When is the shortest day and longest night of a year? The winter solstice (冬至)!     1    

After this date in December, we will have longer days and shorter nights. So the winter solstice means yang (day) beats yin (night). Its Chinese characters “dongzhi” mean winter arrives.     2    

    3     They say, “Eating dumplings on winter solstice protects the ears from cold weather”. This came from a famous doctor named Zhang Zhongjing. He lived during the Eastern Han Dynasty.     4     To help them, Zhang made some dumplings. After eating the dumplings, people felt warmer. Their ears soon got better. From then on, people started this tradition.

However, the southern Chinese enjoy tangyuan.     5    

Our lives would not be the same without bees. Bees help plants grow. Many of these plants provide us with food. What would happen if there were no bees? Some fruits and vegetables that we enjoy could not grow. Bees are wonderful creatures.

But now the number of bees is getting lower and lower. Scientists worry that bees may die off. How to solve it? One answer is to make our gardens friendly to bees.

Making our gardens bee-friendly can increase the number of bees. Planting a bee garden is a great idea. These gardens provide bees with nectar (花蜜). A successful bee garden would have flowers from spring to fall. The garden would have all types of plants that are closely grouped together.

Many people believe that all bees live in hives (蜂箱). In fact, some bees dig into the ground. There they build their nests and lay their eggs. People lay wood pieces or other things on the ground. Bees can not dig nests when these materials cover the ground. Here is another good way to help bees. When you are working outside, leave loose dirt (松土) in flower beds and gardens.

Some bees’ nests are in old pieces of wood while others’ in holes, in buildings or in trees. Gardens can provide spaces like these for bees. Trees or walls that stop wind are a good idea. And cool areas also can help bees get away from the hot sun. Bee gardens also provide bees with water. Bees need water just like people do.

Making a garden friendly for bees is far from a useless task. The results are worth the efforts. A bee-friendly garden is beautiful and colorful. Most importantly, it helps to keep bees healthy and happy.

【推荐3】①Eyes are important to us. We use them to do many things such as reading books, seeing colors and the beauty of the world. But today there are more and more people having eye problems because of their bad eye habits（习惯）. But don’t be afraid. Here are some ways to protect（保护）our eyes.

②First, try to use our eyes in a right way. When we read books, we must keep our eyes 0.3 meters away from the book. One or two hours of looking at screens（屏幕）a day is OK for your eyes.

③Second, eat the best eye food to keep eyes healthy（健康的）. Milk, fruit, vegetables and sea food are good for our eyes, because they have much vitamins A, C, D. Having food like ice-cream and Coke for a long time can even make us lose our eyesight.

④What’s more, we should also know what to do when we have eye problems. If our eyes get hurt, go to the doctor right away. Blink（眨眼）often and this can help us stop dry eyes. If we get something into our eyes, don’t rub（揉）them with our hands. Try to use clean water to wash them.

⑤We only have one pair of eyes. Not having good eyes, we will lose a lot of fun in life. So, let’s try our best to keep them healthy.

【推荐1】“Plants are the basis（基础）of all life, including ourselves. We depend on them for every mouth of food that we eat and air that we breathe,” said David Attenborough in The Green Planet. It is plants that bring us fruit and vegetables. Plants also give us the air we need. Though they can’t walk or talk, they act like animals in many ways.

【推荐2】For most American kids, it wouldn’t be Halloween without trick-or-treating for candy. However, that wasn’t always the way it was.

When the custom of trick-or-treating started in the 1930s and early 1940s, children were given everything from homemade cookies and pieces of cake to fruit, nuts, coins and toys. In the 1950s, candy makers began to promote products for Halloween by putting up many posters in the streets. Kids were interested in them and bought a lot. So the candy makers made billions. As time went by, candy became an affordable and convenient offering.

By the 1970s, the wrapped(有包装的) factory­made candy was thought to be the only acceptable thing to hand out to all the little kids. A key reason for this was safety. Parents feared that other people might do something bad with handmade candy.

Today, when it comes to Halloween candy, a number of the most popular brands(品牌) are still classics. For example, the Hershey’s Milk Chocolate bar was produced in 1900 and was first sold seven years later. In the early 1900s, the company founder Milton Hershey even built an entire town, Hershey, Pennsylvania, around his chocolate factory.

Another popular Halloween candy, the Kit Kat bar, was first sold in England in 1935 as a Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp. Since 1988, the brand has been owned by Nestle, one of the largest food makers in the world.

And of course, no Halloween would be complete without candy corn, which was invented in the 1880s by George Renninger of the Wunderle Candy Company of Philadelphia. Other companies went on to produce their own versions(版本) of the tricolor candy corn, none longer than the Goelitz Confectionery Company, which has been doing so since 1898.