At 5:05 pm on March 19, a loud alarm sounded around the playground of Tanghu Middle School, Sichuan. Students hurried to the playground with something covering their mouths. Don't worry. There wasn't a fire. Students were having a fire drill（演习）. School is a good place for students to study. Yet sometimes, it is easy to have accidents there.

A survey suggests that right safety training could prevent 80 percent of these accidents. In China, fire drills at school are common to teach students to deal with emergencies（紧急情况）. At the same time, many other countries have their own ways to keep children safe around school.

In Japan, public primary schools hold earthquake drills once a month. They teach students safety tips during an earthquake drill. The training teaches students to escape from earthquake-stricken areas without pushing and stampeding（踩踏）.

Most US school buildings have fire escapes on each floor. A fire escape has platforms with stairs and ladders. They are usually made of iron. Students can get to the fire escape through a fire exit door or a window.

In many middle schools in the UK, students can choose to take a bicycle course. There, they learn how to ride to school safely. Also, on roads without traffic lights near schools, there are crossing guards. They wear bright color clothes and stop cars to guide children across the road safely.

    Listening to songs is a great way to learn English. Here are a few reasons.

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#}. And when you are enjoying yourself, you learn without even realizing it. The best thing is that there are so many good songs in English and there are so many kinds of music, including pop, country, R&B, rock, soul and so on. Let David Bowie, Madonna, The Beatles, Alicia Keys...be your teachers!

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}. Just take your MP3 player with your favorite tracks and press “play”. And you can listen to them whenever and whatever you want, so you can learn English while you're walking, driving, doing sports or relaxing on the sofa.

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#}. While you're listening to songs, you are raising your awareness of language structures. And you're seeing how the structures are formed and used.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#}. And after singing along to the songs several times, all those phrases and expressions will become firmly fixed in your long-term memory. Then later you'll find that you use them naturally when you're speaking or writing.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#}. For example, the song American Pie is about the 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the The Big Bapper, which was an important event in US history.

    So, load up your MP3 player, put on your headphones and press “play”!

A. Learning English by listening to music is easy, too.

B. Songs can also teach you about history, culture and traditions.

C. Songs are full of useful language that you can use when you're speaking and writing.

D. Songs are good for developing your understanding of English grammar.

E. Listening to music is fun.

The Special Olympics

    The Olympics are some of the most exciting sports events in the world. But there is another Olympics about which you may not have heard. This is the Special Olympics, for people with mental disabilities.

    The first Special Olympic Games were held in Chicago in 1968. One thousand people competed in many events. Since then Special Olympic programs have been organized in all 50 states and more than 150 countries. Today more than a million people take part in the Special Olympics.

    Mentally disabled persons over the age of eight may take part in the Special Olympics. These people may also have physical disabilities. People have run in races using crutches or walkers. A young girl enter the long jump event with an artificial leg. A blind runner raced around the track with the help of his coach's voice. A deaf basketball team planned their plays using sign language.

    Winning is wonderful for people who may never have had much success. But training for and entering the Special Olympics is also important. The participants become more confident. They learn how to concentrate in order to play well. Then they use that concentration in school to improve their schoolwork. Like anyone else they feel great when they prove they can do something well.

    Claude Monet's paintings were quite different from the art styles that were popular in the 1870s France. Traditional artists always did their artwork in a studio and their paintings were realistic-they looked exactly like the real world. Claude Monet was part of a group of painters who were called Impressionists(印象派画家). Their paintings were light and a bit fuzzy-they gave an impression of what the real world looked like. Sometimes Impressionists worked outside, which was a very unusual thought in their time. Impressionism received its name from an early painting by Claude Monet titled impression, Sunrise.

    Knowing that trains were interesting subjects and represented modern progress, Claude Monet crated a series of Impressionist paintings of trains from January to March of 1877. He worked on his paintings right on the train platform at the Gare Saint-Lazare, the train station on Saint Lazare Street. Although there were many train stations in Paris, this was the first train station built in Paris so it had historical significance(意义).

    Monet's friend, Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir, told the following story to his sons about Claude Monet and painting the trains. Monet needed permission(允许)to spend time on the train platform and paint what he saw in his impressionistic style. One day Monet dressed himself in his very best suit along with a fine top hat, a good linen shirt and a silk tie. He appeared to be a wealthy gentleman while he really was a poor painter.

    When he went towards the clerk at the train office, he presented his calling card which introduced him as Claude Monet, Painter. He asked to see the station master. The clerk quickly allowed this fine gentleman to enter the station master's office. The station master was also impressed and gave Monet permission to paint on the train platform. The station master even kept trains from leaving on time so Monet could complete a scene even though passengers complained.

    Was it all worthwhile(值得)? Monet's train scenes turned his career into a success and for the station master, made his train station famous until even now.

Claude Monet

    Global warming is a big problem that we have to stop. One of the best things we do is to plant more trees. Trees can take in CO₂ in the air and stop global warming. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    A team of scientists at Boston University has been working with NASA to study Earth's green vegetation (植被). They used a special NASA camera and found that global leaf area had increased by 5 percent since the early 2000s. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} That's about one-quarter of the size of the entire Amazon rainforest.

    The growth mainly came from China's forest protection programs, NASA said. For example, since 1962, China has been planting trees in Saihanba, Hebei Province. It was once a desert. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#} Ant Forest, a feature in Alipay app, gives users points for doing eco-friendly things such as walking and going paperless in the office. Users can then use these points to water and grow their own virtual (虚拟的) trees. When the virtual trees are big enough, Ant Forest will plant real trees somewhere in the world. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}