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Now in some places of our country, many people are cutting down (砍伐) the trees in the forests. They need more ______ to build houses and more farmland to grow crops and so on. The areas of forests are getting ______. Some scientists say that there ______ no big forests in 20 or 30 years. It is really a(n)______ thing. ______ the forests, we will have sandstorms (沙尘暴) often. The weather will get ______. The earth will become a big desert (沙漠). A lot of plants and animals will ______. Crops will not grow anywhere. Life will be ______ for everyone.

So we should do our best ______ our living environment and keep our mountains ______, the water clean, and the sky blue.

Which is the biggest country in the world? Well, look at the map and you’ll know it is Russia. It is followed by Canada, China, the U.S.A. and Brazil. Among them, China has the largest number of people, with a population(人口) of about 1.3 billion(十亿). Canada has the longest coastline(海岸线). The total length(长度) of the coastline is about 202,080 kilometers. It is long enough to go around the earth six times.

Do you know which is the largest island(岛) in the world? Is that Hawaii? No, it is much smaller than the largest island in the world—Greenland. Greenland is to the northeast(东北) of Canada. Ice covers 81% of its land. It is very cold there, so there are only about 56,000 people living on the island.

We asked thirty young people between 14 and 18 several questions. All the children had computers at home. The average time spent on a computer in a week was about 12 hours, with the highest about 32 hours, and the lowest only 5 hours. Most children said they usually used computers to play games. Fourteen children told us they did some word-processing(文字处理) at times. Eight people told us they kept addresses and phone numbers on their computers or used them as diaries. Only three people said they were learning to write computer programs and nobody used databases(数据库). Only two of them said computers helped with their lessons. The diagram(表格) gives all the results one by one.

The results show that computer use is quite common among 14-18-year-old children. They also show quite clearly that computers are seen by most young people as little more than game machines. It means to us that, though computers are common(普遍) in the homes of young people, they have not yet become popular in everyday life.

What will the future be like? It’s possible that we may often fly up into space! Out of all the coolest inventions of the year, Times chose Spaceship One as the best.

Spaceship One is a 6-meter-long white spaceship. On June 21st, American pilot Mike Melvill flew it to space and back-about 100 kilometers up into the sky. ①Some might say it’s not a big deal. You know, people went to the moon years ago.

Well, Spaceship One is special because it is the first spaceship that wasn’t made by the government. A private(私人的) US company built and launched it. Lots of people want to travel in space. But it’s too expensive. American millionaire(大富豪) Dennis Tito paid almost US $20 million to become the first space tourist to visit the International Station in 2001. So private companies began to think of making their own spaceship to take other tourists up into space. The success of Spaceship One is a good start. In the next 10 to 15 years, ②if you pay $20,000 to $100,000 you could fly high above the earth.

③What about having your own spaceship in your garage(车库) and taking it to space at the weekend?