Hello, everyone. I’m Jill Green. I’m a middle school student. It’s nice to meet you here. First, let me tell you something about my family. There are five people in my family. They are my mother, my father, my sister, my brother and me.

My father is a driver. My mother is a teacher of English at my school. My sister is sixteen and my brother is sixteen, too. They are twins. I am twelve. We all enjoy watching football games.

My home is on West Street. There is a big tree and a lot of small trees around my house. The big one is a pear tree and the small ones are apple trees. But there aren’t any pears or apples on them. There is a photo of my house. In the photo, you can see a cat in my house. It’s black and white. We like it very much.

【推荐2】On a street in Manhattans Chinatown, there is a small shop full of customers called Fong On. It is a food shop and sells a kind of traditional Chinese food — tofu. However, several years ago, the owner of the shop Paul Eng faced lots of difficulties. He was the heir (继承人) to the tofu shop though he had no idea how to make tofu.

Mr. Eng’s grandfather learned to make tofu in the 1900s from a Chinese master when he arrived in Chinatown. He opened a small tofu shop and developed recipes (配方). His tofu had been popular in Chinatown for more than eighty years. However, as many Chinese people left Chinatown and foreigners moved in, many tofu shops closed down. In 2017, Mr. Eng’s parents closed their shop, too. The recipes, never written down, also disappeared with it.

But Mr. Eng had a chance to reopen the shop. Because Mr. Eng didn’t know how to make tofu, he decided to make the recipes in his own way. He turned to the Internet. “There are lots of videos. I try to match what I heard from our former (前任的) workers to what people are doing in these videos,” he said.

In August, 2019, Mr. Eng’s tofu shop opened again. It serves not only fresh traditional tofu but also a kind of tofu pudding, which is a new product. The shop quickly attract (吸引) both old customers and young people. The old are happy to see fresh tofu come back, while the young want to try new food from a different culture.

Two years ago, I got a job in a Chinese-Canadian company in Vancouver(温哥华). One day my new boss said he would invite me to have dinner to celebrate my new job in a Chinese restaurant. “A Chinese restaurant? Chopsticks? Oh no! Will I make a complete fool of myself?” I thought.

That evening, I cooked noodles and spent two whole hours trying to learn how to use chopsticks. Try as I might, I didn’t succeed. I called my penfriend and asked her to explain exactly how to use chopsticks. She patiently explained the proper way of holding them.

“Louise, it’s not that hard,” she said.

“That’s easy for you to say,” I replied. “You’ve been eating with chopsticks all your life. It’s natural for you!”

I didn’t sleep well that night. The next day, when my boss took two co-workers(同事) and me to the restaurant, he spoke to the server in Chinese. My heart was beating fast, but then I noticed something strange. Instead of chopsticks, we all had knives, forks and spoons. I didn’t understand at first, but then, it hit me. My boss knew that I would have trouble with chopsticks. To save me from embarrassment(尴尬), he had arranged(安排) for us to be served with knives, forks and spoons. I couldn’t believe how thoughtful he was.

Now, we often go out for lunch. After a lot of practice, I’ve mastered how to use chopsticks. And it isn’t really that difficult once you get used to them.

[1] Mr. Klarke (克拉克) works in an agricultural (农业) college. There he taught his students how to keep the seeds and when to sow (播种) them and how to look after the plants. He knows much and makes his classes lively and interesting. So he is①            .

[2] One day he was asked to give a talk in a town. On his way there, something was wrong with his car at a foot of a hill. He tried to②              it, but he failed and he had to climb up the hill and ask the villagers there for help. It was very hot that day and soon he felt thirsty. He saw a lot of pear trees in a garden. And a young man was picking them in it.

[3]“Young man!” said the old man, “Could you give me some pears, please?” In fact the young man was one of his students and he③             him at once. He wanted to have a joke with him. So he answered, “Of course, sir. Do you want the hot ones or cold ones?”

[4]It made Mr. Klarke feel strange. He thought to himself, “I’ve never heard of hot pears. Well, let me tell him I want some hot ones.”And he said as he thought.

[5]Having heard this, the young man threw some pears to the ground. Mr. Klarke picked them up, blew the dust (灰尘) off them and ate them up. “You said they were hot, but why were they cold?” asked the old man. “What did you blow them for, then, Mr. Klarke?” said the young man with a smile.

I am Peter. As a university student, I decided to learn German. For some reason I really liked the language, but I was not very good at learning it. The grammar troubled me a lot and even drove me crazy. My only advantage (优点) was spelling—I got an A on every word test I took. After two years of studies, I struggled to communicate in broken German and signed up to study in Germany to complete my degree. It was the hardest term I would ever have.

The moment I arrived in Germany, I felt like I was starting from scratch. The German I’d learned in university wasn’t practical for everyday conversation. My book knowledge fell by the wayside as I thought about the basics of getting around, reading emails and talking with my classmates, I was often nervous at school, worried about whether the teachers would call on me in class and whether I’d understand their questions. I only relaxed a little around my eight roommates, who were willing to speak German slowly to me.

I chose to study three courses-reading & writing, grammar and history. All were in German and difficult, but the history class was the worst. The teacher spoke so quickly that almost everything he said flew right over my head. I sat in the front, took notes and even recorded every single word he said in class, but nothing helped. I had no idea what the class was really about…

Years have passed, but I still remember how it felt to struggle so hard at learning another language. That trip was a difficult but valuable lesson. I think my failure that term taught me just as much as my success.