Long long ago, there was a kind lady. Every day, she baked bread for her family and an extra loaf for any hungry passer-by. She placed the extra bread beside a window. When the woman placed the bread, she always gave a prayer for her son. Her son had gone to a faraway place and she hadn’t heard from his for a very long time.

Every day, a tramp came and took away the bread. He said when he was leaving, “The evil you do remains with you. The good you do comes back to you.”

The woman felt irritated. “Not even a word of thanks”, she said to herself with unhappiness.

This went on, day by day.

Finally, the woman became so angry that she decided to get rid of the tramp. She added poison to the bread she was going to offer to the tramp! When she was placing it, her hands shook. “Look at what I’ve done!” she immediately threw the bread into fire and made another one.

As usual, the tramp came and pick up the bread. “The evil you do remains with you. The good you do comes back to you,” he said again and left.

That evening, there was a knock on the door. Surprisingly, the women’s son was standing in the doorway. He was tired and weak. “Mum, it’s a miracle that I can come back home! While I was only a mile away, I was so hungry that I almost gave up. But just then an old tramp gave me a loaf of bread. He said that the bread was his food everyday. But today, I should get the bread, for I needed the bread much more than he did!”

The lady’s face turned pale when she heard those words. The tramp’s words suddenly came back to her, “The evil you do remains with you. The good you do comes back to you.”

A couple of days ago, a brownish gray hazed(雾霾) settled over Shanghai. It was, of course, ________. There have been several days since then and some people are ________ that we may be the next city to catch up with Beijing, a city was slowly covered by a thick dirty brown haze.

The terrible pollution has not escaped the notice of foreigners in China, either. Recently a number of foreigner talents have left China. Mare van der Chijs, a co-founder(共同创始人) of the Chinese Video site Tudou(土豆网), said one of the big ________ he is leaving China is that “the pollution is too heavy.”

Shanghai does have a pollution problem, but it is not unsolvable. There are new laws to restrict harmful emission from cars and the city is trying to use “green technology” in his new buildings, factories and energy plants. But it will take years ________ we see the wonderful changes.

In the meantime, we should try to protect ourselves, or ________ not add to the pollution problem. We should pay attention to the city’s pollution alerts(警报) and wear masks on heavily polluted days. We should try to ________ our energy consumption(消耗量). Remember: The more energy we use, the more pollution we produce.

How can I win a Nobel Prize for writing? Here is the secret from this year’s winner: make it short, keep it real, and work hard.

Canadian author Alice Munro, 82, was a    48     the 2013 Noble Prize in the literature (文学). She is known for her short stories about personal relationship of ordinary people, usually women.

Munro was born in a farmer family in Ontario. The family was very poor. Munro did a lot of physical work a    49     a young girl.

But she decided to be a w    50     when she was 12. She turns her hard childhood into great writing ideas.

The story Dear Life, for example, opens with a description of the neighborhood in which Munro grew up.

B    51    , she talked about her poor relationship with her mother in many of her stories, such as Lives of Girls and Women and Friend of My Youth.

Since she p    52     her first book in 1968, Munro has won many awards, with the Nobel Prize as her biggest honor. But Munro doesn’t see h    53     as a talented writer.

“I’m the opposite of a writer with a quick gift. I don’t grasp it very readily (轻而易举地) at all, the ‘it’ being whatever I’m trying to do,” she said.

Do you d    54     of becoming a writer while sadly admitting you are not that talented? Munro has a tip for you: use notebooks and write a lot.

“I have lots of notebooks that contain this terribly clumsy (蹩脚的) writing,” she said. But it helps her sort out her mind. “Stories would just be working in my head for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them.”

PISA is not the same as pizza, although both words are pronounced the same by Chinese. Pizza, of course, is the tasty Italian dish of crispy bread topped with many wonderful flavors. PISA, on the other hand, is just a test, a reflection of the knowledge you learn in school. And how could that possibly be as flavorful as pizza?!

PISA stands for Programme for International Student Assessment. It’s a test taken every three years by fifteen-year-olds worldwide. It tests students’ ability in math, reading and science. Last year’s results were just released and they show that Shanghai students are ranked number one in the world. Yes, that’s right! Shanghai students are the best in the world!

Shanghai students are the best because they are also the hardest working. No other students in the world put in as many hours of study, homework and test taking as Shanghai students. And few others feel the stress of schoolwork like Shanghai students.

That’s why the Shanghai education authority is encouraging students to step away from their books from time to time and take up hobbies or join clubs. Schools are setting aside time and providing facilities so that students can follow some personal interests such as photography, art, singing and dancing. They want students to have a little more flavor in their lives.

Doing well on the tests like PISA is important, but developing yourself as a whole person is also important. There is no end to the flavor you can add to pizza, and there should be no limit to the amount of flavors you can add to your own life.