One day an ant was drinking at a small stream and fell in. She made desperate efforts to reach the side, but made no progress at all. The poor ant almost exhausted was still bravely doing her best when a dove saw her. Moved with pity, the bird threw her a blade of grass, which supported her like a raft, and thus the ant reached the bank again. While she was resting and drying herself in the grass, she heard a man come near. He was walking along barefooted with a gun in his hand. As soon as he saw the dove, he wished to kill it. He would certainly have done so, but the ant bit him in the foot just as he raised his gun to fire. He stopped to see what had bit him, and the dove immediately flew away. It was an animal much weaker and smaller than herself that had saved her life.

    Like most July days, it was hot. I stepped into a tiny ice-cream shop to cool off with a chocolate ice-cream. It was an old-time store with little round tables and chairs.

    As I entered, I found a very old woman bent over a table near the door. Her back was so badly twisted by some sadness that her face nearly touched the table top. I sat down facing her several tables away.

    “Poor woman,” I thought. “What does she get out of life? Why God let people live so long past their prime?”

As I thought, another aged lady entered the shop and sat down with her. Soon the two of them were talking about childhood days. They talked of how little the shop had changed in 70 years… In minutes, the two of them were trembling with laughter.

    I looked again at the first woman, then in the mirror on a nearby wall, catching a picture of myself.

I was wearing a dirty shirt. She was well dressed in white, her hands shining with gold rings.

    I was gloomy(愁闷的). She was laughing, smiling.

    I was putting the pieces of my life together. She had millions of wonderful memories to recall.

    I sat alone. She was sharing the day with a good friend.

I was secretly worried about getting old. She was old, but it wasn't hurting her.

    As I left the shop, I thought of my foolish question about God letting people live past their prime. Why, that woman was more alive, more sensitive to life than I was. Age has not bent her spirit.

    One morning, my newspaper wasn't delivered on time. Since I always brought it to work, it upset me that I would have to pick one up on my way to work. After breakfast, I was already running late, but figured I could make it if I hurried.

    As I pulled into the parking lot of the store, I noticed a young man in a wheelchair who seemed to be struggling. “Someone else will stop and help him,” I thought.

    However, no one stopped. I got out, and walked over to see what the trouble was.

    “Is there anything I can do?” I asked. It was then that I noticed he wasn't able to speak, and was still struggling with the chair.

    I looked down at the chair and noticed that the clamps (夹具) holding the electronic keyboard had apparently become loose causing the equipment to slip down, out of his reach.

    I pulled it back into place and then re-tightened the clamps. He hit a key on the keyboard. An electronic voice told me, “Thank you.” He then found the control that steered (操纵) the chair, turned and left.

    I got back in my car and headed off to work, completely forgetting my newspaper. As I drove, I felt a deep gratitude (感激). I was truly blessed to have the physical abilities that allow me to live a normal life. Here was this young man who relied on machines to get around and communicate. He probably dreamed about doing all the things that I thought were normal and simple.

    It's funny; fifteen minutes before that happened, I was whining because my morning paper hadn't arrived on time. I was glad I helped the young man, because he helped me gain a new viewpoint on everything I had in my life.

    If you don't use your arms or your legs for some time, they become weak; when you start using them again, they slowly become strong again. Everybody knows that. Yet many people do not seem to know that memory works in the same way. When someone says that he has a good memory he really means that he keeps his memory in practice by using it. When someone else says that his memory is poor, he really means he does not give it enough chance to become strong.

    If a friend says that his arms and legs are weak, we know that it is his own fault. But if he tells us that he has a poor memory, many of us think that his parents are to blame, and few of us know that it is just his own fault. Have you ever found that some people can't read or write but usually they have better memories? This is because they can not read or write and they have to remember things; they can not write down in a little notebook; they have to remember days, songs and stories; so their memory is the whole time being exercised. So if you want to have a good memory, learn from the people: practice remembering.

    A good modern newspaper is an extraordinary piece of reading. It is remarkable first for what it contains: the range of news from local crime to international politics, from sports to business to fashion to science, and the range of comment and special features as well, from editorial page to feature articles and interviews to criticism of books, art, theatre, and music.

    A newspaper is even more remarkable for the way one reads it: never completely, never straight through, but always by jumping from here to there, in and out, glancing at one piece, reading another article all the way through, reading just a few paragraphs of the next. A good modern newspaper offers a variety to attract many different readers, but far more than any one reader is interested in. What brings this variety together in one place is its topicality(时事性), its immediate relation to what is happening in your world and your locality now. But immediacy and the speed of production that goes with it mean also that much of what appears in a newspaper has no more than transient value.

    For all these reasons, no two people really read the same paper: what each person does is to put together, out of the pages of that day's paper, his own selection and sequence, his own newspaper. For all these reasons, reading newspapers efficiently, which means getting what you want from them without missing things you need but without wasting time, demands skill and self-awareness as you modify and apply the techniques of reading.

    Primary school students in China started using new editions of their textbooks last September, with new illustrations(插图)to go with classic Chinese poems.

    With the 110 classic poems for primary school students from Grade One to Six come one hundred illustrations painted by artist Huang Guoxiang of Wenzhou, Zhejiang province. The old version of Chinese was in use for more than 10 years. "Our aesthetic(美学的)tastes have changed. The illustrations in textbooks should keep up with that," said Huang.

    "An editor from People's Education Press called me last September and asked whether I was interested –to create illustrations for three poems: Ode to Goose, Min Nong and Spring Dawn. I made it. After about 20 days, the publisher called me again and asked me to do all of them," Huang said.

    Huang also said he referred to the Chinese textbooks his son used previously before working on a new painting.

    But he did not just create any ink paintings; Huang changed his style of painting a little bit for his young readers. Primary school students may not necessarily be attracted to traditional Chinese ink painting, as the stokes(笔画)tend to be thick and the colors dark. So he mixed ink painting with watercolor to make the pictures visually appealing to the young readers while fully expressing the meanings of classic poems.

    "It's not that difficult to illustrate a single poem. The hard part is: sometimes there are three poems on one page and the contents of these poems may change greatly, so it was difficult for me to express the feelings of all of them with one illustration. Sometimes I had to think with a bigger picture and create something that fits it all," added Huang.