Mary was a little girl and she lived with her parents in Africa. Her parents had gotten tired of the neighbors always complaining to them about their daughter, who was naughty and disrespectful to others. To change the situation, the father told Mary a story of a thief who would come and take away the parents of a bad child to take care of a better child and leave the bad child alone.

    However Mary went on with her ways. One day she made fun of an old blind man on her way to school. On hearing this, her parents thought of a new plan.

    The next day Mary came back from school. To her surprise, nobody was at home. It was getting dark but neither of her parents showed up. The little girl started to wonder where they were. Suddenly she remembered the story. Mary began to cry, for she thought she would never see them again. While she was crying, the door opened and her parents came in. She ran to them and asked, “Where have you been? I thought the thief had taken you away.”

    “He did but he let us go and told us to come back home because he knows you are going to be a good girl. He told us that if you are still a bad girl, he will come back for us,” they told her.

    “I am a good girl now and I promise never to be bad again because I don't want him to take you away from me.” Mary's words made her parents very happy. From that day on, Mary has never misbehaved again.

任务一：判断下列句子正误。

任务二：回答问题。

Once a wise man and his student traveled on the horses to a mountain village which even couldn't be found in a map. They were well 1 at a small house by a family of five. The wise man asked, "How do you live in such a lonely place?

"That's what keeps us going," said the host, pointing to a thin and tired cow. "She gives us 2 , some of which we drink and some we make into cheese. When there is extra (额外的), we 3 the milk and cheese for other food."

The wise man thanked them and left the village. When he reached the first turning in the road, he said to his student, "Go back and get the cow, take it to the cliff (悬) and 4 it off." Although the student was shocked and angry, he followed his master's order.

Years later, the student still felt a sense of 5 about what he had done, so he returned to the poor family to find out what he could do. 6 , in place of the small house there turned into a large one with trees all around. He recognize (辨认) the host standing on the opposite who once treated him. He went over to the man and asked, "What happened?"

The man replied with a smile, "Our cow fell off the cliff and died. Firstly, we lost heart and didn't know 7 to live our life. Later, we accepted the fact and tried to come up with new ways of doing things and develop new skills. And so, we are now much 8 ."

Sometimes our dependence on something small and limited (有限的) is the biggest obstacle (障碍) to our growth. 9 you free yourself of the thought "it's little but it's certain and comfortable", then your life will really change. I hope you have the wisdom to recognize your "10 " this new year, and the courage to push it off the cliff.

According to the report, during the past summer vacation, a 15-year-old boy made a model plane on his own in less than a month. Then he flew it successfully, which surprised all the people around him.

The boy named Li Banghua is from Hefei, Anhui. He made the model plane by himself. It is 0.6 metres wide, has a wingspan (翼展) of 4.4 metres and weighs about 40 kilos. Li just finished his high-school entrance exam (入学考试) a year ago and got good grades. After the exam, he threw himself into the work of making the model plane at once.

Li has been interested in model planes since he was a child. And he has been studying and building model planes for years. This time the model plane is the largest he has ever built and he considers it the most successful one.

During the process (过程) of building the plane, he failed many times. "But the biggest difficulty I had was that the adults couldn't understand me well," Li said. "When I said I was going to build a model plane, a lot of adults thought it was impossible. But I decided to keep on working hard. That is because once I start something, giving up is not a choice for me."

When talking about his future, he said he dreamed of becoming a plane engineer.

No one likes thieves (小偷), but for most people in a town in California, they just laugh when they find that something small is lost. That's because the thief is a cat. 

Jean Chu and her family adopted (收养) Dusty as their pet cat a few years ago. Not long after Dusty moved in, the family started finding new things around. One day, they would find a shoe. The next day, there would be a sock. At first, no one knew where these things came from. Soon they found that the things always showed up in the mornings. And who went out every night? That might be Dusty. However, it was difficult to catch Dusty in the act (当场). Soon workers of the TV show Must Love Cats heard about Dusty's story and they decided to make a film about Dusty. They used an infrared camera (红外摄像机). Sure enough, the camera caught Dusty in the act when he brought home a toy. 

Soon the film of Dusty became popular on the Internet. The cat is a celebrity (名人) now. People come to Chu's house to get back their things every day. They have become good friends with Chu and Dusty.