A girl who graduated from a world famous university wanted to do translation work for authority leaders. She was so happy when she entered the British Embassy (大使馆). She thought it was the greatest happiness in her life as many graduates wanted to get that job and she was one of the few people who got it!

But when she started her new job, she realized that it was just a job of answering calls and recording staff members'arriving and leaving times. It was supposed to have no future. For some time, she felt disappointed and didn't know what to do. However, she didn't want to give up this job. She thought about it for one or two days and finally she decided that she would try her best to do this job. From then on, she learnt to appreciate her own job. She wrote down the names and phone numbers of the staff members on a notebook so that she could remember them. She found great pleasure in dealing with the daily chores. When a phone call came in, she picked up the phone as soon as possible. When someone asked her about who was not in the office, she would give the right name and even the time when he or she left. Nobody could do that except her.

Her excellent work received praise not only from the embassy's members, but also from people in the local government. A leader of a famous company in Britain was deeply impressed by her, so he invited her to work for him. After that she became the leader's personal translator and she was appreciated by the foreigners.

      We cannot choose our destiny(命运), but we can choose the attitude with which we face our life. Maybe the attitude could change our destiny.

    A young and successful man was driving down a street in his new Jaguar (捷豹汽车). He was going too fast. As his car passed, a brick (砖块) knocked into the Jaguar's side door. He was very angry and drove the car back to the place where the brick had been thrown. The angry driver jumped out of the car and stopped the nearest kid, shouting, "Who are you? What are you doing? That's a new car and that brick you threw is going to cost a lot of money. Why did you do that?"

    The young boy was apologetic. "I'm sorry. I didn't know what else to do," he said. "I threw the brick because no one else would stop."

    With tears dropping down his face, the young boy pointed to a place just around a parked car. "It's my brother," he said, "he fell out of his wheelchair (轮椅) and I can't lift him up."

    Crying, the boy asked the man, "Would you please help me get him back into his wheelchair? He's hurt and he's too heavy for me." Moved deeply, the driver hurriedly lifted the disabled boy into the wheelchair.

    "Thank you and God bless you," the thankful child told the man. And the man simply watched the little boy push his brother down the sidewalk toward their home.

    It was a long and slow walk back to the Jaguar. The dent (凹痕) was very noticeable, but the driver didn't want to repair the side door. He kept the dent there to remind him of this message: Don't go through life so fast that someone has to throw a brick at you to get your attention.

    God speaks to our hearts every day. Sometimes when we don't have time to listen, he has to throw a brick at us.

B

    Thomas Edison lit up the world with his invention of the electric light. Without him, the world might still be in the dark at night. However, the electric light was not his only invention. Nearly every two weeks, he created something new.

    Thomas Edison was born in 1847. He attended school for only three months. His mother taught him at home, but he was mostly self-educated. He started trying out his new ideas at a very young age.

    When he was 12 years old, he got his first job. He became a newsboy on a train. He did experiments on the train in his spare time. Unluckily, his first work experience didn't end well. He was fired when he accidentally set fire to the floor of the train. Then Edison worked as a telegraph operator (电报员) for five years, but he continued to spend much of his time creating things until the vote recorder (投票计数器), his first invention, came in 1868.

    Thomas Edison was nearly deaf in one ear, but he never minded. Because of this, he could have more time for work. He always worked 16 out of every 24 hours. Sometimes his wife had to remind him to eat and sleep. Thomas Edison died at the age of 84. He left many inventions that greatly improved the quality of life all over the world.

    Abdul Sadiq, an Afghanistan's only professional cyclist, began by training his daughter. And when she competed successfully abroad, he set up the team. It is the world's most unlikely sporting team, because the sport breaks taboos in a country where in many traditional communities, women are not allowed out of the house.

    The head coach faces frequent threats and the girls' families do not always approve "If it's not their fathers trying to stop them, it's a brother or uncle."

    Two members of the team, Massouma, 18, and Zarab, 17, are sisters. Their father and their brothers approve, but they know that their uncles complain to their father. "They will never come in front of us to say ‘Why are you cycling?', but they say bad words to our father," she said. His team have, however, competed and won regionally against Bangladesh and Pakistan.

    "We want to go cycling because we want to be heroes one day," said 16-year-old Jella, one of the latest riders. In one of the mildest and driest winters for many years, training has gone on without stopping. And next spring, the girls will go up into the mountains. "We say that women should not sit at home, they need to come out and do sports," said Abdul Sadiq, And 18- year-old Zainab said she wished that she could just go cycling alone on the street one day. "It's my ambition, and I hope that one day girls will be allowed to go cycling on the streets, not having a coach, or anyone with them, and they will not have problems," she said.

    One day I happened to meet an Englishman in the street and soon we began to talk. As I was talking about how I was studying English, the foreigner seemed to be very surprised, gently shaking his head and saying "You don't say!". I was puzzled, and I thought, "Perhaps this is not a right thing to talk about." So I said to him, "Well, shall we talk about the Great Wall? Have you ever been there?"

    "Certainly! Everyone back home will laugh at me if I leave here without seeing it. The Great Wall is wonderful!" "Yes, it is one of the wonders in the world. And people of many countries have come to visit it." As I went on telling him more about it, he stopped me again, "You don't say!"

    I couldn't help asking, "Why do you ask me not to talk about it?"

    "Well, I didn't ask you to do so," he answered, greatly surprised.

    "Did you say 'You don't say!'?" I asked again.

    Hearing this, the foreigner laughed loudly. He began to explain," 'You don't say!' means 'Really'. Perhaps you know little about English idioms."

    Wow! How foolish I was! Since then I have been careful with English idioms.

    Not many years ago, a wealthy and rather strange old man named Johnson lived alone in a village in the south of England. He had made a lot of money in trading with foreign countries. When he was 75, he gave ￡12,000 to the village school to buy land and equipment for a children's playground.

As a result of his kindness, many people came to visit him. Among them was a newspaperman. During their talk, Johnson remarked that he was 75 and expected to live to be 100, and the newspaperman asked him how he managed to be healthy at 75. Johnson had a sense of humor. He liked whisky and drank some each day. "I have an injection (注射) in my neck each evening", he told the newspaperman, thinking of his evening glass of whisky.

The newspaperman did not understand what Johnson meant. In his newspaper he reported that Johnson was 75 and had a daily injection in his neck. Within a week, Johnson received thousands of letters from all over Britain, asking him for the secret of his daily injection.