When I look back at the first half of the year, I am amazed by how many challenges I have been through. But the biggest one was definitely my high school graduation _______ .

When I first arrived in this Czech Republic four years ago, I was just a normal exchange _____________who spoke only English，then at the end of the year-Long exchange program, I came up with the idea of _____________my high school studies there。

At that time, I was only sixteen and delighted by my new future. But I didn’t realize the _________of completing school in the Czech language, which is considered to be one of the most ___________languages in the world. As I _________ knowledge of certain subjects, I received the worst marks and people around the doubted whether I could graduate. However, I practiced all the time. Gradually, I could communicate with others fluently and my _________ grew.

The final exam day came. Thinking about everyone who had helped and supported me along my journey, I felt_________and confident.

In May, I received notice that I had _________the exam. At my graduation ceremony, my Czech teacher said very proudly in front of everyone. “One student, she is from China with merely/only three years of learning Czech, she __________. She deserves a golden folder for the certification. ”

My journey through high school was finally finished, though the journey of University is just about to begin, I think I am ready.

So what is rewilding?

Imagine our natural homes growing instead of getting smaller. Imagine a variety of species instead of less species. That is rewilding. Rewilding is environmental restoration. Rewilding offers hope for wildlife, humans and the planet.

Why is rewilding important and necessary?

● Our natural ecology is broken. The places where you would expect wildlife to exist have been reduced to wet deserts. The seabed has been destroyed and there have been no living creatures any more.

● Our wildlife is disappearing. Many wonderful species have declined over the past century. We’ve lost more of our large animals than any European country.

● We need keystone species. These vital species, including top predators (食肉动物), drive ecological processes. Their loss has worsened our living systems.

● Nature looks after us. Good natural ecology can provide us with clean air and water, prevent flooding and store carbon. Rewilding can leave the world in a better state than it is today.

What are challenges?

As a long-term project, our “rewilding britain” has its challenges. Many people are not interested, because we have got used to the lack of/fewer native forests. Many farmers oppose/disagree with the idea. They thought it a crazy idea to bring back predators because they would start killing farm animals. It takes time to educate them. Above all, we need money! So we need your help!

Make a donation/contribution.

Help us bring back living systems and restore wild nature!

With your help we can...

● Open up new chances for rewilding and push for change.

● Develop tools to educate, influence and spread the word.

Thanks for your support.   

Check other information on our homepage as follows http://www.rewildingbritain.com.

Three months after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Rebecca Sell, a photographer and reporter, photographed a New Orleans couple worriedly examining photo collections. As she took the photo, a thought flashed through her mind. “I told them I could take the ruined/destroyed pictures, copy them and give them digitally restored (修复) photos,” she recalls. Although a bit sceptical/doubt, the couple agreed. Rebecca took their photos home, restored them and took them to the couple at their   home. “It felt so good to be able to do that for them,” says Rebecca.

When her editor, Dave Ellis, saw the photo of the couple, he suggested they go back and restore destroyed photos for even more people. So in January 2006, with paid time off from the paper, the two set up Operation Photo Rescue in Pass Christian. After posting a notice in the community newsletter, Rebecca and Dave received 500 photos in four days. For each, the pair took a new digital picture, then used high-tech software to erase/remove the water spots/mud and restore colors. It just so happened that a popular website mentioned the experience, and soon Operation Photo Rescue   had emails from hundreds of volunteers, including photographers and restoration experts, eager to help.

Though digital restoration is a painstaking process, mending valuable family pictures means the world to victims like Emily Lancaster, 71, who took out lots of destroyed photo collections after Katrina, never thinking the mess could be saved. But she just couldn’t lose a few treasured pictures, including a picture of her father, who had passed away, and a photo of her husband as a boy. Then she heard about Operation Photo Rescue. “I didn’t have a whole lot of hope they could fix them, but they did,” Emily says. “Almost every day I think about all the pictures I’ve lost. I’m so happy to have these two.”

In the five years since Katrina, Operation Photo Rescue has collected thousands of pictures.   Volunteers make “copy runs” to areas across the country to gather destroyed photos. “It’s great to be able to give people some of their history back,” says Rebecca. “One person told me that thanks to us, her grandmother got to see her photos again before she passed away. Things like that remind me why I do this.”

GOING TO UNIVERSITY is supposed to be a mind-broadening experience. That statement is probably made in comparison to training for work straight after school, which might not be so encouraging. But is it actually true? Jessika Golle of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, thought she would try to find out. Her result, however, is not quite what might be expected. As she reports in Psychological Science this week, she found that those who have been to university do indeed seem to leave with broader and more inquiring minds than those who have spent their immediate post-school years in vocational (职业的) training for work. However, it was not the case that university broadened minds. Rather, work seemed to narrow them.

Dr. Golle came to this conclusion after she and a team of colleagues studied the early careers of 2,095 German youngsters. The team used two standardized tests to assess their volunteers. One was of personality traits, including openness, conscientiousness（认真）and so on. The other was of attitudes, such as realistic, investigative and enterprising. They administered both tests twice—once towards the end of each volunteer’s time at school, and then again six years later. Of the original group, 382 were on the intermediate track, from which there was a choice between the academic and vocational routes, and it was on these that the researchers focused. University beckoned for 212 of them. The remaining 170 chose vocational training and a job.

When it came to the second round of tests, Dr. Golle found that the personalities of those who had gone to university had not changed significantly. Those who had undergone vocational training and then got jobs were not that much changed in personality, either—except in one crucial respect. They had become more conscientious.

That sounds like a good thing, certainly compared with the common public image of undergraduates as a bunch of lazybones. But changes in attitude that the researchers recorded were rather worrying. In the university group, again, none were detectable. But those who had chosen the vocational route showed marked drops in interest in tasks that are investigative and enterprising in nature. And that might restrict their choice of careers.

Some investigative and enterprising jobs, such as scientific research, are, indeed beyond the degreeless. But many, particularly in Germany, with its tradition of vocational training, are not. The researchers mention, for example, computer programmers and finance-sector workers as careers requiring these traits. If Dr. Golle is correct, and changes in attitude brought about by the very training Germany prides itself on are narrowing people’s choices, that is indeed a matter worthy of serious consideration.