Henry Ford was born on a farm on July 30th, 1863. The farm was near the city of Detroit.

    Henry was always interested in machines. He enjoyed fixing clocks.And he helped repair farm equipment. When Henry was sixteen years old, he left the family farm and went to Detroit to learn more about machines. Henry used what he learned from work to develop engines. In 1903, he was ready to start building cars for the public. On July 15th, 1903, a man named Doctor Pfenning bought the first car from the Ford Motor Company.

    The sale to Doctor Pfenning was the beginning of a huge number of requests for Ford cars.By the end of March, 1904, almost 600 Ford cars had been sold. At the start of 1905, the Ford Motor Company was producing 25 cars each day.

    Henry Ford was sure the future of the automobile industry was in a low-priced car for the general public. He said then, and many times after,“I want to make a car that anybody can buy.”

    In 1907, Henry Ford said: "I will build a motor car for the great mass of people. 1t will be large enough for the family, but small enough for one person to operate and care for. It will be built of the best materials. It will be built by the best men to be employed. And it will be built with the simplest plans that modern engineering can produce. It will be so low in price that no man making good money will be unable to own one.”

    Tulips(郁金香) are the national flower of Iran and Turkey. The European name for the flower is a misuse of the Persian word for turban(头巾), a mistake probably arising in the common Turkish custom of wearing flowers in the folds of the turban. Alternatively, the misuse may have arisen because this eastern flower, when not yet in full bloom, looks like a turban. In Persia, to give a red tulip was to declare your love for someone. The black center of the red tulip was said to represent the lover's heart, burned to a coal by love's passion.

    Originally growing in the Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey), tulips were imported into Holland in the sixteenth century. When Carolus Clusius wrote the first major book on tulips in 1592, they became so popular that the tulips in his garden were stolen from time to time. As the Dutch Golden Age grew, so did this colorful flower. They were commonly seen in paintings and at festivals. In the mid-seventeenth century, tulips even created the first economics bubble（泡沫经济）, known as “Tulip Mania”. At that time, tulips were so expensive that they were used as money until the market for them crashed.

    Today, Holland is still known for its tulips and other flowers, often sincerely called “the flower shop of the world.” Tulips are planted in great fields of beautiful color, and transform the landscape into a sea of different colors. Tulip festivals are held throughout the country in spring. However, the most well-known tulip festival is organized in the Noordoostpolder, a province in the central Netherlands, each year. Held in the middle of the tulip fields, this flower festival runs from late April to early May. The Dutch people took their love of tulips abroad when they settled, and tulips and tulip festivals are now found in New York and Michigan, where the connection to their Dutch roots is still very strong.

    A food chain is a simple way of explaining how each living thing gets its food. For example, a simple African food chain might consist of three parts: first, trees and bushes; second, giraffes; and third, lions. Each link in a food chain is food for the next link. Food chains always start with plants and end with animals.

    Plants are at the bottom of the food chain. Scientists call them producers, because they use light energy from the sun to produce food from carbon dioxide and water through photosynthesis（光合作用）. Animals, unlike plants, can't produce their own food. Instead, they must eat plants or other animals. This is why scientists call them consumers.

    Consumer animals fall into three categories. Herbivores（食草动物）eat only plants. Carnivores（食肉动物） eat only other animals. Omnivores eat both plants and animals. In addition to producers and consumers, there are also decomposers(分解者).These organisms, such as bacteria and fungi, feed on decaying(腐烂) matter. They help the food chain by speeding up the decaying process that releases minerals back into the soil to be absorbed by plants as nutrients.

    Most food chains have only four or five links in them. As you go up a food chain, the amount of energy at each level diminishes, because some of the energy is lost in the form of waste or is used up by the organism at the level. That is why it takes many plants, for example, to feed a few giraffes who in turn feed one lion.

    Most animals are part of many different food chains, because they must eat more than one type of food to satisfy their energy needs. All of these interconnected food chains form a more complex structure called a food web. Humans, for example, are at the center of a very complex food web, because we tend to eat many different types of plants and animals.

    Traditionally, robots have been hard, made of metal and other rigid material. But a team of scientists at Harvard University in the US has managed to build an entirely soft robot-one that draws inspiration from an octopus (章鱼).

    Described in science journal Nature, the "Octobot" could pave the way for more effective autonomous robots that could be used in search，rescue and exploration. "The Octobot is minimal system which may serve as a foundation for a new generation of completely soft, autonomous robots" the study's authors wrote.

Robots built for precise, repetitive movements in a controlled environment don't do so well on rough terrains (地形) or in unpredictable conditions. And they aren't especially safe around humans, because they're made out of hard and heavy parts that could be potentially dangerous to their users.

    So researchers have been working on building soft robots for decades. They're taken inspiration from nature, looking to animals from jellyfish to cockroaches, which are often made up of more flexible matter.

    But creating a completely soft robot remains a challenge. Even if engineers build a silicone (硅酮) body, it's still a grand challenge to construct flexible versions of essential parts, such as a source of power.

    "Although soft robotics is still in its early stage, it holds great promise for several applications, such as search-rescue operations and exploration," Barbara Mazzolai and Virgilio Mattoli of the Italian Institute of Technology' Center for Micro-BioRobotics, wrote in a comment. "Soft robots might also open up new approaches to improving wellness and quality of life."

    You may probably meet most of the powerful graduation speakers, here who are well-known people in their fields. I think the schools couldn't have picked better speakers than them, because they set good examples, deeply inspiring us in our daily life.

    1) Steve Jobs, Stanford University:

    "Remembering you're going to die, and the best way I know is to avoid the trap of thinking that you have something to lose. There is no reason not to follow your heart. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice... "

    2) Oprah Winfrey, Stanford University:

    "I consider the world, this Earth, to be like a school... And the secret I've learned to get ahead is being open to the lessons from the grandest universe of all. Don't react against a bad situation. And the solution will arise from the challenge. So don't give up easily, acting with responsibility... "

    3) Bono, University of Pennsylvania:

    "For four years you've been buying, trading, and selling everything you've got in this market-place of ideas. Your pockets are full, even if your parents' are empty, and now you've got to figure out what to spend it on... The world is more flexible than you think and it's waiting for you to hammer it into shape... "

    4) Michael Dell, University of Texas at Austin:

    "Now it's time for you to move on to what's next and obtain your desire. But you must not let anything prevent you from taking those first steps. Don't spend so much time trying to choose the perfect opportunity, or sometimes you'll miss the right opportunity. Recognize that there will be failures and obstacles. But you will learn from your mistakes and the mistakes of others."

    Have you ever wondered how your favorite NBA team received its famous name? All NBA teams have an interesting story or a history behind their names. Some of the names reflect the city's culture or history, others came from previous owners and many were selected through "Name the Team" contests.

    For teams like Los Angeles and Utah, the names were not always a reflection of the city. Even though Los Angeles has no lakes, the Laker name has been a city treasure for almost 40 years. Before going to Los Angeles, the team originated in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 1948, team officials chose the name for its direct relationship to the state's motto, "The Land of 10,000 Lakes." The team name went unchanged after moving to Los Angeles in 1960.

    Because Utah's team originated in New Orleans, Louisiana, it was called the Jazz. In 1974, New Orleans club officials chose the name to represent the city for its reputation as the "jazz capital of the world." The name stayed with the team even after finding a new home in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1979.

The Chicago Bull's original owner, Richard Klein, named the team the Bulls. He picked the name because a fighting bull is relentless, and never quits. Klein, who founded the club in1966, believed these qualities were necessary for a championship team and hoped his Chicago athletes would live up to the team name. A belief that Bulls—winner of the six NBA championships have definitely followed.

    In 1967, the Indian Pacers selected their team name in a different way from most other teams. Their decision was based on what they wanted to accomplish in the NBA. Team officials chose the Pacers name because the organization wanted to set the "pace" in professional basketball.