A while ago my brother and I were     1     a lot. At first we would argue at least once a week but then it     2     became a daily occurrence. He was always teasing me and although I tried not     3     to him, it was usually difficult not to.

I can’t     4     the reason for all our arguments, but I remember once he took my mobile phone without asking and used it to make calls to his friends. I was so angry. I couldn’t believe he would     5     do something like that! Instead of fighting with him, I decided then to     6     from him completely and just pretend he didn’t exist. I thought this would help but the situation became     7    .

In the end, I decided to     8     the conflict by telling him how l was feeling. He was surprised as he didn’t realise he had hurt me so much.     9     we made peace with each other and since then he has always been friendly and     10     to me.

Communication is always the best thing when you have a problem with someone.

When I was young, I liked to play jokes on people I knew, especially on my     1    and friends. One day my mother was cooking and I was     2     with my younger brother Tony. Suddenly I     3     to my mother and said,"Tony fell from the open window!" She was very   worried and ran out of the kitchen. Then I said, "Don't worry, I'm just joking"And my mother shouted at me, "    4     you do it again , I'll hit you."

Another day I went swimming with my friends in the sea. I wanted to play a joke on them. In the beginning, I swam     5    and I called out, "Help!" All my friends came to help me,    6     , they found that I was joking.

But half an hour     7     I wasn't joking. I was so fast    8     I got tired and couldn’t swim on in water. I tried my best to call my friends for help, but this time nobody came to help me.In the     9    They found I was telling the truth. They came and saved my life. They took me to the hospital. This is the best lesson in my life. From then on, I haven't joked on    10    .

One evening after dinner, Mr. and Mrs. Bond called a family meeting. “We have to make a final decision”, Mr. Bond     1    , “You see, your mother has been offered a post as co-director of a TV station in Chicago. However, the station is not here. After thinking long and     2     about it, we’ve concluded that the right decision is to move to Chicago.”

Marc looked shocked, while his sister Rachel     3     started asking when they’d be moving. “It’s surprising but exciting!" she said. Marc simply said, “I can’t leave my friends. I’d rather stay here and live with Tommy Lyons!”

The Bonds hoped that by the time they moved to Chicago in August, Marc would grow more     4     to the idea of leaving. However, he showed no signs of accepting the decision, refusing to pack his     5    .

On the morning of their move, Marc was nowhere to be found. His parents called Tommy Lyons’ house, but Mrs. Lyons said she hadn’t seen Marc. Mrs. Bond became increasingly anxious while her husband felt angry with their son for behaving so     6    .

What they didn’t know was that Marc had started to walk over to Tommy’s house with a faint idea of     7     in the Lyons’ attic(阁楼) for a few days. But as he walked along, all the familiar landscape of his neighborhood     8     him of the things he and his family had done together: the green fence he and his mother had painted; the trees he and his sister used to climb while playing hide-and-seek; the park where he and his father often took     9    together. How much would these mean without his family, who made them special in the first place? Marc didn’t take the time to answer that question but instead, he hurried back to his house,     10     if there were any boxes of the right size to hold his record collection.

Internet English

Twenty years ago this week the British inventor Tim Berners-Lee created the world’s first webpage. It is worth pausing to consider the    1     impact that his invention has had on the English language.

Everyday words like google, unfriend and app simply didn’t    2     in 1990.

Even more words have had    3     shifts in meaning in those two decades. If you had mentioned tweeting to an English-speaker a few years ago, he would have assumed you were talking about bird noises, not the use of the microblogging site Twitter.

Long ago, if someone lived online, it didn’t mean they spent every    4     minute on the internet, but that they travelled around with the rail network.

And wireless still means, to anyone of a    5     age, a radio, not the system for retrieving (找回) internet pages without wires.

“The internet is an amazing    6     for languages,” said David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor. “Language itself changes slowly but the internet has    7     up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.”

English is a    8     inclusive language, and if words continue to be used for at least five years they generally end up in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Grammatically correct? An LOLcat.

But less accepted are the peculiar dialects that have    9     up amongst some users. For example, “LOLcat” is a phonetic, grammatically-incorrect caption (说明文字) that accompanies a picture of a cat, like “I’m in ur bed zleeping”.

In an article called “Cats Can Has Grammar”, the blogger Anil Dash referred to LOLcat as “kitty pidgin”. But does something like LOLcat have the staying    10     to become an accepted form of English?

Not according to Professor Crystal. “They are all clever little developments used by a very small number of people — thousands rather than millions. Will they be around in 50 years’ time? I would be very surprised.”

Yuanyuan is a senior secondary school student. She never liked chatting with people online. She thought     1     communication wasn’t worth spending time on and it made people more     2     . All her friends seemed to spend about 90     3     of their time talking to friends on the Internet and only about 10 percent talking to them in real life. Yuanyuan couldn’t understand it at all. Her best friend Tingting agreed with her and felt that     4     communication is important.

Then,     5     happened that changed how she felt about online communication. Yuanyuan moved to Canada with her family and her     6     became her most valuable possession. By chatting to each other online and using a video chat app, Yuanyuan and Tingting could     7     their friendship even though they were thousands of miles apart. From then on, neither of them criticised     8     for having online friendships.