A 108-year-old Message in a Bottle

    On November 30, 1906, George Bidder dropped a bottle from a boat into the North Sea. The weighted glass bottle sank almost to the sea floor, and then it move slowly for 108 years and 138 days.

    Its journey ended when Marianne Winkler found the bottle in 2015. Winkler was then on vacation on Amrum Island. She picked up the bottle when it was washed up onto the beach. She saw a piece of paper inside, but didn't break it open. She could tell that the bottle was old. So she didn't want to damage it.

    Finally she got the piece of paper out of the bottle. She found that the paper was actually a postcard. On the back of the card there was this message: The Marine Biological Association（海洋生物学协会） would pay a shilling（先令） for the bottle. A shilling was a unit of money that was used in Great Britain before the early 1970s.

    Winkler filled out the card and posted it. The association was surprised to get a postcard addressed to George Bidder, the president of the association from 1939 to 1945. The workers of the association searched on the Internet to find a shilling. They found one and sent it to Winkler as a reward.

    The message in the bottle was the oldest ever re-discovered. For this reason Marianne Winkler got a place in  “Guinness World Records”（吉尼斯世界纪录）. She broke the record for the oldest message in a bottle.

    Winkler's bottle was not the only one Bidder sent to sea. Between 1904 and 1906, he spent away more than one thousand bottles. He placed postcards inside them. The bottles were part of a research  project to map currents（洋流） in the North Sea. This was the best method at that time. But whether the association could get the bottles back depended on the people who found them. The association reported that about 55 percent of the bottles were returned. They added that the experiment was a success as it showed the east-to-west flow of the North Sea's currents.

    Jean is a bright young girl from a rich and famous family. She goes to a good university and has almost everything that money can buy. But all her family are so busy that they can hardly find time to be with her. In fact, Jean feels quite Lonely. So Jean spends a lot of her time on Facebook. She likes to be anonymous, using the name Linda on Facebook. She doesn't want people to know anything about her famous family and her rich life.

    Last year Jean made a very special friend on Facebook. His name was David and he lived in San Francisco. David was full of stories and jokes. He and Jean had the same interests in rock music and modern dance. So it always took them many hours to talk happily about the latest rock music and their favorite singers and sometimes they even forgot the time. Of course, they wanted to know more about each other. David sent a picture of himself: He was a tall, good-looking young man with a big, happy smile. As time went by, they became good friends and often sent cards and small things to each other.

    When Jean's father told her that he was going on a business trip to San Francisco, she asked him to let her go with him, so that she could give David a surprise for his birthday. She would take him the latest CD of their favorite rock singer. But when Jean knocked on David's door in San Francisco she found that the special friend she had chatted with on Facebook for so long was a twelve-year-old boy named Jim.

    Zhao Muhe is a 105-year-old man from Taiwan. Praised by many people as an ideal role model, Zhao's motto is that it's never too late to learn. He is now auditing(旁听)classes at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan as he prepares to earn a PhD.

    Zhao entered Open University of Kaohsiung in Taiwan in 1999.He went to school by bike every day, never missing a single class. He studied late into the night, and it only took Zhao four years to finish the 128 academic credits required to graduate, which he did at the age of 91.

    Several years later, Zhao decided to continue his studies. He passed the entrance examination for Nanhua University in Taiwan and got a master's degree two years later. The 98-year-old set a Guinness World Record as the oldest postgraduate in the world.

    In 2016, Zhao started classes at National Tsing Hua University. He lives alone on the fourth floor of an old apartment building. He does his own shopping, cooking and laundry, refusing other's help because he thinks it would make him feel old.

    Zhao was born in Shandong Province in 1912. Influenced by traditional Chinese culture, he studied at a private school and started to study calligraphy(书法)when he was 14.Years of practice made him a calligraphy master. Over the decades, he has donated plenty of money raised by calligraphy charities to people in need.

    Zhao held a calligraphy exhibition in Hong Kong in 2013, and also published an autobiography. As he couldn't use a computer at that time, the autobiography was written by others, based on Zhao's oral narration. After the book was written, Zhao decided that he should learn how to use the Internet. Now he can buy his own tickets online.

    There were two men who lived next to each other. One of them was a retired teacher and the other was a businessman. Both of them had planted many different plants in their gardens. The retired teacher seldom watered his plants and didn't pay a lot of attention to them. But his neighbor was very careful with his plants and watered them often.

    The retired teacher's plants were small, but still looked okay, while the businessman's plants were much bigger and greener. One night, there came a storm with a heavy rain and strong wind. The next morning, both of the neighbors came out to check in their gardens. The businessman saw that his plants had come out from the earth, and were totally out of life. But the retired teacher's plants nicely stood where they were.

    The businessman was surprised. He went to consult (咨询) the retired teacher. "We both grew the same plants and I cared for my plants better than you did. How could your plants still be okay?"

    The retired teacher smiled and said, "Because you gave your plants too much attention. You made it too easy for them to grow. I gave my plants just a little bit of water, so they had to grow deeper to absorb(吸收) more water. That is why my plants survived."