An old lady in a plane had a blanket（毯子）over her head and she did not want to take it off. The air hostess spoke to her, but the old lady said, “I have never been in a plane before, and I am frightened. I am going to keep this blanket over my head until we are back on the ground again!”

    Then the captain came. He said, “Madam, I am the captain of this plane. The weather is fine, there are no clouds in the sky, and everything is going very well. ”But she continued to hide.

    So the captain turned and started to go back. Then the old lady looked out from under the blanket with one eye and said, “I am sorry, young man, but I don't like planes and I am never going to fly again. But I'll say one thing, ”She continued kindly, “You and your wife keep your plane very clean!”

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    While music has value all by itself, researchers have long noticed that musicians also tend to be better at learning languages and show other improved reading and math abilities. Now a new study from the University of Washington by Christina Zhao shows that rhythm is an important bridge between music and speech as early as nine months of age.

    Researchers randomly placed babies into two groups of 20 each, and each group played at the lab with their parents for a dozen 15-minute sessions over a month.

    In one group, researchers played recordings of songs with a waltz rhythm and showed the parents how to help their babies tap out that 1-2-3 beat in time with the music on boy drums or with their feet. In the other group, children played with typical toys and no music.

    The babies in the music group were better able to detect random mistakes in that rhythm when they heard it within two weeks of the last session. They also showed a stronger brain response to disruptions in the rhythm. For example, researchers would sometimes alter the timing of syllables(音节) by slightly shortening the middle sound of a word like bibbi to make it bibi—and the babies with music training were more likely to notice it.

    In other words, music training not only improved the babies' ability to notice when a musical rhythm skipped a beat, but also improved their ability to notice when the rhythms of speech changed unexpectedly, an important skill for learning to talk.

    The study reflects Zhao's personal experiences as a pianist who music in college, and as someone who speaks both Mandarin and English. She noticed that a lot of her fellow musicians were also good at learning other languages. “That really got me wondering how these two are related, “Zhao said.

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    I admire my father for as long as I can remember. I loved the way he treated people with such respect and kindness.

    On Sundays we usually took the bus into Manhattan, where we would do interesting things, like riding the Circle Line. He would point out every landmark and tell us the history behind it. He loved to take us on the subway to Nathan's in Coney Island. Once there, he would give my sister and me each a five-dollar bill and then he would enjoy himself for the afternoon with his newspapers.

    In 1968, we went to see the movie “Oliver”, a Charles Dickens' classic story of a young orphan(孤儿) boy called Oliver. On the way home from the theater that afternoon he told us how he was raised in an orphanage(孤儿院) in New York after both of his parents died. He told us the nuns(修女) were wonderful to him and loved him like a mother would. As he grew older, he was placed in a few foster(寄养) families before he joined the Army.

    When we were teenagers, he still took us out each weekend and he would ask us to invite specific friends to join us and he would pay for them. We often went to Yankee Stadium to watch the baseball game and he bought us tickets in the least expensive seats. To keep the cost down, he waited for us in the car where he read his newspapers and then took a nap(小睡).

    He was always happy and appreciated everything he had. He loved his two little girls and later his two granddaughters. He gave so much, yet he had so little. He thought he was the richest man in the world.

    Nola (August 21, 1974 -November 22, 2015) was a northern white rhino（犀牛）who lived at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park near Escondido, California. At her death, she was one of only four remaining northern white rhinos in the world. The other three lived in Kenya. World Rhino Day, held on September 22, is to raise awareness of the less than 30,000 other rhinos left on Earth.

    "Rhinos need our help today, not tomorrow," Nola's lead keeper Jane Kennedy said. "Last year we lost over 1,200 rhinos just in South Africa. If we continue to lose more than 1,000 rhinos a year, in 10 to 20 years all the rhinos on the planet will be gone."

    "Unfortunately, most animals are in danger of dying out because of humans," Kennedy says." Humans have either poached（偷猎）animals, or because there are over seven billion of us, we've taken up too much of the world's resources ". Poachers illegally hunt rhinos for their horns. They sell the horns for thousands of dollars per pound, to be used for art, jewelry, and decorations. Experts believe that one rhino is poached every eight hours.

    In 1975, the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research started the Frozen Zoo, a program through which researchers have collected cell (细胞) samples from more than 8,000 different types of animals, including the northern white rhino. Scientists hope that by studying the rhino cells, they will get greater understanding of it, and will find ways to increase its numbers.

    Jane Kennedy describes World Rhino Day as "a celebration of rhinos along with an awareness campaign for everybody across the world to know that rhinos need our help." At the San Diego Zoo, children and adults are welcome to visit and speak with zookeepers to learn about rhinos. But you don't have to live in San Diego to celebrate World Rhino Day. It is observed around the world, with zoos and wildlife parks holding special events and programs to teach people about rhinos, and enable them to see the animals up close. For more information, go to www.worldrhinoday. org.

    On December 26, 2004, hundreds of tourists relaxed on Sri Lanka's Yala National Park's beaches. But at mid-morning the park's elephants began crying wildly and running away from the ocean and up a nearby hill. The puzzled keepers could tell the animals were worried about something but what?

    What the keepers did not know was that a 30-foot wall of water was headed straight toward them. This tsunami(海啸) had been caused by an earthquake more than 1, 000 miles away in the Indian Ocean. When the huge wave hit the coast, it caused severe damage. Many people died. The elephants, however, were not swept away by the water. They stood safely on the hill.

    Scientists have long suspected that animals sense natural disasters before humans do. People have told stories of dogs refusing to go outside and sharks swimming to deeper waters before a hurricane. After the 2004 tsunami, people said they saw tigers, monkeys, and water buffalo escaping to higher ground before the waters rushed in. Even in the hardest-hit areas of southern Asia, there were few animal deaths.

    It's unlikely that an animal's so-called sixth sense comes from some magical power to see into the future. Experts believe that animals may be more sensitive than humans to changes in temperature and other environmental conditions that take place before a natural disaster. The elephants in Sri Lanka, for example, may have picked up vibrations from within the Earth, a sign that earthquake was coming. Because vibrations in the ground travel much faster than an ocean wave, the elephants may have felt the earthquake that caused the tsunami well before the tsunami itself came to the coast.

    A few scientists are calling for a system to track reports of strange behavior in people's pets, hoping that these reports can serve as a warning system that a natural disaster is about to happen. But Marina Haynes, an animal behavior scientist at the Philadelphia Zoo, says, "It would be an unreliable way to predict disasters. It can be difficult to know what an animal is doing. Is the animal nervous because an earthquake is about to happen or is it frightened because there is an enemy nearby?"