【推荐1】Papa's jaw dropped when mama told him that Sister had cheated on her final exams - not to succeed but to fail. “It's unbelievable!” he said. “Sister has always been so proud of her good grades!”

“Yes, she has,” said Mama. “But it's not unbelievable. It just shows how badly she wanted off the swimming team.”

“Wanted off the swimming team?” said Papa. “She never said anything about that to me.”

“Of course she didn't,” said Mama. “She was afraid you'd blow your top. You already had her getting a swimming scholarship to collage and winning gold medals at the Olympics. Can you imagine how much pressure she must have felt? For her, being on the team couldn't have been much fun.”

“Oh, my Gosh!” Papa said, clapping a hand to his forehead. “I've been so stupid! I just thought she'd want to be a champion swimmer because she's so good at it.”

“It's like anything else, dear,” said Mama. “No matter how good at it you are, if it stops being fun, you won't want to do it anymore.”

Papa put his head in his hands.

“She must be rally mad at me,” he mumbled. “Maybe I should say sorry to her.”

Sister's footsteps could be beard on the stairs She came into the kitchen and looked hopefully up at her parents. with a smile, "Your papa and I have decided that there's no reason for you to.

“Honey,” said Mama with a smile, “Your papa and I have decided that there's no reason for you to be on the swimming team if you don't want to.”

Sister's face lit up like a Christmas tree. “Yippee!” she cried.

“And,” added Papa, “there's no need for any more drills. I'm sure you'll bring your grades back up all by yourself.”

Sister ran to Papa and jumped into his arms. She gave him a big hug. “I'm going to go play cards with Lizzy!” she said. “See you later!”

From the kitchen window, Mama and Papa watched their daughter run down the sunny road toward Lizzy's house.

“It's good to see her happy again,” said Mama.

“It sure is,” Papa agreed. “As for the swimming team, there's always next year.”

“If?” Mama prompted him.

“Oh, right,” said Papa. “If she wants to.” Mama smiled. “At least you're learning, dear.” she said. She kissed him.

“Well, you know what they say,” Papa said. “Better late than never.”

【推荐2】After Joe and his six-year-old son, Joey, arrived at a wildlife shelter in Florida’s Everglade, Joe went to the service centre, leaving his son alone by the water. Seconds later, Joe heard a scream.

Joey had slipped on snake-grass at the edge of the water and fallen in face-first. Turning around, Joe saw Joey’s right arm in the jaws of a big alligator(短吻鳄).

Time seemed to stop as Joe ran towards his son and into the water, which was almost a metre deep. As Joey screamed, Joe wrapped his left arm across the boy’s chest and began pulling him back towards the bank. With his right hand, Joe struck the alligator’s head as hard as he could.

A young man nearby ran over, screaming at Joe to pull Joey out of the water. But Joe feared what would happen to Joey’s arm if he pulled too hard. So he guided Joey up the bank, dragging the alligator along with him.

While Joe dealt blows to the beast’s head, the other man kicked its belly. After three or four kicks, the alligator released Joey and fled. Joe picked up his son and found that he’d suffered only a few cuts. Joe thanked the stranger and sped home.

A week after the accident, the child went with his class on a field trip to another wildlife shelter. His teacher, who watched him closely at the alligator exhibit, told Joe his son acted like any other little boy.

“Because of my dad, I feel less and less afraid of alligators,” says Joey. “He’s like my bodyguard.”

【推荐1】With the young unable to afford to leave home and the old at risk of isolation (孤独), more families are choosing to live together.

The doorway to peace and quiet, for Nick Bright at least, leads straight to his mother-in-law: she lives on the ground floor, while he lives upstairs with his wife and their two daughters.

Four years ago they all moved into a three-storey Victorian house in Bristol — one of a growing number of multigenerational families in the UK living together under the same roof. They share a front door and a washing machine, but Rita Whitehead has her own kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and living room on the ground floor.

“We floated the idea to my mum of sharing a house,” says Kathryn Whitehead. Rita cuts in: “We spoke more with Nick because I think it's a big thing for Nick to live with his mother-in-law.”

And what does Nick think? “From my standpoint, it all seems to work very well.

Would I recommend it? Yes, I think I would.”

It's hard to tell exactly how many people agree with him, but research indicates that the numbers have been rising for some time. Official reports suggest that the number of households with three generations living together had risen from 325,000 in 2001 to 419,000 in 2013.

Other varieties of multigenerational family are more common. Some people live with their elderly parents; many more adult children are returning to the family home, if they ever left. It is said that about 20% of 25-34-year-olds live with their parents, compared with 16% in 1991. The total number of all multigenerational households in Britain is thought to be about 1.8 million.

Stories like that are more common in parts of the world, where multigenerational living is more firmly rooted. In India, particularly outside cities, young women are expected to move in with their husband's family when they get married.

【推荐2】Shi developed an interest in handicraft (手工艺) when she was a child who often found herself alone at home. Out of boredom, she would play with paper, folding and cutting them into different shapes. This interest later developed into a passion, one that she decided to pursue by majoring in arts and design during her time in university. After graduation, however, she found herself working at a ship design company as she was unsure about what she wanted to do with her future. About a year later, the Shanghai Arts and Crafts Research Institute offered her a position in their paper-cutting department. Realizing that she still had a love for the handicraft, she made the career switch.

In 2010, Shi started learning paper-cutting from Xi Xiaoqin, an expert of paper cutting. Three years later, one of her works, The Fighting Fish, won the third place in a national competition. Six years later, Shi was named a Shanghai paper-cutting inheritor (继承人)and became the city’s “youngest inheritor” of the paper-cutting heritage. Over the past decade, Shi’s works have been exhibited in 23 exhibitions. Although Shi is already so skilled that she can create an animal pattern in 10 minutes, she continues to practice her skills every day. The reason is that she views paper-cutting as not just an art form, but also a form of learning about traditional Chinese culture. She thinks she has the responsibility to inherit this cultural treasure, and will make more efforts to attract people from different age groups and different fields to try paper-cutting.

【推荐3】The loveliest house that I’ve ever lived in was one that I lived in with my grandparents when I was a child. The name of the house was Crosslands. And I have some very happy memories of Crosslands.

It was, it seemed, so huge to me as a child. And it had a lovely living room with a piano in it and a lovely sort of hall with lots of carpets and chests and antiques(古董)and so on. And there was a mysterious room. It was the drawing room, and we only used it on Sundays, or Christmas Day or Easter Day, and I used to be amazed about this room because it had the best furniture in it but it was covered up with sheets. It was as if all the furniture was wearing clothes and it seemed to me ridiculous that we couldn't enjoy this beautiful furniture all the week through. And probably my favorite rom was the kitchen. It had a lovely red flagstone(石板)floor, which was always highly polished, and an Aga, you know, one of those big cookers that heats the whole room so it was always warm there. It was a very warm room with baked bread and my grandmother used to make ice cream and we’d eat it in there and … there was a vegetable garden leading from there so I spent a lot of time in the vegetable garden picking peas and eating them — my grandmother used to really cross with me because I used to pick all the vegetables and the fruit for our meals and then I’d eat half of them, because they tasted so delicious coming fresh from the garden.

I went back to it a few years ago and it was a big mistake. They've modernized it inside, they've got rid of those lovely old fire-place … have just gone. And they've knocked a wall down so the drawing room and the living room have become one big modern plastic kind of room. But I think what upset me most about it was the feeling that the house had shrunk. It had become smaller and my memory of this lovely large warm comfortable. house had turned into an old house with modernized rooms inside it. And it taught me a lesson really, that you can’t go back on the past and recapture it. But there's still a beautiful memory there.