Conor Grennan was unwilling to be a volunteer(志愿者). The 29-year-old American was not sure if he had the skills or a strong feeling for it.However, he went to work at an orphanage(孤儿院) in Nepal. His first thought was to make people impressed.

    "I thought that if I volunteered just once. I could retell the story over and over," Grennan said in a Huffington Post article.However, his three-month stay it the orphanage turned into in unusual experience. It was 2004 and Grennan had given up his job to begin a year-long around-the-world trip, His first three months were spent in Nepal.

    When he arrived in the village, he knew nothing about the children or the local culture. When he opened the gate of the Little Princes Children's Home, he was faced by the excited children.

    The young American ended up caring for 18 children. He later discovered that they were trafficked(被拐卖的)children. So he walked through the mountains with great difficulty to find the kids' families, "I started walking with photos of the kids." he told the Reuters reporter. "I would show up in villages and show photographs around. I went with 24 photos, and I found 24 families." At the same time, he put his heart into Nepalese culture.

    Grennan said, “Volunteering is the single best way to see how the rest of the world lives.”

    He also encouraged others to do what he had done. He believes that volunteering needs only making decisions to show up.

    Grennan's fight against child-trafficking has changed him. His book, Little Prince, came out last week.

Sign Up for Your Free iDOGO ID

    The Mac Kids Book Club is home of the latest and greatest books, activities, and prizes. Claim your badge（徽章）now to join the coolest club around!

Why Join:

    With iDOGO you can:

    Create your custom avatar （虚拟化身）

    Earn points and badges

    Follow other DOGO users

    Bookmark & share news, books, and movies

    Express your opinions about news, books, and movies

    FREE Book Club giveaway:

    Terms and Conditions

    This Free Book giveaway is open to all iDOGO account holders in the US, except where prohibited by law. YOU MAY ONLY ENTER THIS GIVEAWAY ONLINE, NO OTHER METHOD OF ENTRY WILL BE ACCEPTED.

    If the number of readers interested in the book exceeds the number of copies available, winners will be picked solely at the mercy of DOGObooks.

    No purchase necessary. Only one entry is allowed per household. Ages 15 and under, and a legal resident of the US.

    The book publisher is the sponsor of this giveaway and is responsible for shipment of books to winners.

    You are not required to review the book if you win a copy. However, you are encouraged to do so.

    Winners will be notified by email. Note that in order to be considered for a giveaway participants must have their parent or legal guardian complete, sign, and return the Parental Consent Form.

    By accepting a free book and posting a review, you grant (授权) DOGObooks and the publisher a permanent, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, and distribute your review.

    Please reveal in your review that you received the book for free through DOGObooks.

阅读下列短文，从每题所给的四个选项 （A 、B 、C  和 D ）中，选出最佳选项。

    Christmastime in the city brings forests of trees already cut and waiting to be sold. But some people like to drive to tree farms. Others wait for their trees to come to them. They order one from the pages of a catalog or on the Internet. Some say the easiest thing of all is to buy a man­made tree with Christmas lights already on it. No falling needles to have to clean up.

    The National Christmas Tree Association says 33,000,000 real trees were sold last year, compared to 9,000,000 man­made ones. Man­made trees generally cost more, but they can be reused. Most natural trees are cut up and recycled, but some people buy trees that can be planted.

    Most Christmas trees are now grown on farms instead of in forests. Twenty-one thousand tree farmers in the United States grow Christmas trees on more than 180,000 hectares. Oregon was the leading producer last year.

    Twenty-two percent of people who bought real trees last year chose them at a farm. Two percent of those people cut the trees themselves. The next most popular places were big stores like Walmart and Home Depot. Groups like the Boy Scouts also sell Christmas trees. But some people pay nothing for theirs. They steal it.

    Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has many pretty evergreens. Some years ago, a university worker found a way to keep them there. A month before Christmas, workers treated them with “pink ugly mix”. It contains water and red food colour. The bright colour starts to disappear after about a month. It can take longer, however. Cornell decided not to use the mix this year, but the idea has spread.

    The year 2117 will be an eventful one for art. In May of that year in Berlin, the philosopher-artist Jonathon Keats' “century cameras”— cameras with a 100-year-long exposure (曝光)time—will be brought back from hiding places around the city to have their results developed and exhibited. Six months after that, the Future Library in Oslo, Norway, will open its doors for the first time, presenting 100 books printed on the wood of trees planted in the distant past of 2017.

    As Katie Paterson, the creator of the Future Library, puts it: “Future Library is an artwork for future generations.” These projects, more than a century in the making, are part of a new wave of slow art intended to push viewers and Participants to think beyond their own lifetimes. They aim to challenge today's short-term thinking and the brief attention spans of modern consumers, forcing people into considering works more deliberately. In their way, too, they are fighting against modern culture—not just regarding money, but also the way in which artistic worth is measured by attention.

    In a similar fashion, every April on Slow Art Day, visitors are encouraged to stare at five works of art for 10 minutes at a time—a tough task for the average museum visitor, who typically spends less than30seconds on each piece of art.

Like the Future Library, the century cameras are very much a project for cities, since it's in cities that time runs fastest and the pace of life is fastest. “Since I started living in a city, I've somehow been quite disconnected,” Anne Beate Hovind, the Future Library project manager, who described how working on the library drew her back to the Pace of life she knew when she was growing up on a farm in her youth, told The Atlantic magazine.

    Eco-friendly Vauban, lied in the southwest part of Germany, has everything－tree-lined streets, perfect houses－but it's missing one urban feature of the last 100 years or so: the car. And Vauban residents(居民) don't mind one bit. Vauban doesn't ban cars entirely. Rather, it just tries to reduce the use of cars by creating “parking-free” and “car-free” living. In Vauban, parking spots are a no-no private property(私人财产). Cars can only be parked in public parking lots, so living without a car saves residents the cost of parking in the public lot. Cars also are prevented from using certain roads and must stick to strict speed limits. With these limitations, fewer than 20 percent of residents own cars. Without cars, bikes are almost religion in this small town. Kids pick them up even before they can ride one. Vauban is about much more than just using two wheels instead of four. In Vauban , residents ride bikes and even receive money from the electric company for selling electricity back to the power grid (电网系统). It's an environmentally-friendly city of the future, with organically grown food, renewable energy, and carbon-neutral homes. And now, with a population of 5,500, it's attracting attention from around the world. Can an eco-friendly city like Vauban be a model for Americans to stop their over-reliance on the cars?

    Sometimes when I watch a news report what's in the back of my mind is what isn't being reported or stressed. While this eco-friendly city is inspiring in that it shows residents getting exercise and fresh air through the majority use of bicycles, as well as good old fashioned walking, common sense would tell you that even for a place like Vauban, Germany, it owes its existence to the cars.

    Do you think that bicycles were able to transport all the construction materials that were needed to build and maintain the eco-friendly homes and businesses in Vauban? It took cars to help build this utopia. It's one of the paradoxes of life that sometimes in order to get away from relying on something like the car, you actually have to rely on that very thing at the beginning and into the foreseeable future to some degree.

    I myself haven't owned a car for more than 14 years, and mostly get around town running, walking, or using public transportation. There are times I wish I had one, since it would make many things easier, but overall I'm glad not to have to deal with the headaches of owning a car, which caused me to get rid of it in the first place. And all the walking and running has helped to keep me fit and healthy.

    To get even close to being like eco-friendly Vauban, Americans will need to absolutely change the way they live. Commuting(乘车上下班) patterns will have to change, public transportation will have to be invested in, and so on. And though ending our love affair with the car will be impossible during my lifetime, we may at least start to see more Vauban-like areas in the USA.

    We can hope that Americans will consider using their feet more to get around, cutting down on pollution, and giving themselves some more exercise.

    I felt excited, curious and nervous at the same time. I was excited because I would be skipping（跳级）two grades. I was curious because I didn't know how high school students were taught.

    However, I was most nervous at the idea that I would be doing high school homework. I had just walked into the class when the bell rang. This wasn't a good start. But the kid in front of me looked very friendly. Luckily, since it was the first day of school, my teacher talked for about half of the period and we just had the rest of the period to start the class. I didn't know what he was saying at first, but when I saw the problems on the paper, I knew what to do. The next day, the kid said hi and I said hi back. We got into a conversation. It seemed that whenever I was talking to my friend, everyone stopped staring at me. Then the class started. It was easy. But I was still uncomfortable because I couldn't look around without meeting others' eyes, so I just kept my eyes on the whiteboard and on my textbook. However, my friend didn't show up the next day, and the eighth graders just kept on staring at me. I didn't know why.

    The next day everything changed. My friend was back to school. I was praised for my homework. Everyone stared at me less. Some started to be a little friendlier towards me. I felt at home at last here. My teachers also seemed pretty nice.