On one of her trips to New York several years ago, Eudora Welty decided to take a couple of New York friends out to dinner. They settled in at a comfortable East Side cafe and within minutes, another customer was approaching their table.

      “Hey, aren't you from Mississippi?” the elegant, white-haired writer remembered being asked by the stranger. “I'm from Mississippi too.”

      Without a second thought, the woman joined the Welty party. When her dinner partner showed up, she also pulled up a chair

      “They began telling me all the news of Mississippi,” Welty said. “I didn't know what my New York friends were thinking.”

Taxis on a rainy New York night are rarer than sunshine. By the time the group got up to leave, it was pouring outside. Welty's new friends immediately sent a waiter to find a cab. Heading back downtown toward her hotel, her big-city friends were amazed at the turn of events that had changed their Big Apple dinner into a Mississippi.

      “My friends said: 'Now we believe your stories,'” Welty added. “And I said: 'Now you know. These are the people that make me write them.'”

      Sitting on a sofa in her room, Welty, a slim figure in a simple gray dress, looked pleased with this explanation.

      “I don't make them up,” she said of the characters in her fiction these last 50 or so years. “I don't have to.”

Beauticians, bartenders, piano players and people with purple hats, Welty's people come from afternoons spent visiting with old friends, from walks through the streets of her native Jackson, Miss., from conversations overheard on a bus. It annoys Welty that, at 78, her left ear has now given out. Sometimes, sitting on a bus or a train, she hears only a fragment(片段) of a particularly interesting story.

    Here is your best chance to travel around the UK in 2012: More than 200 B&Bs (bed & breakfast) across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are selected to offer you amazing services for your stay at their lowest prices! Don't miss it. Just collect the vouchers（活动券）in our B&B Daily printed from 01/ 04/ 2012 to 07/ 04/ 2012 and book the stays for your travel following the terms and conditions below:

● The offer includes a room for the night and a breakfast the next morning.

● The offer is of two kinds: £20 per room, per night, valid（有效的）during stay

period of 02/ 04/ 2012—31/ 05/ 2012 and then again 01/ 09/ 2012— 31/ 10/ 2012; £35 per room, per night, valid during stay period of 01/ 06/ 2012 — 31/ 08/ 2012.

● The offer is valid for a basic twin or double room only.

● The stay must be booked directly with the chosen B&Bs before 28/ 04/ 2012.

● Each voucher can only be used by the holder to book one room for one night.

● If voucher holders book either the £20 or £35 per room per night, any additional

    services such as lunch, evening meal or activities may require an extra charge. But these are not required in order to take up the offer. Please check directly with your chosen B&Bs to see what extra services are available.

● Vouchers must be presented on arrival. If no vouchers are presented, the B&Bs may reserve（保留） the right to charge at full price for every night of stay.

● Vouchers may not be used together with any other offer.

● The voucher holders must pay for the stay in full at the time of booking. Additional £10 may be paid to confirm（确认）the booking and will be returned on arrival.

● The B&Bs reserve the right to refuse voucher holders' bookings for people under the age of 18.

    When slaves were first brought over from West Africa to the southern parts of America, they brought along with them aspects of their own culture—religion, dance,language, music, and cuisine.A mix of the two cultures eventually appeared.The religious dance of the ring shout turned into modern dances like the Charleston, and tribal chants slowly transformed into sorrowful hymns (圣歌) sung by slaves that described their hardships.

    These soulful accounts by slaves of the severe climate and conditions began to be called “the blues”,which continued in popularity among African Americans after the Civil War.This music increased in popularity into the early 1900s when many black musicians became an important part of the music industry.

    The slaves that had been brought over were from all different regions of West Africa, but they worked together until they gradually formed a common culture.This strengthened the identity of their music that, in the 1950s, eventually led to the beginning of rock and roll.The Beatles, the most influential band of the 1960s, are often determined as the accelerator that resulted in the ideology (意识形态) surrounding music that is still around today.The freedom and individuality associated with that time period brought forth a whole culture surrounding music.It was not just music any more, but a lifestyle.

    Over the decades, music has developed into such a vital part of society and pop culture.Musicians are glorified, with tons of adoring and screaming fans.The modern technology of present day has allowed for a greater gap between the creator of the music and the fans, as well as a widespread commercialization of music.However, criticisms of modern pop music often arise due to its mass production, and now there is a lack of the same soul and quality of naturalness and simplicity in music that was rising in the early 20th century.

    As kids, my friends and I spent a lot of time out in the woods. "The woods" was our part-time address, destination, purpose, and excuse. If I went to a friend's house and found him not at home, his mother might say, "Oh, he's out in the woods," with a tone (语气) of airy acceptance. It's similar to the tone people sometimes use now a days to tell me that someone I'm looking for is on the golf course or at the gym, or even "away from his desk". For us ten-year-olds, "being out in the woods" was just an excuse to do whatever we feel like for a while.

    We sometimes told ourselves that what we were doing in the woods was exploring (探索). Exploring was a more popular idea back then than it is today. History seemed to be mostly about explorers. Our explorations, though seemed to have less system than the historic kind something usually came up along the way. Say we stayed in the woods, throwing rocks, shooting frogs, picking blackberries, digging in what we were briefly persuaded was an Indian burial mound.

    Often we got "lost" and had to climb a tree to find out where we were. If you read a story in which someone does that successfully, be skeptical; the topmost branches are usually too skinny to hold weight, and we could never climb high enough to see anything except other trees. There were four or five trees that we visited regularly-tall beeches easy to climb and comfortable to sit in.

    It was in a tree, too, that our days of fooling around in the woods came to an end. By then some of us has reached seventh grade and had begun the rough ride of adolescence (青春期). In March, the month when we usually took to the woods again after winter, two friends and I set out to go exploring. We climbed a tree, and all of a sudden it occurred to all three of us at the same time that we really were rather big to be up in a tree. Soon there would be the spring dances on Friday evenings in the high school cafeteria.

    The European Union(EU) is an organization of European countries. The countries are independent and are governed in different ways. In the United Kingdom, for example, the head of state is a king or queen. In France, on the other hand, the head of state is a president. But each of them sends representatives(代表)to European Parliament, which has some control over what happens in each of the member countries.

    The idea of the EU began in the 1950s. The first members were France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Italy. Little by little, the number increased during second half of the twentieth century. By the year 2000, there were 15 member countries. The new countries were Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

    In 2004, the EU increased to 25 members. The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia, plus the Mediterranean islands of Cyprus and Malta all became members. The expanded EU has a population of more than half a billion people, twice as big as the population of the US.