Listening to audio books(有声读物) is a really terrific way to enjoy all kinds of books during those times of the day when stopping to sit down and read a book is not an option. An audio book gives the listener hours and hours of entertainment or instruction, or sometimes both at the same time. They are great for people of all ages and make a long road trip a more interesting experience, instead of being boring and dull.

    The biggest benefit of an audio book is that it can be listened to anyplace and anytime. It is a favorite companion for people while they are traveling, commuting, exercising, shopping, working in the garden, or even dusting and vacuuming the house. Using headphones with your favorite audio book player allows you to listen to and absorb the information no matter what might be going on around you.

    Even when you are in a situation that is quiet and are able to enjoy a good audio book, there are still advantages of using your headphones. You can often improve your retention(记忆力) and comprehension of the material when you use headphones because they help reduce distractions from other noises and help you focus better.

    There are a number of different audio books these days that people can choose from. There are audio books on CDs, on audio cassettes(盒式磁带) and also as MP3s and any standard CD player, cassette recorder, or MP3 player that you might use to listen to music can function as an audio book player as well.

    No matter which kind of audio book you prefer to listen to, there is an ever-increasing variety of works that you can select from these days. Virtually any subject matter that is contained in printed books will have at least some audio version available as well. However, books on audio cassettes are starting to become rarer.

    Scientists have found what they believe are pieces of a meteor(流星)that fell to the earth last year. The objects were discovered off the coast of the United States in the Pacific Ocean.

    The crew of the Nautilus, a private research ship, recovered the rock particles(颗粒).The Nautilus is operated by the Ocean Exploration Trust. The group says its aim at present is to examine areas of the ocean that have never been explored before.

    The search was launched after US government weather stations observed a large meteorite exploding some months ago. The explosion lit up the sky and sent the rock particles to the earth. The meteorite fall was the largest recorded over the United States in at least 20years. The team includes scientists from NASA, the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary and the University of Washington. The scientists examined what they believe were two small meteorite fragments. Further testing is needed before they can confirm that the material came from the explosion.

    The Nautilus is equipped with two remotely operated vehicles(ROVs), called Hercules and Argus. These robotic submarines help researchers find and collect materials from the seafloor. The fact that the particles landed in the ocean, instead of on land, means larger pieces may have survived and can be studied. For this reason, scientists decided to launch the first intentional search for meteorites from the ocean. Until the latest research, scientists had only accidentally discovered a small number of meteorites from drilling operations.

    The objects recovered from the bottom of the sea likely came from the recent explosion for two main reasons. First, meteorite particles are basically made of glassy materials that do not tend to last long in seawater. Secondly, they came from what looked like a small hole on the seafloor. Some evidence shows that they came from something that fell.

    Let us begin by saying what causes our dreams. Our dreams do not come from another world. They are not messages from some outside source. They are not a look into the future, either.

    All our dreams have something to do with our feelings, fears, longings, wishes, needs and memories. If a person is hungry, or tired, or cold, his dreams may include a feeling of this kind. If the covers on your body, such as a quilt or a blanket, have slipped off your bed, you may dream that you are sleeping on ice or in snow. The material for the dream you will have tonight is likely to come from the experience you have today.

    So the subject of your dream usually comes from something that has effect on you while you are sleeping（feeling of cold, a noise, a discomfort, etc. ）and it may also use your past experiences and the wishes and the interests you have now. This is why children are likely to dream of fairies, older children of school examinations, hungry people of food, homesick soldiers of their families and prisoners of freedom.

    To show you how this is happening while you are asleep and how your needs and wishes can all be joined together in a dream, here is the story of the experiment. A man was asleep and the back of his hand was rubbed with a piece of absorbed cotton. He would dream he was in hospital and his charming girlfriend was visiting him, sitting on the bed and feeling his hand gently!

    There are some scientists who have made a special study of why we dream, what we dream and what those dreams mean. Their explanation of dreams, though a bit reasonable, is not accepted by everyone but it offers an interesting approach to the problem. They believe that dreams are mostly expressions of wishes that did not come true. In other words dreaming is a way of having your wishes carried out.

    Many years ago, my dad was facing a serious heart condition. He was unable to do a steady job. He fell suddenly ill and had to be admitted to the hospital.

    He wanted to do something to keep himself busy, so he decided to volunteer at the local children's hospital. My dad loved kids. It was the perfect job for him. He ended up working with the seriously ill children. He would talk, play, and do arts with them.

    One of his kids was a girl with a rare disease that paralyzed (瘫痪) her from the neck down. She couldn't do anything, and she was very depressed. My dad decided to try to help her. He started visiting her in her room, bringing paints, brushes and paper. He stood the paper up, put the paintbrush in his mouth and began to paint. He didn't use his hands at all. All the while he would tell her, "See, you can do anything you set your mind to." At the end of the day, she began to paint using her mouth, and she and my dad became friends. Soon after, the little girl was sent home because the doctors felt there was nothing else they could do for her. My dad also left the children's hospital for a little while because he became ill. Some time later after my dad had recovered and returned to work, in came the little girl who had been paralyzed and only this time she was walking. She ran straight over to my dad and hugged him really tight. She gave him a picture she had done using her hands. At the bottom it read: "Thank you for helping me walk."

    My dad would cry every time he told us this story and so would we. He would say sometimes love is more powerful than doctor, and my dad—who died just a few months after the little girl gave the picture—loved every single child in that hospital.

    For nearly thirty years I did parent programs in all of the fifty states, and regardless of the community, there was always a shortage of fathers attending, usually by a 10:1 (mothers、 fathers) ratio. Maybe they were all tending to business, and they obviously didn't think school was any of their business.

    The world is now flat. How's that for a sea change? As Thomas Friedman described it in his book The World Is Flat twenty-five years ago, the power structure of the world consisted of highs and lows. The countries with the power and knowledge were at the top of the mountains and the rest were down in the valleys. A handful of countries (the United States, Britain, Germany, and Japan) ruled the world's economy because they monopolize (垄断)the information and power.

    Then came the Internet. Suddenly the countries down in the valleys were connected to the information network and the work flow. These included India, Eastern Europe, South Korea, Brazil, and China. Don't believe it? Walk into a supermarket and pick up any ten toys, checking each for where it was made. My last count: China, ten out of ten. The world's workforce became "flattened". No more disconnected valleys.

    Since 2000, U.S. manufacturing has lost six million jobs, one-third of its workforce, most of them males. For the first time in history, women hold the majority of jobs in the U.S.

    The only people who don't understand the sea change in business are the fathers and sons still clinging to the image of the male who doesn't need to play school—just play ball. It's been thirty years since that idea had any wings, but too many males are still trying to make it fly. Once the only thing that mattered for men was what they could get out of the ground with their hands. Now it's what they can get out of their heads that counts. And without classroom success, today's male faces an impossible challenge from both intelligent women on the home front and foreigners willing to do the same job for less while sitting in an office in Bangalore or Singapore.

Like reading? Interested in Chinese classical novels? Have a look at the following four books which are we known to most Chinese as Four Masterpieces.

The Water Margin

The Water Margin, also known as All Men Are Brothers in Pearl Buck's translation, Shui Hu Zhuan in Chinese, is along chapter novel with the Song Jiang Uprising in the late Northern Song Dynasty as the main background and type of heroic legend. It is an immortal (不朽的) novel and has inspired many storytellers. The author of the novel is generally regarded as Shi Nai'an (1296~1371).

Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Romance of the Three Kingdoms is the first full-length historical romance novel in China. Its author is Luo Guan zhong (about 1330~1400), a famous novelist in the late Yuan Dynasty and the early Ming Dynasty. Characters such as Liu Bei, Cao Cao, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei and Zhuge Liang have become household names among the Chinese.

Journey to the West

Journey to the West is the first romantic chapter novel about gods and devils in ancient China. There are 100 copies of Journey to the Westin the existing Ming Publications without the author's signature. Wu Yuxuan, a scholar of the Qing Dynasty, first proposed that the author of Journey to the West was Wu Cheng'en (1500~1582) of the Ming Dynasty.

The Dream of the Red Chamber

The Dream of the Red Chamber, also called The Story of the Stone, is said to be the greatest masterpiece of Chinese fiction. It is generally believed to be written by Cao Xueqin (about 1715~1763), a writer of the Qing Dynasty. With hundreds of persons and their stories, the story is very complex but also very interesting for its encyclopedic character(百科全书式的人物).