My name is David. I'm 23and I'm a middle school teacher. I go to the school at 7:30 in the morning. I like sports. I play basketball every day.

    My name is Jake Smith. I'm in China with my kids(孩子). I have a daughter and a son. My daughter Lisa is in Huangzhou Middle School. She likes yellow and white. My son Eric is only 6, but he can play ping—pong.

I'm Mary. I'm 10. My brother Nick is 11. He likes to play tennis after school. I have a nice room. It is tidy. But my brother's room is not the same. His books are always everywhere.

    Popeye the Sailor first became a popular cartoon in the 1930s. The sailor in that cartoon ate lots of spinach (菠菜) to make him strong. People watched him, and they began to buy and eat a lot more spinach. Popeye helped sell 33 per cent more spinach than before! Spinach became a necessary part of many people's diets. Even some children who hated the taste began to eat the vegetable.

    Many people thought that the iron in spinach made Popeye strong, but this is not-true. Spinach does not have any more iron than any other green vegetables.

    People only thought spinach had a lot of iron because the people who studied the food made a mistake. In the 1890s, a group of people studied what was inside vegetables. This group said that spinach had ten times more iron than it did. The group wrote the number wrong, and everyone accepted it.

    Today, we know that the little iron there is in spinach cannot make a difference in how strong a person is. However, spinach does have something else which the body needs—folic acid.

    It is interesting to point out that folic acid can help make a person strong. Maybe it was really the folic acid that made Popeye strong all along.

    Joseph Sekar is 62 years old and he is in India(印度). He feeds thousands of parrots(鹦鹉) every day. And he has got himself another new and interesting name "birdman".

    Joseph always left small number of rice on the top of his house. The neighborhood parrots often came to eat them. One day two parrots flew in and Joseph fed them some rice. The birds not only returned the following day, but also brought along other hungry friends. Today between 2,000~4,000 beautiful parrots visit the birdman twice a day.

    Joseph does not feed the birds raw(生的) rice. He cooks the rice! This means that the amazing man usually gets up at 4:30 am every morning and spends over an hour making the breakfast for birds. He then puts the rice on 14 boards on the top of his house carefully.

The breakfast rush begins at about 6:00 am when the beautiful parrots fly in and continues until every last piece of the delicious rice is gone! The similar situation happens in the evening when the birds arrive at around 4:00 pm and stay for almost two hours. Not only the superman feeds them, but also takes in sick and hurt birds and nurses them back to health.

    Of course, feeding so many birds is not a cheap job. Joseph spends 40% of his income(收入) of $13 as a camera repairman on the meals every day. The superman says all of his actions come out of a feeling of love.

    Though Joseph has no plans to stop the action now, he does worry about what will happen to the beautiful birds as he gets older and is unable to go on.

    Albert was an ordinary worker in an oil company in America. His workmates gave a nickname(绰号) "Four dollars a bucket(桶) of oil" below his name whenever and wherever he wrote down his name.

    As time went by, people forgot his real name. Later, when Roller, the board chairman(董事长) of the oil company, heard of it. He was very surprised, so he invited Albert to come to his office. "Some people give you a nickname for 'Four dollars a bucket. Why aren't you angry?" asked Roller in surprise.

    "Oh! Mr. Roller! I like this nickname very much, because 'Four dollars a bucket is our company's advertisement. If someone calls me 'Four dollars a

    Bucket once, I think it's a free advertisement for our company. It's not necessary for me to get angry. Don't you think so, Mr. Roller?"

    "Oh! What a wonderful man!" Roller said excitedly, "Young man! Work hard, you must be successful in the future! I believe in you!"

    Five years later, Albert became the second board chairman.

    Later Albert said in one of his reports, "We should treat everything actively because maybe our future success will begin from a small thing!"

    Michelle Wie, from America, is like a lot of other young girls in many ways. She is a good student, and she likes reading, drawing, and computers. However, in some other ways, she is very different. She doesn't spend much time going out with friends or shopping or going to parties. She's very busy practising golf.

    Michelle Wie is the best woman golfer for her age in the world. She was born in 1989. In 1999, at the age of 10，she began to win games. At 13, she could hit the ball farther than most of the women in the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA). At 14, she showed she could hit the ball farther than most men.

    Wie began playing golf at the age of four. When she grew older, she played about four hours a day on weekdays and seven hours a day at weekends. Another thing that helped her was that she was tall. Now Wie is about six feet tall. She has the flexibility of a dancer and also is very strong. And it's clear that she loves the game.

    A taxi hit a truck. A policeman spoke to the taxi driver and the truck driver. He also spoke to Tom. Tom was a witness(目击者). This is what they said.

    Truck driver: I was driving from the airport to Newtown. A car crossed the road, so I slowed down. I did not stop. A taxi hit the back of my truck. Nobody was badly hurt but both vehicles were damaged.

    Taxi driver: I was driving behind a truck a few kilometres from Newtown. The truck stopped suddenly. The driver did not give me a warning. I was driving very slowly. I could not pass the truck because there were two cars coming near from Newtown. My taxi hit the truck, and some glass cut my left hand.

    Tom: I saw the traffic accident about a kilometre from the airport. A truck was going to Newtown. It was not going very fast. There was a taxi about two hundred metres behind the truck. It was going fast. When the truck slowed down, the taxi hit it. The taxi driver was not looking at the truck. He was looking out of the window at something. My friend saw the accident too.

    Tom's friend spoke to the policeman and agreed with Tom.