I used to watch her from my kitchen window. She seemed so ________ among the tall boys on the playground. The school was ________ the street from our home and I would often watch the kids as they played during breaks. She would ________ dribbling（控球）and shooting over and over again.

One afternoon I asked her ________ she always kept playing. She smiled. “ I want to go to University of California and the only way for me is to get a scholarship. I like basketball a lot. I ________ if I were excellent enough to play college basketball, I would get a scholarship.” My dad told me if the ________ is big enough, the facts don’t count. Then she smiled and ran towards the court to repeat the routine.

Well, she appeared to be very confident. She managed to shoot jump shots just ________ their heads and into the net. The boys always tried to stop her but ________ could. I watched her through those junior high years and into high school.

One day in her senior year, I saw her sitting in the grass ________, head in arms. I walked across the street and sat down in the cool grass beside her. I asked what was wrong. “Oh, nothing,”   she replied in a ________ voice. “I am just too short to play for a top ranked team. So I should stop dreaming about college.”

I asked if she had told her father about it. She said that her father thought they were ________.

They just did not understand the ________ of a dream. He told her that if she really wanted to play for a good college and if she truly wanted a scholarship, nothing could ________ her.

The next year, as she and her team went to the Northern California Championship game, she was ________ by a college basketball coach. She was indeed offered a scholarship, and admitted to the college team. She was going to get the college education that she had ________ and worked toward for all those years.

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

Frank and his brother Jack lived near the ocean. Frank was outgoing while Jack was shy. They liked doing different things. Frank was famous for organizing games of beach volleyball, football, and any other sport imaginable. Jack preferred to draw, paint, or build sandcastles (沙堡).

Frank didn’t understand why Jack would rather do artistic things than play ball. He believed sports often allowed many kids to play together. That was when Jack’s idea hatched. He would show Frank what doing things together looked like!

After Jack finished creating a special sandcastle with stairs, towers and walls, he took pictures of it. Then he painted colorful posters featuring ( 突出) his sandcastle and the question, “Can you top this?” He hung his posters everywhere in town, announcing his plan for a day of sandcastle artistry-all ages welcome.

When Frank saw poster, he told Jack that no one would come. Still, shortly after sunrise on Saturday, Jack was on the beach digging in the sand. By mid-morning, four kids were sculpting (雕塑) the sand alongside him. By noon the number had increased a lot.

After Frank came back from his ball game, he went to check how his brother’s plan turned out.

He couldn’t believe what he saw. At least 30 people were building a city of sandcastles, and everyone was chatting and laughing and working together! It was the most beautiful thing he had seen on the beach.

“I guess you’ve proved me wrong,” Frank said. “You should make this sandcastle day a yearly tradition!” Handing Frank a shovel (铲子) with smile, Jack got started together with his brother on their super creation in the sand.

① It is common to surf the Internet at home now. However, a recent survey showed over 90% of parents are not clear what websites their children visit. I strongly believe that a training project should be started to help parents to improve their internet and computer skills. Then they can better monitor and guide their children.

② Providing training would get parents to pay more attention to their children’s online activities.

This is one advantage. If parents had a better understanding of the internet and websites, they would see the need to make sure that their children use it properly and responsibly.

③ Providing training to parents would allow parents to help their children with their schoolwork as well. These days, some homework of online courses needs to be done on computer. If parents have poor computer skills, they will be of little or no help with the homework. That can make parents very upset. Some people argue that it is good that students can work independently on computers. However, it is clear that students, especially young students often need this kind of home support.

④ Improving parents’ Internet and computer skills might also be a good way for parents to improve their relationships with their children. These days, children spend a lot of their free time on computers. If parents want to be part of their free time, they need to see that playing on computers can be a fun family activity. Joining their children can help parents bridge the gap between them and their children.

⑤ Most people believe that children need to be helped and guided to use the Internet in a proper and responsible way. Therefore, training is extremely important.

From tiny seeds (种子), great discoveries grow. A mini-garden carried on China’s Chang’e 4 moon lander recently became home to the first plant to grow on another world.

This is yet another success for Chang’e 4. On January 2, the probe (探测器) became the first lander to touch down on the far side of the moon. This is the unknown face of the moon that is always looking away from us, so we never see it from down here on the earth. Although it is often regarded as the dark side of the moon, the far side actually gets as much sunshine as the near side. For example, when all we can see is a silver of a new moon, the far side of the moon is in full sunlight.

Part of Chang’e 4’s mission (使命) is to see how a moon base could be built for humans, including exploring (探索) whether humans could grow food and other plant products there. Chang’e 4 carried a mini-garden with air, water and soil with seeds planted in it. When plants shoot on the earth, their stems grow away from the gravity (the force that keeps your feet on the ground), and so they always shoot upwards. The moon’s gravity is a sixth as strong as the earth’s, so Chang’e 4’s experiment was a test: would the earth plants know which way was up on the moon? Four days after landing, a tiny cotton shoot showed that they do.

Night has now fallen on the far side of the moon; sunlight will not return until the start of February. As a result, the cotton shoots died. Besides the darkness, the plants can’t stand the cold (it can drop to -170*C on the moon at night). However, the experiment is a success, since it has proved that it is possible for plants to grow in space.