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    Skin­diving is a new sport today. This sport takes you into a wonderful new world. It is like a visit to the moon. When you are under the water, it is easy for you to climb big rocks, because you are no longer heavy.

    Here, under the water, everything is blue and green. During the day, there is plenty of light. When fish swim nearby, you can catch them with your hands.

When you have tanks of oxygen on your back, you can stay in deep water for a long time. But you must be careful when you dive in deep water.

    To catch fish is one of the most interesting parts of this sport.

    What's more, there are more uses for skin­diving. You can clean ships without taking them out of water. You can get many things from the deep sea.

    Now you see that skin­diving is both useful and interesting.

    In Japan, Luffy is more popular than Harry Potter．Luffy is the main character of One Piece(海贼王)．The book came out in 1997.

    One Piece tells the adventures of Monkey D．Luffy, a 17-year-old boy．He gets supernatural abilities by eating fruit．Luffy's dream is to find the world's biggest treasure, One Piece．Then he wants to become the next Pirate(海盗) King.

    To make his dream come true, Luffy has to reach the end of the most dangerous ocean: the Grand Line．Luffy travels with a group of pirates called the Straw Hats．On his way, more people join the group．It even includes a cook, a soldier and a musician．They also help Luffy fight with other pirates on the way.

    Many Chinese teenagers are One Piece fans．Yang Peiqi, 14, of Shenzhen, says he thinks reading One Piece is great fun and also he likes the themes of the story－dreams and friends．

    A baby giraffe is born 10 feet high and usually lands on its back. Bringing a giraffe into the world is a tall order. In his book, A View from the Zoo, Gary Richmond describes how a new-born giraffe learns its first lesson.

    The mother giraffe lowers her head long enough to take a quick look. Then she puts herself directly over her child. She waits for about a minute, and then she does the most unreasonable thing. She throws her long leg and kicks her baby, so that it's sent sprawling (四脚朝天).

    When it doesn't get up, what the mother has done is repeated again and again. The struggle (挣扎) to rise is important. As the baby giraffe grows tired, the mother kicks it again. Finally, it stands for the first time. Then the mother giraffe kicks it off again. Why? She wants it to remember how it can get up. In the wild, a baby giraffe must be able to get up as quickly as possible to stay with its group, where there's safety.

    Another writer named Irving Stone understood this. He spent a lifetime studying great people, writing stories about such men as Michelangelo, Vincent van Gogh, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin.

    Stone was once asked if he had found something unusual about these great people. He said, “I write about people who sometime in their life have a dream of something. They're beaten over the head, knocked down and for years they get nowhere. But every time they stand up again. And at the end of their lives they've realized some small parts of what they set out (着手) to do.”

    Jenny works in school and teaches us music. She likes shopping. She loves her family very much. It's Sunday, January 1st. She wants to buy a new skirt for her mother, because it's her mother's sixtieth birthday next Sunday. Now many clothes are on sale at Renming Clothes Store. There they have skirts in all colors and sports shoes in different sizes. They are very cheap. Jenny comes to the store with her mother, Mrs. Green. Jenny has a look at a red skirt and asks her mother to try it on (试穿)in the dressing room. After Mrs. Green comes out of it, a salesgirl says to her "You look five years younger in this red skirt. After hearing that, Mrs. Green says, "I will not take this skirt, because I don't want to look five years older after I take off the skirt.''