The police in Taiwan are unable to judge whether to treat it as an extremely clever act of stealing or an even cleverer cheat. Either way, it could be the perfect crime, because the criminals are birds — homing pigeons!

    The crime begins with a telephone message to the owner of a stolen car: if you want the car back, pay up. Then, the car owner is directed to a park, told where to find a bird cage and how to attach money to the neck of the pigeon inside. Carrying the money in a tiny bag, the pigeon flies off.

    There have been at least four such pigeon pick-ups in Changwa. What at first seemed like the work of a clever stay-at-home car thief, however, may in fact be the work of an even lazier and more inventive criminal mind — one that avoids not only collecting money but going out to steal the car in the first place. Police officer Chen says that the criminal probably has pulled a double trick: he gets money for things he cannot possibly return. Instead of stealing cars, he lets someone else do it and then waits for the car-owner to place an ad in the newspaper asking for help.

    The theory is supported by the fact that, so far, none of the stolen cars have been returned. Also, the amount of money demanded — under 3,000 Taiwanese dollars — seems too little for a car worth many times more.

    Demands for pigeon-delivered money stopped as soon as the press reported the story. And even if they start again, Chen holds little hope of catching the criminal. “We have more important things to do,” he said.

    As a father who works outside the home, I recognize that it is easy for me to get caught up in stress at work. Indeed, sometimes it is difficult to turn off my work focus and turn on my family focus so that I can come home and be the loving husband my wife needs and the playful father my kids want. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Good fathers provide stability and strength to the family. As fathers, we do not let the pressures and worries of work get in the way of being there for our kids. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

1）．{#blank#}3{#/blank#} It doesn't need to be a lot of time, but if you are able, have one­on­one time with each of your kids.

2）. Be goofy (滑稽的) with your kids. The more voices you do, the more expressive you are when you play with them, the more they will feel your love and your acceptance of them.

3）. Spend time reading to them. Allow your kids to choose a book and spend time reading some of it to them before bed. The more effort you put into it ,the more they will feel your love. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}

    As a therapist (临床医学家)  who works with children and their families, I have noticed that the better the relationship that a father has with his child, the more influence that father will have on his child. As fathers work on developing a strong link with their kids through positive interactions, they can have a positive effect on the lives of their children. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

A．Fathers have such an important and irreplaceable role in the family.

B．Sometimes books can help you deal with children.

C．Reading stories is an excellent time for dads to practice voice imitations.

D．Here are some thoughts to help fathers keep their little ones in mind.

E．As a father he must involve hardships in all his life.

F．And the confidence can give their children a great advantage to succeed in the future.

G．Make a plan to spend time each day with your kids.

    According to Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, reading aloud was a common practice in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Readers were “listeners attentive to a reading voice,” and “the text addressed to the ear as much as to the eye.” The significance of reading aloud continued well into the nineteenth century.

    Using Charles Dickens's nineteenth century as a point of departure, it would be useful to look at the familial and social uses of reading aloud and reflect on the functional change of the practice. Dickens habitually read his work to a domestic audience or friends. In his later years he also read to a broader public crowd Chapters of reading aloud also abound in Dickens's own literary works. More importantly, he took into consideration the Victorian practice when composing his prose, so much so that his writing is meant to be heard, not only read on the page.

    Performing a literary text orally in a Victorian family is well documented. Apart from promoting a pleasant family relationship, reading aloud was also a means of protecting young people from the danger of solitary (孤独的) reading. Reading aloud was a tool for parental guidance. By means of reading aloud, parents could also introduce literature to their children, and as such the practice combined leisure and more serious purposes such as religious cultivation in the youths. Within the family, it was commonplace for the father to read aloud Dickens read to his children: one of his surviving and often-reprinted photographs features him posing on a chair, reading to his two daughters.

    Reading aloud in the nineteenth century was as much a class phenomenon as a family affair, which points to a widespread belief that Victorian readership primarily meant a middle-class readership, Those who fell outside this group tended to be overlooked by Victorian publishers。Despite this, Dickens, with his publishers Chapman and Hall, managed to distribute literary reading materials to people from different social classes by reducing the price of novels. This was also made possible with the technological and mechanical advances in printing and the spread of railway networks at the time.

    Since the literacy level of this section of the population was still low before school attendance was made compulsory in 1870 by the Education Act, a considerable number of people from lower classes would listen to recitals of texts. Dickens's readers, who were from such social backgrounds, might have heard Dickens in this manner. Several biographers of Dickens also draw attention to the fact that it was typical for his texts to be read aloud in Victorian England, and thus illiteracy was not an obstacle for reading Dickens. Reading was no longer a chiefly closeted form of entertainment practiced by the middle class at home.

    A working-class home was in many ways not convenient for reading: there were too many distractions, the lighting was bad, and the home was also often half a workhouse. As a result, the Victorians from the non-middle classes tended to find relaxation outside the home such as in parks and squares, which were ideal places for the public to go while away their limited leisure time. Reading aloud, in particular public reading, to some extent blurred the distinctions between classes. The Victorian middle class defined its identity through differences with other classes. Dickens's popularity among readers from the non-middle classes contributed to the creation of a new class of readers who read through listening.

    Different readers of Dickens were not reading solitarily and “jealously,” to use Walter Benjamin's term. Instead, they often enjoyed a more communal experience, an experience that is generally lacking in today's world. Modem audiobooks can be considered a contemporary version of the practice. However, while the twentieth- and twentieth-first-century trend for individuals to listen to audiobooks keeps some eharacteristics of traditional reading aloud-such as “listeners attentive to a reading voice” and the ear being the focus—it is a far more solitary activity.

    A recent documentary produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has caused a stir in China and in the UK.

    The documentary, titled Are Our Kids Tough Enough? focuses on five Chinese teachers who are sent to teach 50 UK teens at a school in Hampshire.

    The teachers instruct the students for a month. The pupils are then tested, and the results are compared to the ones of those who have continued in the regular UK education system. The idea is to see if the Chinese method improves academic performance.

    The Chinese teachers use their own teaching methods but receive strong resistance from the students. A clip from the documentary online shows some problems, with Chinese teachers calling their students lazy and lacking in discipline, while the students say the high pressure and harsh teachers are driving them crazy.

    This has aroused a new debate in both China and the UK, with some arguing the teenagers need more regulation and discipline. Others say Chinese methods encourage rote learning (死记硬背) instead of independent thinking. For instance, Chinese language teachers should do more than pass on knowledge about words and characters. They should inspire students, helping them feel the sentiment from Chinese literature. This is a higher level of teaching.

    Yang Dongping, dean of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, says, "The Chinese teaching methods are designed to strictly train the majority. Foreign teaching methods, however, are more natural and relaxing, and designed to inspire students' interest in learning. Education methods are based on culture. That is why a successful education method in one place may not work that well when simply 'transplanted' into another place."

    Yang Dongping says, "The documentary does reflect some problems rooted in traditional Chinese teaching methods. Nobel prize winner, Yang Zhenning, gave a very fair comment on this issue. He said the Chinese-style education method works for most ordinary qualified students effectively, helping them reach high standards. However, it may weaken the training for high-potential outstanding students."

    Each year, hundreds of thousands of wild animals around the world are killed in trophy hunting—the organized shooting of animals for pleasure. The hunters then bring parts of the animal home with them as their "trophy" to remember the hunting.

    Trophy hunters pay big money to kill animals. Some of the money goes to helping wildlife protection. Trophy hunting also attracts business, which encourages people to preserve land and breed(饲养) animals that would otherwise be endangered. Cathy Dean, head of the Save the Rhino Charity, says that at the start of the 1900s there were only 50–100 southern white rhinos. Now, there are around 18,000. This is partly because some of them were raised specially for trophy hunting.

    But things don't usually go on one way. According to WWF, elephant populations have fallen from 1.3 million to just over 400,000 since the 1980s. Over the same period, hunters from around the world have taken home more than 100,000 African elephant trophies. Trophy hunting is not illegal(非法的) but unfair on the animals. In 2015, Cecil the lion was shot by a US trophy hunter. Cecil was a beloved lion in Zimbabwe, Africa. Cecil was lured with bait(诱饵), shot with an arrow and struggled in blood for more than ten hours before his hunters tracked and finished killing him. His son, Xanda, met a similar fate two years later.

    Cecil's death caused worldwide outrage and protests(反抗) against trophy hunting. Countries including Australia, France and the Netherlands banned(禁止) the import of lion trophies—they stop hunters from being allowed to bring home parts of the animal they kill. They believe that people will stop trophy hunting because the activity might lose its attraction if hunters can't bring their trophies home.

    The UK Government said that it would consider a ban on trophy-hunting imports by 2017, but no action had been taken. In April 2019, a letter by protesters against trophy hunting was sent to the UK government asking to ban trophy-hunting imports. On 7 May, the official in charge of the environment, Michael Gove, said that the UK would not ban the imports for the time being. This left the world in a state of a shock. Hopefully the UK will place a ban on trophy-hunting imports, which would be an important message and inspire others to treat animals better. We're waiting for the day to come.

    You've probably heard such reports. The number of college students majoring in the humanities (人文学科) is decreasing quickly. The news has caused a flood of high-minded essays criticizing the development as a symbol of American decline.

    The bright side is this: The destruction of the humanities is, finally, coming to an end. No more will literature, as part of an academic curriculum, put out the light of literature. No longer will the reading of, say, "King Lear" or D.H. Lawrence's "Women in Love" result in the annoying stuff of multiple-choice quizzes, exam essays and homework assignments.

    The discouraging fact is that for every college professor who made Shakespeare or Lawrence come alive for the lucky few, there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two hours in the dentist's chair.

    The remarkably insignificant fact that, a half-century ago, 14% of the undergraduate population majored in the humanities (mostly in literature, but also in art, philosophy, history, classics and religion) as opposed to 7% today has given rise to serious reflections on the nature and purpose of an education in the liberal arts.

    Such reflections always come to the same conclusion: We are told that the lack of a formal education, mostly in literature, leads to numerous harmful personal conditions, such as the inability to think critically, to write clearly, to be curious about other people and places, to engage with great literature after graduation, to recognize truth, beauty and goodness.

    Literature changed my life long before I began to study it in college. Books took me far from myself into experiences that had nothing to do with my life, yet spoke to my life. But once in the college classroom, this precious, alternate life inside me got thrown back into that dimension of my existence that bored me. Homer, Chekhov and Yeats were reduced to right and wrong answers, clear-cut themes and clever interpretations. If there is anything to worry about, it should be the disappearance of what used to be an important part of every high-school education: the literature survey course, where books were not academically taught but thoroughly introduced—an experience unaffected by stupid commentary and useless testing.

    The literary classics are places of quiet, useless stillness in a world that despises (鄙视) any activity that is not profitable or productive. Literature is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read.

    Soon, if all goes well and literature at last disappears from the undergraduate curriculum—my fingers are crossed—increasing numbers of people will be able to say that reading the literary masterworks of the past outside the college classroom, simply in the course of living, was, in fact, their college classroom.