When Regina Spektor moved to the Bronx from Russia as a young child of 9, she could speak no English and her family was so poor that they could afford nothing. Yet she carried with her a love of the piano and music.

     "For me, the thing that I loved the most was playing the piano, so when we left Russia I was so afraid I would forget how to play and I would just find a little table and play my pieces," she told "When you spend your life doing something like playing the piano and then you take that away, it's so surreal."(离奇的)

     Her father, Ilya Spektor, said that, little by little, the family saved enough money to afford their first apartment.

     "I was a photographer and, in six weeks, I found my first job in a big photo lab in Manhattan," he said. On the subway one day, Ilya Spektor spotted a man carrying a violin case. The man also seemed to have an Eastern European accent. A conversation led to a visit and, eventually, Regina Spektor was introduced to Sonia Vargas, a piano teacher. She was a well-known professor who taught piano, took Spektor under her wing and trained her for years, at no cost. "I remember talking to Sonia," Spektor said. "She said that when a student is ready, a teacher appears. So she said that I must have been ready to study piano, and so that's why she came into my life."

     "Immediately, how she played," Vargas said. "You can tell the sound. The sound tell you whether the person loves the instrument, loves the music."

     Much later, while playing her own music and selling a CD that she'd created, Regina Spektor caught the attention of a music producer. The rest is history, complete with concerts around the world and performance in front of the Obamas at the White House.

Regina Spektor greatly appreciated her parents, piano teachers and friends for helping her become the musician she is. “I love the idea that if you're walking toward the world, the world will take some steps towards you,” she said.

    When Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, his unmarried mother decided to put him for adoption because she wanted a girl. So in the middle of the night, his mother called a lawyer named Paul Jobs and said, “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” But his mother told his future parents to promise that they would send Jobs to college. After Steve Jobs graduated from high school, he went to college but decided to drop out because it was so expensive that he had to sleep on the floor in his friends' rooms.

At 20, he and a friend started a company in a garage on April 1, 1976. Jobs named their company —-Apple in memory of a happy summer he had spent as an orchard (果园) in Oregon.

    After 10 years of hard time and failures, starting from two kids working in a garage, Apple computer eventually grew into a big company with over 4,000 employees.

    At 30, Jobs , however, was fired from the company he co-founded. But after he had to leave the company, Apple was under heavy pressure from rival (对手) Microsoft and in 1996 posted billions of dollars in losses. Apple needed Steve Jobs and he was appointed as Apple' CEO in1997. Under his leadership, Apple returned to profitability and introduced new products such as the iPhone and the iPad.

    Steve Jobs once said, “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick, Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking.

    Reading can be a social activity. Think of the people who belong to book groups. They choose books to read and then meet to discuss them. Now the website BookCrossing.com turns the page on the traditional idea of a book group.

    Members go on the site and register the books they own and would like to share. BookCrossing provides an identification number to stick inside the book. Then the person leaves it in a public place, hoping that the book will have an adventure, traveling far and wide with each new reader who finds it.

Bruce Pederson, the managing director of BookCrossing, says, “The two things that change your life are the people you meet and books you read. BookCrossing combines both.”

    Members leave books on park benches and buses, in train stations and coffee shops. Whoever finds their book will go to the site and record where they found it.

    People who find a book can also leave a journal entry describing what they thought of it. E-mails are then sent to the BookCrossers to keep them updated about where their books have been found. Bruce Peterson says the idea is for people not to be selfish by keeping a book to gather dust on a shelf at home.

BookCrossing is part of a trend among people who want to get back to the “real” and not the virtual(虚拟). The site now has more than one million members in more than one hundred thirty-five countries.

    Dogs were living as companions to the early settlers of North America over 10,000 years ago. The oldest domestic dogs in the Americas were thought to be around 9500 years old. Angela Perri of Durham University, UK, and her colleagues have carried out fresh radiocarbon dating on the two dog skeletons that gave this date, discovered in the prehistoric Koster site in Illinois, and found they were even older: around 10,100 years old.

    A third dog from another Illinois site called Stilwell II was older still, at 10,190 years old. That makes it the oldest known domesticated dog in the Americas. The team concluded that all three dogs were domesticated as they skeletons were complete and unskinned, and so hadn't been butchered for food. They had also been carefully buried, evidence they were valued by their owners. The Stilwell II dog, which probably resembled a small English settler, was under what seemed to be the floor of a living area. It is unclear why it took so long for tame dogs to arrive in the Americas, given that they were domesticated at least 14,000 years ago in Eurasia. By this time, people were already moving into North America from Siberia; there is evidence some reached Chile 18,500 years ago. Geneticists have found signs of at least three waves of migration over the following millennia. There is no evidence that domestic dogs accompanied them. “We don't know if dogs were part of the first waves of immigration to the Americas" says Luc Janssens of Ghent University in Belgium. "It could be so, but no archaeological bones have yet been found." It is "overwhelmingly probable" that some of the early settlers did bring dogs to the Americas, but they may not have had "the time or the spiritual compulsion to bury them", says Pat Shipman of Pennsylvania State University.

    Nowadays, top performing sportsmen earn huge amount of money as compared to people in other professions. Some people consider it a rational approach. However, there are a few who think it is unjustifiable.

    Some people think sports professionals with outstanding performance should be overpaid as it is a short-lived career which requires rigorous hard work as compared to other professions. This field demands a strict, disciplined life with extensive physical efforts, consistent practice, a fixed diet schedule to bring pride and glory to the country. Due to such tough requirements, people in this field have an average career span of 10-15 years. As sports professionals have limited tenure, they should be rewarded with high monetary gains to acknowledge their excellent performance.

    However, there are a few who think that top performing sportsmen and women should not have high salaries as it is a biased approach. They feel that there are other critical professions which are more valuable to the country as compared to the sports field. For example, the professions, like doctors, social worker, works for the betterment of the society. Their efforts not only help to reduce the social issues prevailing in the community, but they also contribute in providing a healthy environment. As a result, they significantly contribute to the growth of the country. Henceforth, their efforts should be equally recognized along with the sports professionals.

    In my opinion, although there are some logical reasons for huge earnings of the top performing players, people from other professions should also be equally appreciated in terms of lucrative monetary benefits for their outstanding contribution. As all the professions are critical in their own field and contributes to the overall development of the country.

    To conclude, sports people delivering excellent performance should not be overpaid in comparison to other professionals who make a significant contribution to the society.

    Brazil, the largest country in South America, is famous for the Amazon rainforest and soccer. But on the hottest days, people travel there for another reason – the Carnival. Full of excitement and fun, the Carnival is held annually in February or March. This year, the celebration runs from March 2^nd to 9^th.

    It is a wild festival of food, music and dance. The word "Carnival" comes from the Portuguese "Carne Vale", which means "farewell to meat". In the early 1600s, the Portuguese brought European traditions to Brazil. Then they started their own carnival with dances and music, which were inspired by black people brought there by the slave trade.

    With its beautiful floats (花车), attractive clothes and happy people, the Samba Parade is the most fantastic event of the Carnival. The Sambadrome is a special stadium for the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro with 80,000 seats where people can sit and enjoy the festival. Samba is said to be the soul of Rio. "This is where the passion for samba lies – the atmosphere is electric as even the oldest men and women sing and dance to the music," travel guidebook Lonely Planet noted.

    Top samba schools stand out in the main parade, with fantastic parades of floats and thousands of dancers. The parade goes on until dawn. The schools base their performances on certain themes from Brazilian history or on social and environmental problems, such as that of the Amazon rainforest.

    Besides fun street parties, colorful costumes and energetic music, Carnival also offers plenty of tasty street food, such as Quindim – a dessert made of egg yolks and sugar.

Overall, it is traditionally a time to go a bit crazy with eating, dancing and dressing up.