Mary is an American girl. She is now in Beijing with her parents. She doesn‘t know Chinese, but she is trying to study and speak it .She often tries to speak Chinese to her Chinese friends. Sometimes they don't understand (理解 )her, because she can't speak Chinese well.

    It's Saturday morning. Mary goes out. She is on her way to the park. She is going there to see a flower show But she doesn't know how to get there. She asks a Chinese boy. The boy can't understand her. Then she takes out a pen and some paper. She draws some flowers on it, gives the picture to the boy and says something about it. The boy smiles and then shows ( 指 ) Mary the way to the park.

    Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf, a cartoon film based on a popular Chinese cartoon TV series, has won the hearts of children in China. The Chinese cartoon began to be shown in public on 16th January, 2009, the first day of the winter holiday for Chinese primary school students. The children seemed to go straight from the school to the cinema.

    Two weeks after its release(首次上映), the cartoon film got a box office income(票房收入)of 68 million yuan, bigger than that of an American film, Madagascar 2, which was released in China on 1st January, 2009.

    “I think it is more interesting than Madagascar 2, ” said 8­year­old Wang Lu, who had seen both the Chinese and American cartoon films.

    However, some parents don't have the same enthusiasm for Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf. “It's so childish that I almost fell asleep in the cinema, ”Wang Lu's father said.

    But because primary school children's great interest, the Pleasant Goat and Big Big wolf made a great success at the box office results. Parents join their children in the cinema—buying two or three tickets to keep them accompanied(陪同).

    Some young people find the film funny enough to watch. “The Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf are so cute, ” Dong Lei, a 22­-year-­old college student said.

    “However, compared with the animation(动画制作)technology of Hollywood cartoon films such as Kung Fu Panda, the film still has room for improvement, ” said cartoonist Yang Lin.

    On a farm lived a father and a son. The father always got up early and read by the window. One morning, the son came up to him and said, Dad, I read books at night but forget most of them the next morning. What's the good of reading?

    The father didn't reply to his question at once. He passed him a basket that was used to carry coal (煤). He said, "Get some water from the river with the basket and then I'll tell you the answer."

    The son felt surprised but he did as his father said. He tried many times but every time the water leaked(漏掉) from the basket.

    An hour later, the son came back with the empty basket and told his father it was impossible to hold water with the basket. The father said with a smile, "Yes, you are right, my son. The basket can't hold water. But did you notice the basket was different?" The son found the dirty basket had become clean. The father continued, "Reading is like holding water with the basket. Although we can't remember all we read, we have changed while reading."

    By the time Rihanna was seventeen, she had released(发行)her first album and had an international hit with her first single(单曲)Pon de Replay.

    Rihanna was born in Saint Michael, Barbados in 1988.She grew up there with her two younger brothers. As a child, she loved singing. She formed her first group with two friends from secondary school when she was just fifteen. In 2004 her friends introduced the group to American record producer Evan Rogers, who was on holiday in Barbados. Rogers thought Rihanna could be a big star in America, so she moved there aged sixteen to take up music after she finished school. Rihanna lived with Rogers and his wife. Then she worked for Def Jam Recordings and started working on her first album, Music of the Sun. It came out in 2005 and got into the top ten. Over 69,000 copies of the album were sold in the first week alone. It went on to sell over two million copies worldwide and Rihanna quickly became a big star. Her second album, A Girl Like Me, came out a year later and included the song SOS, which was her first number one hit in America. In 2007 Rihanna brought out her third album, Good Girl Gone Bad, which had more dance music than the first two albums.

    Rihanna sold more than fifteen million albums and forty-five million singles worldwide between 2005 and 2010, the most of any artist at the same time. However, she manages to find time for her charity work, too. She has performed in several concerts to raise money for charity and in 2006 she created her Believe Foundation to help sick children. She also took part in Gucci's activities to raise money for children in Africa.