When the evening is coming, my dear son and I are preparing for the tape time. “Shoes on,” I remind 9-year-old Sam. “Snakes are always waiting for the chance to kiss you. But with our feet stepped into my car, we are safe.” We take blankets and cups of milk and head out to the shelter that serves as our garage. This has become our bedtime habit.

    I press “play.” A motherly voice fills the car. My mother and my aunt send us books on tape obtained from secondhand shops or rescued from the back of drawer. Maybe no one in England lays cassettes anymore, but I still love them.

    Sam rests on his seat. He's sitting in the front seat. I am listening to the cassette. But I am also thinking. In a month's time, my boy will be 10. Next year, he will be 11. And so it will go on, until he leaves me and his father and his sister to live out his own stories— as it is only right and proper he should.

    Will he think back to the times when he sat in the dark in a car in Africa, listening to tales of Wales in World War Ⅱ, the finest lady detective of Botswana, or a country he has visited, and tells me he finds them “very interesting”? Will he think , when he is grown-up, the poor mum always makes the ancient tape player which is out of date work?

    I like to believe that he will recall those wonderful moments. By then, perhaps, my child will realize a deep love of sharing and understanding by listening to the old tape player. I hope Sam will think that these evenings we spend in the car are a story themselves. It is his own first chapter. In time my boy will ease off the hand brake and roll out into the world. Until then, I'll keep pressing “play”.

    There have always been a lot of commonly believed but false ideas about being fat and doing exercise. Some people believe that they can't help putting on weight as they get older, while others hold that if they stop exercising, their muscles will turn into fat. Here are some more myths:

I'll never lose weight — I come from a fat family

    Wrong! While we can't change the body type we are born with, we can't blame our genes for making us fat. There's plenty of evidence that fatness runs in families, and the main reason is that they share the same habits of eating too much and exercise too little.

    I am fat because I burn calories slowly

    Wrong! Fatness is not caused by a slow metabolism（新陈代谢）. If fact, although fat people consume more energy that slim people, they also fail to realize how much they eat! Keeping a diary can help you work out your daily food intake more accurately.

    Exercise is boring

    Wrong! Anything will become boring if you do it repetitively. The key is to develop a balanced and varied program that's fun as well as progressive. If you enjoy a Sunday walk, take a different route. If you do Yoga, try a tai chi class. If you like swimming, set yourself a distance or time challenge.

    No pain, no gain

    Wrong! Exercise is not meant to hurt. Indeed, pain is your body telling you something's wrong, and continuing to exercise could lead to serious injury. You may experience mild discomfort as you begin to exercise regularly, but this your body adapting to the positive changes in your lifestyle and the aches should disappear relatively quickly. If you don't, rest and seek medical advice.

    Jack Ma's net worth increased $2.8bn overnight as Alibaba forecast sales growth that topped every analyst's estimate, despite the fact that China's economy is slowing down.

    Mr. Ma, aged 52 this year, is now the richest person in Asia and 14^th wealthiest in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His net worth has climbed $8.5bn this year to $（4）8bn.

    The latest surge came after China's largest e-commerce company forecast 45 to 49 percent revenue(收入) growth in the year ending March, demonstrating how investments beyond online shopping are paying off. Shares in Alibaba, where Mr. Ma is chairman, rose 13 percent to a record high.

    Alibaba and Tencent, which dominate online shopping and social media, respectively have ventured(冒险) deeper into new areas from cloud computing services to streaming music and video as the country's economy slows. Alibaba is capturing more digital advertising spending by incorporating(合并) social elements such as video in its shopping sites.

    Alibaba is holding meetings with investors this week. On Friday, the former English teacher said he wasn't going to discuss corporate forecasts. He took the stage instead to describe how his company had become effectively the world's 22^nd largest economy—just after Argentina—in terms of transaction(交易) by never fearing to think big. Mr. Ma, who said Alibaba revises 10-year plans annually, foresaw the company becoming the fifth-largest eventually by 2036 by serving a burgeoning Chinese middle classes, taking advantage of global trade and making use of its valuable data.

    Ma's comments about the evolution of data-driven technology echoed Masayoshi Son, Chairman of Japan's SoftBank. SoftBank—Alibaba's largest shareholder—has invested billions in companies such as ARM with the intention of staking out a leading position in the future Internet of Things.

    “The Internet of Things is going to be big because in the past, machines drink electricity,” Mr. Ma told investors. “In the next 20 years, machines will drink data. In the future, no company, no country, no business can survive without data.”

    Camping is a good way to spend time along with your kids and to show them how wonderful nature can be. Through camping, children can discover new things about nature, such as flowers, birds, and other small animals. Camping gives kids time to get away from all the electronics (电子) of today's culture. So it is necessary to plan exciting and enjoyable family camping trips with your children while they are young.

    When planning your family camping trip, consider the activities your kids like: games, hiking, swimming, boating, bicycling, etc. Select a camping place that has some of the activities the kids are interested in. Meal planning is an important part of your camping trip. Plan the meals together, and kids love to choose what they want to eat.

    When starting to pack for your trip, let the kids pack their own items (物品) . Each person should have his/her own sleeping bag with a luggage (行李) bag to put it in. Personal items should be packed with their sleeping bags. Encourage the kids to put their items in a certain place and always return it when they have finished using it.

    When you have arrived at your campsite, make all the camping activities a family activity, which will help children to realize how important team-work is. Everyone can have his/her own job sitting up the campsite. Meal time can be a fun time. So let the older ones help with the cooking on your outdoor camping stove while the younger ones get the picnic table ready.

    Of all nature's disasters, forest fires are often considered the most frightening. Moving at lightning speed, huge walls of flames can burn acres of land in just a few minutes. And although technology, including the use of fire-retardant chemicals, has greatly helped the fight against forest fires, they still do great damage.

    According to the National Interagency Fire Center, the fire season last year was the worst on record in terms of the number of fires and acres burned. There were 96. 385 fires and 9.873429 acres affected by fire in a year that was 125% more destructive(毁灭性的) than the10-year average. These fires cost the federal government $1.5 billion to fight, and this figure does not include the money spent by local and state governments as part of the effort.

    Fires in the southern states represented half of the national total last year with Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas being home to a usually high amount of activity. Wildfire has also taken place in Western states such as California, Colorado and Alaska throughout the past 10 years.

    It is said that two-thirds of forest fires are started accidentally by people. Almost one quarter are purposely set, while lighting causes 10%.

    Forest fires can have advantageous effects. Charcoal(木炭) enriches soil and some plant species(种类) grow well after fire. The cones of the jack pine tree, for example, will not spread their seeds unless there is heat. Douglas fir trees grow best in open sunlight areas after fire.

    If there's one memory Anna wanted to keep from her experiences during the Second World War, it was her son, Andrzej.Anna,89, lost touch with him when she was forced to leave her native Poland and sent to a labor camp in Austria more than 60 years ago.Now,64，Andrzej hugged his mother at the airport, who had been waiting for him.

    Andrzej searched for his mother for more than 50 years, almost giving up. But his mother made the first phone call. Unluckily, he wrote down his mother's phone number wrong and spent another month trying to reach her again. When he did, the two talked regularly on the phone for two months to break down the language barrier. Anna can hardly speak Polish over the years and Andrzej doesn't speak English.

    After the war, Anna could not find her son and went to Italy, finally ending up in Great Britain，the US，then Canada 45 years ago. She used the Internet to track her son，making phone calls with no luck. Meanwhile Andrzej contacted(接触) the Polish Red Cross last year to help in his search. At last, they locate each other at the same time. Andrzej will spend a month with his mother in Britain.