Hello! This Chinese boy is Li Lei. He's 12. He's in No.3 Middle School. He's in Class 2, Grade 1. His good friend is Jack. He's an English boy. He's in Li Lei's school. He's in Class1.Grade2. Mrs Read is an English teacher in their school. She's an English woman. Jack an Li Lei has a secret(秘密)—-Jack is their English teacher's son.

    This story is about a young man. He worked very hard at his lessons, so he was too busy to have a rest. At last, he couldn't go to sleep every night. When he went to bed, he closed his eyes and tried to sleep.But the more he tried, the more he stayed awake.

    After a while, he decided to visit the doctor."I just can't go to sleep at night. What should I do?" "I have a suggestion,"said the doctor, "try counting numbers. By the time you reach one thousand, you'll be asleep. I'm sure of it. The next day the man returned to the doctor's office."well," said the doctor, "How are you today? Did you try my suggestion?"

    The man still looked tired, "Yes,"he said, " I tried counting one, two, three…up to one thousand. But when I reached five thousand and sixty-nine, I began to feel sleepy. I had to get up and drink some tea so that I could go on counting up to one thousand, but then I still couldn't fall asleep.

    One day, some tourists came to a hotel but there were only two rooms left. One was on the fourth floor and the other was on the seventh floor.

    "We Chinese like the number 8. 8 means we will get rich. We also like 9 because it means we can live long. But we don't like the number 4 because it sounds like 'death' in Chinese. I think if we sleep on the fourth floor, we may die?

    The Greeks said,"We want the room on the fourth floor." In Greece, 4 is a lucky number.

    The South Korean said, "We don't like number 4 or 13. 4 sounds like 'death', and 13 is an unlucky number in the west." The tourists from the west said, "Oh, we love number 7. There are seven days in the world as it says in the Bible(圣经).We don't like the number 13. It is an unlucky number. If we sleep on the 13th floor, oh…"

    "In Japan, 4 sounds like 'death', so we don't like it. And 6 is also not welcome. There isn't the fourth floor or the sixth floor in the tall buildings in our country. However, we like 7 very much", said the Japanese.

    At last, only the Greeks lived on the 4th floor, and the rest slept on the 7th floor.

    Once upon a time in a land far away, there was a wonderful old man who loved all kinds of small animals, such as spiders, insects and butterflies and so on.

    One day while walking through the woods, the nice old man found a cocoon（茧） of a butterfly. He took it home.

    A few days later, a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to make its body out of that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared it could go no farther.

    Then the man decided to help the butterfly, so he took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then got out of the cocoon easily.

    But it had a swollen（肿胀的） body and small shriveled（枯萎的） wings. The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge to be able to support the body, which would contract（收缩） in time. Neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings.

    What the warm-hearted man in his kindness did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening were Nature's way of forcing fluid（体液） from the body of the butterfly into its wings, so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.

    Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our life. If we were allowed to go through our life without any difficulties, it would be bad for us. We would not be as strong as what we could have been. And we could never fly.