The school music club opens. Tony wants to join（加入） the club, but he doesn't want to go alone. He wants to ask his friends to go to the club with him. So he calls them at home, but no one is free.

    Martin is doing his homework at home. It usually takes him two hours to finish it.

    Peter is writing to his pen friend Gina, a girl from America, an e-mail on the computer. He is telling her about his school life .In fact, he doesn't like music.

    Lily likes music very much. So Miss Green is teaching her and her classmates to sing songs at school. They are having a singing competition.

    Alice is having her twelfth birthday party. Her parents are making dinner for her.

Kate is helping her brother with his English .He always doesn't do well in his tests.

    Tom is playing baseball with his sister. It is his favorite sport.

    Tony is not happy because no one can go to the club with him.

    I read some stories about amazing people today. Here I'd like to share something interesting with you. Xie Qiuping, a Chinese woman, has the longest hair in the world. Her hair is 5,085 meters long! How amazing! Before I got to know this, I thought my hair was quite long. It is nearly 50cm long. I don't know how she washes her hair.

    The tallest man in the world lived in the USA. His name was Robert Pershing Wadlow. He was 2.72 metres tall. I want to know if he lived in a flat like mine, how could he go into the room? The tallest man died in 1940.

    There is a man in France called Michael Lotito. He eats such items as metal(金属), glass and rubber. He even once ate a model plane! How strange! I don't think metal is as tasty(美味的) as sweets or chocolates.

    One windy spring day, I noticed young people having fun using the wind to fly their kites. Colorful creations of different shapes and sizes filled the skies like beautiful birds flying and dancing. As the strong winds blew against the kites, a string (线) kept them in control.

    Instead of blowing away with the wind, they rose against it to achieve great heights. They shook and pulled, but the restraining (控制的) string and the cumbersome (笨重的) tail kept them in control, facing upward and against the wind. As the kites struggled against the string, they seemed to say, "Let me go! Let me go! I want to be free!" They rose beautifully even when they fought the restriction of the string. Finally, one of the kites succeeded in breaking loose (松散的). "Free at last," it seemed to say. "Free to fly with the wind."

    Yet freedom (自由) simply put it in the control of an unkind wind. It fell down to the ground and landed in a mass of weeds and string against a dead bush. "Free at last", free to lie powerlessly in the dirt, to be blown helplessly along the ground, and to stop lifelessly against the first obstacle (障碍物).

    How much like kites we sometimes are. The Heaven gives us adversity (逆境) and rules, rules to follow from which we can grow and get strength. Some of us break away from the rules so hard that we never reach the heights we might get to. We keep part of the rules and never rise high enough to get our tails off the ground.

    Let us each rise to the great heights, knowing that some of the rules that we may be angry about are in fact the strong force that helps us achieve.

    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.

    Everybody hates rats. But rats may soon be man's new best friends.

    What happens after an earthquake? We send in rescue (援救) dogs. Why? Because they can smell people. Dogs save lives. They help rescuers to find living people. But dogs are big and they can't get into small space. So now a new research project is using a smaller animal to save lives: the rat.

    How does it work? First, the rat is trained to smell people. When this happens, the rat's brain gives a signal. This is sent to a small radio on its back, and then the rescuers follow the radio signals. When the rat's brain activity jumps, the rescuers know that someone is alive. The rat has smelled that person.

    Although there are already robots which can do this job, rats are better. "Robots' noses don't work well when there are other smells around. Rats are good at that," says a scientist. Rats can also see in the dark. They are cheaper and quicker to train than dogs, and unlike robots, they don't need electricity.

    The "rat project" is not finished, but a scientist says, "It would be fantastic. A rat could get into space we couldn't get to and a rat would get out if it wasn't safe." Perhaps for the first time in history, people will be happy to see a rat in a building (but only after an earthquake, of course).