Today I went to Sam's school in the UK. It was really different from my school in China.

    Girls wore grey skirts and white shirts, boys wore grey trousers, and everyone wore the school tie.

    Some of Sam's lessons were a bit strange for me. We were reading Shakespeare in the English lesson, and there were quite some old words like "thou" and "thee" to mean "you". In history we studied 20th Century China. It was strange hearing a foreign side of history — and hearing English people trying to say all our Chinese names!

    Classes were also a lot more relaxing than in China. Teachers were called "sir" or "miss", everyone shouted answers and raised their hands in classes. It was more like a debate than a class. A bell rang at the end of each lesson and everyone jumped up to go to the next class.

    At break we bought potato chips and cookies in the dining room. Lunch was later than in China at 1 o'clock. We had big plates of pie with carrots. For dessert there was hot sweet rice called rice pudding.

    It was good that I'd had an excellent lunch, because at Sam's school Monday afternoons are taken up with sports.

    I played my first game of netball — a bit like basketball, but with some differences. Luckily I'd had a quick look in the rule book before I tried to join in the game.

    The story is about a young student. She worked very hard at her lessons. She worked so hard that she became ill. She couldn't go to sleep at night. When she got up the next morning, she felt very tired.

    So she went to see a doctor. Hearing the student's words, the doctor said, "You are too stressed out. You must eat more food like vegetables and tofu. Besides you can try to count(数) numbers when you are lying in bed. By the time you reach one thousand, you will be asleep. I'm sure of it."

    The next day, the student came to see the doctor again. "Well," said the doctor, "how are you feeling today?"

    The student still looked tired. "Yes," she said, "I tried to count one, two, three, four... up to one thousand. But when I reached five hundred and sixty, I feel sleepy. I had to get up and drink some coffee so that I could go on counting up to one thousand. But then I still couldn't be asleep."

    Mary was a little girl and she lived with her parents in Africa. Her parents had gotten tired of the neighbors always complaining to them about their daughter, who was naughty and disrespectful to others. To change the situation, the father told Mary a story of a thief who would come and take away the parents of a bad child to take care of a better child and leave the bad child alone.

    However Mary went on with her ways. One day she made fun of an old blind man on her way to school. On hearing this, her parents thought of a new plan.

    The next day Mary came back from school. To her surprise, nobody was at home. It was getting dark but neither of her parents showed up. The little girl started to wonder where they were. Suddenly she remembered the story. Mary began to cry, for she thought she would never see them again. While she was crying, the door opened and her parents came in. She ran to them and asked, “Where have you been? I thought the thief had taken you away.”

    “He did but he let us go and told us to come back home because he knows you are going to be a good girl. He told us that if you are still a bad girl, he will come back for us,” they told her.

    “I am a good girl now and I promise never to be bad again because I don't want him to take you away from me.” Mary's words made her parents very happy. From that day on, Mary has never misbehaved again.

任务一：判断下列句子正误。

任务二：回答问题。

    Joseph Sekar is 62 years old and he is in India(印度). He feeds thousands of parrots(鹦鹉) every day. And he has got himself another new and interesting name "birdman".

    Joseph always left small number of rice on the top of his house. The neighborhood parrots often came to eat them. One day two parrots flew in and Joseph fed them some rice. The birds not only returned the following day, but also brought along other hungry friends. Today between 2,000~4,000 beautiful parrots visit the birdman twice a day.

    Joseph does not feed the birds raw(生的) rice. He cooks the rice! This means that the amazing man usually gets up at 4:30 am every morning and spends over an hour making the breakfast for birds. He then puts the rice on 14 boards on the top of his house carefully.

The breakfast rush begins at about 6:00 am when the beautiful parrots fly in and continues until every last piece of the delicious rice is gone! The similar situation happens in the evening when the birds arrive at around 4:00 pm and stay for almost two hours. Not only the superman feeds them, but also takes in sick and hurt birds and nurses them back to health.

    Of course, feeding so many birds is not a cheap job. Joseph spends 40% of his income(收入) of $13 as a camera repairman on the meals every day. The superman says all of his actions come out of a feeling of love.

    Though Joseph has no plans to stop the action now, he does worry about what will happen to the beautiful birds as he gets older and is unable to go on.