Our room was on the second floor but you could still hear the roar of the ocean and see the stars at night. I used to take long walks along the water. The food in town was wonderful and the people were very friendly. The area was very quiet and peaceful, and fairly deserted.

    The last evening of our vacation, however, we all heard strange footsteps following closely behind us as we were walking up to our room in the holiday centre. We turned around and noticed a fairly young man moving very rapidly across the beach and getting closer to us. He was tall and wore a baseball cap. We didn't have any cell phones on us. I never saw Dad as worried as he was then and knew that something was terribly wrong. The sense of fear started to overwhelm Mom and me. We had had such a good time in town. Now, the night was rapidly turning into a dangerous situation.

    We could hear the man's footsteps getting closer. Dad's face was almost pale. The so-called intruder (侵入者) had moved nearer and nearer when all of a sudden, the nearby vending (自动贩卖) machine started going crazy and spitting out cans of soda! The noise actually scared the intruder and he ran out of sight. My parents were shaking, but we all turned around to see who had put money into the vending machine downstairs, and actually saved us, but no one was around at all.Not a soul.

    It's one vacation I will never forget.

    David Beckham was born in 1975 in London, at a place called Leytonstone. When he was a young boy, his greatest passion was in football. He played it whenever he had the chance. Sometimes he would go and watch a game with his friends. When David Beckham was 12 years old, he won the Bobby Charlton Soccer Skills award. This was an important step forward for this young boy, and it led him to go for a visit to a football training camp in Spain. As a boy he played for schools of Essex and also for his county team.

    In 1991, he became a trainee with Manchester United. This meant that he could practice football as much as he wanted to and play for the highly successful Manchester United Youth Cup team and Under-21 team. In April, 1995 he played his first football league game against Leeds Untied. During 1995 and 1996, David became a regular member of the team and Manchester United won in both football seasons, with David scoring many goals.

    His goals made him a household name. In the first game of the 1996-1997 season, he scored a surprising goal from beyond the halfway line; seeing the goalkeeper a little way out of his goal, Beckham became famous overnight. He continued to score astonishing goals, especially from free-kicks. The speed of one of his shots was timed at 157 kph. He also had the ability to make the ball go from left to right, or right to left, whenever he chose. Goalkeepers were never sure where the ball was going, and it regularly ended up in the goal.

    For thousands of years comets have been a mystery to man. They travel across the sky very fast and have a bright “tail” of burning gas. The comet Tempel 1 has an orbit（轨道） far outside the orbit of the furthest planet in our solar system, Pluto. It has been there for 4.6 billion years, 133 million kilometers from Earth. Last week a little American spacecraft crashed into Tempel 1. The spacecraft had a camera and it took a photograph of the comet every minute before it finally crashed into its surface.

    The space mission to Tempel 1 cost $335 million and was called Deep Impact. The spacecraft was travelling at 37,000 kilometers per hour when it hit the comet and the crash completely destroyed the spacecraft. But before it hit the comet, the spacecraft took some amazing photographs. The last one was a close-up picture which the spacecraft took just 3 seconds before it crashed into the comet.

    “Right now we have lost one spacecraft,” said a delighted NASA engineer. Deep Impact was like a American Independence Day fireworks display. It took many years to plan and ended in an enormous explosion. 

    The spacecraft which crashed into the comet was made of copper and was the size of a washing machine. It was dropped from a mothership into the path of the comet and the mothership then photographed the cloud of ice, dust and organic chemicals that rose from the surface of the comet after the crash.

    The crash completely destroyed the spacecraft but nothing really happened to the comet: experts believe that the crash slowed the comet down by no more than 1/10,000 of a millimeter a second.The aim of the mission was to study for the first time the interior of a comet.

    The mothership was 480 km from the explosion and observed the crash and the explosion with instruments for 800 seconds. Seven satellites, including the Hubble space telescope, watched the moment of drama, and over the next day and night about 50 telescopes on Earth were watching the distant comet.

    Time flies, but the tracks of time remain in books and museums. This is what made a recent tragedy in Brazil even more terrible.

    On Sept.2, a big fire ripped through the National Museum of Brazil.“ Two hundred years of work, research and knowledge were lost,” Brazilian President Michel Temer wrote on Twitter after the fire. “It's a sad day for all Brazilians.”

    Most of the 20 million pieces of history are believed to have been destroyed. Only as little as 10 percent of the collection may have survived, Time reported. Among all the items, there were Egyptian mummies, the bones of uniquely Brazilian creatures such as the long－necked dinosaur Maxakalisaurus, and an 11,500－year－old skull called Luzia, which was considered one of South America's oldest human fossils.

    Besides these, Brazil's indigenous(本土的，土著的) knowledge also suffered. The museum housed world－famous collections of indigenous objects, as well as many audio recordings of local languages from all over Brazil. Some of these recordings, now lost, were of languages that are no longer spoken.

    “The tragedy this Sunday is a sort of national suicide, a crime against our past and future generations,” Bernard Mello Franco, one of Brazil's best－known columnists, wrote on the O Globo newspaper site.

    The cause of the fire is still unknown, as BBC News reported on Sept. 3. After the fire burned out, crowds protested outside the museum to show their anger at the loss of the irreplaceable items of historical value.

    According to Emilio Bruna, an ecologist at the University of Florida, museums are living, breathing stores of who we are and where we've come from, and the world around us.

    Just as underwater grass floats on the surface if it loses its roots, a nation is lost without its memories. The fire at the National Museum of Brazil teaches the world an important lesson: We should never neglect history.

    My elephant adventures began in 1984 when, with our one-year-old daughter, my husband and I crossed the jungle in a jeep, slicking behind a lorry for comfort and company. The elephants standing like watchers on either side of the forest highway had us praying for our safety. One elephant made loud noise and angrily pawed (抓) the ground, warning us off. We raced away before they could attack.

    It was wise to keep elephants at a distance. We heard stories of tourists whose jeeps were overturned, and a couple of photographers were killed because they moved too close. Elephants are misleading animals. They give people an impression of being quiet and kind, so tourists think it's safe to picnic in the jungle (丛林). Yet angry elephants have knocked them down in seconds before they could take off.

    Elephants might make life unpredictable and dangerous. It's difficult for inexperienced environmentalists to even, begin to grasp this reality. I've heard city people say " We humans are encroaching (侵害) on their forests." But what's the solution?

    When a poor farmer borrows heavily to plant a crop, he'll do anything to protect it His life depends on it Elephants ruining an about-to-be-harvested corn field cannot expect to be welcomed like special guests. The battle between beast and farmer is violent.

    Experts are working on solutions to human-elephant conflicts (冲突). Some are sure to fail to like the plans to build electric fences around human settlements. Elephants rapidly figure them out and come in, around and over them.

    There are more questions than answers, for sure. But as my husband said, "More people die in car accidents every single day, in every city on the earth. But they won't take cars off the roads, will they?" So we need to seek practical ways of preventing elephant accidents.

    The big fire in April that tore through the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris(巴黎圣母院) is still fresh in people's minds. The 800-year-old landmark suffered great damage to its top, but thankfully the most valuable religious relics and cultural treasures were undamaged.

    So a US publishing company GoArchitect organized the People's Design Competition to invite designers, worldwide to share their ideas of rebuilding the French landmark. The open call attracted more than 200 proposals from 56 countries and regions. In the end, Chinese architects Cai Zeyu and Li Sibei won the competition with their striking design. They are both the post-90s generation.

    Named "Paris Heartbeat", the design replaces the old top with a kaleidoscope(万花筒) of multifaceted mirrors, which is combined with a mirror roof, reflecting the ever–changing urban environment.

    The kaleidoscope is the floating "time capsule", at the top using magnetic levitation(磁悬浮) technology, which is meant to open every half century. The "time capsule" moves up and down, breathing and beating together with the city.

    "I believe that the 'time capsule' can be achieved with present technology," Cai told the Global Times.

    The pair hoped that their design, Paris Heartbeat, could meet people's high expectations for the rebuilding. As Cai and Li told GoArchitect, "Notre Dame witnessed Parisian history. It burns, survives and co-breathes with the ever-changing world…The 2019 fire will mark a new era."

    Though people still don't know what kind of design the French government will choose, it's clear that people around the world hope that the lost beauty of Notre Dame will come back. Once rebuilt, it will certainly become a permanent part of history and the Parisian skyline again.