Mr. Harris taught sixth-grade science. On the first day of class, he gave us a talk about an animal called" birdcat", which died out during the Ice Age. He passed around a skull（头骨） as he talked. We all took notes carefully and later we had a test.

    When he returned my paper the next day, there was a big red"×" through each of my answers. I failed! There must be some mistakes! I wrote down exactly（确切地）what Mr. Harris had said. Then I learned that everyone in the class had failed. Why? "Very simple, "Mr. Harris said, "I made up all that 'birdcat'. But there had never been any such animal. So the information in your notes was not correct. Did you think you would get good grades for that?"

    However, we felt that was unfair. What kind of a test was this? And what kind of a teacher was he?

    Mr. Harris added, "I have told you many unbelievable things about this animal, such as the size, the color, but none of you have questioned. I hope you will learn something from this lesson. Teachers and textbooks are not always correct. In fact no one is." He also told us not to let our minds go to sleep, and to speak up if we thought he or the textbook was wrong.

    Up to now Mr. Harris' class gave me and my classmates something just as important: to look people in the eye and tell them they are wrong.

    Uncle Li and Uncle Wang are good friends. They live next to each other and their farms are both at the foot of the mountain. So they can help each other. But neither of them likes to use his head. They're both poor though they work hard. Most villagers have built new houses，but they still live in the low and broken houses. They never find out why.

    Once Uncle Li went to town to buy some medicine for his wife. In the town he heard the apples in a city were expensive. He told Uncle Wang about it as soon a she went back. They decided to carry some apples to the city. They borrowed some money from their friends and bought nearly 1, 000 kilograms of apples in the villages and carried them to the city on a tractor. Bad luck！A lot of apples have already been carried there when they arrived. A few days later they had to sell them at a low price. They felt unhappy and returned to their village.

    "I can't understand why we sustained（蒙受）losses in business while others always profit（盈利）. "Uncle Li asked one day.

    "The tractor was too small，"Uncle Wang said without thinking. "We'll carry more apples on a truck next time！"

    "I agree!" said Uncle Li. "How foolish we were!"

    The robin (知更鸟) stood on an old climbing plant, and sang his most beautiful song. Suddenly the wind made the plant move, and Mary saw something under the dark green leaves. The thick, heavy plant was covering a door. Mary's heart was beating fast and her hands were shaking as she pushed the leaves away and found the keyhole. She took the key out of her pocket, and it fit the hole. Using both hands, she managed to unlock the door. Then she turned round to see if anyone was watching. But there was no one, so she pushed the door, which opened, slowly, for the first time in ten years. She walked quickly in and closed the door behind her. At last she was inside the secret garden!

    It was the loveliest, most exciting place she had ever seen. There were old rose trees everywhere, and the walls were covered with climbing roses. She looked carefully at the grey branches (枝条). Were the roses still alive? Ben would know. She hoped they weren't all dead. But she was inside the wonderful garden, in a world of her own. It seemed very strange and silent, but she did not feel lonely at all. Then she noticed some small green shoots coming up through the grass. So something was growing in the garden after all! When she found a lot more shoots in different places, she decided they needed more air and light, so she began to pull out the thick grass around them. She worked away, clearing the ground, for two or three hours, and had to take her coat off because she got so hot. The robin hopped around, pleased to see someone gardening.