It was Molly’s job to hand her father his brown paper lunch bag each morning before he headed off to work.

One morning, besides his ______ lunch bag, Molly handed him a second paper bag, which looked a bit old.

“Why two bags?” her father asked. “The other is something else,” Molly answered. “What’s in it?” “Just some something. Take it with you.”

Not wanting to discuss the matter, he put both bags into his briefcase, kissed Molly and rushed off. At noon he opened Molly’s bag and took out all the things: a small Teddy bear, 2 tiny sea shells, three small stones, and 12 pennies … The ______ father smiled, finished eating, and swept the desk clean into the wastebasket, Molly’s things in the bag included, and then put himself into the afternoon work.

That evening, Molly ran up to him a she was reading the newspaper.

“Where’s my bag?” “What bag?” “The one I gave you this morning.”

“I ______ it at the office. Why?” “I forgot to put this ______ in it,” she said. “And, besides, Daddy, the things in the bag are the things I really like — I thought you might like to ______ with them. You didn’t lose the bag, did you, Daddy?”

“Oh, no, I just forgot to bring it home.” He ______.

While Molly hugged her father’s neck, he opened the note that read, “I love you, Daddy.” Molly had given him her ______ — all that a 7-year-old child owned.

Love in a paper bag, and he ______ it. He had even thrown it in the wastebasket. So he went back hurriedly to the office. Just before the night cleaner, he found all the things back and carried the bag home ______.

After dinner, he asked Molly to tell him about the things in the bag. It took a long time to tell. ______ had a story or a memory.

“Sometimes I think of all the great times in this sweet life,” he thought.

The life journey with the people we love is all that really matters. It is such a simple truth but it is so easily forgotten.

Languages have been coming and going for thousands of years, but in recent times there has been less coming and a lot more going. When the word was still populated by hunter-gatherers, small closely knit (联系) groups developed their own forms of speech which have no connection with each other. Some language experts believe that 10,000 years ago, when the world had just five to ten million people, they spoke perhaps 12,000 languages between them.

Soon afterwards, many of those people started settling (定居) down to become farmers, and their languages too became more settled and fewer in number. In recent centuries, trade, industrialisation (工业化), the development of the nation-state and the wide spread of basic education, especially globalisation and better communications in the past few years, all have caused many languages to disappear, and dominant languages such as English, Spanish and Chinese are increasingly taking over.

At present, the world has about 6,800 languages. And they are used in different parts of the world. The general rule is that mild zones have relatively few languages, often spoken by many people, while hot wet zones have lot, often spoken by small numbers, Europe has only around 200 languages; the Americas about 1,000; Africa 2,400; and Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3,200, of which Papua New Guinea alone offers over 800. The median number (中位数) of speakers is only 6,000, which means that half the world’s languages are spoken by fewer people than that.

Already well over 400 of the total of 6,800 languages are close to extinction (消亡), with only a few elderly speakers left. For example, Busuu in Cameroon (eight remaining speakers), Chiapaneco in Mexico (150), Lipan Apache in the United States (two or three) or Wadjigu in Australia (one, with a question-mark): none of these seems to have much chance of survival.