There once was a very special boy who loved to play games on a computer that sat on his mother’s desk. When his mother wasn’t using the computer, he was ________ to sit and play for as long as he liked.

When he was playing, the game was like a dream in his mind. He was so ________ about the game that he didn’t know if it was sunny outside. He wouldn’t have noticed if a tornado was blowing away his house.

And then one day it ________! He climbed into the chair at his mother’s desk and wanted to play a game, but the keyboard was gone! And so was the monitor and even the mouse.

“Mom!”

The very special boy’s scream ________ his mother and his father running from the kitchen.

“What is it? What’s up?” they cried, rushing to his side.

“Mom!” he said, pointing at the desk. “________!”

His mother looked. His father looked. “At what, son?” they asked. “There’s nothing there.”

“I know. I know,” he said. “The ________ is gone!”

“Oh, is that all,” said his mother as she went back to the kitchen. “The computer is broken. We’re having it fixed. It’ll be back soon.”

“How soon is soon?” the boy ________.

“A week or two,” chuckled (轻声地笑) the father.

It might as well have been a million years. The boy was left alone with nothing to do.

He sat, ________, at the desk. He stared at the empty place where the screen, keyboard, and mouse used to sit. Now there was nothing except a raggedy-paged (页面残破的) old book called Leo the Lop.

With a deep sigh (叹气), he opened the book and looked at the words spread across the page. He read a few words and then a few more. He was ________ to find that pictures began to form in his mind, just like with the computer game. Like a river, the pictures from words began to flow through his mind as he read the wonderful story. He read that book and another and another.

In time, the computer was returned. But the very boy now had a very special ________ that didn’t need a mouse or a keyboard.

For from books come dreams, and from dreams come magical tomorrows.

A new study in Nature shows sea otters (海獭) returning to their home ground in Central California has helped slow down erosion (侵蚀) of the area’s stream banks and marsh (沼泽) edges by up to 90%.

Findings show that areas with large otter populations have less erosion, mainly because the sea otters like eating crabs so much. “It would cost tens of millions of dollars for humans to rebuild these stream banks and restore these marshes. The otters are stabilizing (稳定) them for free, in exchange for a big all-you-can-eat crab meal,” said biology professor Brian Silliman, at Duke University. “Remodeling a coastline is usually something only strong physical forces, like powerful storms or huge tidal flow change, can do,” he continued, “so it begs a question: Could similar results be achieved in other environments around the world?”

Like many California river mouths, Elkhorn once was home ground for otters, which need to eat around 20 to 25 pounds of food every day, with crabs being one of their favourite meals. But after fur traders hunted the local otter population nearly to extinction (灭绝), the number of crabs increased rapidly over the next century.

“Crabs eat salt marsh roots, dig into salt marsh soil, and over time can cause a salt marsh to wear away and disappear. This had been happening at Elkhorn for years until sea otters returned in the mid-1980s,” said the lead author of the study, Brent Hughes. “Today, years after the otters returned, marshes and stream banks became more stable.”

① To discover what role sea otters were playing in all this, the researchers carried on surveys across 13 tidal streams and small field experiments at five locations around the river mouth. ②They lasted over a six-year period. ③The information, collected on the ground, confirmed that the places with large populations of otters, erosion had slowed by the study’s end. ④ “The return of the sea otters didn’t completely fix the losses, but it did slow them down so that these places could become stable again, even with all the other problems,” Huges said.

Angelini, another member of the research team, saw hope in this new method. “All these challenges, like sea level rise and storms, seem difficult to deal with,” she said. “But this study shows us that if we really understand the ecosystem and know what tools to use, we can help make these systems healthier and more stable. And after all these years, we now see these amazing results. It’s a great story.”