Liu Wei is very famous in China because he can play the piano with his toes(脚趾).

 One day when Liu Wei was only 10 years old, he played a game with some friends. He lost both his arms because of electricity.

 Liu Wei was very sad when both his arms were cut off after the accident. But soon he had to make a choice.

“For people like me, there were only two choices. One was to give up all the dreams, which would cause a quick death. The other was to work hard without arms to live an excellent life.”says Liu Wei.

Liu Wei's dream was to be a pianist. He learned to play the piano with his toes. And teaching himself to play the piano with his toes was very hard. Many times he wanted to give up, but his parents went on encouraging him and he wanted to make his parents proud.

 Maybe you can not believe that Liu Wei is able to play well only with his toes. The audience(观众) were deeply moved and very excited when they watched his performance.

    A king received a gift of two great falcons (猎鹰), and they were really beautiful. He gave the birds to his head falconer to be trained.

    One day, the falconer told the king that although one of the falcons was soaring (高飞) high in thesky, the other bird couldn't move from its branch (树枝) since the day it arrived.

    The king called on many falcon trainers to train the falcon, but no one could make the bird fly.

    After he tried everything else, the king thought to himself, "Maybe I need someone morefamiliar (熟悉的) with the countryside to work out this problem.” So he asked his men to go and get a farmer.

    In the morning, the king was surprised to find the falcon was soaring high above the gardens. The king asked the farmer, “How did you make the falcon fly?” The farmer said to the king, “It was very easy. I just cut the branch which the bird was sitting on".

    We are all made to fly. But sometimes we just sit on our branches, don't want to leave the things that are familiar to us. So sometimes our lives are boring and not exciting. Let us learn to cut the branch that we are familiar with and free ourselves to a brave soar!

    In March 2016, a group of people walked into a theater in New Mexico, USA to watch the movie Finding Nemo. The movie first hit the big screen in 2003 and it was a great success. Now it came back! What was special about it this time? It was dubbed(配音)  in Navajo. That's the language spoken by the Navajo, one of the biggest Native American tribes(美国土著部落). This movie wasn't made just for fun, though. It was made to save a dying language.

    The number of people who speak Navajo is dropping. In 20 14, only about 164, 000 people spoke it at home. That was down from about 173, 000 in 2005.

    Like many other Native American languages, Navajo has been in trouble for a long time. In the 1800s, thousands of Native American kids were forced to attend boarding schools. They were allowed to speak only English there. Over the years, fewer people learned their native languages. Some of these languages have been lost forever.

    Today, many Navajo kids aren't good at speaking Navajo. Some people worry that if today's kids don't learn Navajo and pass it down, the language could disappear.

Information Card

The seed vault(种子地窖)

    A lot of countries need different kinds of seeds so that they can plant them again. There is an important reason for this, Sometimes plants can't grow in a country because of bad weather or disease, so farmers need new seeds.

    You can keep seeds in a" seed vault". It's a place at a special temperature. The seeds don't grow, but they can live for a long time. Norway has the biggest seed vault in the world ﹣the Svalbard Global Seed Vault﹣and it has seeds from a lot of different countries.

    The vault is on the island of Spitsbergen. The island is about one thousand kilometers from the North Pole. It's a very cold place so it's good for seeds. Above the ground, the doorway is small, but inside, the building is huge. You walk down a long corridor (走廊), which is one hundred and thirty meters inside a mountain. At the end of it, there are three large areas with seeds.

    There are about half a million kinds of seeds inside the vault. For example, there are kinds of seeds for rice from Asia and Africa, 32 kinds of seeds for potatoes from Ireland and seeds for different tomatoes from the USA.

    The seed vault has space for a lot more seeds. You can put about 2.2 billion(十亿)seeds inside. The seeds can live here for thousands of years because of the cold temperature of ﹣18℃. So in the future, humans can grow any seed they want. In other words, the seed vault is the difference between life and death.