The Hunger Games is a book by an American author Suzanne Collins. It came out in 2008 and has sold millions of copies. You can buy it in 26 different languages.

    The story happens in the future, after the destruction（毁灭）of North America. There are twelve poor districts governed（统治）by the rich Capitol.

    The Capitol organizes the Hunger Games every year. One boy and one girl aged 12 to 18 in each of the twelve districts are chosen to fight. Only one person will live. The whole country must watch the games on television.

    The story is about Katniss Everdeen, a sixteen-year-old girl. Her younger sister, Prim, is chosen, but Katniss volunteers to go instead. She has to fight with a boy named Peeta.

    Where did the idea for The Hunger Games come from? One night in 2003, Suzanne Collins was watching TV. At that time, there was a war between the US and lraq. The only programs she could find on TV were "reality" programs and news about the war. Suzanne says that the two things started to mix together in her head and she had the idea for The Hunger Games.

    Some parents in the US have complained about the violence（暴力）in the book. But Suzanne says she is very worried about how much violence we see on TV nowadays. Suzanne is also worried about the amount of reality TV we watch." We put too much of our lives on TV, "she says." And we care less for people because of this." She says that writing about death and violence in the story was the hardest thing for her to do and she hopes it will make people think about what they watch in the future.

    Mary is an American girl. She is now in Beijing with her parents. Mary doesn't know much Chinese, but she is studying it. She often speaks Chinese with her Chinese friends. Sometimes they can't understand her, because she can't speak Chinese very well.

    It's Saturday morning. She goes out. She is walking in the street. She wants to go to the zoo to see the elephants and monkeys, but she doesn't know how to get there. She asks a Chinese boy the way. The boy can't understand her. Then she takes out a pen and a piece of paper. She draws an elephant on it, and shows the picture to the boy. The boy understands, and shows her the way to the zoo.

Meiyu, born in 1991, is from Turkey(土耳其). She is the youngest child of her family. After high school, many people learned English or Japanese, but Meiyu decided to learn Chinese in university. She learned Chinese for four years in Ankara University in Turkey, and got her name Meiyu there.

Meiyu fell in love with Chinese after going to university. She became more interested after she knew more about Chinese history. In the beginning many people did not understand her decision. But they all said Meiyu had made a right choice when she graduated from university in 2013. Since then, more Chinese have been visiting Turkey. The trade between the two countries also requires Chinese-speaking people. ＂Speaking Chinese means more job opportunities.＂ said Meiyu.

Now Meiyu has been in Wuhan, China for about two years. Besides going on studying Chinese, she shows great interest in Chinese kung fu as well, so she spends her free time on kung fu training with her coaches. Not only can kung fu help improve her health, but she is also fascinated by the history and culture behind it. Meiyu said, ＂The more I know about China, the luckier I feel to have been here. But the truth is that fun and pain go together in the process of learning.＂

Meiyu will graduate in June this year. Her friends want her to stay in China, but her parents hope she can come back home. Meiyu thinks it is difficult to decide. ＂Even if I go back to Turkey, I will choose Chinese language education as my job,＂ said Meiyu.

    Once upon a time, there was a young man who liked puppets (木偶) so much that he became an apprentice(学徒) to a master puppet-maker. Sadly, the young man was not so clever, and his teacher and the other apprentices were always telling him he had no talent for making puppets, and that he would achieve nothing in making puppets.

    Even so, he was fond of it so much that he worked day after day to improve himself. Though he made every effort, they would always find something wrong with his puppets, and the poor puppets ended up being thrown out of the workshop.

    The young man wasn't going to give up, so he decided that from then on he would spend all his time making just one kind of puppet. Whenever he found a fault in his puppet he would throw it away and start again. Years passed, and with each new attempt his puppet became a little bit better. By that time, his puppet was much better than anything that the other apprentices could make, but he kept making improvements. Living like that, the man wasn't making any money, and many people laughed at how poor he was.

    By the time he was an old man, his puppet was truly wonderful. Finally, after so many years of work, he finished work on his puppet, and said, "I can't find anything wrong with it. This time it is perfect." And for the first time in all those years, instead of throwing his puppet away, he put it up on the shelf, feeling truly satisfied and cheerful.

    It is well-known that the perfect puppet, Pinocchio, came to life after that, had a thousand adventures, and gave that old man –whose name was Geppetto—more joy than any other famous puppet—maker had ever got from any of their creations.