A

    Tom lives in a town near New York. His father has a factory there and his mother is a doctor. He is seven and begins to go to school this September. The school is a little far from home and his father drives a car to take him to school five days a week. So he is never late for class and his teachers like him very much.

    It is Monday today. Miss Green is teaching them to count from one to ten in the morning. Tom is studying hard. Soon he can count them. Miss Green is happy and asks," How many people are there in your family, Tom?"

    Tom stands up and says, "Two, Miss Green."

    "Who are they?"

    "My father and my mother."

    "Oh," Miss Green is surprised. Then she says, "There are three people in your family."

    "But now I'm not at home. I'm at school, you know!"

D

    Linda was Tara's best friend before, but now things are different. Tara is a member of Purple Girls Club and they have some rules about who they can be friends with. Linda isn't very pretty and doesn't wear cool clothes. So she can't be in their club. Now Tara is making a name list for her party, and she decides not to invite Linda.

    “Tara, come here.” her mother calls from the living room. Tara goes to her mother and sees the school report card in her hands.

    “Tara, what's the matter with you? You have failed(不及格)math and English and you did badly in all of your other subjects. You were such a good student before!”

    Tara sees the disappointment in her mom's eyes. She feels terrible. The activities of Purple Girls Club leave her very little time for studies. The girls get together almost daily for movies, shopping and surfing the Internet. She calls every friend in the club and asks them to help her. But they all refuse(拒绝）and say, “Who cares about studies now?” This makes Tara even sadder.

    Later, Tam's mom takes her to Linda's house across the street. Tara says sorry and Linda is glad to have her friend back. She happily helps Tara with her studies.

    Tara now has a new rule for friendship and it is that a friend that lends a helping hand is a true friend.

    When I was a kid, I did something really terrible. My father bought me two goldfish and named them "Iasc" and" Iasc Elie". He told me that meant "Fish" and "Other Fish" in Irish. To an eight-year-old child, the names seemed really boring.

    These boring names made me feel the goldfish were boring, too.  They did nothing more than swim around in their bowl. Sometimes, for fun, they would swim to the bottom of their bowl and dance around along the bottom, looking for interesting pieces of gravel.

    I tried many ways to make the goldfish more exciting. The most interesting thing was to see how long they could live out of the water. I took a fish out of the water with my hands and watched it gasping for air. Then I put it back in the bowl.  And then I would take them out of the water again, for longer and longer each time.

    Iasc and Iasc Elie started swimming towards the top of the water, not moving very much. Then they started floating on the top of the water. In other words, they were dead.

    I thought that bigger pets are more exciting, such as a cat and a dog. It would live longer than a goldfish, and then I kept a dog as my pet.

    After a serious earthquake happened, a father left his wife safely at home and rushed to his son's school, only to find that the building where his son studied had collapsed and looked like a pancake.

    He was shocked. He didn't know what he should do for a while, and then he remembered the words he had said to his son, "No matter what happens, I'll always be there for you!" And tears began to fill his eyes. He started digging through the ruins（废墟）.

    As he was digging, other helpless parents and the firemen arrived and tried to pull him off the ruins, saying, "It's dangerous here! There's nothing you can do!" To them he replied with one line," Are you going to help me now?" And then he kept on digging.

    He went on because he needed to know for himself, "Is my boy alive or is he dead?" He dug for 8 hours…12 hours…24 hours…36 hours… Then, in the 39^th hour, he pulled back a rock and heard his son's words. He shouted his son's name, "Armand!" He heard back, "Dad?! It's me, Dad! I told the other kids not to worry. I told them that if you were alive, you'd save me, and when you saved me, they'd be saved. You promised, 'No matter what happens, I'll always be there for you!' You did it, Dad!"

    "What's going on there?" the father asked, "There are 14 of us left out of 33, Dad. We're frightened, hungry. Thirsty, but thankful you're here. When the building fell down, it made a triangle（三角形）and it saved us."

Come out, boy!"

    "No, Dad! Let the other kids out first, because I know you'll get me! No matter what happens, I know you'll always be there for me."

    A feral child is a child who, from a young age, has lived with animals in the wild. What makes wild animals adopt these children and raise them as their own is a mystery. Since feral children have often had no contact with humans for a long time, they may be more like wild animals than people. Their stories, although often upsetting can teach us how people learn and use language — and perhaps even what it means to be human.

    In Uganda in 1991, a tribeswoman saw a naked boy living with a troop of wild monkeys in the jungle. The woman was shocked and quickly told the people in her village about the boy. When they tried to take him away from the monkeys, the frightened boy threw sticks at them and climbed up a tree to hide. The monkeys fought fiercely, trying to stop the tribesmen from taking him away, but they did not succeed.

    After his "rescue", the boy was taken to Kamuzinda Chritan Orphanage, outside Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. He was identified as John Ssabunnya, a boy who had disappeared three years earlier after his mother was murdered and his father went missing. John was only two years old when he disappeared.

    John couldn't speak when he arrived at the orphanage. It was obvious that he did not know how to act in a human way-- he knew only how to behave like a monkey. However, he soon began to talk and was found to have a beautiful singing voice.

    John shot to fame at the age of fourteen, when he toured the UK with a children's choir(合唱队). "His is a remarkable story. One day it could even be made into a film." said tour organizer Hillary Cook.