There was a pet store and the owner had a parrot. One day a 1 walked in and the parrot said to the man ,“Hey you!” The man said, “What!?” The parrot said, “Your 2 is really ugly.” The man got very 3 and went to the store owner and said, “Your bird just 4 my wife. It said she was ugly.”
The owner stormed over, 5 the bird, took it into the “black room,” shook it a bit, 6 out a few feathers, and said, “Don't ever, ever say anything to 7 my customers again. You got that！！！”
With that 8 he took the bird and put it back into its cage. The old bird shook out its 9 and relaxed in its cage. A couple of weeks 10 and in walked this guy and his wife again. The parrot said, “Hey you!” The guy said, “What!?” The parrot answered, “You know that.”
Charlotte Whitehead was born in England in 1843, and moved to Montreal, Canada at the age five with her family. While1her ill elder sister throughout the years, Charlotte discovered she had a(an)2in medicine. At 18 she married and3a family. Several years later, Charlotte said she wanted to be a4Her husband supported her decision.5, Canadian medical schools did not6women students at the time. Therefore, Charlotte went to the United States to study7at the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia. It took her five years to8her medical degree. Upon graduation, Charlotte9to Montreal and set up a private10 Three years later, she moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, and there she was once again a11doctor. Many of her patients were from the nearby timber and railway camps. Charlotte12herself operating on damaged limbs and setting13bones, in addition to delivering all the babies in the area.
But Charlotte had been practicing without a license. She had14a doctor's license in both Montreal and Winnipeg, but was15. The Manitoba College of Physicians and Surgeons, an all-male board, wanted her to16her studies at a Canadian medical college! Charlotte refused to17her patients to spend time studying what she already knew. So in 1887, she appeared to the Manitoba Legislature to18a license to her but they, too, refused. Charlotte19to practice without a license until 1912. She died four years later at the age of 73.
In 1993, 77 years after her20, a medical license was issued to Charlotte. This decision was made by the Manitoba Legislature to honor “this courageous and pioneering woman.”
One morning, Ann's neighbor Tracy found a lost dog wandering around the local elementary school. She asked Ann if she could keep an eye on the dog. Ann said that she could watch it only for the day.
Tracy took photos of the dog and printed off 400 FOUND fliers（传单）, and put them in mailboxes. Meanwhile, Ann went to the dollar store and bought some pet supplies, warning her two sons not to fall in love with the dog. At the time, Ann's son Thomas was 10 years old, and Jack, who was recovering from a heart operation, was 21 years old.
Four days later Ann was still looking after the dog, whom they had started to call Riley. When she arrived home from work, the dog threw itself against the screen door and barked madly at her. As soon as she opened the door, Riley dashed into the boys' room where Ann found Jack suffering from a heart attack. Riley ran over to Jack, but as soon as Ann bent over to help him the dog went silent.
“If it hadn't come to get me, the doctor said Jack would have died,” Ann reported to a local newspaper. At this point, no one had called to claim the dog, so Ann decided to keep it.
The next morning Tracy got a call. A man named Peter recognized his lost dog and called the number on the flier. Tracy started crying, and told him, “That dog saved my friend's son.”
Peter drove to Ann's house to pick up his dog, and saw Thomas and Jack crying in the window. After a few moments Peter said, “Maybe Odie was supposed to find you, maybe you should keep it.”
It was one of those terribly hot days in Baltimore. Needless to say, it was too hot to do anything outside. But it was also scorching in our apartment. This was 1962, and I would not live in a place with an air conditioner for another ten years. So my brother and I decided to leave the apartment to find someplace indoors. He suggested we could see a movie. It was a brilliant plan.
Movie theaters were one of the few places you could sit all day and—most important —sit in air conditioning. In those days, you could buy one ticket and sit through two movies. Then, the theater would show the same two movies again. If you wanted to, you could sit through them twice. Most people did not do that, but the manager at our theater. Mr. Bellow did not mind if you did.
That particular day, my brother and I sat through both movies twice, trying to escape the heat. We bought three bags of popcorn and three sodas each. Then, we sat and watched The Music Man followed by The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. We'd already seen the second movie once before. It had been at the theater since January, because Mr. Bellow loved anything with John Wayne in it.
We left the theater around 8, just before the evening shows began. But we returned the next day and saw the same two movies again, twice more. And we did it the next day too. Finally, on the fourth day, the heat wave broke.
Still, to this day I can sing half the songs in The Music Man and recite half of John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart's dialogue from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance! Those memories are some of the few I have of the heat wave of 1962. They're really memories of the screen, not memories of my life.
Elizabeth Freeman was born about 1742 to African American parents who were slaves. At the age of six months she was acquired, along with her sister, by John Ashley, a wealthy Massachusetts slaveholders. She became known as “Mumbet” or “Mum Bett.”
For nearly 30 years Mumbet served the Ashley family. One day, Ashley's wife tried to strike Mumbet's sister with a spade. Mumbet protected her sister and took the blow instead. Furious, she left the house and refused to come back. When the Ashleys tried to make her return, Mumbet consulted a lawyer, Theodore Sedgewick. With his help, Mumbet sued(起诉) for her freedom.
While serving the Ashleys, Mumbet had listened to many discussions of the new Massachusetts constitution. If the constitution said that all people were free and equal, then she thought it should apply to her. Eventually, Mumbet won her freedom—- the first slave in Massachusetts to do so under the new constitution.
Strangely enough, after the trial, the Ashleys asked Mumbet to come back and work for them as a paid employee. She declined and instead went to work for Segdewick. Mumbet died in 1829, but her legacy lived on in her many descendants(后裔). One of her great-grandchildren was W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founder of the NAACP, and an important writer and spokesperson for African American civil rights.
Mumbet's tombstone still stands in the Massachusetts cemetery where she was buried. It reads, in part: “She was born a slave and remained a slave and remained a slave for nearly thirty years. She could neither read nor write, yet in her own sphere she had no superior or equal.”
How fit are your teeth? Are you lazy about brushing them? Never fear: An inventor is on the case. An electric toothbrush senses how long and how well you brush, and it lets you track your performance on your phone.
The Kolibree toothbrush was exhibited at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. It senses how it is moved and can send the information to an Android phone or iPhone via a Bluetooth wireless connection.
The toothbrush will be able to teach you to brush right (don't forget the insides of the teeth!) and make sure you're brushing long enough. “It's kind of like having a dentist actually watch your brushing on a day-to-day basis,” says Thomas Serval, the French inventor.
The toothbrush will also be able to talk to other applications on your phone, so developers could, for instance, create a game controlled by your toothbrush. You could score points for beating monsters among your teeth. “We try to make it smart but also fun,” Several says.
Serval says he was inspired by his experience as a father. He would come home from work and ask his kids if they had brushed their teeth. They said “yes,” but Serval would find their toothbrush heads dry. He decided he needed a brush that really told him how well his children brushed.
The company says the Kolibree will go on sale this summer, for $99 to $199, developing on features. The U.S. is the first target market.
Serval says that one day, it'll be possible to replace the brush on the handle with a brushing unit that also has a camera. The camera can even examine holes in your teeth while you brush.
The kids in this village wear dirty, ragged clothes. They sleep beside cows and sheep in huts made of sticks and mud. They have no school. Yet they all can chant the English alphabet, and some can make words.
The key to their success: 20 tablet computers(平板电脑) dropped off in their Ethiopian village in February by a U.S. group called One Laptop Per Child.
The goal is to find out whether kids using today's new technology can teach themselves to read in places where no schools or teachers exist. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers analyzing the project data say they're already amazed. “What I think has already happened is that the kids have already learned more than they would have in one year of kindergarten,” said Matt Keller, who runs the Ethiopia program.
The fastest learner—and the first to turn on one of the tablets—is 8-year-old Kelbesa Negusse. The device's camera was disabled to save memory, yet within weeks Kelbesa had figured out its workings and made the camera work. He called himself a lion, a marker of accomplishment in Ethiopia.
With his tablet, Kelbasa rearranged the letters HSROE into one of the many English animal names he knows. Then he spelled words on his own. “Seven months ago he didn't know any English. That's unbelievable,” said Keller.
The project aims to get kids to a stage called “deep reading,” where they can read to learn. It won't be in Amharic, Ethiopia's first language, but in English, which is widely seen as the ticket to higher paying jobs.
[1] Nowadays the cost of a new car has fallen in real terms so that it is cheaper than ever to own one, and better road conditions have also attracted more drivers. The result is overcrowding on the road system, which is one of the problems the local governments are faced with.
[2] When people travel to other towns, the problem might be relieved by getting them to park outside the town. Buses could be provided to take them into the centre. These Park and Ride projects are increasingly popular in the UK. At Southerton, for example, a council-funded project led to a 15% drop in city centre traffic over five months.
[3] What the council found, though, was that the project proved somewhat unpopular with shop owners in the area outside the centre. Many of their shops relied on passing car drivers for some of their trade. As the number of people driving past dropped, so did their incomes.
[4] Making car driving expensive is another way of ____________. Road taxes tend to mean that people use their cars less. Fining drivers who are in areas where cars have been banned can also tend to encourage them to leave their cars behind.
[5] However, one thing has to be got right for any solution to succeed. If we expect people to give up the habit of driving, we must give them an alternative they can rely on. Constant delays, unannounced changes to the timetable and sudden cancellations all discourage people from using public transport. People will only see it as a real choice if the buses and trains are on time.
