A rich woman began to learn painting（画画）. When she was sixty years old, she loved it very much. She painted and painted. ①十年之后，在她的工作室(workroom)里有许多画。And she thought they are very good.

    One day, the old woman is badly ill in bed, but she doesn't forget her pictures. She says to his grandson, Hand, “②I want to give my pictures to a school, then the students will remember me__But which school do you think is the best, my dear?”

    “Well,” says the little boy, “You'd better give ③them to the blind school!”

    Every morning my father buys a newspaper on his way to work. Every day I open my books in class and start lessons. Every evening my mother looks through magazines at home. And every night, I look at the posters with photos of David Beckham and Yao Ming on my bedroom wall before I go to sleep. Can we imagine life without paper or print?

    Paper was first created about 2,000 years ago, and has been made from silk, cotton, bamboo, and, since the 19th century, from wood. People learned to write words on paper to make a book. But in those days, books could only be produced one at a time by hand. As a result, they were expensive and rare. And because there weren't many books, few people learned to read.

    Then printing was invented in China. The first printed books were made by putting ink on a wooden block and holding the paper against it. When printing was developed greatly at the beginning of the 11th century, books could be produced more quickly and cheaply. As a result, more people learned to read. After that, knowledge and ideas spread(传播) quickly, in a way that can be compared with the introduction of the Internet in the 20th century.

    But will books be needed in the future? Today information can be received online, downloaded from the Internet rather than found in books, and information can be kept on CD-ROMs or machines such as MP4 players. These machines are smaller and lighter than books so that they can be carried very easily.

    Computers are already used in classrooms, and newspapers and magazines can already be read online. So will books be replaced by computers one day? No, I don't think the Yao Ming poster on my bedroom wall will ever be replaced by a computer two metres high!

    A month ago the Brown family, who lived in Lyndhurst, had a special experience. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} She was making coffee while her husband, Frank, was watching a comedy program on television. Upstairs(在楼上) their young daughter, Ruth, was asleep in her room and their son, Mark, was doing some homework on his computer. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} However, at the end of the afternoon, it started to change. Soon, it began to rain very heavily. Tina looked out of the kitchen window and saw big storm clouds in the sky. The Browns' dog, Tilly, was in the back garden. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Shortly afterwards, Tina saw lightning(闪电) in the sky and then everything in the house went dark. Frank was unhappy because the television didn't work. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} Then they heard baby Ruth crying. Frank went upstairs to look after the baby but when he climbed the stairs(楼梯) , there was a loud sound and the house seemed to shake. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} A big tree from their garden fell through the window of Ruth's room！Luckily it missed the baby by just half a meter!

    A man stopped at a flower shop. He wanted to order some flowers for his mother for her birthday.

    As he got out of his car and walked to the shop, he saw a little girl sitting in the corner. The girl looked quite sad. He asked her what was wrong. The girl said, “I want to buy a red rose for my mother, but I don't have much money. A red rose is two dollars.”

    The man said, "Come with me. I'll pay for the rose. "He bought the little girl a red rose and also ordered his mother some flowers. Then the girl told the man where she would go. It's a cemetery(墓地). Her mother died 20 days ago.

    Later that day, the man took his flowers and drove a long way to his mother's house. He wanted to give the flowers to his mother in person.

    Robert is a middle school boy from Australia. He is in Grade Seven. This term, he learns Chinese and he likes it very much. He wants to learn it well, so he finds a pen pal from Guangdong, China. His name is Yang Guang and he is a clever boy. He and Robert are in the same Grade. They both love playing football. They often chat with each other on the Internet. They have different school lives. Yang Guang is very busy every day. He gets up early and he has to stay at school for 8 hours every day and he has much homework to do after school. But Robert only stays at school for 5 hours and he often finishes his homework in just half an hour.

Information Card

    You must have remembered the story from your childhood: an old man was worried about his sons because they always quarreled with each other. So one day he asked them to break a bundle(捆) of chopsticks tied together. Clearly, none of them could. But when the bundle was untied, they were able to break each chopstick easily. Why? This is because of the power of unity(团结).

    Dr. John Maxwell, in his book Success Journey says that every success is not something you can achieve alone. Think about it —if at the end of all the achievements, you find yourself alone, will you call it success in a real sense? It is known to all of us that success always belongs to unity. But we often seem to forget it when it comes to individual(个人的) success. Most of us consider our success as a personal thing.

    Your dream and your success do not belong to you alone. Even though you work hard towards your dream, there are people who are working behind you to make sure that you are able to give yourself a hundred percent energy.

    Do you think that it is possible without unity? Don't you feel that these people are doing their best so that you can be successful? And so, unity plays an important role, even if you are talking about your personal success. Just like those chopsticks, they can't be broken only when they are tied together.

    So, it is your responsibility to keep unity if you really want to be successful in your trip. Only if you always treat things and people seriously, you will succeed because all the things and people around you have connections in some way.