Long ago, people lived on wild animals, fruits and other plants and they didn't need to use money.
As time passed, families had more products(产品) than they needed, such as animals and crops. So they needed to trade(交易) with others. They began to use money to make it easier. However, it was not like the money we use today. They used shells, rice, salt or large stones.
During the 600s BC, people began using coins as money. Because they were easier to carry than goods(货物), countries began to make coins as their money.

The Chinese were the first to use paper money, probably in the 11th century. An Italian traveler, Marco Polo, saw the Chinese use paper money when he visited China in the 1200s. After his travel, he told the western people what he saw. But European countries didn't start using paper money till the1600s.
Today we have many ways to pay for things, such as coins, paper money and cards. Some prefer to pay by card. That's because paying with a card is easier and safer than carrying around a lot of “real” money.

    There are about 7,000,000 people in London. London is one of the big cities in the world. London is famous for many things. People from all over the world come to see the famous buildings. There is a famous clock called Big Ben, too.

    Like many big cities, the traffic is very busy in London. When the work hours begin, over 1,000,000 people use the London underground(地铁), but there are still too many buses and cars on the streets. The air isn't clean.

    For me, the best things about London are the parks. There are five in the middle of the city. But my children's favorite is playing in Hamleys, the biggest toy（玩具） shop in the world.

    Ted, my little brother, is in Grade One. Last Friday he came back from school with a letter. The letter was from his teacher. “I got a red flower today. Could you please sign this note?” he said to mum. The note showed that he had been talking in class.

    Ted hardly gets top scores in his school work. The best he gets is “OK”, but he often gets “You can do better than this.” Mum knows what it means. She tells me “You can do better than this” means “Extremely bad” in China.

    In the USA, teachers never say anything too bad about their students, even if the students are making trouble in class or not working hard enough. The worst they might say is “Please be nicer tomorrow”. Many parents are satisfied with a B-grade for each subject.

    But things in Chinese schools are quite different. Parents have high expectations for their children. I sometimes felt that my second-grade cousin spend more time on homework than I did when I was 6^th grade in the US! Yet his parents and teachers didn't think he worked hard enough.

    Is it too strict in China? Or is it not strict enough in the USA? Maybe both are true.

    Libraries give kids a quiet and safe place to read and learn. For over 100 years, libraries have played an important role in Americans' education. But how are these book-filled buildings changing with the times? You may be surprised to find out.

    Benjamin Franklin famously founded America's first lending library in 1731. But the public library system got its biggest development in the American history in the late 1800's. Businessman Andrew Carnegie donated millions of dollars to help build free public libraries across the country. Between 1886 and 1919, Carnegie's donations helped build 1,679 new libraries.

    Carnegie believed that libraries could offer the chances to Americans, young and old. He knew that the more libraries there were, the more people would have opportunities to read and use books, speeches and news.

    If you can easily find a public library in your community, you'll get more chances. After all, the United States has 9,225 public libraries. Today, libraries keep growing. Seven tenths of the libraries have free Internet. It provides much more information and opportunities to ask for jobs online.

    Libraries are also teaching kids about the fun of reading. The new program Read! Build! Play! Adds reading into playtime. As kids listen to a book that is being read aloud, they use Legos (乐高积木) to build images(图像)from the story happily. Today's libraries are always looking for creative programs to bring people into the library.

    Benjamin Franklin once said, “The doors of wisdom are never shut.” As long as the doors of public libraries are open, what he said is most certainly correct!

    The Vieira family moved to the United States in1981. At that time, they decided to stop speaking Spanish at home and only communicate in English. This was because they were now living in an English-speaking country.

    Now the Vieira children are adults, and they sometimes travel to Spain to visit their family and friends. But they can't communicate with them. Unfortunately this is common. When people move to new countries, they often leave their own customs and mother language behind. This is a mistake because there are many benefits to knowing more than one language.

    One advantage of speaking more than one language is that you can communicate with more people around the world. You don't have to depend on others to talk for you, so you are more independent. People who know only one language must use others to help them communicate.

    Furthermore, speaking the second language also allows people to experience other cultures and customs more effectively. Local expressions, vocabulary, and even jokes can have a powerful effect on a person's understanding of other culture. So knowing more than one language increases your knowledge of other cultures.

    Finally, having more multi-language speakers improves relationships between countries. If people from different countries can communicate well, the world can become closer. Countries will then have more respect for each other and better understand each other's problems.

    The benefits of knowing more than one language are clear. In fact, there are no disadvantages. It is very sad that many people don't try to learn another language. It' seven worse when people let themselves forget their mother language and become silenced.

    From a large elephant to a small mouse, animals live happily together in Disney's new movie Zootopia. Judy Hopps, the main character, becomes the first rabbit police officer in the city. While solving a mystery, she meets the smart fox, Nick, who helps her with her case（案件）, and some other animals like the lion mayor（市长）and a mouse called Flash. Here is something more about the movie.

    There are 61 kinds of animals in the movie. All of them look like real ones except Judy, the first rabbit police officer. Its appearance is a bit different from real rabbits. Real rabbits actually have split lips（嘴唇）, but the film makers decided to make Judy's lip all together to look nice.

    Film makers learned that not all fur（皮毛）of animals is the same. In the movie, some of polar bears' fur is clear. It appears white because the light reflects off it. Part of a fox's fur is dark at the root, getting lighter till its red top. They did so to make sure that the animals in Zootopia were believable.

    Moreover, a film maker, Nathan Warner with his partners also took a trip to Africa for researching animals. There they had a close watching of different animals. According to their discovery, these artists added leaves to animals' coats like the big sheep. They also made animals' tears run from the inside corners of eyes down to the outside of the mouths.