himself a basketball fan. He watched quite a lot of American NBA basketball games. Not only did he watch them, he spent much of his free time playing on the court too. Then came the final year of his middle school. All of his regular teammates stopped showing up on the court because they were simply too busy preparing for the high school entrance exam to play. He was, of course, under much stress himself, like everyone else. A good exam result meant a good high school; a mediocre(平庸的) score meant a mediocre school. Much was at stake.

    However, he loved basketball so much that he still found time to play, this time with a group of guys who were said to have skipped classes(逃课) before.

    Some of his teachers started worrying about him. They asked his mother to go to school to let her know that Jack was hanging out with problem kids. When his mother returned home that day, she wanted to talk to Jack. Knowing the purpose of her visit to the school, Jack though his mother would punish him for befriending those bad guys. To his surprise, his mother was not angry with him at all. She wanted to hear her son's side of story. So Jack told his mother about what he knew of Simon and Peter. Simon's parents were badly ill; Peter's father had lost his job. They both seemed to Jack to be normal kids. Jack's mother thought for a moment, and then went on to say that she was OK with her son playing with them and that she and her son should think of ways to help these kids. Soon Jack's mother introduced some part -time jobs to Simon and Peter, which they accepted. She believed in her son and cared about those who were less lucky.

    Jack's basketball friends and he have left for different places, but they still keep in touch. He knows Peter is now a manager of a local bank. Simon is currently a freshman at a university. Sadly, it is impossible to get together to play basketball again, but whenever they get on the phone, they talk about all the time.

    A woman is at the cinema, and she is enjoying the film very much, but there is a man in the next seat, and he begins looking at the floor under her. The woman is angry and asks, "What are you doing there? What are you looking for (寻找) ?" "A piece of chocolate." The man says to her, I drop (掉落) it on the floor." "A piece of chocolate?" the woman says angrily, t is dirty now. Take this and be quiet, please. I am listening to the film." She gives the man a big piece of chocolate. But the man says, One of my teeth is in the chocolate!