【推荐2】My husband had just bought a new washing machine for me. I decided to use it the very day and I washed a lot of things.

Everything worked well, but I found one of my husband’s socks (短袜) missing. I looked everywhere for it , but I couldn’t find it anywhere.

The next morning, I got ready for school as usual. When the bell rang, the students came in. I greeted them and told them what we were going to do that day.

When I turned around to write on the blackboard, the class burst into a roar (大笑声)! They laughed and laughed. They laughed so much, in fact, that I was afraid the headmaster would come in to see all this.

I asked the class to stop, but the more I talked, the more they laughed. I decided to pay no attention to them and I continued to write on the blackboard. When I did this, they roared even more.

Finally, the teacher who had the room next to mine came in to see what all the laughter was about.

“Good heavens,” I said, “Will someone please tell me what is so funny?”

“Oh, God,” said the teacher, “You have a brown sock to the back of your skirt !”

So that’s how I found my husband’s missing sock.

“Oh, well,” I said to the class, “Let’s just say you have had an unforgettable lesson on static electricity (静电).”

【推荐3】I remember the first day I saw her playing basketball. I watched in wonder as she ran circles around the other kids. She managed to shoot jump shots just over their heads and into the net. The boys always tried to stop her but no one could.

I began to notice her at other times, basketball in hand, playing alone, sometimes until dark. One day I asked her why she practiced so much. She looked directly in my eyes and without a moment of hesitation she said, “I want to go to college. The only way I can go is if I get a scholarship. I like basketball. I decided that if I were good enough, I would get a scholarship. I am going to play college basketball. I want to be the best. My daddy told me if the dream is big enough, the facts don’t count. Then she smiled and ran towards the court to repeat the routine I had seen her over and over again.

One day in her senior year, I saw her sitting in the grass, head cradled in her arms. I walked across the street and sat down in the cool grass beside her. Quietly, I asked what was wrong. “Oh, nothing,” came a soft reply, “I’m just too short.” The coach told her that because of her height she would probably never get to play for a top ranked team — much less offered a scholarship — so she should stop dreaming about college.

She was heartbroken and I felt my own throat tighten as I sensed her disappointment. I asked whether she had talked to her dad about it yet. She lifted her head from her hands and told me that her father said those coaches were wrong. They just didn’t understand the power of a dream. He told her that if she really wanted to play for a good college, if she truly wanted a scholarship, that nothing could stop her except one thing — her own attitude. He told her again, “if the dream is big enough, the facts don’t count.”

The next year, as she and her team went to the Northern California Championship game, she was seen by a college recruiter. She was indeed offered a full scholarship to a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) women’s basketball team. She was going to get the college education that she had dreamed of and worked toward for all those years.

It’s true: If the dream is big enough, the facts don’t count.

【推荐2】Halley’s Comet (哈雷彗星) appeared at the time of Mark Twain’ s birth, making his arrival an even more special event. Twain said in 1909, “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.” Surprisingly enough, Mark Twain died the day after it passed by earth a second time.

Mark Twain was a gifted writer, speaker and humorist whose own characters shone through his work. As his writing grew in popularity, he became a public character in America. As the young country grew in size but not in a cultural manner to the liking of the European people, it became fashionable to criticize (批评) “the ugly American”. Twain travelled to Europe and made the Europeans friendly to America with his wisdom (智慧) and humor.

Twain began his working life as a typesetter at a newspaper, worked as a printer, a riverboat pilot, and then turned to gold mining. When he failed to strike it rich, he turned to journalism and it was during that time that he wrote the short story that started his writing life, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras county.

Although Twain’s life as a writer made him rich, his turn as a gentleman investor (投资者) did much to make him impoverished. He lost a great deal of money earned by writing on different investments. Twain recovered financially with the help of a man named Henry Huttleson Rogers. Further success from book sales improved his financial health.

【推荐1】Fire fighting is a serious matter. Knowing what to do during a fire can save people’s lives. It is important to know the ways you can use and show them to everyone else in the family, such as stairways and emergency exits, but not elevators.

From the lower floors of buildings, escape through windows is possible. Learn the best way to get out from a window with the least chance of serious injury.

The second floor window is usually not very high from the ground. An average person, hanging by the fingertips will have a drop of about 6 feet to the ground. It is about the height of an average man. Of course, it is safer to jump a short way down than to stay in a burning building.

Windows are also useful when you are waiting for help. Be sure to keep the door closed before opening the window. Otherwise, smoke and fire may be drawn into the room. Keep your head low at the window to be sure you get fresh air rather than smoke that may have leaked（漏）into the room.

On the second or third floor, the best windows for escape are those which open onto a roof. From the roof a person can drop to the ground more safely. Dropping onto cement might end in injury. Bushes and trees can help you to have a soft landing.

【推荐2】Some English words are made up of the same part and have different beginnings and different endings, such as import, export, report and transport. All these words, you can see, have the same “port”, which come from the Latin word, meaning “to carry” or “to move” from one place to another. And according to the bit at the beginning, which we call the prefix the meaning changes. “Import” means “to carry in” or “to bring into a country”, “export”, “ex” means “out of”, so this word means “to carry out of the country”, “re” means “back”, so the “report” means “to tell somebody, to bring back information to somebody”, “transport”, “trans” means “across” and it means “to carry across one place to another”.

Let’s look at the following words: supporter, reporter, importer and exporter. You can see that in this case these words are nouns which are made up of the verbs plus a suffix, thus meaning a person who completes the verb. So supporter means somebody who supports. A reporter is somebody who reports. Importer is somebody who imports and exporter is somebody who exports, and so on.

【推荐3】Salad seeds（生菜种子）that went on a round trip to outer space and back grew at a slightly slower rate than the ones on earth, scientists have found, thanks to thousands of young people who helped conduct an out-of-this-world experiment.

The project started in 2015, when British astronaut （宇航员）Tim Peake took a million rocket seeds with him on his journey to the International Space Station （ISS）. The seeds spent six months there before they were sent back to Earth in 2016. In a message sent from the ISS, Peake said the science experiment was to find out if the conditions in space affected the seeds' ability to grow.

Around 600,000 pupils at 8,600 schools in the UK were then asked to grow the rocket seeds that had been to space, along with regular seeds that had never left the planet. Peake described the experiment as "one of the largest and most inspirational experiments of its kind".

The results of the study, which have just been published, found that the space seeds grew more slowly than the ones that had stayed on Earth. Researchers on the experiment said this was due to the stresses of space travel, such as the zero-gravity （零重力）atmosphere and high levels of cosmic rays（宇宙射线）,which slowed the growth of the plants.

Now researchers are hopeful that if the seeds are properly protected, it might be possible to grow plants during future space tasks to other planets. Dr Jake Chandler, from University of London, who led the study, said,“ The possibility of eating home-grown salad on Mars may be one small step closer.

【推荐1】Brian arrived at the San Francisco airport two hours before the flight to Paris. He was wearing three shirts, a jacket, two pairs of socks, a pair of shorts, and two pairs of jeans. He was carrying one small backpack, which was very full, but he didn't have any other luggage(行李). Brian needed to meet a man named Tony before he checked in (办理乘机手续) for his flight. He found Tony near the Air France counter. Tony gave him a round-trip ticket and a small package.

"Give this package to Jean Paul at the airport in Paris. He will have a sign with your name on it. I think you can find him easily," Tony said, "You don't have any luggage, right?"

"Only this backpack," Brian answered. "You said I could bring one carry-on bag."

"That's right. One carry-on bag is fine. Have a good trip."

"Thanks."

Is Brian a criminal (罪犯)? Not at all. He is an air-courier. And he paid only $110 for the round-trip ticket to Paris. Air-couriers get cheap airline tickets because they take important packages and papers to foreign countries. Businesses sometimes need to get packages and papers to people in foreign countries by the next day. Often, the only way they can do this is to use an air-courier company. It is not cheap for a business to send a package with an air-courier, but it is quick.

Every year about 80,000 people worldwide travel as air-couriers. The number of tickets for the air-courier travel is growing by about 10 percent a year. However, air-courier travel isn't for everyone. But if you have very little money, you can be flexible (灵活的) about your travel plans, and don't mind wearing the same clothes for a week, it can be a great way to take a vacation!

【推荐3】Whether in the home or the workplace, social robots are going to become a lot more common in the next few years. Social robots are about to bring technology to the everyday world in a more humanized way, said Cynthia Breazeal, chief scientist at the robot company Jibo.

While household robots today do the normal housework, social robots will be much more like companions than mere tools. For example, these robots will be able to distinguish when someone is happy or sad. This allows them to respond more appropriately to the user.

The Jibo robot, arranged to ship later this year, is designed to be a personalized assistant. You can talk to the robot, ask it questions, and make requests for it to perform different tasks. The robot doesn’t just deliver general answers to questions; it responds based on what it learns about each individual in the household. It can do things such as reminding an elderly family member to take medicine or taking family photos.

Social robots are not just finding their way into the home. They have potential applications in everything from education to health care and are already finding their way into some of these spaces.

Fellow Robots is one company bringing social robots to the market. The company’s “Oshbot” robot is built to assist customers in a store, which can help the customers find items and help guide them to the product’s location in the store. It can also speak different languages and make recommendations for different items based on what the customer is shopping for.

The more interaction the robot has with humans, the more it learns. But Oshbot, like other social robots, is not intended to replace workers, but to work alongside other employees. “We have technologies to train social robots to do things not for us, but with us,” said Breazeal.