Chinese New Year for Kids

    Chinese New Year for Kids is a full color paperback book with beautiful Chinese illustrations (插图). This is a hands-on workbook for parents and teachers, written for children from ages 3 to 12 years old, for use in the classroom or at home. Music, physical movement, art, and food all add to the atmosphere of taking an imaginary trip to China during the Chinese New Year.

   The Polar Express

One couldn't select a more delightful and exciting premise (前提) for a children's book than the tale of a young boy lying awake on Christmas Eve only to have Santa Claus sweep by and take him on a trip with other children to the North Pole. And one couldn't ask for a more talented artist and writer to tell the story than Chris Van Allsburg.

   The Secret of Saying Thanks

Perhaps you'd like to know a secret, one of the happiest ones of all. You'll discover it all on your own, maybe when you least expect. If you've not yet discovered the secret of saying thanks, it's waiting for you. The secret can be found in the sunrise that offers promises for the day ahead, or in the gentle shade of a tree sheltering you from the hot rays of the sun.

   The Runaway Pumpkin

When Buck, Billy and their little sister Lily spy the biggest pumpkin they've ever seen, they can't resist (抵制). Buck and Billy try to roll the pumpkin down the hill to show everyone, but it's too big! Before they know it, it's rolling out of control down the hillside. It knocks over Gran dpa Baxter and makes him think of pumpkin soup. And when Poppa Baxter finally stops, all he can think of is pumpkin bread.

    It's 2035. You have a job, a family and you're about 40 years old! Welcome to your future life.

    Getting ready for work, you pause in front of the mirror.

    “Turn red,” you say. Your shirt changes from sky blue to deep red. Tiny preprogrammed electronics(智能电子元件) are re-arranged in your shirt to change its color. Looking into the mirror, you find it hard to believe you're 40. You look much younger.

    With amazing advances in medicine, people in your generation may live to be 150 years old. You're not even middle-aged! As you go into the kitchen and prepare to pour your breakfast cereal into a bowl, you hear, “To lose weight, you shouldn't eat that.” from your shoes. They read the tiny electronic code on the cereal box to find out the nutrition details. You decide to listen to your shoes. “Kitchen, what can I have for breakfast?” A list of possible foods appears on the counter as the kitchen checks its food supplies.

    “Ready for your trip to space?” you ask your son and daughter. In 2005 only specially trained astronauts went into space and very few of them. Today anyone can go to space for day trips or longer vacations. Your best friend even works in space. Handing your children three strawberries each, you add, “The doctor said you need these for space travel.” Thanks to medical advances, vaccination shots(防疫针) are a thing of the past. Ordinary foods contain specific vaccines. With the strawberries in their mouths, the kids head for the front door.

    It's time for you to go to work. Your car checks your fingerprints and unlocks the doors. “My office, Autopilot,” you command. Your car drives itself down the road and moves smoothly into traffic on the highway. You sit back and unroll your e-newspaper. The latest news downloads and fills the viewer. Looking through the pages, you watch the news as video film rather than read it.

    Lately a popular eight-floor bookstore in Hefei,Anhui province,has risen to fame because it becomes the world's first shared bookstore,in a move meant to encourage more reading among Chinese citizens.

    It comes to people's attention as more than 200,000 visitors flooded the store on its first day as a shared bookstore on July 16 this year,a record high since it was reopened to the public in 2013.Some 4,000 books were brought home on the first day,Thepaper.cn reported.

    Customers are allowed to borrow up to two books valued under 150 yuan per visit after registering with an app and paying the 99 yuan deposit fee（押金）.

    All books on sale in the bookstore are available for sharing.Returned books that are damaged are sold at a discount.The bookstore also provides a bonus for bookworms.People who finish reading 12 books in three months receive eight percent of their deposit back,and members can be rewarded one yuan for every book read.

    "We want to bring down the cost of reading so people could read more books,"Xu Xinwei,who helps run the bookstore,told Thepaper.cn.

    Some parents buy a lot of books for their children,but they usually end up collecting dust as their children grow up.Similarly,some popular novels for young people also fall out of fashion,according to Xu."Books are more effectively circulated when they're shared."

    Mary went out at night. She never forgot the night when she met a robber many years ago. That evening, she was invited to a birthday party which lasted until two o'clock in the morning. Without company Mary walked along the quiet street.

    Suddenly from the shadow of a dark building a tall man with a sharp knife in his right hand ran out at her. "Good evening, lady," the man said in a low voice, "I don't think you wish to die here."

    "What do you want?" Mary asked.

    "Your earrings（耳环）. Take them off!"Slowly Mary's eyes looked down. She tried to cover her necklace with the collar（领子）of her overcoat while she used the other hand to take off both of her earrings, and then she quickly threw them on the ground.

    "Take them and let me go." She said. The robber looked at her only feeling uncertain. He saw the girl didn't care for the earrings at all, only trying to protect the necklace. He realized the necklace would cost more. So he said, "Give me your necklace."

    "Oh, sir. It's not worth much. Please let me keep it."

    "Stop rubbish. Quick!"

    With shaky hands, Mary took off her necklace. As soon as the robber disappeared, she picked up her earrings and ran as fast as she could to one of her friends.

    The earrings cost 480 pounds and the necklace the robber had taken away cost only six pounds ten shillings.

    A bicycle may be seen by most people as just another vehicle (交通工具), but for many Londoners, cycling is a way of life. According to an official UK government survey in 2017, about 570,000 bike journeys are made every day in London. In fact, almost half of the vehicles that pass over London Bridge each day are bikes.

    London introduced a public bike-sharing system in 2010. "There can be no doubt that our trusty bicycles have changed the way people get around our great city," Johnson told the Guardian in 2015.

    In London, bikes are used for more than just taking short trips to and from the subway. No matter where you want to go in the city, taking a bike is usually the quickest and easiest choice.

    And it's not just shared bikes that the government is encouraging people to ride. In many companies across the UK, the UK government's Cycle to Work scheme (骑行倡议) allows employees to buy a brand new bike without having to pay any tax (税). This means that it's common to see many people cycling to and from work, and some employers even provide workplace showers and lockers (储物柜) for their workers. More importantly, a cycle-friendly boss may let you off for being late if you rode a bike to work.

    Not only is it great for the environment and our body, cycling is also good for the mind. According to National Geographic Magazine, "Bike riding can improve people's happiness."

    I use tea to refer to a snack(点心)taken in the late afternoon or early evening (ie after getting home from work but before the main meal, which I call dinner) and I don't think that's rare(罕见)at all. I think the difference is when you originally had your main meal and I would agree that it's a class thing, not a north/south thing(I've heard the midday meal referred to as both lunch and dinner by different people in all areas of England).

    Dinner was always the main meal. In the past, working class men worked near(or even at)home and came home for their main meal at midday, and so that was their dinner. Middle class men worked in offices far from their homes(often working in the city centre, and living outside the city) and so couldn't go home for a meal at midday. They therefore had a light meal at midday and had their main meal with their family in the evening after they go home from work, so dinner was in the evening. Because most children at state schools were working class, we still use dinner for school meals. For middle and upper class people, tea was a light snack served in the mid-afternoon at which ladies(who didn't, of course, go out to work)could entertain their friends. For working class people, however, tea was the light snack you had before going to bed. Supper, for all classes, was the light snack you had before going to bed.

    However, because work patterns changed and many working class people started eating their main meal in the evening too, dinner, tea and supper started to become interchangeable for them. Also many working class families have since become middle class, so the terms have become less of a current class thing(if class still exists at all) and more of a system of terminology inherited(家族术语)from grandparents etc, different from family to family. When I was a child(Southern English, middle class family, but with working class forebears(祖先)) we called the midday meal dinner and the evening meal tea, but when I was in my early teens I had a new stepfather(from a family that had always been middle class for generations)who used lunch and dinner, and that's what I've used ever since.