The kids in this village wear dirty clothes. They sleep beside cows and sheep in huts (棚屋) made of sticks and mud. They have no school. Yet they all can sing the English letters, and some can make words.    

    The key to their success: 20 tablet computers (平板电脑) dropped off in their Ethiopian village in February by a U.S. group called One Laptop Per Child.

    The goal is to find out whether kids using today's new technology can teach themselves to read in places where no schools or teachers exist. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers analyzing the project say they're already amazed. “What I think has already happened is that the kids have already learned more than they would have in one year of kindergarten (幼儿园),” said Matt Keller, who runs the Ethiopia program.

The fastest learner—and the first to turn on one of the tablets—is 8-year-old Kelbesa Negusse. The tablet's camera couldn't save memory, yet within weeks Kelbesa had figured out its workings and made the camera work. He called himself a lion, a marker of accomplishment in Ethiopia.

With his tablet, Kelbasa rearranged the letters HSROE into one of the many English animal names he knows. Then he spelled words on his own. “Seven months ago he didn't know any English. That's unbelievable,” said Keller.

The project aims to get kids to a stage called “deep reading,” where they can read to learn. It won't be in Amharic, Ethiopia's first language, but in English, which is widely seen as the ticket to higher paying jobs.

阅读下列短文，从每题所给的四个选项（A、B、C和D）中，选出最佳选项。

    The Price of Success

    One problem for schools is that many students do not want to study hard. As a result, they perform (表现) poorly in their classes. This is especially true in the United States, where average scores for math and science are lower than in many other countries. In recent years, schools and charities have been looking for ways to help students get better grades in these subjects. An organization called the LMD Foundation introduced a program called Learn and Earn recently.

    In the program, money was used to get a group of students to study harder in math and science. In addition to the normal school day, they went to after-school classes for four hours each week. The students were paid eight dollars for each hour of after-school class. By the end of the year, the students in the program had higher grades than a similar group of students who had not taken part.

    Not everyone thinks that this is a good idea, though. TV reporter John Tulenko studied data (数据) from a similar program. He found that students' grades went back down when they stopped getting paid. Many people are worried about this. They think that the students study because they want money, not because they enjoy learning. Also, some people believe that these types of programs are a bad idea because it is a large part of a teacher's job to get students to study. If students are given money, some teachers might stop trying to do this.

    However, others believe that these learning programs can be helpful for students from poor families. Many of these students do part-time jobs after school, and some even quit school at a young age to work. Some do this to help get money for their families. Others feel that they can learn more by working than by going to school. Programs like Learn and Earn let these students stay in school and still make money.

    Humans are much worse at estimating risk than we think we are. While we overestimate the risk of rare but disastrous occurrences, such as being attacked by a shark, many of us seriously underestimate the risk of behaviors that reduce our lifespan (寿命), such as smoking.

    In fact, there are two types of risks — acute and chronic. Acute risks are those that may kill you immediately, such as a car accident.

    Chronic risks don't kill you immediately but rob you of your life a little at a time. If you choose to eat an unhealthy diet, for instance, you may appear to be getting away with this, but you risk developing illnesses in future that may shorten your life.

    The problem is we value things much less when they occur in the future. Distant events are abstract — we don't know how and when they might affect us -~ so we care less about them.

    Take smoking for example. It is just about the worst choice you can make for your health. Every two cigarettes that you smoke takes 30 minutes off your lifespan.

    In contrast, eating vegetables is clearly very good for you, with each serve increasing your lifespan by two hours. This is a massive health gain and clearly should be a strong motivator for you to eat healthily.

    Drinking coffee is also good for you, though with limited health gains. Each cup of coffee (assuming you drink reasonably), is associated with approximately a ten-minute gain in your lifespan.

    Even drinking alcohol may add to your lifespan, with each serve adding 30 minutes to the length of your life. But this health gain is only true for the first drink; following drinks shorten lifespan. Alcohol also causes an acute risk when consumed in excess. Too much drinking gives you a 25 in one million chance of sudden death.

    We shouldn't be too nervous about exposure to risks. Life is all about making decisions about risks and rewards, and we all have a different starting point for what we consider acceptable risks to take. Even if we don't always make the healthiest decisions, at least we can make ones that are fully informed.

    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 away 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 'vacancies'. So they did not go to house where the sign outside said 'VACANCIES', which in English means there are free rooms. Then my friends went to house where the sign said 'NO VACANCLES', because they thought this meant the 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."

    There are many places to go on safari in Africa, but riding a horse through the flooded waters of Botswana's Okavango Delta must rank as one of the world's most exciting wildlife journeys.

    Several safari camps operate as the base for this adventure, providing unique rides twice a day to explore deep into the delta. The camps have excellent horses, professional guides and lots of support workers. They have a reputation for providing a great riding experience.

    The morning ride, when the guides take you to beautiful, shallow lakes full of water lilies, tends to be more active. It is unlike any other riding experience. With rainbows forming in the splashing water around you and the sound of huge drops of water bouncing off your body and face. It is truly exciting. You are very likely to come across large wild animals, too. On horseback it is possible to get quite close to elephants, giraffes and many other animals. The sense of excitement and tension levels rise suddenly though, as does your heart rate, as you move closer to them.

    In the evening, rides are usually at a more relaxed and unhurried pace. With golden light streaming across the grassy delta and the animals coming out to eat and drink. Sedate though they are, rides at this time of day are still very impressive. As the sun's rays pass through the dust kicked up by the horses, the romance of Africa comes to life.

    Back at the camp you can kick off your boots and enjoy excellent food and wine. Looking back on your day, you will find it hard to deny that a horseback Safari is as close as you will ever come to answering the call of the wild.

    The smallest kids on Earth are much smaller than you or your baby brother or sister. They're even smaller than the hairs on your head. We call them “NanoPutians”(纳米小人). Also known as NanoKids, the NanoPutians aren't real people. They are actually tiny molecules (分子) made to look a little bit like people.

    James Tour invented the NanoPutians as a way to teach kids about nanoscience, which refers to the study of things that are smaller than about 100 or 200 nanometers. “The exact size is less important than the possible applications of working with such tiny things,” Tour says, “Nanoscience is the study and development of the small so that it will affect the large.”

One of the goals of the research is to control individual atoms. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and other types of atoms are the building blocks of the universe. They make up planets, rocks, people, trees, CDs — all the stuff out there. “Most things that people build come together in a top-down way”, Tour says. If you want to make a table, for instance, you cut down a big tree, make wooden boards, and hammer them together. Nature, on the other hand, builds things from the bottom up. When atoms join together they make molecules. Each molecule has a certain shape, and a molecule's structure determines what it can do. Molecules can make them come together to make a cell — or a tree.

    Tour and his co-workers turned these molecular structures into cartoon figures and made an animated(动画的) science video about the little people, set it to music and started showing it to kids in school while talking about how exciting research on small things can be.

    “Learning about the NanoKids has opened up a world of possibility for real kids who ordinarily would rather not study biology, chemistry or physics.” Tour says. When you look closely enough, the really small can be really cool.