One of my first memories as a child in the 1950s was a discussion I had with my brother in our tiny bedroom in the family house in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

    We had heard in school about a planet called Pluto. It was the farthest, coldest, and darkest thing a child could imagine. We guessed how long it would take to die if we stood on the surface of such a frozen place wearing only the clothes we had on. We tried to figure out how much colder Pluto was than Antarctica, or than the coldest day we had ever experienced in Pennsylvania.

    Pluto, which famously was downgraded from a “major planet” to a “dwarf planet”(矮星) in 2006, captured our imagination because it was a mystery that could complete our picture of what it was like at the most remote corners of our solar system

    Pluto's underdog discovery story is part of what makes it so attractive. Clyde Tombaugh was a Kansas farm boy who built telescopes out of spare auto parts, old farm equipment and self-ground lenses. As an assistant at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, Tombaugh's task was to search millions of stars for a moving point of light, a planet that the observatory's founder thought existed beyond the orbit of Neptune. On February 18, 1930, Tombaugh found it. Pluto was the first planet discovered by an American, and represented a moment of light in the midst of the Great Depression's dark encroachment(入侵).

    Pluto is much more than something that is not a planet. It's a reminder that there are many worlds out there beyond our own and that the sky isn't the limit at all. We don't know what kinds of fantastic variations on a theme nature is capable of making until we get there to look.

    Does Fame Drive You Crazy?

    In the fall of 1985, I was a bright-eyed girl heading off to Howard University to study law, aiming at a legal career and dreaming of sitting on a Supreme Court bench somewhere. Twenty-one years later I am still a bright-eyed dreamer and one with quite a different tale to tell.

    My grandma, an amazing woman, graduated from college at the age of 65. She was the first in our family to reach that goal. But one year after I started college, she developed cancer. I made the choice to withdraw from college to care for her. It meant that school and my personal dream would have to wait.

    Then I got married with another dream: building my family with a combination of adopt and biological children. In 1999, we adopted our first son. To lay eyes on him was fantastic and very emotional. A year later came our second adopted boy. Then followed son No.3. In 2003, I gave birth to another boy.

    You can imagine how busy I became, raising four boys under the age of 8. Our home was a complete zoo--a joyous zoo. Not surprisingly, I never did make it back to college full-time. But I never gave up on the dream either. I had only one choice: to find a way. That meant taking as few as one class each semester.

    The hardest part was feeling guilty about the time I spent away from the boys. They often wanted me to stay home with them. There certainly were times I wanted to quit, but I knew I should set an example for them to follow through the rest of their lives.

    In 2007, I graduated from the University of North Carolina. It took me over 21 years to get my college degree!

    I am not special, just single-minded. It always struck me that when you're looking at a big challenge from the outside it looks huge, but when you're in the midst of it, it just seems normal. Everything you want won't arrive in your life on one day. It's a process. Remember: little steps add up to big dreams.

    One silly question I simply can't stand is "How do you feel? Usually the question is asked of a man in action — a man on the go, walking along the street, or busily working at his desk. So what do you expect him to say? He'll probably say, "Fine, I'm all right," but "you've put a bug in his ear" — maybe now he's not sure. If you're a good friend, you may have seen something in his face, or his walk, that he overlooked that morning. It starts him worrying a little. First thing you know, he looks in a mirror to see if everything is all right, while you go merrily on your way asking someone else, "How do you feel?" Every question has its time and place. It's perfectly acceptable, for instance, to ask "How do you feel?" if you're visiting a close friend in the hospital. But if the fellow is walking on both legs, hurrying to catch a train, or sitting at his desk working, it's no time to ask him that silly question. When George Bernard Shaw, the famous writer of plays, was in his eighties, someone asked him, "How do you feel?" Shaw put him in his place. "When you reach my age," Shaw said, "either you feel all right or you're dead."

Save the Animals

    Animals are natural resources(资源）that people have wasted all through our history.

    Animals have been killed for their fur and feathers(羽毛), for food, for sport, and simply because they were in the way. Thousands of kinds of animals have disappeared from the earth forever. Hundreds more are on the danger list today. About 170 kinds in the United States alone are considered in danger.

    Why should people care? Because we need animals. And because once they are gone, there will never be any more. Animals are more than just beautiful or interesting. They are more than just a source of food. Every animal has its place in the balance(平衡)of nature. Destroying one kind of animal can create many problems.

    For example, when farmers killed large numbers of hawks(鹰), the farmers stores of com and rain were destroyed by rats and mic. Why? Because of hawks ate rats and mice that multiplied(繁殖)quickly

    Luckily, some people are working to help save the animals. Some groups raise money to let people know about the problem .And they try to get the governments to pass laws protecting animals in danger.

    Quite a few countries have passed laws. These laws forbid(禁止)the killing of any animals or plants on the danger list. Slowly, the number of some animals in danger is growing

    Having a great collection of books at home doesn't really mean that you are a person who loves reading. It may be got from your father or your father's father, and it can just impress people around you with the fact that you are a person of culture.

    From my point of view, reading is very important in our daily life. For example, reading is a way of gaining knowledge in different areas. It can help us have a great imagination, and it makes things easier when it comes to making compositions on different themes. It gives you the possibility to speak about science, even if you don't work in this field. You can express your opinions about a political event because you have read something about that.

    Secondly, reading gives us the possibility to enter the world of imagination. We can imagine what life will be like in the future. Sometimes, we compare ourselves with the people in the stories we read and they can give us some clues to solve the problems and tell us what to do in certain situations. Books are based on real life. Even if writers are considered to be somehow different from common people, they often face the same problems as we all do.

    In short, I would like to say that literature is the perfect way of enriching our culture, expressing correctly, having a rich vocabulary, being able to understand different fields and really being considered to be a learned person.