When 12-year-old Taylor Smith wrote a special letter to herself last spring, to be read in 10 years' time, she didn't know it would be opened before even a year had passed— and that it wouldn't be her eyes reading the words.

  “She had told me that she had written a letter to herself, and that she was excited that she was going to open it when she was older,”said Taylor's  mother, Mary Ellen Smith.

    Instead, it was opened by Taylor's parents after she died last spring. They posted the letter to Facebook, hoping it would inspire others.

    It has. “We've gotten letters from lots of parents who have said it has encouraged them to love their kids and love each other,” said Mary Ellen Smith.

    In the letter, Taylor congratulated herself on graduating from high school and asked, “Are you in college?”

    She also wanted to know if she had been on a plane yet and if the show “Doctor Who” was still on the air.

    Taylor also had some words for her future kids. After considering the idea of selling her iPad and getting an iPadmini instead, she told her future self to mention to her kids that “We're older than the tablet.” She included a drawing of an iPad for them to see.

    Taylor died suddenly of pneumonia (肺炎), leaving behind both her parents and an older brother.

  “I just want people to know just what an awesome, awesome person she was,” her father, Tim Smith said.

    Her mother said, “I can't bring her back, but I'm so grateful people have been inspired by her story.”

    Taylor's father read the closing g words of her letter, which said, “It's been years since I wrote this. Stuff has happened, good and bad. That's just how life works, and you have to go with it.”

         When I was a boy my father told me that he could do anything he wanted to. Dad said that he wanted to be the first to develop color prints in our city and so he did．

        When I was 16，Dad looked closely at the violin I played and said that he wanted to make one．He read about violin-making, and then became a violin-maker at the age of 43. He bought the tools and materials, opened a small store and set Mom up as the shopkeeper, while he worked at a local company. He retired from the company 17 years later and continued to make violins and other instruments.

        Dad often guessed why the Stradivarius violins sounded so beautiful. Some experts told him that it was the special varnish(油漆)that gave the instruments their beautiful sound．Dad argued that chemists could analyze the varnish—if that was the answer．

One of Dad's friends asked him which kind of wood was used to make violins．When Dad explained that the top was made of spruce(云杉), his friend said that he had all old piece of spruce which Dad might be interested in.

He worked for the next 12 months making a violin from the wood that his friend had given him. It proved to be an excellent violin and it would become Dad's masterpiece. He believed that the secret of the Stradivarius sound was in the wood itself.

        Later, the instrument was stolen, Dad's spirit was broken and he stopped making instruments. But he kept the music shop until he was 80 years old, selling guitars and violins.

        The violin has been missing for more than 25 years．Somewhere a musician is playing a late-20th-century violin with an excellent tone．The owner today may never understand why this Ordinary-looking violin sounds so much like Stradivarius．

    To American visitors, Iceland is a very interesting country, partly because it is different in so many ways from he or she is used to seeing at home. There are quite a few things that are not done, or that do not exist on the island—quite a few “No's”.

    There is no pollution, for instance, no dogs are permitted in Reykjavik, the capital. There is no television on Thursdays or during the whole month of July, and only three hours of black and white TV the rest of the time. There is no hard liquor（酒） on Wednesdays and no beer at any time. There is no handguns; only one prison of thirty-five rooms in the whole land—an admirable figure, even for a small country of 313,376 people.

There is no army, air force or navy. There is no tipping（给小费） for anything. There are no large stores open on Saturdays or Sundays. Since Iceland is located just under the Arctic Circle, there is no darkness in summer and no daylight in winter. But thanks to Gulf Stream, the climate is rather mild, with temperatures between 34 degrees and 52 degrees in July.

The rules on television liquor and guns are the result of government decisions. But the absence of pollution is because of in great part the fact that Iceland gets its power from the thousands of hot springs(泉水) that come out of the ground. They provide all the energy needed by the country. In fact, Iceland uses only 3 percent of all its available power.

    Iceland has been described as a democratic（民主的） independent country where more fish are caught and more books published per person than anywhere else in the world. The Icelanders have always felt a particular love for literature. They wrote their first books in the ninth and tenth centuries AD. These works were poems and tales about the kings, heroes, and heroines of Iceland and Norway. At first, the stories were remembered and passed from generation to generation. They were finally written down between 1140 and 1220. The Icelanders have never stopped writing ever since. “Rather shoeless than bookless,” they proudly say.

    Everyone knows that fish is good for health. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}  But it seems that many people don't cook fish at home. Americans eat only about fifteen pounds of fish per person per year, but we eat twice as much fish in restaurants as at home. Buying, storing, and cooking fish isn't difficult. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}  This text is about how to buy and cook fish in an easy way.

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Fresh fish should smell sweet: you should feel that you're standing at the ocean's edge. Any fishy or strong smell means the fish isn't fresh.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}  When you have bought a fish and arrive home, you'd better store the fish in the refrigerator if you don't cook it immediately, but fresh fish should be stored in your fridge for only a day or two. Frozen fish isn't as tasty as the fresh one.

     There are many common methods used to cook fish. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} First, clean it and season it with your choice of spices(调料). Put the whole fish on a plate and steam it in a steam pot for 8 to 10 minutes if it weighs about one pound. (A larger one will take more time.) Then, it's ready to serve.

A. Do not buy it.

B. The easiest is to steam it.

C. This is how you can do it.

D. It just requires a little knowledge.

E. The fish will go bad within hours.

F. When buying fish, you should first smell it.

G. The fats in fish are thought to help prevent heart disease.

    Reading can be a social activity. Think of the people who belong to book groups. They choose books to read and then meet to discuss them. Now, the website Book Crossing.com turns the page on the traditional idea of a book group.

    Members go on the site and register the books they own and would like to share. Book Crossing provides an identification number to stick inside the book. Then the person leaves it in a public lace hoping that the book will have an adventure, traveling far and wide with each new reader who finds it.

    Bruce Pederson, the managing director of BookCrossing, says, "The two things that change your life are the people you meet and books you read. BookCrossing combines both."

    Members leave books on park benches and buses, in train stations and coffee shops. Whoever finds their book will go to the site and record where they found it.

    People who find a book can also leave a journal entry describing what they thought of it. E-mails are then sent to the BookCrossing to keep them updated about where their books have been found. Bruce peterson says the idea is for people not to be selfish by keeping a book to gather dust on a shelf at home.

    BookCrossing is part of a trend among people who want to get back to the "real" and not the virtual(虚拟). The site now has more than one million members in more than one hundred thirty-five countries.

    A home science experiment recently took the world by storm. Two teens from Toronto, in Canada, sent a Lego man rising above the Earth and captured their tiny astronaut's trip on film.

    Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, both 17, used a weather balloon to launch their plastic lego model 16 miles above the Earth. This is inside a part of Earth's atmosphere.

    The two teens were inspired by a similar project performed by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT). The MIT students had launched a weather balloon with a camera into near space and taken many unusual images of the Earth. Mathew and Asad then spend four months figuring out how to launch their own spacecraft into the space.

    Travelling to space is expensive for NASA, but Mathew and Asad worked hard to keep their costs down. They bought much of their equipment used and even sewed the Lego man's parachute by hand. In total, the project cost only$400.

    "We had a lot of anxiety on launch day because there were high winds when we were going up," Mathew told reporters. They had to pump extra helium(氦)into the balloon so that it would rise quickly and avoid being blown too far off course by the strong winds.

    The toy astronaut's journey lasted 97 minutes before the balloon broke and he fell back to Earth. Mathew and Asad then spent two weekends looking for their spacecraft. It had landed 76miles away from the launch site.

    The student scientists are currently finishing up their final year of high school and applying for colleges. They are also looking into more do-it-yourself space projects.

    "I guess the sky is not really the limit anymore," Mathew told reporters. "We never knew we'd get this far. It's been a lesson for us that hard work pays off."