I was always blamed for watching too much cartoons. As I have said goodbye to my teenage, I shift to watching more movies to prove that I was a grown-up. Surprisingly, I found that movies have something in common with cartoons. They are unrealistic.

    Sometimes movies give people hope, including the hope of justice, the hope of tomorrow and almost everything else. A great number of people were once touched by certain movies. From time to time, movies try to deliver some decisive ideas to the audience. In this way, movies do cheer up many people to go on with their lives.

    It seems that there is a set formula in movies. We usually see the hero or heroine in the movies suffer a lot in the opening. Gradually and likely, the destination of them always comes to a turning point. So they have to struggle or make some important choices. Then the movie ends up with a happy finale. Or at least the hero finally manages to face his poor life with great courage somehow. However, when audience watch movies in the cinema, most of them just follow the story. Few of them may ask, “Will it happen in the real life？”

    Movies are also imitating the real life. Thus a movie, just like a novel, can never be the same as the real life. The setting of a movie is so ideal that we could hardly find it out in reality. The moviemakers just try their best to persuade the audience to believe the story is true. In a word, it is all just make-believe.

    For quite a long time, I think that the adults' world is realistic in the opposite way of the children's cartoon. However, the movies from the adult world turn out to be a made-up thing. At the very moment, I suddenly realize that movies are somewhat of the adult's fairy tales or cartoons.

    To sum up, other than false comfort such as movies and tales, we are more in need of the maturity of mind, so that we can face our lives bravely and correctly.

    You carry a 1.3 kg mass of fatty material in your head that controls everything you will ever do. This fantastic control center lets you think, learn, create, and feel emotions. It also controls everything your body does. What is this amazing machine? It's your brain — a structure so amazing that the famous scientist James Watson called it ＂the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe＂.

    Imagine your kitten jumped onto the kitchen counter, and was about to step onto a hot stove. You would have only seconds to act. In situations like this, your brain reads the signals from your eyes and quickly calculates when, where and at what speed you need to run to save her. Then it tells your muscles to move. No computer can match your brain's great ability to download, process, and react to the flood of information from your eyes, ears and other sensory organs.

    If a bee lands on your foot, sensory neurons(神经元) in your skin send this information to your brain at a speed of more than 240 kilometers per hour. Your brain then uses motor neurons to send a message back to your foot: Shake the bee off quickly! Motor neurons can send this information at more than 320 kilometers per hour!

    Your brain contains about 100 billion tiny cells: neurons — it would take you more than 3,000 years if you tried to count them all. Whenever you dream, laugh, think, see or move, tiny chemical and electrical signals are racing between these neurons along billions of tiny neuron pathways. Believe it or not, the activity in your brain never stops. Countless messages fly around inside it every second, like a super-fast game of table tennis. Your neurons create and send more messages than all the phones in the entire world. And although a single neuron generates only a tiny amount of electricity, all your neurons together can generate enough electricity to power a light bulb.

    Our local Community Youth Club is a very popular organization with young people in my town. I have been a member for four years now and I've taken part in a lot of interesting projects. These include fun activities such as holiday camps and discos. We have organized sports competitions and we even made a video.

    But it isn't all just enjoyment, we have also started doing social work to help people in our neighbourhood. We have organized activities for small children during the holidays. We have also formed a social support group to help young people stop smoking.

    We are particularly proud of the most recent group we have created. It organizes regular visits to the local old people's home. This idea came from a school visit to an old people' home. My class spent an afternoon at a home and everyone found the visit very rewarding.

    The old people at the home were very excited by our visit. They were very talkative(健谈的) and they told us their personal stories. During our visit, the home was filled with the sound of laughter. We sang songs and played games with the old people and had tea together. But we realized that life wasn't always easy. Some of them were in poor health and were very unhappy. They couldn't go outside the visits by children brought some sunshine into their lives.

    Many young people like me do not live with our grandparents and we have very little contact with elderly people. As a result, many young people don't know what they are like and we have a lot of wrong ideas about them. We have little or no idea of the kind of lives they lead in their homes. After this visit, my friends and I decided we should do something to help improve the quality of their lives.

    Since the creation of our visiting group, over twenty volunteers(志愿者) have joined us. Up to now, we have organized three group evenings and a concert. But it is the individual(单独的) visits which are the most important. Club members regularly visit old people and everyone finds the experience rich and rewarding.

    Dogs were living as companions to the early settlers of North America over 10,000 years ago. The oldest domestic dogs in the Americas were thought to be around 9500 years old. Angela Perri of Durham University, UK, and her colleagues have carried out fresh radiocarbon dating on the two dog skeletons that gave this date, discovered in the prehistoric Koster site in Illinois, and found they were even older: around 10,100 years old.

    A third dog from another Illinois site called Stilwell II was older still, at 10,190 years old. That makes it the oldest known domesticated dog in the Americas. The team concluded that all three dogs were domesticated as they skeletons were complete and unskinned, and so hadn't been butchered for food. They had also been carefully buried, evidence they were valued by their owners. The Stilwell II dog, which probably resembled a small English settler, was under what seemed to be the floor of a living area. It is unclear why it took so long for tame dogs to arrive in the Americas, given that they were domesticated at least 14,000 years ago in Eurasia. By this time, people were already moving into North America from Siberia; there is evidence some reached Chile 18,500 years ago. Geneticists have found signs of at least three waves of migration over the following millennia. There is no evidence that domestic dogs accompanied them. “We don't know if dogs were part of the first waves of immigration to the Americas" says Luc Janssens of Ghent University in Belgium. "It could be so, but no archaeological bones have yet been found." It is "overwhelmingly probable" that some of the early settlers did bring dogs to the Americas, but they may not have had "the time or the spiritual compulsion to bury them", says Pat Shipman of Pennsylvania State University.

    AA famous magazine, Amusement Today, does a survey among park lovers every year both in the US and overseas, based on which, "Top 5 List of the Best Amusement Parks in the World" has come out as follows:

    Disneyland, California

    Disneyland is a theme park in Anaheim, California, the US. More than 515 million guests have traveled to this American landmark from around the world since the park first opened to guests on July 17, 1955. The park consists of many world- famous sections, such as Main Street, Adventure land, New Orleans Square, and so on.

    Magic Kingdom, Disney World, Florida

    Magic Kingdom is a theme park within the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, near Orlando opened on October 1, 1971. It is the most famous theme park in Florida. The park's design and attractions don't make much difference from Disneyland Park in Anaheim.

    EPCOT, Disney World, Florida

    EPCOT is the second theme park built at the Walt Disney World Resort near Orlando, Florida. The park opened on October 1, 1982, and was named EPCOT Center from1982 to 1993. It was the largest Disney theme park in the world until 1998, when Disney's Animal Kingdom opened.

    Disney-MGM Studios, Florida

    MGM's streets are the home for some great movie-themed attractions with a history of less than 30 years. With the addition of the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror and the Rock and Roller Coaster, the park is now home to Disney World's most thrilling rides.

    Universal Studios, Florida

    Go behind the scenes, beyond the screen and jump right into the action of your favorite movies at Universal Studios, the number one movie and TV theme park in the world.

    I've always felt a need to be prepared for whatever situation I've found myself in.

    My mother once took me to a store when I was seven years old. She and I got to the checkout counter, and she realized she had forgotten a couple of things on her shopping list. She left me with the cart and ran off to get what she needed.

    "I'll be right back." she said.

    She was gone just a few minutes, but at that time, I had loaded all the things on the belt and everything was rung up. I was left staring at the cashier, who was staring at me. "Do you have money for me, son?" she said. "I'll need to be paid."

    I didn't realize she was just trying to please herself. So I stood there, ashamed and embarrassed.

    By the time my mom returned, I was angry. "You left me here with no money! This lady asked me for the money, and I had nothing to give her."

    Now that I'm an adult, you'll never catch me with less than $200 in my wallet. I want to be prepared in case I need it.

    I've always admired people who are over-prepared. In college, I had a classmate named Norman. One day he was giving a speech on an overhead projector(投影仪) and in the middle of his talk, the light bulb（灯泡）on the projector blew out. We would have to wait ten minutes until someone found a new projector.

    "It's Okay." he said. "There's nothing to worry about."

    We watched him walk over to his bag and pull something out. He had brought along a spare(备用) bulb for the overhead projector. Who could even think of that?

    I often told my students, "When you go into the wilderness, the only thing you can depend on is what you take with you." And essentially, the wilderness is anywhere but your home or office. So take money. Pack a light bulb. Be prepared.