Ten-year-old Barack Obama was one of the only three black students at his school in Hawaii, US. He felt very different from most other students. White girls wanted to touch his hair. ①A white boy asked him whether his father ate people.“I lied (说谎) to them that my father was a Kenyan prince. But I kept asking myself who I am," said Obama. However, 37 years later, the boy made history—Obama became the first black president in the history of the US.

    Obama was born in 1961, to an African father and a white American woman in a small town in the US. He grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii. ②This unusual background made him want to know who he was. He once drank much wine to help forget this question.

    With the help of his friends, Obama finally went to college. His hard work made him a star at Harvard. Later, he became the third black senator (参议员) in the history of the US. During his race to the highest post in the US. Obama talked about his background. He called for a United America, rather than a white America or a black America.

    Obama's success has made Martin Luther King's dream come true. That is: A man should not be judged by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

    I am Turere. I come from Kitengela, a farming community on the edge(边缘) of Nairobi National Park of Kenya(肯尼亚). Since the age of nine. I have helped to look after my family's cows. As a child, in my free time. I enjoyed playing with electronics. I made my own inventions, such as electronic toys from car parts and other things. I also built other electronic devices(仪器) for my neighbors.

    At the age of 13, I invented something that changed my life. It also changed the lives of many people in my community. One night, a lion from the park came into my family's farm and killed one of our cows. I was angry. However, killing the lion, I thought, was not the best way to solve the problem. Instead, I decided to invent a solution

    The first idea I got was to use fire, because I thought lions were scared of fire. But I came to realize that didn't really help, because it was even helping the lions to see through the cowshed (牛棚). So I didn't give up. I continued.

    And a second idea I got was to use a scarecrow(稻草人). I was trying to trick the lions into thinking) that I was standing near the cowshed. But lions are very clever. They will come the first day and they see the scarecrow, and they go back. But the second day, they'll come and they say, this thing is not moving here, it is always here! So he jumps in and kills the animals.

    So one night, I was walking around the cowshed with a torch(手电筒), and that day the lions didn't come. And I discovered that lions were afraid of a moving light. So I had an idea.

    When he was a teenager, Hunter Adams was very unhappy, and he spent many years in the 1960s and 1970s hospital for people with mental (精神的) health problems.

    When he left hospital, Adams decided to become a doctor, so he went to Medical School in Virginia, USA. But when he was there he did things in a different way. For example, he didn't like the doctor's white coats. He preferred to wear shirts with flowers on them when he visited his patients, and he tried to make them laugh. The doctors at the medical school didn't like Adams very much because he was too different.

    But Adams believed that people in hospital need more than medicine. He saw unhappy and lonely people, and he tried to help them as patients, but as people too. He spent a lot of time with children in the hospital, and often put a special red nose on his face to look like a clown and to make the children laugh.

    When he finished medical school and became a doctor, Adams opened his own hospital, called "the Gesundheit Institute", together with some other doctors. They wanted it to be a place in a different way of working with sick people.

    Hunter Adams became famous during the 1980s, and in 1998, Universal Pictures made a film about his life. It was very successful. In the film (called Patch Adams), Robin Williams played Adams. Williams said, "Hunter is a really warm person, who believes that patients need a doctor who's friend. I enjoyed playing him."

    They say that "travel is the best teacher" and there is no better example of this idea than the Ming dynasty travel writer and geographer Xu Xiake (1587-1641). His book The Travel Notes of Xu Xiake, not only encouraged a love of travelling among Chinese people but provided important scientific information about the country's land and geography.

    Born into a wealthy Jiangyin family, Xu became interested in books about different places at anearly age and wanted to travel. When he was 18, however. Xu's father died and so, it seemed, did his travelling dreams. He now was responsible for the family farm and taking care of his 60-year-old mother as tradition required.

    But his mother had different ideas. Understanding her son, slove of travel and valuing the knowledge he could get from such experiences, this modern-thinking woman refused to keep her son at home. She agreed that Xu could travel for three months every year, when there was less farm work.

    So at the age of twenty and with his mother's support, Xu set off for the first time, leaving behind not only his mother but his new wife as well. He would repeat this goodbye each year for most of the next 30 years. During this time, he travelled throughout the Ming kingdom, carefully studying the lands he passed through and recording his experiences and many discoveries in a diary. This diary, which once had over 500,000 words, would eventually become The Travel Notes of Xu Xiake.

    Although rich, Xu avoided comfortable travel, preferring to go almost everywhere on foot. This way he could research the environment in detail and get a true picture of the natural world. Many of his trips were to hard-to-reach mountain areas, and through wild forests where few people lived. His willingness to face hardships came at a cost however. Progress was slow and tiring and he was frequently sick, robbed and beaten during his journeys

    Sadly Xu became seriously ill during his last and longest journey, a 4-year trip through the Southwest of China. He died in 1641, soon after returning to his hometown for the last time. When his diary was finally printed years after his death, much of it had been destroyed or lost. Although incomplete, it still made Xu a travelling legend around the world.