Life is full of miracles. They surround us every day. One of these miracles happened to me recently. I was filling my car's tank at a local gas station. It was only 10 A.M. but I already felt tired. It was a cloudy, gloomy and rainy day and I hadn't slept well the night before. After I paid for the gas I turned my car towards the main road. I looked right and left then my brain sent the signal for my foot to push on the gas pedal but nothing happened. Shocked, I shook my head to clear it and gazed down at my foot.

      Just as I did, though, a truck rushed past my car doing 60 mph. My weary eyes hadn't seen it when I had looked just 2 seconds earlier. If I had been pulling out when I should have been, my little green car would have been smashed and I would have most likely been killed. I sat there for a long time quietly thanking God for sparing my life before pulling out on the road and heading home. This time both my brain and foot worked perfectly.

      As I looked back on that moment later I still couldn't understand it. Did God prevent my brain's signal from reaching my foot? Did an angel hold my toes to keep them from pressing on the gas? One question kept coming back into my mind as well: why? Why did I get this miracle? Why did God spare my life this day? Finally, I felt the answer forming deep within my heart and mind. I heard the words coming from my soul saying: “You still have more to do. Your work is not done yet!”

      Richard Bach wrote: “Here is the test to find if your mission on Earth is finished: if you are alive it isn't.” Wake up each day then knowing that your mission isn't done yet. You have more love to share, more people to help, more kindness to give. You have one more day to be the miracle God meant for you to be.

    One story about Jack, an Irishman（爱尔兰人）, who was not allowed into Heaven because he was stingy（吝啬） with his money. So he was sent to hell地狱. But down there he played tricks on the Devil (Satan) （魔鬼撒旦）, so he was kicked out of Hell and made to walk the earth forever carrying a lantern.

    Well, Irish children made Jack's lanterns on October 31st from a large potato or turnip（萝卜）, hollowed out with the sides having holes and lit by little candles inside. And Irish children would carry them as they went from house to house begging for food for the village Halloween festival that honored the Druid god Muck Olla（督伊德神）. The Irish name for these lanterns was "Jack with the lantern" or "Jack of the lantern," abbreviated as " Jack-o'-lantern" and now spelled "jack-o-lantern."

    The traditional Halloween you can read about in most books was just children's fun night. Halloween celebrations would start in October in every elementary（小学校） school. Children would make Halloween decorations, all kinds of orange-paper jack-o-lanterns. we went together to neighbors' houses, ringing their doorbell and yelling, "Trick or treat!" meaning, "Give us a treat (something to eat) or we'll play a trick on you!"

    The people inside were supposed to come to the door and comment（评价） on our costumes. Oh! here's a ghost. Oh, there's a witch. Oh, here's an old lady. Sometimes they would play along with us and pretend to be scared by some ghost or witch. But they would always have some candy and maybe an apple to put in our "trick or treat bags." But what if no one come to the door, or if someone chased us away?

    Then we'd play a trick on them, usually taking a piece of soap and make marks on their windows. And afterwards we would go home and count who got the most candy. One popular teen-agers' Halloween trick was to unroll a roll of toilet paper and throw it high into a tree again and again until the tree was all wrapped in the white paper. The paper would often stay in the tree for weeks until a heavy snow or rain washed it off.

    No real harm done, but it made a big mess of both the tree and the yard under it. One kind of Halloween mischief.

    Barbara McClintock was one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century. She made important discoveries about genes（基因）and chromosomes（染色体）.

    Barbara McClintock was born in 1902 in Hartford, Connecticut. Her family moved to the Brooklyn area of New York City in 1908. Barbara was an active child with interests in sports and music. She also developed an interest in science.

    She studied science at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Barbara was among a small number of undergraduate students to receive training in genetics in 1921. Years later, she noted that few college students wanted to study genetics.

    Barbara McClintock decided to study botany, the scientific study of plants, at Cornell University. She completed her undergraduate studies in 1923. McClintock decided to continue her education at Cornell. She completed a master's degree in 1925. Two years later, she finished all her requirements for a doctorate degree.

    McClintock stayed at Cornell after she completed her education. She taught students botany. The 1930s was not a good time to be a young scientist in the United States. The country was in the middle of the great economic Depression. Millions of Americans were unemployed. Male scientists were offered jobs. But female geneticists were not much in demand.

    An old friend from Cornell, Marcus Rhoades, invited McClintock to spend the summer of 1941 working at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. It is a research center on Long Island, near New York City. McClintock started a temporary（临时的）job with the genetics department. A short time later, she accepted a permanent（永久的）position in the laboratory. This gave her the freedom to continue her research without having to teach or repeatedly ask for financial aid.

    By the 1970s, her discoveries had had an effect on everything from genetic engineering to cancer research. McClintock won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for her discovery of the ability of genes to change positions on chromosomes. She was the first American woman to win an unshared Nobel Prize.

    Who were your best friends five years ago? Is there anyone you would really like to see again? In 1999, Julie Pankhurst, a computer programmer from London, was thinking about her past-and especially the people she used to go to school with.

    Julie looked on the Internet for a website to help her find her old school friends. But there was nothing. So Julie and her husband, Steve, started their own website. They called it Friends Reunited.

    The site grew slowly at first, but soon they received their first "thank you" email. The man wrote, "Thank you so much. Using your website, I found an old friend from thirty years ago！"Julie and Steve were very excited about this and continued to improve their website. By the end of 2000, there were 3,000 members.

    The next year was really hard work for the couple.

    In January, a national radio station mentioned their website. Their membership doubled in one week! People were talking about the website all over the country, and it became a full-time job for Julie and Steve. In a year, they had four million members!

    Now, over fifteen million people in lots of different countries use Friends Reunited to find old school friends, work colleagues and neighbors. Some of the stories which people tell Julie and Steve are amazing. For example, David Webster lost his memory in a car crash. He used the website to find old school friends, and they helped him remember his past.

    Julie's simple idea gave us a national obsession（痴迷）-getting in touch with old friends and hearing their news. And it made her and Steve very rich in 2005, they sold Friends Reunited for ￡120 million!