Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father came to America from Kenya, which is a country in Africa. His parents, Ann and Barack, met when they were students at the University of Hawaii. Since Barack had the same name as his father, young Barack went by the nickname “Barry”.

    In 1979, after he finished high school, Barry went to Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. There, he started to learn about his African roots and decided to use his African name, Barack. After two years in L.A., he went to Columbia University in New York City to study politics.

    After college, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he worked to help poor people in his city. He traveled to Africa to meet his grandmother and cousins for the first time. He went back many times over the years to visit with his family and learn about where he came from. At work, he met a lawyer named Michelle Robinson. They worked together in a big law firm. Then he left Chicago to go to Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He did very well in law school.

    After he was done with school, Barack moved back to Chicago and in 1992 he married Michelle. He worked as a lawyer, devoted to helping poor people for free who had been treated unfairly. He worked hard to get the people he helped to vote.

    He made many people believe that their votes were important, and helped them feel like they could make a difference.

    Teachers' Day is, interestingly, not celebrated on the same day all over the world. In some countries it is marked by a holiday, in others it is a working day.

    International Teachers' Day is celebrated on October 5. Being held ever since 1994, it is in honor of teachers' organizations worldwide. Its aim is to encourage supports for teachers and to meet the needs of students.

    China    In 1939, Teachers' Day was set for August 27, Confucius' birthday. In1951, the celebration was stopped. However, it was founded again in 1985, and the day was changed to September 10.

    India     Teachers' Day is celebrated on September 5 in honour of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the second president of India, whose birthday falls on that day.

    Russia    In Russia, Teachers' Day was celebrated on the first Sunday of October between 1965 and 1994. Since 1994, the day is observed on the October 5, just the same day as World Teachers Day.

    The US    In the US, Teachers' Day is non-official holiday. It is celebrated on the Tuesday of the first full week of May. A number of activities are organized in schools to honor teachers. The celebrations can continue for the whole week of May.

    Thailand     In Thailand, National Teachers' Day is celebrated every year on January 16. The first Teachers' Day was held in 1957. The day is a holiday in schools.

    When Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, his unmarried mother decided to put him for adoption because she wanted a girl. So in the middle of the night, his mother called a lawyer named Paul Jobs and said, “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” But his mother told his future parents to promise that they would send Jobs to college. After Steve Jobs graduated from high school, he went to college but decided to drop out because it was so expensive that he had to sleep on the floor in his friends' rooms.

At 20, he and a friend started a company in a garage on April 1, 1976. Jobs named their company —-Apple in memory of a happy summer he had spent as an orchard (果园) in Oregon.

    After 10 years of hard time and failures, starting from two kids working in a garage, Apple computer eventually grew into a big company with over 4,000 employees.

    At 30, Jobs , however, was fired from the company he co-founded. But after he had to leave the company, Apple was under heavy pressure from rival (对手) Microsoft and in 1996 posted billions of dollars in losses. Apple needed Steve Jobs and he was appointed as Apple' CEO in1997. Under his leadership, Apple returned to profitability and introduced new products such as the iPhone and the iPad.

    Steve Jobs once said, “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick, Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking.

    It was dawn of March 21, 2018. Gary Messina was on his morning run along New York City'8East River. Suddenly something caught his eye—a large 60-year-old man balancing on the four-foot-high fence that guarded the path from the water. As Messina got closer to the scene, the man took a step forward and slipped into the dark river below.

    When Messina reached nearer, the man was struggling in the water, clearly unable to swim. Other joggers also heard the man's cry. David Blauzvern and John Green dropped their phones and keys on land and jumped in. “ People had called the police, but it was unclear when they'd get there,” says Green. “We just reacted. Messina joined them in the river. Just as the jumper was losing strength, Blauzvern take hold of him. The pair were about 30 yards from the seawall when Messina and Green caught up to them. They seized the man, with Blauzvern supporting his back and Messina and Green holding him up from either side. As the men made their way toward the concrete seawall that stretched for blocks in each direction, Blauzvern had an awful realization:there was no way out of the river.

    By now, a crowd had gathered on land. “A rescue boat is on its way, someone yelled to them. Swimming forward was getting tougher by the minute. The jumper, who was six foot two and weighed around 260 pounds, was heavy in his rescuers' arms. After ten minutes, they managed to get to the river's edge. “I've never been so out of breath, ”says Blauzvern.

    Fifteen minutes after the men had jumped into the river, the two-man rescue boat appeared. But because it couldn't risk getting too close to the seawall, the men had to swim out to it. “I was completely out of energy at this point, “says Blauzver. The men in the water pushed the jumper while the men in the boat pulled him up and, finally, to safety. The man they had saved was taken to the hospital for evaluation(评估). Details on his condition have not been released. As for the rescuers, each of them was at work by 10:30a. m. “I was a bit late,” admits Blauzvern, smiling. “But I had a good excuse.”

When I lived in Spain, some Spanish friends of mine decided to visit England by car. Before they left, they asked me for advice about how to find accommodation. I suggested that they should stay at "bed and breakfast" houses, because this kind of accommodation gives a foreign visitor a good chance to speak English with the family. My friends listened to my advice, but they came back with some funny stories.

"We didn't stay at bed and breakfast houses," they said, "because we found that most families were on holiday." I thought this was strange. Finally I understood what had happened. My friends spoke little English, and they thought "VACANCIES" meant "holidays", because the Spanish word for "holidays" is said "vacaciones". So they did not go to the house where the sign outside said "VACANCIES", which in English means there are free rooms. Then my friends went to the houses where the sign said "NO VACANCIES", because they thought this meant people who owned the house were not away on holiday. But they found that these houses were all full. As a result, they stayed at hotels.

We laughed about this and about mistakes my friends made in reading other signs. In Spanish, the word "DIVERSION" means "fun". In English, it means that workmen are repairing the road, and that you must take a different road. When my friends saw the word "DIVERSION" on a road sign, they thought they were going to have fun. Instead, the road ended in a large hole.

English people have problems too when they learn foreign languages. Once in Paris when someone offered me some more coffee, I said "Thank you" in French, I meant that I would like some more, however to my surprise the coffee pot was taken away! Later I found out that "Thank you" in French means "No, Thank you".

    If English means endless new words, difficult grammar and sometimes strange pronunciation, you are wrong. Haven't you noticed that you have become smarter since you started to learn a language?

    According to a new study by a British university, learning a second language can lead to an increase in your brain power. Researchers found that learning other languages changes grey matter. This is the area of the brain which processes information. It is similar to the way that exercise builds muscles.

    The study also found the effect is greater when the younger people learn a second language. A team led by Dr. Andrea Mechelli, from University College London, took a group of Britons who only spoke English. They were compared with a group of "early bilinguals" who had learnt a second language before the age of five, as well as a number of later learners.

    Scans showed that grey matter density (密度) in the brain was greater in bilinguals than in people without a second language. But the longer a person waited before mastering a new language, the smaller the difference.

    "Our findings suggest that the structure of the brain is changed by the experience of learning a second language," said the scientists.

    It means that the change itself increases the ability to learn.

    Professor Dylan Vaughan Jones of the University of Wales, has researched the link between bilingualism and maths skills. "Having two languages gives you two windows on the world and makes the brain more flexible (灵活的)," he said. "You are actually going beyond language and have a better understanding of different ideas."

    The findings were matched in a study of native Italian speakers who had learned English as a second language between the ages of two and thirty-four. Reading, writing, and comprehension were all tested. The results showed that the younger they started to learn, the better. "Studying a language means you get an entrance to another world," explained the scientists.