My cousin and I have very different living habits. I think I have a good habit. I take an active part in sports. After school, I often play ball games with my classmates. I don't like indoor activities. I'm hardly ill, and I haven't caught colds for years. I get up at the same time every morning and go to bed at the same time every night. I always sleep for nine hours each night, and I always feel refreshed (精力充沛的) in the morning.

    My cousin, however, has a very bad living habit. She never does exercise. She even hates walking to the bus stop from her home. She prefers indoor activities. She likes to play computer games and watch TV. She is overweight and often falls ill. She always goes to bed late and gets up at the last minute. She often feels tired in the morning.

    Hi, friends! What do you like to do after school? In my school, we have different things (不同的事情) to do.

    A little boy was playing in his sandbox on a Saturday morning．While he was building roads and houses in the soft sand, he discovered a large stone in the middle of the sandbox．

    The little boy pushed and pulled, but every time he thought he had made some progress, the stone tipped (倾斜) and then fell back into the sandbox．The little boy tried his best, but his only reward was to have the stone roll back．

    Finally the boy cried．All that time the boy's father watched him from his living room window．At the moment tears fell, his father came to the boy and the sandbox．Gently but surely he said, "Son, why didn't you use all the strength that you had?" The boy said sadly, "But I did, Daddy, I did! I used all the strength that I had! No, son," corrected the father．"You didn't ask me．"With that, the father reached down, picked up the stone and removed it from the sandbox．

    Do you have "stones" in your life that need to be removed? Are you discovering that you are too weak to lift them? There is ONE who is always ready to give us the strength we need．Isn't it funny how we try so hard to do things on our own?

    Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835, in the state of Missouri. When he was four, his family moved to the town of Hannibal, Missouri. Hannibal was a port on the Missippi River, and Clemens loved to watch the big steamboats going up and down the river. He said that all the boys in his school had one ambition in life: to work on a steamboat!

    His father died when he was just 12 years old, and Clemens then went to work for a printer to help support his family. He travelled around, and worked in many different cities. But when he was 22, he achieved his ambition—he got a job working on a steamboat. He sailed up and down the wide Missippi River until the American Civil War began.

    He then moved around America, and tried several jobs. He was a soldier, and a silver miner. Then he started working as a writer for a newspaper. It was at that time that he decided to use a pen name for his stories, and he chose the name "Mark Twain".

    The name is interesting. It comes from his days on the steamboats. He used to throw a piece of rope into the river. There was a heavy weight on the end of the rope, and the rope had some marks on it. He used the rope to find how deep the river was. Then he shouted out, "Mark One" or "Mark Twain", meaning "Mark Two". Each mark was about two metres, so when he shouted "Mark Twain", it meant that the river was deep enough for the big boat.

    In 1865 Clemens wrote a story about a jumping frog. The story and the writer became famous. In 1867 he toured Europe. He married when he returned, and lived for most of the rest of his in Harfort, Connecticut. He wrote many books, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which he wrote in 1876. He also gave many lectures, and became a very famous and popular man.

    Once two of his friends decided to write to him, but they had lost his address. So on the envelope they just wrote "Mark Twain, God knows where". Several weeks later, they received a replay from the writer. It just said, "He does!"

    Samuel Clemens died in 1910. He is considered to be one of America's most important writers.

Luke Hayes-Alexander, 32 years old, looks like a typical eighteen-year-old boy. He speaks slowly and is quite shy. However, when he talks about food, he is different! "My life is about food shopping, preparing food and serving." Luke was the executive chef(行政主厨)of Luke's Gastronomy in Kingston, Canada, started by his parents in 1993. When he was a kid, he liked reading cookbooks. Soon, he started helping his father with cooking in the kitchen. At the age of fourteen, Luke left school and decided to learn more about food. Then, at the age of sixteen, he became the chef and started changing the small family restaurant into a center of creative dishes.

Luke cares about his ingredients(原料)a lot:  they all come from local(当地的): arms and he chooses them carefully. Everything in the restaurant is home-made. Even the wine in his restaurant is from his own vineyard(葡萄园)."I enjoy cooking. I hope every ingredient in my dishes is beautiful and fresh and that the customers will enjoy the taste of my food, "he said.

Luke is happy in Toronto. He has many plans and is already working on a new cookbook. And then he would also like to go to Europe in the future to find out more about cooking and talk with some famous cooks. What words does Luke have for other teenagers interested in cooking?" Have fun, get dirty, listen to some good music and cook!"