Four years ago, when Ted was sixty years old, he retired (退休). He had worked in a restaurant for thirty-three years. He left and returned to his home village. Then he bought a small piece of farm and planted a lot of apple trees on it. He takes care of them and this year there are plenty of apples in the trees. The old man is very happy.

But these days the old man has been worried. Nearly every night his garden is broken into and quite a few apples have been lost. So he decided to try his best to catch the thief himself. Last night, he sat in a tree and carefully watched who would come and pick the apples. Later at night, Mr. Ted was so tired that he went to sleep. Suddenly some noise woke him up. The noise came from a big tree. He went there quietly and saw a boy standing under the tree with a bag full of apples. At once he recognized it was Tom who lives just next to him.

“How can you do that, Tom?” the old man became angry and shouted, “I’ll tell your father about it!” But the boy wasn’t afraid about it. He looked up and called out, “Have you heard that yet, Dad? Mr. Ted has something to talk to you.”

The other day, I happened to meet someone I hadn’t seen for many years. I couldn’t believe the change in him. In fact, he didn’t even seem like the same person.

When I first knew Bill, back in _______ he was one of the most carefree people I had ever met. He was always ready to have a party．He thought nothing of (把…当作平常事) going out for beer at three o’clock in the morning or driving 50 miles to see an old movie he really liked. Bill and I were in the same class in college, and _______ was never dull when he was around. With him there was one wild adventure after another. Sometimes I wondered how we _______ to study for our exams.

Last week I was in Houston on business and I ran into Bill in the bar at the hotel. _______, I wasn’t even sure it was him．Was this short-haired businessman really the same person? I wasn’t really sure until I came near him but it indeed was Bill．Now be works for a bank. He talked most of the evening about his job, his new car and his house. How he had changed! Back when we were in college, the last thing Bill cared about was possessions （财富）．Now they seemed to be his main _______. Although I have changed quite a bit myself, somehow, I never imagined Bill changing so much. My image of him remained the one I had formed at the time when we were college students together.

I suppose it’s foolish to expect people to remain the same, especially when I have changed so much myself. But I must say that I enjoyed the old Bill much more than the new Bill. Maybe he felt the same way about me.

What does travelling mean? Visit, enjoy and discover.

Every year hundreds and thousands of people come to the UK. And London, the c    46     city, is usually their first stop. What can they see? What can they experience (体验)?

Getting around in London is not difficult. There is the underground train, the oldest in the world, or the traditional double-decker bus. A boat trip along the River Thames t    47     you to Tower the London.

Going around the city center on foot is easy. The maps in the streets will show you what is around you in five-minute walk. You can get a great v    48     of the city from 135 meters up on a huge wheel, the London Eye. Look across the river and you will see the Houses of Parliament and the famous clock tower, Big Ben.

There are over 240 museums in the capital, but the two most popular are in South Kensington and c    49     nothing to get into. In the Natural History Museum, the key word is Big. Next to it is the Science Museum. It has those great British i    50    , the history of flight and exploration (探索) of space.

A group of people in my city spend their spare time cleaning up the countryside. They l    51     after the places where birds, insects and other animals live. Before my last birthday I was too young to join them. You have to be at least thirteen years old, and now I am.

On the first Sunday of every month we spend several hours making the countryside a good place for animals to live in and people to v    52    .

Sometimes the human beings are the cause of the problems. They find a pleasant spot for a picnic, but they do not take their litter home with them. The rubbish that they leave behind looks ugly and can harm the wildlife.

Nature also sometimes makes life d    53     for certain animals. Last Sunday we spent all afternoon c    54     overgrown plants from a river. Now the water flows freely again. The fish can swim along without anything in their way.

Some of the work we do does not have such a q    55       result. We know new trees will take several years to grow before they are big and strong enough for birds to begin nesting in their branches. But it is satisfying to know that we are doing what we can do to help.

When Robert was about two years old, he tried to remove a bottle of milk from the refrigerator but it fell, spilling milk all over the kitchen floor.

When his mother came into the kitchen, instead of shouting at him or punishing him, she said, “Robert, what a great and wonderful mess you have made! I have rarely seen so much milk. Well, the damage has already been done. Would you like to get down and play in the milk for a few minutes before we clean it up?”

Indeed, he did. After a few minutes, his mother said, “You know, Robert, whenever you make a mess like this, eventually you have to clean it up and restore everything to its proper order.”

After they cleaned up the spilled milk, his mother then said, “You know, what we have here is a failed experiment in how to effectively carry a big milk bottle with two hands. Let's go out in the back yard and fill the bottle with water and see if you can discover a way to carry it without dropping it.”

The little boy learned that if he grasped the bottle at the top near the lip with both hands, he could carry it without dropping it. At that moment he knew he didn’t need to be-afraid of making mistakes. Instead, he learned that mistakes were just good chances for learning something new, which is, after all, what scientific experiments are all about. Even if the experiment “doesn't work”, we usually learn something valuable from it.