Australia is the smallest continent in the world. It is a little smaller than China. It is on the Southern Hemisphere of the earth. Australia is big, but its population is small. The population of Australia is nearly as large as that of Shanghai.

    Enough laws have been made to fight against pollution. The cities in Australia have little air or water pollution. The sky is blue and the water is clean. You can clearly see fish in the rivers. Plants grow very well.

    Last month we visited Perth, the biggest city in Western Australia, and went to a wild flower exhibition. There we saw large numbers of wild flowers on show, most of which we had never seen before. We had a wonderful time. Perth is famous for its beautiful wild flowers. Every year in spring Perth has a wild flower exhibition. After visiting Perth, we spent a day in the countryside. We sat down and had a rest near a path at the foot of a hill. It was quiet and we enjoyed ourselves very much. When we heard bells ringing at the top of the hills, we looked up, but what we saw made us pick up all our things and run back to our car as quickly as we could. There were about three hundred sheep coming towards us along the path.

    Australia is famous for its sheep and kangaroos. After a short drive from any town, you will find yourself among the white sheep. Sheep, sheep, everywhere you can see sheep.

Incredible experiences in Bucharest

    Admire one of the world's largest buildings

    The world's biggest parliamentary building, Palace of Parliament, happens to be in Bucharest. Hour-long guided tours manage to take in just a fraction of the building's three-million-plus square feet (there are more than a thousand rooms) and focus on the tons of marble, hardwood, and gold used in the building's construction in the 1980s, a time when Romania was trying to feed its own people. Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, both played a direct role in the construction. It was originally intended to house the presidential offices and the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party but was never finished.

    See remains of old “Paris”

    “Paris of the East” was Bucharest's nickname in the decades before World War II. Decades of communist misrule and a tragic earthquake in 1977 brought much of the old city down but there are places here and there where that former elegance can still be glimpsed. The Cismigiu Gardens in the center of the city is a pearl of park built around a romantic lake and featuring old-growth trees and gracious, wrought-iron signposts and benches.

    Learn about Romania's roots

    Walking though Bucharest's busy streets, it's easy to forget that outside the capital and a U large cities, Romania is a largely agricultural country, with a long and rich peasant tradition. The amazing Museum of the Romanian Peasant shows off the elaborate woodworking, pottery-making, egg-painting, and weaving skills of the peasantry in a way that's both educational and amusing. Small tongue-in-cheek signs at the entrance to each room poke fun at modern life, bring a chuckle, and draw you in. Downstairs there's a side exhibition on the Communists' efforts to nationalize the peasantry in the 1970s and 1980s.

    Appreciate 21st-century art

    Romania has exploded onto the contemporary art scene in recent years. The excitement was generated initially by a group of young painters and visual artists from the northern city of Cluj-Napoca, but at least some of the action has shifted to the capital as new galleries and design centers open up. It's hard to pinpoint precisely what constitutes Romanian contemporary art, though critics point to shared elements of wit and dark humor, a somber mood, and bits of surrealism in defining a common style.

    Mom wanted only one thing for her birthday. "Can you find me another copy of this song?" she asked, and handed me a worn-out cassette tape. I knew exactly what was recorded on it: My Redeemer. I heard the song played at least a thousand times while growing up. After so many years, the cassette tape was too worn out to be used. I promised her I would find a replacement.

    My Redeemer became Mom's favorite song after my younger brother Tim was killed by a drunk driver in 1973. The only thing that helped her calm down was the soulful sound of My Redeemer from the local radio station. We recorded it on a cassette tape so she could listen to it any time she wanted but none of us knew who the soloist(独唱者) was. These days, I thought the song would be easy to find out. I went home and searched the Internet. Several songs with that title popped up, but none of them was the one Mom loved. I got frustrated.

    Mom's birthday drew near and then one day, I was driving home, listening to our local radio station. A familiar tune came on. It was My Redeemer!As soon as I could, I phoned the station. I got a line on the soloist, who was called Alan Parks. I typed his name into Google and found his home number in South Carolina. Minutes later, I was telling him how much his recording meant to Mom. He offered to ship two CDs out to me personally. I gave him my address. "Red Lion, Pennsylvania?"he said. "Do you know the Logans?""They are our neighbors!""I've been friends with them for 25years," Alan said. "They'll be at my concert at York Gospel Chapel on April 17th. Would you and your mom come too?" We sure would. Mom was excited to hear Alan sing My Redeemer to her, live in concert-on the evening of her 87th birthday.

    If you are planning on travelling, there are few simple rules about how to make life easier both before and after your journey.

    First of all, always check and doublecheck departure(出发) time. It is surprising how few people really do this carefully. Once I arrived at the airport a few minutes after ten. My secretary had got the ticket for me and I thought she had said that the plane left at 10:50. When I arrived at the airport, the person at the departure desk told me that my flight was closed. Therefore, I had to wait three hours for the next one and missed an important meeting.

    The second rule is to remember that even in this age of credit cards(信用卡), it is still important to have some local money in cash(现金). Once I arrived at a place at midnight and the bank at the airport was closed. The only way to get to my hotel was by taxi but because I had no dollars, I offered to pay in pounds instead. "Listen! I only take real money!" the driver said angrily. You can image how terrible I felt at that moment.

    The third and the last rule is to find out as much as you can about the weather at your destination before you leave. I feel sorry for some of my workmates who travel in heavy suits and raincoats in May, when it is still fairly cool in London or Manchester, to places like Athens, Rome or Madrid, where it is already beginning to get quite warm during the day.

Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki has become the first female artist in the Arab world to be nominated (提名)for an Academy Award, or Oscar.

Labaki directed the film Capernaum, a film about a Syrian refugee (难民) boy and a Kenyan baby who live without parents on the streets of Beirut. It was nominated for best foreign language film.

Labaki wil1 be one of the few female directors to compete for an Oscar this year. She told the Associated press "I wish there were a lot more women filmmakers this year represented, nominated in the Oscars. But I am sure in a few years we won't be having this problem anymore."

Unlike in the West, women filmmakers are industry leaders in Lebanon.

Capernaum received a 15-minute standing ovation (热烈欢迎) at this year's Cannes Film Festival. It won the Jury Prize—the third-highest award given at Cannes.

The United Nations has publicly praised the film. Lebanon's Foreign Minister said.

Capernaum put a Lebanese touch on the international film industry.

The Oscar nomination of Capernaum is the second for Lebanon in two years in the film group. It demonstrates the country's rising star power.

Labaki called making the movie a life-changing experience. She said Capernaum helps humanize the real struggles of refugees only briefly talked about in the news.

We can't help but acknowledge that there is a fear of refugees in general around the world and there are these walls we are building, and this fear that keeps growing," Labaki said.

Capernaum will compete against four other films for the Oscar, including awards season favorite Roma. Directed by Mexico's Alfonso Cuaron, it earned 10 Oscar nominations, including for best picture.

Back in April 1939 and armed with $5,000 provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, professor Frank Cyr at Teachers College, Columbia University took a tour of ten states to make the research about school transportation problems. What he found was that many students had no dependable way to get to school and the ones who did often travelled in unsafe buses in the over 100,000 school areas.

Seeing a need to fix this problem, Cyr organised a meeting—one that would change the future of school buses forever. School officials and transportation experts met to set much-needed standards for buses, including those for colour, height and width as well as safety rules that hadn't been set before or that were different in every state.

There were many different bus colours in the US before this meeting; several areas even planned to have red, white and blue buses as a way of encouraging students to love their country. Cyr presented his new choice to education officials, a reported "50 shades( 色度) changing from lemon yellow to deep orange red". The matter was settled quickly. Yellow, or "National School Bus Glossy Yellow", was chosen because it was quite striking, making the school bus easy to be seen. Besides, it made the bold(黑体的), black writing on the side of each bus clear. (The bold, black writing gives information about each school area, telling students which school bus they could take during early morning and late afternoon hours.) Thirty-five states made the changes quickly, and every state took them on

board by 1974.

Being recognised as the "father of the yellow school bus", Frank Cyr has surely influenced your life if you ever rode a school bus or saw that noticeable colour pulling up to your stop on a dusky morning.