【推荐1】The Golden Week is just about to end and soon we will be back at school. It’s with both happiness and sadness. I look forward to seeing my friends and starting practice again, but it also means that I’m officially going through the placement test (分班考试) in less than half a year. From that time on I can choose some subjects I am good at and like. With school starting there are new club activities to try out and experience. For example, Lily is starting a new sport, Track. It’s similar to Cross Country, which I did before The Golden Week.

Being here for a month now, I can easily tell the differences between my junior and senior schools. The hardest or most different part for me was to have the same schedule every day here. Honestly, I prefer to have different classes every day, as I did in my junior school. However, I have fallen in love with the Friday football games. Football is one of my favorite sports now. Before I came, I knew nothing about it. Now I love it, especially to watch it with my junior schoolmates. In Golden Week, we have also been so lucky to go to two school football games.

Before I left school on the Golden Week, I had a test called Weekly Test. Mostly because I didn’t have too many hard classes, it went pretty smoothly. My favorite class is English, and also my hardest. Personally I really like English, where I could write essays (文章), challenge writing skills and improve English talking.

With the end of the Golden Week, I expect to get starting again, starting a new sport and see my friends and classmates.

【推荐2】In May， 1977， I lived in a Howard Johnson's motel (汽车旅馆). My dad and I shared a room with two double beds and a bathroom way too small for a modest 15﹣year﹣old girl and her father. Dad's second marriage was in trouble and my stepmother had kicked us both out of the house the previous week. Dad had no idea what to do with me. That's when my other family showed up.

Barbara and Roland Beach took me into their home because their only daughter， Su， my best friend， asked them to. I lived with them for the next seven years.

Barbara made sure I had lunch money， doctors' appointments， help with homework， and nightly hugs. Barbara and Roland attended every football game I took part in， every drama performance I was in even when I had no speaking lines. For the Beaches， there was no difference between Su and me: I was their daughter， too. When Su and I left for colleges， they kept my room the same for the entire four years when I attended school. Recently， Barbara presented me with an insurance policy they bought when I first moved in with them and had continued to pay for 25years.

The Beaches knew all about me when they took me in. When I was seven， my mother died. By the time I went to live with the Beaches， I believed that life was entirely unfair and that love was tenuous (脆弱的)and untrustworthy. I believed that the only person who would take care of me was me.

Without the Beaches， I would have become a bitter and unhappy woman. They gave me a home that allowed me to grow and change. They gave me the confidence to open my heart.

【推荐3】Lisa started climbing five years ago when a friend asked her to climb Mt. Rainier. The ability to experience part of the mountain that few people reach drew Lisa to continuing her climbing. By 2012 she and her husband had climbed the highest points in North America, South America and Europe. They had also volunteered for numerous projects with Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation (ASC). Their latest goal was Mt. Vinson in Antarctica to collect snow samples for ASC.

It was difficult for Lisa’s family who had spent all their lives in Illinois to picture what would draw her to such a remote continent (大陆). Her primary motivation was to safely climb Mt. Vinson, but secondarily she wanted to share the experience with others who, like her father, couldn’t imagine what the coldest continent was like.

As they gradually made their way up toward Mt. Vinson, Lisa’s body got used to the cold, dry air and a heavy pack. Her mind was filled with the vastness of this continent. How is it possible that so few people have seen it? How can it be kept so that others have the opportunity to responsibly do so? Part of her duty was to answer the last question.

After she had collected the snow in a small plastic bottle, she labeled (贴标签) it and stored it for safe keeping. As she watched the snow inside, she thought about the story it would tell. What would researchers learn about this mountain? What had it endured during its lifetime? What would we, as servants of this earth, do with this information? She didn’t have the skills to answer these questions by herself, but knowing that she played a small part in allowing them to be answered was exciting, just as gratifying as reaching the top.

【推荐1】Jackie Chan was sick and tired of trying to cross over into American movies. The martial arts wonder and ex-Bruce Lee stuntman(特技替身演员) was a superstar in China, but his attempts at going Hollywood in films like Big Brawl (1980), The Cannonball Run (1981), and The Protector (1985) barely impressed American audiences. “Nobody knew who this little Chinese guy was that spoke no English,” Chan told Yahoo Entertainment during a recent Role Recall interview. “I was disappointed and thought, ‘No more American market.’”

In the late 1990s, his manager begged him to make one more go at it: There was this project called Rush Hour, in which Chan would play a Hong Kong police inspector who teams up with a wise-cracking LAPD detective (Chris Tucker) to rescue a Chinese politician’s kidnapped daughter. Chan agreed to do the 1998 action comedy directed by Brett Ratner in large part because it allowed him to speak in broken English.

After Chan wrapped Rush Hour, he told his manager he would never do another film like it again. “They don’t allow me to do my own style of action. The English, I’m not good. Chris Tucker’s English, I don’t understand.” Chan said.

He sat there dumbfounded(惊呆了的) as moviegoers laughed through the premiere(首映). “Why are they laughing? I just don’t understand,” he thought.

So Chan returned to Asia to work once again in his home region, when he got the call: Rush Hour was a massive hit. Released in Sept. 1998, it earned $141 million at the U.S. box office and $244 million worldwide.

It also leads to two sequels(续集)… and two more hits: 2001’s Rush Hour 2, Chan’s highest grossing(总收入) of all time ($226 million in the U.S., $347 million worldwide) and 2007’s Rush Hour 3 ($140 million in the U.S., $258 million worldwide).

“Slowly, slowly, they’ve brought me to Hollywood again,” Chan said. “Now slowly I’ve been understanding American culture. I’ll try to stay as long as possible.”

【推荐2】When you talk to doctors in the hospitals, it often happens that most of them are very serious and speak in a range of terms that may be difficult to understand. But Zhang Wenhong, the leader of the Shanghai team of experts in the treatment of novel coronavirus pneumonia, is one of the exceptions. He caught the public’s attention for his recent frank and funny speech.

Zhang’s words first went viral(走红)on the Internet after he said in late January that he had sent doctors and nurses who are members of the Communist Party of China (CPC) to frontline hospitals to treat coronavirus cases. “When becoming CPC members, we vowed (发誓)that we would always put people’s interests first in the face of difficulties,” Zhang said. “This is the moment we live up to the vow. All CPC members must rush to the frontline. No bargaining.”

Such a hardcore declaration of his attitude won widespread applause among Internet users. “A person’s morals are witnessed most in a critical situation. Nothing could win more recognition from the people than the down-to-earth behavior of the CPC members,” said Yang Haiyan, a 32-year-old Shanghai resident.

One month later, when Zhang advised local residents to reduce the risk of spreading the virus by staying at home, he said in Shanghai dialect: “If you don’t stop seeing friends, you will see them again in the ICU.”

Though chased by the media, Zhang described himself as a medical worker who must speak out now, but will return to keeping a low profile after the outbreak ends. “I spoke because of the fear among the public, owing to limited knowledge of the contagion (传染病),” said Zhang on Feb 26. “However, once the curtain of this coronavirus incident falls, it may be hard to find me. I’ll just hide myself in a corner, studying complicated patient cases and doing some reading, silently.”

【推荐2】My father told me a family story about his mother, my grandmother.

In 1949, my father had just returned home from the war. On every American highway you could see soldiers in uniform hitchhiking (搭便车) home to their families, as was the custom at that time in America.

Sadly, the excitement of this reunion with his family soon disappeared. My grandmother became very ill and had to be in hospital. The doctors told my father that she needed a blood transfusion immediately or she wouldn’t live through the night. The problem was that Grandmother’s blood types was AB-, a very rare type even today, but even harder to get then because there were no blood banks or air flights to ship blood. All the family members had their blood tested, but not one member was a match. So the doctors gave the family no hope; my grandmother was dying.

My father left the hospital in tears to gather up all the family members, so that everyone would get a chance to tell Grandmother good-bye. As my father was driving down the highway, he passed a soldier in uniform hitchhiking home to his family. Deep in sadness, my father had no inclination at that moment to do a good deed. Yet it was almost as if something outside himself pulled him to a stop, and he waited as the stranger climbed into the car.

My father was too upset to even ask the soldier his name, but the soldier noticed my father’s tears right away and asked why. My father told this total stranger everything.

It got very quiet in the car. Then this soldier reached his hand out to my father, in which rested the dog tags from around his neck. The blood type on the tags was AB-. The soldier told my father to turn the car around and get him to the hospital.

My grandmother lived until 1996, and to this day no one in our family knows the soldier’s name. But my father has often wondered, was he a soldier or an angel in uniform?