A

    How do you win a Nobel Prize for writing? Here's the secret from a previous winner: make it short, keep it real, and work hard.

Canadian author Alice Munro, 82, was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in literature. She is known for her short stories about personal relationships of ordinary people, usually women.

    Munro was born into a farming family in Ontario. The family was very poor. Munro did a lot of physical work as a young girl. She decided to be a writer at the age of 12. Now Munro turns her hard childhood into great writing ideas. The story Dear Life, for example, opens with a description of the neighborhood in which Munro grew up. Also, she talks about her poor relationship with her mother in many of her stories, such as Lives of Girls and Women and Friend of My Youth.

    Since she published her first book in 1968, Munro has won many awards, with the Nobel Prize as her biggest honor. But Munro doesn't see herself as a talented(有天赋的) writer.

    “I'm the opposite of a writer with a quick gift. I don't grasp it very easily at all, the‘it' being whatever I'm trying to do,” she said.

    Do you dream of becoming an author while sadly admitting you are not that talented? Munro has a tip for you: use notebooks and write a lot.

    “I have lots of notebooks that contain(包含) this writing,” she said. But it helps her sort out (整理) her mind. “Stories would just be working in my head for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them.”

    Once there is a boy in London. His name is Jimmy. He starts painting when he is three years old, and when he is five years old, he is already very good at it. He paints many beautiful and interesting pictures, and a lot of people buy his pictures. They say, “This boy is going to be famous when he's a little older, and then we're going to sell these pictures for a lot of money.”

    Jimmy's pictures are different from others' because he never paints on the whole of the paper. He only paints on half of it, and the other half is always empty.

    “That's very clever,” people say. “No other painters have ever done that!”

    One day someone asks Jimmy, “Please tell me, Jimmy, why do you only paint on the bottom (底) half of the paper, but not on the top half?”

    “Because I'm small,” Jimmy says, “and my brushes can't reach very high.”

    Ashima was a girl from a poor family. She was very beautiful and very good at singing and dancing. A lot of young men liked her. But Ashima was in love with Ahei, a brave (勇敢的) and smart young man.

    One day, Ashima met Azhi, the son of a very rich family in the village. Azhi wanted Ashima to marry (嫁) him. But Ashima said she only loved Ahei.

    When the weather got cold, Ahei had to leave the village to work in a very far place. After Ahei left, Azhi kidnapped Ashima, took her home and asked her to marry him. Ashima still said no.

    When Ahei heard about this, he rode his horse back quickly. When he got to Azhi's house, Azhi said he had to win a song competition before he could get in. Ahei sang for three days and three nights and won the competition at last. He went into Azhi's house.

    Azhi asked Ahei to stay one night in his house and said he would let Ahei and Ashima leave the next morning. At night, Azhi put three tigers into Ahei's room. But Ahei killed them. Finally he could take Ashima home.

    When Ashima and Ahei were walking by a river, Azhi made the river flood (泛滥), Ashima fell into the river.  ▲  

    Ashima became river stones (石头), Later when Ahei missed Ashima, he w0uld face the stones and call out Ashima's name and talk to her He always heard an echo (回声). In this way, Ahei lived with A shima forever.

B

    Wang Fuman is a 10-year-old student. He is now studying in Zhuanshanbao Primary School in Zhaotong, Yunnan Province. On Monday morning (January 8, 2018), he braved -9℃ weather to travel over an hour to reach his school.

    When he arrived, his hair and eyebrows had been completely frozen with snowflake (雪花). This made his 16 classmates laugh a lot. Fu Heng, Wang's teacher saw this and took a picture. He uploaded (上传) Wang's picture. The picture soon has got much attention to children from poor families in the countryside. Wang, who has been nicknamed “Snowflake Boy” by netizens, became famous online overnight. By Wednesday morning, his picture had been “liked” more than 260,000 times on Sina Weibo and shared more than 40,000 times.

    After hearing Wang's story, the Yunnan China Youth Development Foundation held a public donation ( 捐赠) activity for children from poor families. The Foundation has promised to give each poor child 500 yuan ($75) to help them stay warm in winter.

    By 1 pm on Wednesday, the Foundation had collected about 300,000 yuan in public donations, according to their website. Wang's village now has electricity and tap water, “…and my family is getting help to build a new house close to the school”, Wang said, “I think our life will get better.”

    On the morning of the day when he left Compton High School in Los Angeles, 18-year-old Allan Guei asked seven of his classmates to come together. Guei, a star on the basketball team, expressed he was giving away he $40,000 he'd won in a competition and was dividing it among them. The room filled with shouts and cheers. "Everyone went mad with excitement," he says. "They were surprised that I would do something like that for them."

    In November 2000, Guei's family moved from the Ivory Coast to the United States, and he immediately took up basketball." When I first came to California, the Lakers were winning: it was Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal era (时代),"he recalls." I just fell in love with the game."

    A few years later, he was playing for the school. Then, in March, he entered a free-throw competition at the school, and the town saw just how big a team player Guei really is—both on and off the court (球场).

    In the first round, each of the eight contestants (竞争者) took ten shots, and the top four shooters advanced." I was one of the final four, but I really didn't shoot that well," Guei says." I was nervous!"" In the second round, however, he took the winning shot. He went home with the prize of $ 40,000.

    A few months before Guei left school, he was offered a full scholarship (奖学金) to California State University, and he had an idea." I could have kept the prize money, but I was already going to college for free," Guei says. "I know the others were going to have a lot of difficulty paying for school. They needed it for their futures, so I just decided to give it away."

    Now wearing No.25 on Northridge's Matadors basketball team, Guei has little time for anything but training and studying, though he keeps in touch with most of his classmates." I know those kids. Whatever they decide to do in life is going to be something good," he says." It was just the right thing to do."

    As for his own future, Guei is still learning. "I work really hard at everything I do," he says. "But whatever happens in my future, I'm just happy that I was able to help somebody else along the way."