Just before Christmas in 1994, a letter arrived at our house. The postmark was from Tuskegee, Alabama, so we all knew who it was from. We excitedly gathered around mother as she opened it.

I didn’t get the leave I expected for Christmas. I’ll miss all of you. Please leave the Christmas tree up until I make it back. I hope to be home by March.

Love from your son,

Clifton

My heart sank. I felt extreme sadness that my favorite brother wouldn’t be home for Christmas. My mother, being the optimist she always was, said, “Well, it looks like we’ll get to have two Christmases this year!”

After Christmas, my sister and I worked together to make sure we kept that Christmas tree looking as pretty as possible. This was no easy feat. By mid-January, the branches drooped so low to the ground. Each day, ornaments would come crashing to the ground and there were brand new sprinklings of pine needles all over the wooden floor. My sister and I took turns sweeping them up. We repositioned the ornaments to the stronger branches on the tree, hoping they would stay on.

Each time we freshened that tree up, my sister and I were full of thoughts about Clifton and how happy we would be to see him again. It made us feel that he was close by, even though he was hundreds of miles away.

On March 5, the doorbell rang. We ran to the door and gave Clifton a big hug. As he hugged mother, I could see him peek over her head at the Christmas tree.

“It’s beautiful,” he said. “Thank you.” Clifton opened his presents and told us all sorts of stories about his work in Tuskegee. That night as we slept, we heard a crash in the living room. We all ran to see what had happened. The tree had toppled onto the sofa and there were needles and broken ornaments everywhere. We all had a good laugh. It was fortuitous (巧合的) Clifton got home when he did.

UK consumers spent a record £7.2bn in 2017 on all forms of music, video and games, for CDs, DVDs, and vinyl records(黑胶唱片)to console(控制台)software and subscriptions to music and TV streaming services. That surpassed the £7.1bn spent by consumers on “printed word” books, magazines and newspapers for the first time, according to figures published by the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA).

The research, prepared by the Leisure Industries Research Centre (LIRC) at Sheffield Hallam University, credits the “dramatic growth” in the popularity of paid-for digital services such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Deezer and Spotify as the key factor behind booming sales of entertainment.

ERA Chief Executive Officer Kim Bayley said: “It is an extraordinary proof of the appeal of digital entertainment services that they have helped home entertainment to this milestone since the invention of the printing press.

“The success of the UK entertainment market is ultimately the result of collaboration between the creatives, studios and labels that produce compelling(扣人心弦的)content and the retailers and services that bring it to the public.

Dr. Themis Kokolakakis from the LIRC added: “The 2008-2009 recession hurt both the entertainment and reading market. Since 2012, the entertainment market has recovered very strongly, producing record 2017 results.

“Traditional media is under pressure, partly because of the growth of streaming services, partly because there is so much competition for people’s time and attention. Entertainment has grown while reading has stagnated(停滞).”

The ERA said the statistics showed the dramatic change in consumer habits as they shifted form buying physical products to digital consumption and formats.

Five years ago, 80% of revenues were generated by “buy to own” formats such as DVDs and CDs. Now 56% of revenues come from digital sources including video streaming, electronic movie rental, subscriptions, online multiplayer games and in-app and mobile purchases.

Two physical products, however, have bucked the downward sales trend. The vinyl revival(重新流行)is still going strong with sales up 34 percent to £87.7m. Sales of boxed software for games consoles have also made a comeback, rising by 5% to £750m- the first growth in a decade.

The ERA’s Bayley commented: “Digital services may be grabbing the headlines, but physical retailers continue to identify new opportunities to drive sales of discs.

“Vinyl is a prime example of retailers nurturing demand for a product most people had long written off. It would be foolish to underestimate consumers’ continuing affection for the physical products.”

Planning a trip to Italy is half about the history and beauty and half about the food. Enjoying everything that Italian cuisine has to offer can be daunting, especially since most of the really exciting options are outside the big cities.

Alba

Alba's greatest culinary(烹饪的) offering is the Festa dei Tartufi - the White Truffle Fair - which takes place across every weekend in October and November. It offers world-famous truffles from the local area, as well as the Truffle Show. The fair also features folk traditions as well as the food and drink, particularly aiming at educating children and thus making the event fun for all the family.

Minori

Minori is known for its handmade pasta - particularly scialatielli, a thick and short pasta similar to linguine, which features heavily on local menus, along with pastries made from the local lemons as with other towns on the Amalfi Coast.

Procida

The main attraction, however, is the food - the local lemons, often called limoni pane or "bread lemons", thanks to their large amounts of pith, are the main ingredient in a popular local dish: lemon salad, in which the lemons are flavored and garnished with garlic and mint.

Naples

Naples made its stamp on culinary history with the invention of the pizza and has maintained it to the modern-day by having more stars from the Michelin Guide than any other Italian city. It's appropriate, then, that it plays host to numerous food festivals, including the Marco Island Seafood and Music Festival, and the Mercato Spring Fling and Food Festival. The former, founded to raise money for charity, takes place in March each year over the course of three days. The latter is only a month later, in April, with Mercato restaurants providing a range of food and bar options.

Most of us relate creativity to our concept of self, Either we’re “creative” or we aren’t, without much of a middle ground. “I’m just not a creative person!” a frustrated student might say in art class, while another might blame her talent at painting for her difficulties in math, giving a comment such as, “I’m very right-brained.”

Dr. Pillay, a tech entrepreneur and an assistant professor at Harvard University, has been challenging these ideas. He believes that the key to unlocking your creative potential is to ignore the traditional advice that urges you to “believe in yourself. “ In fact, you should do the opposite: Believe you are someone else.

Dr. Pillay points to a 2016 study examining the impact of stereotypes (固有印象) on one’s behavior; The authors, educational psychologists Denis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar, divided their college student subjects into three groups, instructing the members of one to think of themselves as “romantic poets” and the members of another to imagine they were “serious librarians” (the third group was the control). The researchers then presented all the participants with ten ordinary objects, including a fork, a carrot, and a pair of pants, and asked them to come up with as many different uses as possible for each one. Those who were asked to imagine themselves as romantic poets came up with the widest range of ideas, whereas those in the serious-librarian group had the fewest. Meanwhile, the researchers found only small differences in students’ creativity levels across academic majors.

These results suggest that creativity is not a fixed individual characteristic but a “malleable product, as long as he or she feels like a creative person. Dr. Pillay argues that, besides identifying yourself as creative, taking the bold, creative step of imagining you are somebody else is even more powerful. So, wish you were more creative? Just pretend!

England

England is the biggest of the four countries in the United Kingdom. Over 50 million people live in England, which is around 80% of the total UK population.

    16     It is spoken today by billions of people all over the world. Many students go to England from other countries to study the language and learn about the culture. Although everyone speaks English, there are many different accents around the country. French was the official language in England between 1066 and 1362.       17    

The English people love music.       18     Glastonbury is a five-day festival of music, dance, comedy, and theatre and around 175,000 people go there. Many people stay at the festivals for a few days and they camp in tents. People listen to all types of music, especially pop and rock. England has produced many international groups and singers.

The most popular sports in England are football, rugby and cricket. Most towns have a football, rugby and cricket ground where teams can play.       19           Womenˈs football is also popular. Cricket is a traditional sport played with a bat and a ball. People like to watch all these sports on TⅤ．

England is a multicultural country.       20       Indian, Chinese and Italian foods are popular. Traditional English food includes fish and chips, roast beef, sausages and mashed potatoes. Many English people drink several cups of tea every day, usually with milk. However, different types of coffee are also popular.