As a teenager, you may listen to stories often. But have you ever been a storyteller?{#blank#}1{#/blank#}The following are some tips:

    Who will listen?

    Will you tell your story to children of your own age? Will they are friends or young people you haven't met before? Perhaps you will tell it to younger children. Or, well it be an audience of adults?{#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    Why are you telling it?

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#}Knowing why you are telling it may be the most helpful reason for choosing a story for a particular audience. Many storytellers choose tales just to entertain(娱乐). They tell jokes or silly stories. Others want to teach something, such as how to be kinder to animals, the environment, or other people.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}Some babysitters tell stories to help children feel not afraid of thunder, lightning or scary shadows in their rooms. Others want to make people think or to help people remember. Some like to tighten other audiences with ghost stories.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

    How you tell your story and what story helpers you use depend on where you will be speaking. Will you be taking at an evening party, in your classroom, in a library storytelling program, at a family dinner, at a museum, at a storytelling festival, or during a religious program?

A. One storyteller likes to encourage his listeners to try new things.

B. Will it be just a few people, a small group, or a large audience?

C. Generally, a story should be interesting.

D. Where will you speak?

E. When will you speak?

F. There are many reasons for telling a story

G. And do you know how to tell a story?

    Small talk is the short conversations we have at parties, while we wait in line at the store, at family events or work. Sometimes we make small talk with people we already know but not well. Often we have to make small talk with complete strangers.{#blank#}1{#/blank#} Here are some tips to improve your small-talking ability.

    ⒈{#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    If you have seen a really good movie or have read a really good book, you can talk about that.

    When you are sharing the same experience with someone, it's easy to start a conversation. You simply notice and comment on what's going on around you. For example, if you are at a party and a song comes on that you like or that reminds you of something, you can talk about that.

    ⒉Ask open-ended questions

    These types of questions require more thought and more than a simple one-word answer.{#blank#}3{#/blank#} the conversation will go on longer.

    ⒊Become a student

    Nobody knows everything. So，as someone is answering one of your open-ended questions, they bring up something about which you know nothing. So, tell them! This lets the other person become the teacher.{#blank#}4{#/blank#} It's a win-win situation.

    Like anything, getting good at making small talk takes practice.{#blank#}5{#/blank#}you might become happier. If you are making small talk using English, you will most definitely improve your speaking and listening skills.

A. Have some conversation starters ready

B. If you make small talk in your native language

C. However, some people are not good at small talk

D. If you ask questions that need more details to answer

E. You can talk about something that you recently learned

F. Many people find these small conversations about random topics easy

G. They feel good about sharing their knowledge and you get to learn something

    From: terri @ wombat. Com. Au

    To: (happylizijun) @ yaboo. com. cn

    Subject: My school

Hi, Li Zijun,

    Thanks very much for your email. I really enjoyed reading it. I think we have a lot in common. I wonder if our school life is similar too.

    I go to a big high school in Sydney called Maylands High School. There are about 1000 students and 80 teachers. My class has 25 students in it, which is normal for a Year 11 class. In the junior school there are about 30 students in a class.

    In the senior high school we have lots of subjects to choose from, like maths, physics, chemistry, biology, history, German, law, geography, software design, graphic arts and media studies. (Different schools sometime have different optional subjects.) English is a must for everyone and we have to do least three other subjects in Year 11 and 12. At the end of Year 12 we sit for a public exam called the High School Certificate.

    As well as school subjects, most of us do other activities at school such as playing a sport, singing in the choir or playing in the school band. We can also belong to clubs, such as the drama club, the chess club and the debating society.

    We have a lot of homework to do in senior school to prepare for our exam, so unless I have basketball practice, I usually go straight home and start studying. I arrive home about 4 pm, make myself a snack and work till 6 pm. Then I help the family to make dinner and we all eat together. I'm usually back in my room studying by 8 pm. I stop at about 10 o'clock and watch TV or read a book for half an hour to relax. On Saturdays, I usually go out with my family or with friends and I sleep in till late on Sunday morning. Then it's back to the books on Sunday afternoon.

    How about you? What's your school life like? Do you have a lot of homework? What do you do to relax when you're not studying? I'm looking forward to finding out.

Your Australian friend

Terrie

    The color of animals is by no means a matter of chance; it depends on many considerations, but in the majority of cases tends to protect the animals from danger by making it less outstanding Perhaps, it may be said that if coloring is mainly protective, there ought to be fewer brightly colored animals. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}. The kingfisher itself, though so brightly colored, is not easy to see.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}. Thus, for instance, the lion, and the wild donkey are all sand—colored. “Indeed, in the desert, neither trees, brushwood, nor even undulation (起伏) of the surface afford the slightest protection to its enemies.{#blank#}3{#/blank#}.” says an expert.

    The next point is the color of the mature caterpillars(毛虫), some of which are brown. This probably makes the caterpillar even more outstanding among the green leaves. What would you do if you were a big caterpillar? Why, like most other defenceless creatures, you would feed by night, and lie hidden by day. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}. When the morning light comes, they go down the stem of the food plant, and hide among dry sticks and leaves around the ground, and it is obvious that under such circumstances the brown color really becomes a protection. While we may say as a general rule that the large caterpillars feed by night and hide by day, it is by no means always the case that they are brown: some of them still remain green.{#blank#}5{#/blank#}, and that the brown color is a later adaptation.

A. So do these caterpillars

B. Therefore, the color of the animals is bright

C. We can say that they formed a good habit

D. Desert animals are generally the color of the desert

E. We may conclude that the habit of hiding themselves by day comes first

F. However, there are some cases where vivid colors are themselves protective

G. So the color of birds, snakes and even smaller animals, is of one uniform sand color

    Although his 1-year-old smart-phone still works perfectly, Li Jijia already feels the need to replace it.

    "There are many better ones available now. It's time to upgrade(更新）my phone."

    Li's impatience is shared by many. Shortly after the season when new products are released（发布，发售）, many consumers feel the urge to upgrade their electronic equipment, even though the ones they have still work just fine.

    As consumers' minds are occupied by Apple's newly released products and debate whether the Google tablet is better than the new Amazon Kindle, it might be time to take a step back and ask: "Do we really need the latest upgrades?"

    According to Donald Norman, an American author, "planned obsolescence (淘汰）" is the trick behind the upgrading culture of today's consumer electronics industry.

    Electronics producers strategically release new upgrades periodically, both for hardware and software, so that customers on every level feel the need to buy the newest version.

"This is an old-time trick—they're not inventing anything new," Norman said. "This is a wasteful system through which companies--many of them producing personal electronics—— release poor-quality products simply because they know that, in six months or a year, they'll put out a new one."

    But the new psychology of consumers is part of this system, as Norman admitted, "We now want something new, something pretty, the next shiny thing." In its most recent year, Apple's profit margin(利润) was more than 21 percent. At Hewlett-Packard, the world's biggest PC maker, it was only 7 percent.

    Apple's annual upgrades of its products create sales of millions of units as owners of one year's MacBook or iPhone line up to buy the newest version, even when the changes are slight.

    As to Li Jijia, the need for upgrading his smart-phone comes mainly from friends and classmates. When they are switching to the latest equipment, he worries about feeling left out.

    "Some games require better hardware to run," said Li. "If you don't join in, you lose part of the connection to your friends."

    People who sleep fewer than six hours a night are more likely to die early, researchers in University of Warwick have found in a recent study. They discovered that people who slept for less than six hours each night were 12% more likely to die before the age of 65 than those who slept the recommended six to eight hours a night.

    The researchers pointed out that previous studies had shown that the lack of sleep was associated with problems like heart disease and high blood pressure. However, the researchers also found that sleeping too much was linked to an early death. Those who slept for more than nine hours a night were 30% more likely to die early, as an article in the latest Sleep suggested. That directly contradicts another passage in the same journal last month suggesting that people who slept for ten hours or longer a night were more likely to live to 100. This was thought to be because people who lived into extreme old age were healthier and therefore slept better.

    However, the authors of the latest research contradicted this and suggested that long sleep was a sign of underlying illnesses such as depression and low levels of physical activity. Professor Francesco Cappuccio at the University of Warwick said: "While short sleep may represent a cause of ill-health, long sleep is believed to represent more an indicator of ill-health."

    He also mentioned: "Modern society has seen a gradual reduction in the average amount of sleep people take, and this pattern is more common among full-time workers, suggesting that it may be due to social pressures for longer working hours. On the other hand, the worsening of our health is often accompanied by an extension of our sleeping time."

    "Consistently sleeping six to eight hours per night may be good for health. However, whether to achieve the goal depends on various factors such as the environment as well as measures of public health aimed at favourable changes of the working environments," Professor Francesco Cappuccio added.