Joe is interested in getting exercise and competing (竞争) on a team. He reads about the events at the local pools and finds the perfect activity.

                                                                           Swimming Programs

     Summer Swim Team

     Join a Summer Swim Team and compete with other swimmers! The program is offered at eight different local pools for youths to 17 years old. The season runs June 21-August 21. Practices are daily (Monday through Friday) throughout the summer. Cost: $50.00.

     Junior Swim Instructor (少年游泳教练)

     Two weeks, 20 hours of instruction, two hours per day for children 11-14 years old. Pre-training for youths interested in becoming swim instructors ($45 per child).

     Junior Lifeguard (救生员)

     Two weeks, 30 hours of instruction, three hours per day for children 11-14 years old. Pre-training in lifeguarding, and customer (消费者) service ($45 per child).

     Junior Swim Instructor & Junior Lifeguard Training Dates

     Special Offer

     Anyone who takes part in both junior swim instructor and junior lifeguard programs at the same time need only spend $75 instead of $90 for 50 hours of training.

     Register(注册) Online

     You can now register online! Visit our website at http://www.example.com. You can choose an area of town, a specific local center, a program, or search for classes which can meet the needs of students of different ages. Just visit our website, and you're on your way!

    A famous teacher was speaking to the students at our school. He began his lesson by holding up a ￡100 bill. Then he said to the three hundred students, "Who would like to have this ￡100 bill?" The students began to put up their hands at once.

    Then he said, "I am going to give this bill to one of you, but first, let me do this." He then made this bill into a ball. Then he said, "Who wants it?" Hands went into the air.

    "Well," he said, "What if I do this?" and he dropped it on the floor and stepped on it. He picked up the dirty, crumpled bill and said, "Who still wants it?" Hands went back into the air.

    "My friends," he said, "You've learned a valuable lesson today. No matter what I did to the money, you still wanted it because it didn't go down in value. It was still worth ￡100.”

     “Many times in our lives, we're dropped, crumpled, and stepped on by the chances we take and the things that happen to us. We feel as if we are worth nothing. But remember, no matter what has happened to you, you will never lose your value: you are always valuable to those who love you. Your value doesn't come from what you drop or whom you know, but WHO YOU ARE.”

    You are special and valuable. Don't ever forget it!

    Many people wrongly think that cities don't have farms and fruits and vegetables are only grown in the country. Believe it or not, there are more urban farms popping up in cities all over the world.

    Alexandra Sullivan, a food systems researcher in New York, studies urban agriculture. Urban agriculture is another name for farming and gardening in a city environment. Ms. Sullivan studies everything from tiny gardens in empty lots between buildings to bigger fields that have been planted and grown. According to Ms. Sullivan, “Urban agriculture has existed since cities have, across the world.”

    The number of humans living in urban areas, or cities, is increasing. The amount of people who wanted to garden in urban areas is also rising. Ms. Sullivan says, “In small gardens, on rooftops and indoors, city residents grow fruits, vegetables, grains, and herbs, and raise animals to produce milk, eggs, honey, and meat. City residents use these foods as supplements to food produced by rural agriculture.” Even though some people who live in urban areas grow crops, urban residents still need to rely on food grown in rural areas. This is because a city doesn't have enough space to grow enough food for everyone living in it.

    In New York City, urban farmers have come up with many different ways to grow their own produce, even though there isn't a lot of room. For example, Brooklyn Grange is a farming operation that has two rooftop vegetable farms in New York City. All together, the farms are made up of 2.5 acres of rooftop space. This makes Brooklyn Grange one of the largest rooftop farming operations in the world.

    Brooklyn Grange grows all kinds of things. The farming company sells its vegetables to local residents and restaurants. And because the farms are on rooftops, they are specially adapted to their urban location. They use available space that is not needed for anything else. As more urban farmers find ways to grow food in cities, urban residents will be better able to get fresher materials for their meals.

    To save as much language diversity as possible in the face of its rapidly dying out, researchers suggest using “evolutionary trees”, a tool from conservation biology.

    One of the world's 7,000 languages disappears every other week, and half might not survive the 21st century, experts say.

    When setting conservation goals, ecologists use evolutionary trees—diagrams that show how biological species are related to one another—to identify species that have few close relatives. Such species are said to be evolutionarily distinct. Similarly, recent advances in the construction of language trees make it possible to measure how unique a language is.

    “Evolutionary trees have transformed our understanding of how life has evolved and helped us to decide which species most need conserving,” says Jonathan Davies, senior author of the new study.

    “The rapid rate of language loss, as well as limited resources for preservation（保护）, means that we must choose carefully where to focus our efforts,” adds Max Farrell, a PhD student in Davies' lab. “The more isolated (孤立的) a language in its family tree, the more unique information it contains and eventually contributes to language diversity.”

    As a case study, they used this approach to rank 350 Austronesian languages, spoken in islands spread across Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean.

    For each of these languages, the researchers combined measures of evolutionary distinctiveness (ED) and global endangerment (GE) to produce an “EDGE” score. The language with the highest score, which means it is extremely distinct（不同的） yet nearly dying out, was Kavalan, a language native to Tai Wan. The next-highest scores went to Tanibili, an endangered language in the Solomon Islands.

    By building trees for other language groups, language specialists could target preservation efforts and help reduce the loss of language diversity in the future, the researchers say.

    Linda Eveans was my best friend—like the sister I never had. We did everything together: piano lesson, movies, swimming, and horseback riding.

    When I was 13, my family moved away, Linda and I kept in touch through letters， and we saw each other on special times, like my wedding and Linda's. Soon we were busy with children and moving to new homes, and we wrote less often. One day a card that I sent came back, stamped "Address Unknown". I had no idea about how to find Linda.

    Over the years, I missed Linda very much, I wanted to share happiness of my children and then grandchildren, And I needed to share my sadness when my brother and then mother died, There was an empty place in my heart that only a friend like Linda could fill.

    One day, I was reading a newspaper when I noticed a photo of a young woman who looked very much like Linda and whose last name was Wagman—Linda's married name. "There must be thousands of Wagmans." I thought, but I still wrote to her.

    She called as soon as she got my letter, "Mrs, Tobin!" she said excitedly, "Linda Evans Wagman is my mother." Minutes later I heard a voice that I recognized at once, even after 40 years. We laughed and cried and caught up on each other's lives. Now the empty place in my heart is filled. And there's one thing that Linda and I know for sure: we won't lose each other again!

    It's never easy to explain exactly when a specific language began, and in the case of English we can hardly regard it as a separate language before the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain. Germanic invaders (入侵者) came and settled in Britain from the north-western coastline of continental Europe in the fifth centuries. The invaders all spoke a language that was Germanic (related to Dutch, Frisian, German and the Scandinavian languages), but we'll probably never know how different their speech was from that of their continental neighbors.

    The reason that we know so little about the language in this period is because we do not have much in the way of written records from any of the Germanic languages until several centuries later. When Old English writings began to appear in the seventh and eighth centuries there was a good deal of regional variation (变化), but not more than that found in later periods.

    The Celts already lived in Britain when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, but there are few obvious signs of their language in English today. Some scholars have suggested that the Celtic tongue might have had some influence on the grammatical development of English, particularly in some parts of the country, but this is highly speculative (猜测). The number of borrowed words that have entered Old English from this language is very small. Those that survive in modern English include “comb” (a type of valley), alongside some place names.