A rabbit is running into its hole. You may ask, "What happened?"
Well, when a rabbit sees something dangerous, it runs away. Its tail moves up and down as it runs. When other rabbits see this tail moving up and down, they run too. They know that there is a danger. The rabbit has told them something without making a sound. It has given them a signal.
Many other animals use this kind of language too. When a bee found some food, it goes back to its home. It cannot tell the other bees where the food is by speaking to them, but it does a little dance in the air. This tells the other bees to go with it to find food.
Some animals say things by making sounds. A dog barks, for example, when a stranger comes near. A cat purrs (发出呼噜呼噜的声音) when it is pleased. Some birds make several different sounds, each with its own meaning.
But human beings have something that no animals have—a large number of words about things, actions, feelings or ideas. We are able to give each other information and to tell or inform other people what is in our mind or how we feel. By writing words down we can remind ourselves of the things that have happened, or send messages to people far away. No animal can do this. No animal has the wonderful power of language.
No one knows how man learned to make words. As centuries went by, he made more and more new words. This is what we mean by language.
People living in different countries made different kinds of words. Today there are about fifteen hundred different languages in the world. A very large English dictionary, for example, contains four or five hundred thousand words. But we do not know all of them. The words we know are called vocabulary. We should try to make our vocabulary larger. Read as many books as possible. When we meet a new word, look it up in the dictionary. A dictionary is the most useful book.
Benjamin Banneker was born a few months before another great American—George Washington. Benjamin was black, but he was not a slave (奴隶). He and his mother and his grandmother were free. Benjamin's grandmother came from England. In America she got a job and worked for many years to pay for her boat trip across the ocean. After working many years, she saved enough money to buy a farm. Benjamin lived with her for a while. She taught him to read, write and do arithmetic (算术).
Benjamin's neighbours knew that he was clever. They were not surprised when he built a large wooden clock. He made each piece after studying a small pocket watch. The clock made him famous, for it was one of the first clocks built in America. People from other places began to send hard problems of all kinds to Benjamin to settle.
Thomas Jefferson heard of Benjamin Banneker's ability to settle hard problems. He asked Banneker to help build the city that was to be the capital of the United States—Washington, D.C. Banneker worked hard on the plans for the city. He marked where the streets and buildings—the Capitol (美国国会大厦), the White House, and many other places should be built.
Later, L' Enfant, the Frenchman who had designed the new city, had a quarrel, and went back to France in anger. He took all of the plans away. The workmen couldn't build without any plans to follow.
For a while it seemed that the plans for the capital might have to be changed, but Benjamin Banneker remembered the plans he had helped draw. He drew each again as he had built each piece of his clock.
If it weren't for Benjamin Banneker, Washington,
D.C might look very different from the way it does today.
Rosa liked making up stories. She was sosure that her classmates believed her from time to time. In fact, the wholeclass believed her! At first she supposed it was1. Now, as she got up to talk before theclass, she knew that making up stories had some way of coming back to make yousad.
Rosa's parents were separated. Nine monthsout of the year, Rosa lived with her mother in an apartment on Anderson Street.But when summer2, she went to her father's farm inArizona.
The farm was great! Rosa rode horses andhelped with some farm work. Her father, however, was so3 that he couldn't find time to go to otherplaces with her. When she arrived each summer, her father would meet her at theairport and take her out to eat. And the day she went back to the city he wouldalways buy her a present.
When summer came to a close, Rosa returnedto her mother. At school she heard lots of stories her friends told about theirfamily trips. Rosa wished she had a4totalk about too.
Not long after5 began, Rosa was looking through travelmagazines in the school library. They talked about many exciting places, likeEngland and Germany. When Rosa's friends asked what she had done in the summer,she made up something that was not6. Remembering the travelmagazines she had read, she told her classmates that she and her father hadgone to England.
When the class began studying England, MrThomas asked Rosa to tell all the things she could7 about her trip to England!
He uses his stage name, Rain, when he works as a singer and dancer. His real name is JungJi-hoon and he is also a f actor.
He showed his interest in dancing ever since he was in the 6th grade. As a teenager, he was part of the boy band (乐队) group c "fan club". Years later, Park Jin-young (Korean singer) took Rain under his wing and trained him for years in dancing and singing. During those training years Rain was not at home much and didn't have enough money, so at times he had to train w meals.
Finally in 2002 the song Bad Guy made him famous. Following the s of the first album (专辑), he came back with a new set of music in his 2nd album. In 2004, he acted in a successful play called Full House which was welcomed in other Asian countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, China, Malaysia, Thailand and Japan. His performance in Full House has won him the Best Actor Award at the KBS Acting Awards. It is hard to describe his dancing with simple words b it is a mixture of so many different elements. He has created a whole new style of his own. In Beijing he won the Best Korean Singer Award. Since his success in 2002, the 26-year-old boy has become one of the most popular Korean artists in Asia.
Singer Park Jin-young once said to his friends, "I was always wondering whether Rain understood w I said because he never said anything when I scolded (责备) him. One day I entered his room, and was surprised to discover a wall covered with notes. Every note was filled with my words and advice. " Rain had written down every single piece of a his older friend had given him and he had been doing his best to correct his mistakes and improve his skills.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835,in the state of Missouri. When he was four, his family moved to the town ofHannibal, Missouri. Hannibal was a port on the Missippi River, and Clemensloved to watch the big steamboats going up and down the river. He said that allthe boys in his school had one ambition in life: to work on a steamboat!
His father died when he was just 12 yearsold, and Clemens then went to work for a printer to help support his family. Hetravelled around, and worked in many different cities. But when he was 22, heachieved his ambition—he got a job working on a steamboat. He sailed up anddown the wide Missippi River until the American Civil War began.
He then moved around America, and triedseveral jobs. He was a soldier, and a silver miner. Then he started working asa writer for a newspaper. It was at that time that he decided to use a pen namefor his stories, and he chose the name "Mark Twain".
The name is interesting. It comes from hisdays on the steamboats. He used to throw a piece of rope into the river. Therewas a heavy weight on the end of the rope, and the rope had some marks on it.He used the rope to find how deep the river was. Then he shouted out, "MarkOne" or "Mark Twain", meaning "Mark Two". Each markwas about two metres, so when he shouted "Mark Twain", it meant thatthe river was deep enough for the big boat.
In 1865 Clemens wrote a story about ajumping frog. The story and the writer became famous. In 1867 he toured Europe.He married when he returned, and lived for most of the rest of his in Harfort,Connecticut. He wrote many books, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, whichhe wrote in 1876. He also gave many lectures, and became a very famous andpopular man.
Once two of his friends decided to write tohim, but they had lost his address. So on the envelope they just wrote "MarkTwain, God knows where". Several weeks later, they received a replay fromthe writer. It just said, "He does!"
Samuel Clemens died in 1910. He isconsidered to be one of America's most important writers.
