I arrived at my mother's home for our Saturday family dinner. The smells of food flew over from the kitchen. Mother was pulling out quilt after quilt from the boxes, proudly showing me their beauties. I knew they were all made herself. She was preparing for a quilt show on TV. When we began to fold and put them back into the boxes, I noticed something at the bottom of one box.

    I pulled it out. "What's this?" I asked.

    "Oh?" Mom said, "That's Mama's quilt."

    I spread the quilt. It looked as if a group of school children had made the pieces together.

    "Grandmother made this?" I asked in surprise. My grandmother was a master at making quilts. This certainly didn't look like any of the quilts she had made.

    "Yes, right before she died. I brought it home with me last year and made some changes,"

Mom said, "I'm still working on it. See, this is what I've done so far."

    I looked at it more closely. She had made a line straight(直的). At the center of the quilt, she had stitched a piece of cloth with these words: "My mother made many quilts. She didn't get all lines straight. But I think this is beautiful. I want to see it finished. Her last quilt."

    "Oh, this is so nice, Mom." I said. I was sure now that by completing my grandmother's quilt, my mother was honoring her own mother. I realized that I held in my hands a family treasure. It started with the loving hands of one woman, and continued with the loving hands of another.

    On October 17,2016 the Shenzhou-11 manned spaceship was sent into space from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in Gansu. Two days later the spaceship successfully connected with the space laboratory Tiangong-2. It meant China got closer to its plan of building a space station in 2020.

    The spaceship took two Chinese astronauts to space this time. Jing Haipeng was an experienced astronaut who flew on Shenzhou-7 in 2008 and Shenzhou-9 in 2012. But it was Chen Dong's first space flight.

    Jing and Chen were given a 30-day task on Tiangong-2. They tested new technology and did experiments to prepare for future space station tasks. The astronauts themselves were also the subject(对象) of those experiments. The life support devices(设备) they used and how they lived inside the space laboratory were studied. No Chinese astronaut had stayed in space for that long before.

    A month-long space task was not easy, so Chinese scientists and engineers had come up with lots of new technologies to allow astronauts to stay more safely and more comfortably in space.

One of the new technologies tested during this task was a device called "space hospital". The space hospital was two little silver boxes tied around the two astronauts' legs. Through the "space hospital", scientists and doctors on the Earth could watch the astronauts' heart rate and temperature. When the astronauts felt tired, the "space hospital" could even massage(为……按摩) them.

    After this task, China is expected to send an unmanned cargo spaceship(无人货运飞船) in mid-April next year. It will dock with Tiangong-2 and take new fuel to the space laboratory.

Misunderstandings

    A man, wearing dirty clothes, with dirty hair and only 35 cents in his pocket, got on a bus and headed straight for the restroom. He thought that if he hid in the restroom, he could ride to New York without paying. But a passenger at the back of the bus saw him. She tapped(拍)the person in front of her on the shoulder and said, "There's a bum in the restroom. Tell the bus driver. "That passenger tapped the person sitting in front of him. "Tell the bus driver there's a bum in the restroom," he said.

    The message was passed from person to person until it reached the front of the bus. But somewhere along the way, the message changed. By the time it reached the bus driver, it was not "There's a bum in the restroom" but "There's a bomb(炸弹)in the restroom. "The driver pulled over to the side of the highway(高速公路)at once and called the police. When the police arrived, they told the passengers to get off the bus and stay far away. Then they closed the highway. That soon caused a 15-mile-long traffic jam. With the help of a dog, the police searched the bus for two hours. Of course, they found no bomb.

    Two similar-sounding English words also caused trouble for a man who wanted to fly from Los Angeles to Oakland, California. His problems began at the airport in Los Angeles. He thought he heard his flight announced, so he walked to the gate, showed his ticket, and got on the plane. Twenty minutes after take-off, the man began to worry. Oakland was north of Los Angeles, but the plane seemed to be heading west, and when he looked out his window all he could see was ocean. "Is this plane going to Oakland? "he asked the flight attendant. "No, "she said. "We're going to Auckland-Auckland, New Zealand."

    Because so many English words sound similar, misunderstandings among English-speaking people are not uncommon. Most misunderstandings are much less serious. Every day, people speaking English ask one another questions like these: "Did you say seventy or seventeen?" "Did you say that you can come or that you can't?"

    Similar-sounding words can be especially confusing（混淆）for people who speak English as a second language. When a Korean woman who lives in the United States arrived at work one morning, her boss asked her, "Did you get a plate?" "No." she answered, wondering what in the world he meant. She worked in an office. Why did the boss ask her about a plate? All day she wondered about her boss's strange question, but she was too embarrassed to ask him about it. At five o'clock, when she was getting ready to go home, her boss said, "Please be on time tomorrow.

You were 15 minutes late this morning." "Sorry," she said. "My car wouldn't start, and…"

    Suddenly she stopped talking and began to smile. Now she understood. Her boss hadn't asked her, "Did you get a plate?" He had asked her, "Did you get up late?"

    Auckland and Oakland. "A plate" and" up late". When similar-sounding words cause a misunderstanding, probably the best thing to do is just to laugh and learn from the mistake. Of course, sometimes it's hard to laugh. The man who traveled to Auckland instead of Oakland didn't feel like laughing. But even that misunderstanding turned out all right in the end. The airline paid for the man's hotel room and meals in New Zealand and for his flight back to California. "Oh well, "the man later said. "I always wanted to see New Zealand."

    Unlike most restaurants, the Enoteca Maria Restaurant in New York offers only home-cooked food by grand mas coming from across the world.

    Joe Scaravella, a 61-year-old Italian-American born and raised in New York, opened a restaurant in 2007. Having lost almost all his family members, he tried to recreate the feeling of home-cooked meal in his restaurant.

    He employed (雇佣) grandmas from different parts of Italy at first, and later, he begin hiring grandmas from other countries like Brazil, France and Greece. He built two kitchens in the restaurant: one for Italian grandmas to cook during lunchtime and the other for grandmas from other countries to cook every evening. The menus in the restaurant are constantly (不断地) changing because what is being served depends on the grandmas who are on duty.

    The restaurant opens five a week from Wednesday to Sunday. At present, there are more than 40 grandmas working in it. Most of them came to the U. S. with their children, helping take care of their grandchildren Scaravella give them the chance to express themselves in a culinary (烹饪的)way.

    The Enoteca Maria Restaurant has received positive reviews since its opening. Customers are ingested by its delicious food, comfortable environment and most importantly, the grandma who may remind them of their own.

    Sharon Reasonover first started volunteering at the age of 16. She hadn't really understood the meaning behind doing something for others until that summer day.

    Sharon got to the Ronald McDonald House (RMH) in Dallas, Texas. RMH is a "home away-from-home" for families so they can spend little money or no money to stay close by their sick children.

    Sharon remembered her first time walking into RMH-nervous and afraid of doing something wrong. After only 5 minutes, she began to communicate with families. "That day, I played with kids, laughed with their parents, and heard so many stories," says Sharon.

    Now Sharon is a 21-year-old student at the University of North Texas. She is still volunteering with RMH. "I met so many people there, and they changed my life," she says.

    A smile that Sharon will always remember came from a girl named Caroline. Caroline was badly ill, and she had great difficulty in eating. One day, Caroline's mom was angry with her, because she refused to have dinner. To help, Sharon said to Caroline that if she ate 5 bites. Sharon would do whatever she wanted. Little Caroline ate dinner that day, and Sharon had to dance in front of everyone! Although Caroline has passed away (去世), Sharon will never forget her smile.