After Mom died, I began visiting Dad every morning before I went to work. He was frail and moved slowly, but he always had a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice on the kitchen table for me, along with an unsigned note reading, "Drink your juice." Such a gesture, I knew, was as far as Dad had ever been able to go in expressing his love. In fact, I remember, as a kid I had questioned Mom "Why doesn't Dad love me?" Mom frowned, "Who said he doesn't love you?" "Well, he never tells me," I complained. "He never tells me either," she said, smiling. "But look how hard he works to take care of us, to buy us food and clothes, and to pay for this house. That's how your father tells us he loves us."

    I nodded slowly. I understood in my head, but not in my heart. I still wanted my father to put his arms around me and tell me he loved me. Dad owned and operated a small scrap (片) metal business, and after school I often hung around while he worked. Dad fed scrap steel into a machine which looked like a giant pair of scissors with blades thicker than my father's body. If he didn't feed those terrifying blades just right, he risked serious injury. "Why don't you hire someone to do that for you?" Mom asked Dad one night as she bent over him and rubbed his aching shoulders . "Why don't you hire a cook?" Dad asked, giving her one of his rare smiles.

    Many years later, during my first daily visit, after drinking the juice my father had squeezed for me, I walked over, hugged him and said, "I love you, Dad." From then on I did this every morning. My father never told me how he felt about my hugs, and there was never any expression on his face when I gave them.

    Last month, the president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, held an underwater meeting. The purpose of the ocean floor conference is to highlight the effects of global warming on his island nation.

    The Maldives, located in the Indian Ocean, is the lowest-lying country on Earth. Melting glaciers and polar ice are causing sea levels to rise, putting the Maldives and other low-lying areas at risk of being swallowed by the sea within the next 100 years.

    What can be done? Scientists and leaders from 190 nations will try to figure that out at the United Nations climate change conference next month. The main goal of the meeting is to come up with a new climate agreement for 2012 and beyond. That is when the existing plan, the Kyoto Protocol will expire. The agreement was created in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997. Since then, it has been ratified(正式批准) by 190 nations. The countries promised to limit the amount of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, which they produced each year.

    The debate over who should cut greenhouse emissions has been going on for years. The US has been hesitant to reduce emissions unless fast-growing nations such as China and India also reduce their use of fossil fuels. In recent months, China has taken steps to be greener. But India has been unwilling to change. It argues that it is unfair for rich nations to ask poorer countries to cut down on emissions.

    While world leaders work on a plan in Copenhagen, there are many things you can do to help the planet. You can save fuel by walking or biking instead of riding in a car. You can start a recycling program in your community. You can plant trees. Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the air and give off oxygen.

    Music is magic! Music speaks louder than words and it is a "language" that the whole world can understand. A piece of music can produce a response in the heart and mind. Like feeling an electrical current or receiving a personal radio signal, music has a spiritual effect on a person. Different kinds of music influence people in different ways.

    I have listened to music all my life. When I was twelve years old, the Beatles came to America and my whole world opened up. Maybe young people today cannot understand the influence of the Beatles when they exploded across America. Their influence changed the way we dressed, looked, acted and spoke, even our culture. The Beatles arrived in America from the UK just three months after the assassination(暗杀) of President John Kennedy, which had put America into a great depression. And the freshness and lively spirit of the Beatles was exactly what the country needed to refresh itself.

    Music links the heart of the hearer with that of the composer. This means that it mixes the spirit of the composer with your spirit when you listen to it. And the music can take your spirit out of your body and transport you into another world. Music has a great way of touching people. Music can make you laugh, cry or shout. It's also a great source of inspiration.

    Try this one day and notice what happens: make yourself a cup of tea, sit on your sofa and play one of your favorite songs. Close your eyes, and soon you'll find yourself creating vivid mental images matching the music that you are listening to.

    Dreams are expressions of thoughts, feelings and events that pass through our minds while we are sleeping. People dream about one to two hours each night. We may have four to seven dreams in one night. Everybody dreams. But only some people can remember their dreams.

    The word “dream” comes from an old word in English that means “joy” and “music”. We dream in color. Our dreams often include all the senses—smells, sounds, sights, tastes and things we touch. Sometimes we dream the same dream over and over again. These repeated dreams are often unpleasant. They are bad dreams that sometimes frighten us.

    Artists, writers and scientists sometimes say they get ideas from dreams. For example, the singer Paul McCartney of the Beatles said he awakened one day with the music for the song Yesterday in his head. The writer Mary Shelley said she had a very strong dream about a scientist using a machine to make an animal come alive. When she woke up, she began to write her book about a scientist named Frankenstein who made a frightening monster(妖怪).

    In China, people believed that dreams were a way to visit with family members who had died. Some native American tribes(部落) and Mexican civilizations believe dreams are a different world we visit when we sleep.

    The British are known for their sense of humor. However, it is often difficult for foreigners to understand their jokes. The main point to remember is that the British often use understatement.

    Understatement means saying less than you think or feel. For example, if someone gets very wet in a shower of rain, he might say, "It's a little damp (潮湿的) outside." Or, if someone is very impolite and shouts at another person, someone else might say, "She isn't exactly friendly." Understatement is often used in unpleasant situation or to make another person look silly. Understatement plays an important part in British humor.

    Another key to understanding British humor is that the British like to make fun of themselves as well as others. They often laugh about the silly and unpleasant things that happen to our everyday life when someone accidentally falls over in the street. They also like to make jokes about people from different classes of society. They like to make jokes about their accents, the way they dress and the way they behave. What's more, the British love to watch comedies (喜剧) about people who do not know how to behave in society. The comedies series Mr. Bean is a good example of this kind of humor.

    Mr. Bean is the character created by British actor Rowan Atkinson in 1990. Mr. Bean doesn't talk often, and instead he uses his body movement and facial expressions to make people laugh. Perhaps what makes Mr. Bean so funny is that he does things that adults in the real world cannot do. Mr. Bean is popular in many countries around the world because you do not have to speak English to understand the humor. Because of this, many people have become familiar with the British sense of humor.

My clder brother Steve, in the absence of my father who died when I was six, gave me important lessons in values that helped me grow into an adult.

For instance, Steve taught me to face the results of my behavior. Once when I returned in tears from a Saturday baseball game, it was Steve who took the time to ask me what happened. When I explained that my baseball had scared through Mrs. Holt's basement window, breaking the glass with a crash, Steve encouraged me to confess(认罪) to her. After all, I should have been playing in the park down Fifth Street and not in the path between buildings. Although my knees knocked as I explained to Mrs. Holt, I offered to pay for the window from my pocket money if she would return my ball.

I also learned from Steve that personal property is a sacred(神圣的) thing. After I found a shiny silver pen in my fifth-grade classroom, I wanted to keep it, but Steve explained that it might be important to someone else in spite of the fact that it had little value. He reminded me of how much I'd hate to lose to someone else the small dog my father carved from a piece of cheap wood. I returned the pen to my teacher, Mrs. Davids, and still remembered the smell of her perfume as she patted me on my shoulder.

Yet of all the instructions Steve gave me, his respect for life is the most vivid in my mind. When I was twelve I killed an old brown sparrow in the yard with a BB gun. Excited with my accuracy. I screamed to Steve to come from the house to take a look. I shall never forget the way he stood for a long moment and stared at the bird on the ground. Then in a dead, quiet voice, he asked, "Did it hurt you first, Mark?"I didn't know what to answer. He continued with his eyes firm," The only time you should even think of hurting a living thing is when it hurts you first. And then you think a long. long time." I really felt terrible then, but that moment stands out as the most important lesson my brother taught me.