Long ago, a farmer, hard-working, had a wonderful olive orchard(橄榄园). Unluckily, his three sons cared less about his olive orchard. They couldn't wait to be wealthy in a short time.

    When the farmer was old, and felt that his time had come to die, he called the three sons to him and said, "My sons, there is a pot of gold hidden in the olive orchard. Dig for it, if you wish it."

    The sons tried to get him to tell them in what part of the orchard the gold was hidden, but he would tell them nothing more.

    After the farmer was dead, the sons went to work to find the pot of gold. Since they did not know where it was, they agreed to begin in a line at one end of the orchard, and to dig until one of them should find the money.

    They dug until they had turned up the soil from one end of the orchard to the other, round the tree-roots and between them. But no pot of gold was to be found. The three sons were disappointed to have all their work for nothing.

    The next olive season, the olive trees in the orchard bore more fruit than they had ever given. When it was sold, it gave the sons a whole pot of gold.

    And when they saw how much money had come from the orchard, they suddenly understood what the wise father had meant when he said, "There is gold hidden in the orchard. Dig for it, if you wish it."

    “Reading makes a full man,” novels written by famous writers help us to know more about our history, culture and many other things.

    Jane Austen was one of the most well-known women writers of the world. She was born in England in 1775. Jane liked reading and writing. She wrote a number of famous novels in her life. Among them, Pride and Prejudice written in 1779 was the most popular.

    Ernest Hemingway, an outstanding American writer and reporter, was born in 1899. His life experience had a great influence on his writing style. Hemingway lived in France and Italy between the 1920s and 1950s. Most of his books such as The Sun Also Rises were written at that time. He won the Nobel Prize in 1954 mainly because of the novel The Old Man and the Sea.

The name of every British town and city has a long history. 

Two thousand years ago, most people living in Britain were Celts（凯尔特人）. Even the word "Britain" is Celtic. Then the Romans arrived and built camps. These camps became cities called "castra". This is why there are so many place names in England that end in "-chester" or "-caster". Manchester is one example. 

After the Romans left Britain, it was attacked by Anglo-Saxon people and became its new owners. These people were from the area that is now Germany and the Netherlands （荷兰）. The names of their villages often ended in "-ham" or "-ton". Some got their names from the leaders of the villages, so Birmingham, for example, means "Beormund's village". 

Twelve hundred years ago, Vikings（维京人） came to England. They traded with the Anglo-Saxons but lived in their own villages. These often ended in "-by" or "-thorpe". The name "Kirkby" means "a village with a church（教堂）" and Scunthorpe was the village of a man called Skuma. Finally, in 1066, England became Norman（诺曼人的）—the Normans gave us the place name "grange", which means "farm". 

And how about London? Experts cannot agree! The Romans called the city Londinium, but they were not the first people there. People once believed that the United Kingdom's capital city was named for the castle（城堡） of a king called Lud, but this is almost impossible. Our best guess today is that the name comes from a Celtic word meaning "a fast-flowing river". 

Look at the family tree! It's Tom's family. 

Elephants are the biggest land animals. They are gray and have no hair. Their skin is thick. They come from Africa and Asia, but we can also find them in other countries. Africa elephants have very big ears while Asian elephants have small cars. Elephants have a very long nose and some have two long white teeth.

Elephants eat a lot of food, but they don't eat meat. They eat leaves, grass and fruit. They eat about 140 kilos of food a day. A big elephant is over 3.5 meters tall and weighs (重) 6,000 kilos.

Elephants love water and they are good at swimming.

Nowadays elephants are in danger. They have less and less land to live on, because people are taking away their land and forests. People cut down many trees, so elephants are losing their homes.

People also kill elephants for their long teeth. Today there are only about 3,000 elephants (over 100,000 before) in the wild. There will not be any elephants if we don't protect them. If we don't help these wild animals, they will die out (灭绝) soon. So we should help them. To protect elephants, we must save the trees and not buy things made of ivory (象牙).