Every person has their own way of saying things, their own special expressions. Many everyday American expression are based on colors.

    Red is a hot colour. Americans often use it to express heat. They may say they are red hot about something unfair. When they are red hot they are very angry about something. The small hot tasting peppers found in many Mexican foods are called red hots for their colour and their fiery taste. Fast loud music is popular with many people. They may say the music is popular with many people. They may say the music is red hot, especially the kind called Dixicland jazz.

    Pink is a lighter kind of red. People sometimes say they're in the pink when they're in good health. The expression was first used in America at the beginning of the 20th century. It probably came from many babies who were born with a nice pink colour showing good health.

Blue is a cool colour. The traditional blues music in t he United States is the opposite of red hot music. Blues is slow, sad and soulful. Duke Ellington and his orchestra recorded a famous song—Mood Indigo—about the deep blue colour, indigo. In the words of the song: “You aren't blue till you've had that Mood Indigo.” Someone who is blue is very sad.

    The colour green is natural for trees and grass. But it is an unnatural colour for humans. A person who has a sick feeling in his stomach may say he feels a little green. A passenger on a boat who is feeling very sick from high waves may look very green.

    Sometimes a person may be upset because he does not have something as nice as his friend's, like a fast new car. That person may say he is green with envy. Some people are green with envy because a friend has more dollars of greenbacks. Dollars are called greenbacks because that is the colour of the back side of the paper money.

    The colour black is often used in expressions. People describe a day in which everything goes wrong as a black day. The date of a major tragedy is remembered as a black day. a blacklist is illegal now. But at one time, some businesses refused to employ people who were on a blacklist for belonging to unpopular organizations.

    If you see a group of people dancing and singing on the street or in the railway station, you don't need to feel surprised. They are a flash mob(快闪族). Who are they Are they mobs? Don't be confused by their name. Actually, a flash mob is a group of people who gather suddenly in a public place, do something unusual for a brief period of time, and then quickly disappear.

    They are usually organized with the help of the Internet or other digital communications networks. The messages may be sent to friends, who send to more people. At a predetermined time, they gather and perform some activities such as exchanging books, coming together to look at the sky, waving their hands and yelling something at the top of their voice for 30 seconds. Then, they quickly disappear before the police can arrive Using mobile phones, the flash mob can change its place if the first one has been cancelled for any reason.

    Bill Wasik, senior editor of Hamper's Magazine, organized the first flash mob in Manhattan in May 2003 and the first successful flash mob gathered on June 3, 2003. Wasik claimed that he created the flash mob as a social experiment designed to laugh at fashion seekers and stress the cultural atmosphere of wanting to be an insider or part of "the next big thing”.

    Flash mob gatherings can sometimes shock people. Such an activity might seem amusing and magical, but it also might frighten people who are not aware of what is taking place. Undoubtedly, flash mob can serve as good political tools and have great potential, such as using flash mob to advertise a product.

    The flash mob is now becoming more and more popular. People use it to do many things. Flash mobs give people from all walks of life an opportunity to come together to create a memory.

    What's going on under Liverpool?
A Rainy Day in Liverpool

    Dark clouds appear over the River Mersey and a cold wind is blowing. A few rain drops are beginning to fall. We're in the famous city of Liverpool and we're going to spend this rainy day in the Williamson Tunnels.
  An Interesting Life Story

    Joseph Williamson was born into a poor family in 1769，but left home and went to work for a tobacco company aged 11. He began at the bottom, and finally became head of the business.

 An Unsolved Mystery

    Nobody knows why Williamson dug tunnels under most of Liverpool, but many think it was to create jobs. Perhaps half of Liverpool's population worked for him. The industry of war had made enormous amounts of money, but now Liverpool was in a terrible financial situation.

 The King of Edge Hill

    I went on a guided tour starting close to where his empire began in Edge Hill. In the tunnels, the steps leading from rooms below ground to those buildings, which no longer exist, seem particularly ghostly.

Incredible Engineering

    We go into the Double Tunnel. It's just been discovered that it's actually a triple tunnel - but nobody knows why the three tunnels were built on top of each other.

    We finish the tour and decide we'll have a coffee in the Williamson Tunnels Cafe Bar. There, I notice lots of flyers for bands and theater groups that are coming to play there.

Why Liverpool?

    Apart from the obvious attractions like the football clubs, or anything to do with the Beatles, Liverpool has a lot to offer. Princes Park and Croxteth Park were royal hunting grounds and the trees are 200 years old. Renshaw Street displays are an unusual mix of architecture styles. The nightlife is exciting. If you want to experience a part of the British Isles with a character entirely different from London, you should definitely come to Liverpool.

    International Children's Day is coming up on June 1st. Here we have chosen some films from around the world that are most worthy for children to see.

    E, T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

    Director: Steven Spielberg

    Country: United States of America

    Storyline: A group of aliens are visiting the Earth at night. But one of the visitors from space is left behind and finds himself all alone on a very strange planet. Fortunately, he meets Elliot, a lonely boy himself, and slowly makes friends with Elliot's older brother Michael, his sister Gertie. Meanwhile government officers work day and night to track down the little alien. Elliot and others try their best to help the alien go home.

    Children of Heaven (1997)

    Director: Majid Majidi

    Country: Iran

    Storyline: Ali takes his little sister Zahra's shoes to the shoemaker to be repaired but loses them on the way home. There is no money to buy another pair. Ali makes a plan to share his shoes: Zahra will wear them in the morning and hand them to Ali at midday so he can attend school classes. Ali then enters a children's racing competition in hopes of receiving the third prize, a new pair of shoes.

    Kes (1969)

    Director: Ken Loach

    Country: United Kingdom

    Storyline: Bullied (欺凌) at school and getting little attention at home by his mother and older brother, Billy Casper, a 15-year-old boy from a working-class family, finds peace in his pet falcon (猎隼), Kes. With encouragement from his English teacher, Billy eventually discovers a positive purpose to his unfortunate life, until some bad thing comes.

    83-year-old Antonio Vicente has spent the last four decades of his life fighting against the trend. As Brazilian landowners cut down rainforests to make room for profitable plantations(种植园) and cattle grounds, he struggled to bring the jungles of his childhood back to life.

    "When I was a child, the peasants cut down the trees to make grasslands and charcoal, and the water dried up and did not come back," he told the reporters, "I thought: 'Water is valuable, no one makes water and the population will not stop growing. What is going to happen? We are going to run out of water.'"

    With only some donkeys and a small team of hired workers, Antonio Vicente set about bringing back the forest to his land. What started out as a weekend hobby soon became a permanent way of life, and Antonio recalls often spending whole days and nights in his young jungle, surrounded by rats and foxes, and eating banana sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Over the last 40 years, he has planted an estimated 50,000 trees on his 31-hectare land, which now make up a small but unique area of rainforest, and a haven for wildlife.

    As the forest grew, the water returned, and Antonio says that there are now over 20 water, sources on his land that were no longer there when he bought it. Then the animals started making a home there. Today, the forest is alive with the sounds of birds and insects living there, and more species are settling in every year.

    "There are toucans(巨嘴鸟), all kinds of birds, squirrels, lizards, and even the boars are returning," 83-year-old Vicente says, "If you ask me who my family are, I would say all this right here, each one of these that I planted from a seed."

Oxford English Dictionary (OED) announced on November 23 for the first time that it has chosen not to name one single word of the year, but many words for the "special" year 2020. Describing 2020 as "a year which cannot be neatly summarized in one single word". OED said on Monday that there were too many words to sum up the events of 2020. From more than 11 billion words found in web-based news, blogs and other text sources, its lexicographers(词典编纂者)revealed what the dictionary described as "great shifts in language data and frequency rises in new words" over the past 12 months.

Most words of the year are coronavirus-related, including coronavirus, lockdown, circuit-breaker, keyworkers and face masks. The report said the word "coronavirus" dates back to the 1960s and was previously "mainly used by scientific and medical specialists". But by April this year it had become one of the most frequently used nouns in the English language, beyond even the usage of the word "time". It said use of the word "pandemic" has increased by more than 57,000 percent this year.

The revolution in working habits during the pandemic has also affected language, with both "remote" and "remotely" seeing more than 300 percent growth in use since March. "On mute(静音)"and "unmute" have seen 500 percent rises since March, while the words "workation" and "staycation" also increased drastically.

Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Dictionaries, said. "I've never witnessed a year in language like the one we've just had. The Oxford team was identifying hundreds of significant new words and usages as the year unfolded." "2020 has been filled with new words unlike any other," Grathwohl added.

The OED's announcement mirrored the huge influence of the COVID-19 on the people from all walks of life. To bring life back to normal, countries such as Britain, China, Germany, Russia and the United States are racing against time to develop coronavirus vaccines.