1970 was World Conservation (保护) Year. The UN wanted everyone to know that the world was in danger. They hoped something could be done.

    Here is one example of the problem. At one time there were about 1,300 kinds of plants, trees and flowers in Holland, but now only about 866 are left. The others have been destroyed by modern people and their science. We are polluting earth, air, water and everything around us. We can't live without these things. If things go on like this, we shall destroy ourselves.

    What will happen in the future? Perhaps it's more important to ask "What must we do?". More and more young people have known this. Many of them are helping to save our Earth. For example, they plant trees. In a small town in the United States, a large group of girls cleaned the banks of 11 kilometres of their river. Young people may hear about conversation through an album called "No One's Gonna Change Our World". It includes songs of Cliff Richard and other singers. The money from selling it will help to conserve tigers, elephants and pandas on Earth.

    In America, the school life is not easy for us students. There are so many rules we have to follow. When we start school, we get a rule book. There are always teachers looking out for people who are breaking the rules and prefects (长官) are everywhere too.

    The most rules are in the classroom and in the hallways. For example, you can't run or dance around in the hallways. We can't put our bags everywhere in the hallways.

    You can't eat or drink in the classroom or the hallways. Prefects watch you, They can give out duty slips (cleaning the dining hall for about 2 hours).

    If you make mistakes, you will get a detention. You may have to do some work for school. A detention is the most painful. You have to do a lot of tiring and boring things. There are rules for students out of school as well. Boys should not buy take away food in the street if they wear the school uniforms. The school also expects good behavior on public transport and in public places.

    Here I want to tell you some information about water.

    Water covers most of our planet. People can find it in oceans, lakes and rivers, and under the ground. Water moves in the environment by evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. The warm Sun helps water change into vapour and rise up into the sky. It is evaporation. The vapour in the air forms clouds in the sky. It is condensation. When the clouds get heavy enough, the water falls back to the ground as rain or snow. This is precipitation.

    Ocean water has too much salt in it. Much of the water travels far over the land. When it travels over the land, the water picks up salt from the rocks and soil. About 97.5% of the Earth's water is salty water. It is expensive to take salt out of the water.

    All people need clean water. They need it for drinking, for cooking, and for bathing. Some people in a village in South America did not have clean water. Their water was full of oil and dirty things. People there got sick when they drank the water. Other people heard about the problem. They sent empty water tanks (储水池) to the village. Rainwater fell into the tanks. Now the people in that village have the clean water.

    Don't be too surprised if you see a car going down the road without a driver in Beijing these days. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}Last month, Baidu began to test its self-driving cars on open roads in Beijing.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}Since then, companies like Tesla, Uber and Baidu have been working to produce and test their own self—driving cars.

    Self-driving cars are safer than regular cars. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}They can remove the stress of driving and allow disabled or blind people to get around more easily.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#}In one test, researchers pointed a laser pointer (激光棒) at the car's sensors (传感器) while it was moving. The car mistakenly thought that the laser beam was in its way and slowed down or changed the direction.

    The software that is used to direct the cars may not be safe enough. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}When we use our computers or smartphones, they sometimes crash (崩溃) without any reason. But if this happened to a self-driving car, the result could be deadly. Improvements to the software could be a solution to this problem.

    XBOX 360 Kinetic, RoboSapien, WiiParty, these are just a few of the modern toys sold in recent years. But some of the most popular toys are actually quite old.

Games have been around for thousands of years. In 4000 B. C, Babylonians played a board game that was similar to chess. Yo-yos made of stone were first used in ancient Greece around 1000 B C. And kites appeared in China around the same time.

    Another famous game is Scrabble. It was invented by an architect in the 1930s, but it didn't get popular until 1953 And since then, more than 100 million sets have been sold worldwide.

    As you can imagine, toys and games are a multi-billion-dollar industry. Mr. Potato Head, the first toy advertised on TV, grossed more than $4 million in its first year. Play-Doh made its inventor Joseph McVicker a millionaire by his 27th birthday, while Mattel sells 1. 5 million Barbie dolls each week (that's two dolls each second!).

    Some toys go out of fashion, but then become popular again, such as Rubik's Cube. Research says parents are increasingly choosing to buy toys they remember from their own childhood.

    These days, toys are not just for fun. RoboSapien is a remote-controlled robot that was launched in 2004. He can walk, turn around and do other poses. RoboSapien was designed by Mark Tilden, who once created robots for NASA space missions. He expected the toy to be used mostly by and scientists, but almost 2 million RoboSapiens have been sold worldwide since its launch as a toy?

    Fancy a game anyone?

Several times each year the Queen gives afternoon tea parties at which guests are served tiny cakes filled with cream from her own cows. Cakes and sandwiches are bought in by footmen, yet you never see the Queen touch a thing. She

simply sits beside a big silver plate, pouring cups of tea for everyone and carefully avoiding the cakes.

At cocktail parties the Queen moves from group to group, chatting informally, and manages to make one glass of diet drink to last a whole evening. Tours abroad are difficult because hosts seem to believe the warmth of their welcome must be shown with wonderful state banquets(宴). But the Queen has perfected the art of appearing to enjoy her meal without actually eating much. During one visit to the Pacific islands of Tonga, a specially-prepared dinner was set up in   a hut made of wood and bamboo leaves. Deep holes were dug in the ground, filled with hot stones and baby pigs, and the pigs were slowly cooked with dry heat over several days. The Queen looked uneasily at her plate when she discovered a   whole roast(烤) pig was her serving.

Then she became uneasy when a turkey, some meat, bananas and an apple were also carried in for each guest. So she depended on her old favourite trick of talking with her host, King Tupou IV, carrying on a warm conversation. At the same time she pushed her food around her plate and only ate a piece of turkey and some fruit.

Reporters traveling with her have noticed that the Queen will sometimes seem so interested in a foreign leader's political(政治的) chat that she simply never has time to finish a meal before it is time to get up and make her speech. She will lift her fork, then put it down again to make another point, leaving almost all of her meal untouched.