He was an old manwho fished alone in a small boat on the sea and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish, the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone with another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his boat empty. The sail looked like the flag of failure forever.

      The old man was thin with deep wrinkles (皱纹) in the back of his neck. His face was terribly brown because of the strong sunlight on the sea every day and his hands had the deep scars (伤疤) from dealing with heavy fish on the lines. But none of these scars were fresh. Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful.

      “Santiago,” the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from the sea. “I could go with you again. We've made some money.”

        The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him.

      “No,” the old man said. “You're with a lucky boat. Stay with them.”

      “But remember how you went eighty-seven days without fish and then we caught big ones every day for three weeks.”

      “I remember,” the old man said.

     “It was papa who made me leave. I am a boy and I must follow him.”

     “I know,” the old man said. “It is quite normal.”

       "He hasn't mush faith(信心)"                       

     “No,” the old man said. “But we have. Haven't we?”

     “Yes,” the boy said. “Can I offer you a beer on the Terrace?”

    “Why not?” the old man said “Between fishermen.”

    As the birds wake up the people on the farm early in the morning, one man is already up. In fact, he has never slept not once in the past 36 years.

    The man has never been ill after so many years of insomnia(失眠). This has not only made him famous, but also interested many scientists to study him.

    Sixty-four-year-old Thai Ngoc said he could not sleep at night after getting a fever in 1973, and since that time he has experienced more than 14，000 sleepless nights.

  “I don't know whether the insomnia has impacted my health or not, but I'm still healthy and can work normally like others,” Ngocsaid.

His wife said,“My husband used to sleep well, but these years, nothing can make him get to sleep.” She said when Ngoc went to Da Nang for a medical examination, doctors said he was healthy.

    Ngoc now lives on his farm at the foot of mountain, busy farming and taking care of pigs and chickens all day. “I have tried sleeping pills and some other medicine, but nothing helps,  even to sleep for a few minutes,” he said.

    Ngoc often does more farm work or helps his neighbors during the sleepless night.

A 108-year-old Message in a Bottle

    On November 30, 1906, George Bidder dropped a bottle from a boat into the North Sea. The weighted glass bottle sank almost to the sea floor, and then it move slowly for 108 years and 138 days.

    Its journey ended when Marianne Winkler found the bottle in 2015. Winkler was then on vacation on Amrum Island. She picked up the bottle when it was washed up onto the beach. She saw a piece of paper inside, but didn't break it open. She could tell that the bottle was old. So she didn't want to damage it.

    Finally she got the piece of paper out of the bottle. She found that the paper was actually a postcard. On the back of the card there was this message: The Marine Biological Association（海洋生物学协会） would pay a shilling（先令） for the bottle. A shilling was a unit of money that was used in Great Britain before the early 1970s.

    Winkler filled out the card and posted it. The association was surprised to get a postcard addressed to George Bidder, the president of the association from 1939 to 1945. The workers of the association searched on the Internet to find a shilling. They found one and sent it to Winkler as a reward.

    The message in the bottle was the oldest ever re-discovered. For this reason Marianne Winkler got a place in  “Guinness World Records”（吉尼斯世界纪录）. She broke the record for the oldest message in a bottle.

    Winkler's bottle was not the only one Bidder sent to sea. Between 1904 and 1906, he spent away more than one thousand bottles. He placed postcards inside them. The bottles were part of a research  project to map currents（洋流） in the North Sea. This was the best method at that time. But whether the association could get the bottles back depended on the people who found them. The association reported that about 55 percent of the bottles were returned. They added that the experiment was a success as it showed the east-to-west flow of the North Sea's currents.

    Emma's dream was to be a boxer. All her life, everyone said she couldn't be a boxer because she was a girl. They said that she should just get a normal job. Her parents told her that she would be killed one day if she kept boxing. It was hard to hear "you can't" all the time. Emma still decided to prove everyone was wrong.

    Emma's life was hard. Girls didn't like her, because they thought she was too manly (有男子气概的). Boys didn't like her, because they thought she wasn't as good at boxing as they were. Because of all these, Emma didn't have any friends at school. She always sat alone in the cafeteria (自助餐厅), and it was hard for her to find partners for group projects.

    However, Emma did have friends from her boxing class. They were all female (女人) boxers. They understood what Emma was going through because they were in the same situation. All they had was each other. They were a family. Because of this, Emma was always excited for boxing class. One day, she was going to be a famous boxer.

    Jack is in Grade Three now. He is a polite boy and studies hard. He is good at his lessons and can answer all the questions in class. His teachers and classmates like him except Henry. They're deskmates. Henry likes playing and often fails the exams. His father is a dentist (牙医) and makes a lot of money. The boy thinks he lives in the richest family in the town. So he looks down upon (瞧不起) others and laughs at them. Of course he has few friends.

    Jack is busy all the time. His father is a shoemaker. The man works hard but he still can't buy enough food for the family. He tells Jack to help him after school, so Jack has to do all his homework at school.

    One summer afternoon, on his way home, Jack met his sister Lily.

    The girl carried a heavy box in her arms without wearing shoes. Jack carried it for her. Henry saw them and said to Jack, "You father is a shoemaker, but your sister has no shoes!"

    "I don't think it's strange," replied Jack. "Your father is dentist, but your little sister has no teeth!"