【推荐1】Born in Shiqian county in Guizhou province, 34-year-old Sun Xiaojun used to be the naughtiest student in class. This changed after he broke an ankle and was diagnosed with osteomyelitis (骨髓炎) at the age of 9. His right leg later had to be amputated. His family spent all of their money for the operation. The young man then made the decision to study hard.

In 2006, Sun was admitted to the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, Hubei province, majoring in material forming and control engineering. In 2009, he won the opportunity to continue his studies at Japan’s Tohoku University. “I started to wear a prosthesis (假肢) two years after I began studying in Japan. I had never worn one before, so it took quite a long time to get used to it.” he said.

The experience wasn’t very comfortable. He would sometimes fall over when he tried to walk fast, which made him feel awkward. In 2013, he came up with the idea of creating a smarter prosthetic that used robotics. In 2018, he founded BionicM in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, to create inventions to help those with a disability. Sun won the Red Dot Best of the Best award in 2020 because of his robotic prosthetic knee.

“I myself use a prosthetic limb, and I’m also a researcher. There are about 4 million people in China with amputated lower limbs,” he added. “The cost of an ordinary prosthesis is around 60,000 to 100,000 yuan, unaffordable for most.” Sun said most prosthetics are produced in Europe. “I didn’t start my company for the money, but to make a product that is useful to society. Amputees have a basic need to walk,” he said. According to Sun, the robotic knee his company produces is priced at around 300,000 yuan per pair, while similar products sold elsewhere average around 800,000 yuan. Admitting that this is not ideal, he said that his robotic knees are still in small-scale production. He hopes that by raising more money, he’ll be able to expand production and make his devices more affordable.

【推荐2】Faced with many challenges in his life, John has never let them stop him. Despite having his leg amputated as a young man, he has gone on to be first a Paralympic champion and more recently an astronaut in training! Let’s learn more about his story…

John first discovered his love for sports when he was young, and he quickly became passionate about running and hockey. When he was 19 and visiting Vietnam, he had a bad accident that required one of his legs to be amputated.

When he returned to his home country of England, he missed running. Eventually, he was provided with an artificial leg that allowed him to run again. He started to compete in events that were designed for disabled athletes and, after much hard work, won several medals in international competitions, including the Paralympics.

Following his success in running, John studied exercise and medicine. He continued to focus on how to manage his emotions to not allow his disabilities to limit the possibilities for his life. When he learned that the European Space Agency (ESA) was looking for new astronauts, it intrigued him. He decided to give it a try, among 22,000 other applicants!

John was selected by the ESA to become the first “para-stronaut” the world has ever known. The ESA will work with John to understand how a person with a disability can operate in space. If all goes well, it will be at least five years before John goes into space as an astronaut.

John’s story is truly inspiring, and it shows us that anything is possible if we set our mind to it. No matter what challenges we face in life, we can overcome them and achieve greatness if we work hard and persevere. So, keep pushing yourself to be the best you can be, and never let anyone tell you that you can’t achieve your dreams.

【推荐1】In the early 1870s, Mark Twain was on his way to becoming the world’s most famous writer and humorist. Meanwhile, the tools of writing were undergoing a profound transformation — from fountain pens to typewriters. Like any other new technology, the new writing machine did not perform well enough at first. But when Twain laid eyes on a Remington in a Boston store window, its salesman claimed that the writing tool was quite reliable.

The salesman began to explain it to Twain and his friend. “He showed us samples of its work,” Twain later recalled, “and said it could do fifty-seven words a minute — a statement which we frankly confessed that we did not believe. So he put his type-girl to work, and we timed her by the watch. She actually did the fifty-seven in sixty seconds. We were partly convinced.” They timed the girl over and over again — with the same result always. Twain bought it on the spot at the price of $125.

And he recognized its usefulness almost immediately. In a letter he typed to his brother, Twain wrote: “The machine has several virtues. I believe it will print faster than I can write. One may lean back in his chair & work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It doesn’t untidy things. Of course it saves paper.”

But Twain fell out of love rather swiftly. After a year or two, he found it was damaging his character. He found the machine to be “full of faults — unbearable ones,” he later wrote. Then he gave his machine to his writer pal William Dean Howells. “My morals began to improve,” Twain said.

However, Howells sent the machine back to him after just six months. “I gave it away twice after that,” Twain said, “but it wouldn’t stay,” Trying to get rid of it completely, he settled on a coachman (someone driving a coach pulled by horses) who “was very grateful, because he did not know the animal, and thought I was trying to make him wiser and better.” The coachman eventually traded it to another person.

But Twain would ultimately come back to the uncontrollable creature. His 1883 book, Life on the Mississippi, was the first literary work to be completed on the machine.

The First Kite

Kites have been around for thousands of years. The first kites were created in China. There are three stories about how the first kite was born.

Many people believe that the kite was created when people watched birds fly. They then attempted to make a light object shaped like a bird that could fly high in the wind.

The second story goes like this. The kite was born as Chinese children sat below a catalpa tree (梓树). A catalpa tree is known for large leaves and seed pods (荚), which can be over 10 inches long. The catalpa tree’s seed pods have two “wings” that help the seeds move far from the base of the tree. As the leaves and seed pods sailed on an upward wind, the children became inspired to create their own kites.

There is a Chinese legend (传说) telling a different story. When a farmer was working in his field one morning, the wind blew his hat off many times. He had to stop to run after his hat. When the farmer went in for lunch, he had an idea that he could tie one end of a thin rope to his hat and the other end around his wrist (手腕). That afternoon, he went to work again. A sudden and strong wind swept the hat off his head and carried it high into the sky. But the farmer no longer needed to run after his hat. At that time, he got the idea of making a kite.

The idea for a kite could have been born as people watched birds fly, sat below a catalpa tree or found a way to get back a hat. Like the roots of many inventions, these stories are each inspired by people’s experiences or observations of the natural world.

【推荐3】The Nez Perce Indians are a tribe that lived in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. At the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition (探险队) , which was one of the first journeys by Americans from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast and back again, the Nez Perce territory (领土) covered about 17 million acres, covering parts of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. But that was a brief sweet history.

In September 1805, when Lewis and Clark came off the Rockies on their westward journey, the entire exploring party was hungry and ill -- too weak to defend themselves.

Had the Nez Perce chosen to attack them, they could have put an end to the Lewis and Clark expedition there on the banks of Clearwater River. Instead the Nez Perce welcomed the white Americans and looked after them until they made a full recovery. Thus began a long friendship between the Nez Perce and white Americans. But white men’s greed for land and gold finally broke the friendship.

In 1855 Governor Isaac Stevens of Washington Territory invited the Nez Perce to a peace conference. He said there were a great many white people in the country, and many more would come. But the Chief of the tribe at that time, Old Joseph, replied, “Take away your paper. I will not touch it with my hand.”

Things were quiet for a while after that, but not for long. When Old Joseph died, the chiefship was passed onto Young Joseph. In the late 1870s, government officials came to order the Nez Perce to leave the Wallowa Valley and then began hard battles between the Nez Perce and the white soldiers. After the tribe had fought thirteen battles and moved 1,600 miles to-wards Canada in an attempt to retreat(撤退) north, Young Joseph, gave in to the United States Army. Here was his famous statement, “Hear me my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”

In 1885, Chief Joseph was sent along with many of his band to the Colville Reservation in Washington where Joseph continued to lead his band for another 25 years, at times coming into conflict with the leaders of 11 other tribes living on the reservation.(保留地，居留地)