Annie’s eyes popped open Friday morning. She hurried downstairs and began to have her breakfast quickly.

“What’s the rush, early bird?” Dad asked. “Today’s my spelling test. Dad,” Annie said. “Mrs. Page promised a prize to everyone who gets 100 percent. I’ve studied the list all week. The words are hard, but I’m ready.”

Annie studied the spelling of each word again as Mom drove her to school. Finally, it was time for the test. “Impatient,” Mrs. Page began. Annie wrote down the word correctly and quickly.

“Word number two: weird,” Mrs. Page said.

“Easy,” Annie thought. She quickly wrote it on her paper.

Twenty-three words later, Mrs. Page collected the test papers. “I’ll mark your papers during lunch,” she told the class. After lunch Mrs. Page said, “Several of you earned a prize today for perfect test scores. Tracy, Jonas, Olivia, and Annie all scored 100 percent on the test!”

Annie smiled as she walked to the front of the room. Mrs. Page gave each of the four students a nice pencil. Annie’s was silver, pink, and blue — her favorite colors. She held the beautiful pencil high while the class clapped. “This is one of my best days ever,” Annie thought as she sat down.

Mrs. Page handed back the test paper and Annie read the words over, proud of the hard words she had spelled. Suddenly she stopped at the word “weird”. It didn’t look right. Annie pulled out the study list and made a comparison. “W-i-e-r-d,” she whispered. She had spelled it wrong.

“What should I do?” Annie wondered. “I want my classmates to think I’m a great speller. If I tell Mrs. Page I’ll have to give back my prize, or I will become an example for telling a lie.”

Annie stared at the test paper with the big red “100%” written at the top. Then she thought of a lesson Dad taught her when she was very young, “We should always be honest.”

Slowly, Annie raised her hand.

Annie looked around.

On the morning of July 14, 1960, the young woman Jane Goodall arrived at the Gombe National Park. She had brought a tent, a cup, a pair of binoculars and her mother. A group of local men met the strange pair of women and helped carry their camping equipment. Then, around 5 pm, somebody reported that they had seen a chimpanzee. Straight away, Jane set off into the forest to find her first chimpanzee.

After many months of difficult work she made three important discoveries: chimpanzees ate meat, they used tools to get food and they also made tools, Jane wrote her findings in diaries and she began to publish articles in journals such as National Geographic magazine. After a while, scientists and experts started reading her studies and Jane was offered a place at a university. After more years of research she became Doctor Jane Goodall in 1966.

During the seventies, Jane found that chimpanzees can also be violent. She wrote in one diary,“ I thought the chimps were nicer than we are. But it is proved that they are not. They can be just as awful”

A different problem developed in Gombe in the 1980s. Because of the progress of clearing forests, there were only about a hundred chimpanzees living in Gombe by the end of ten years. Jane realized that something had to be done so that chimpanzees and humans could live together, so she set about helping the local community to grow more trees in the region.

After 1989, Jane left her career in Gombe. Firstly, she started travelling and giving lectures. She protested (反对) about the cruelty to chimpanzees used in medical research laboratories. She also set up reserves for chimps which survived.

Nowadays, she spends about 300 days a year giving interviews, talks and lectures, meeting with government officials and raising money for the Jane Goodall Institute, which continues her research. She has very little spare time left but she still spends part of every year in the forest in Gombe, watching her chimpanzees.

I had been acting in school for a few years. When I got a rough role in a play, I, only a junior in my high school, was excited that my inspiring drama teacher and director had trusted me with the part.

We had little time to prepare and I would never forget reading the lines for the first time. At first the dialogue was lively, but then it became quite long and boring. To my surprise, my character had one disrespectful line that complained about his bad luck. I had never said something like that on stage before. Uncomfortable as I felt about it, I had never thought of making myself heard to make a change. I was weak, went silent, and accepted the line as it was.

At our first rehearsal (彩排), I whispered, the line and hoped with so many distractions on stage that the director wouldn’t notice. Luckily, she didn’t. Over three wild weeks of rehearsals, I convinced myself that I could keep faking it. Then, when the curtain finally rose with an audience, maybe I would feel fine about saying the line just once as loudly as I could.

On the night of the open dress rehearsal, I was nervous to see an old couple, the Ehlers, seated in the hall. They were close friends of our family and I had no idea they would be there. When the big moment arrived, with nervousness racing through my body, I went for it. I remember the moment quite clearly. Where I stood. How it sounded. How I felt.

After the show, the Ehlers met me with cheers, a warm hug, and some brief dialogue of their own. While talking with them, I was overwhelmed by mixed feelings of regret and shame.

“Jason, that was quite some language. You surprised us,” Mrs. Ehlers looked at me.

I said goodbye to the couple and waited in the drama room until our director appeared.