【推荐1】If you have no special plans for your holidays, why not spend your time helping others?

Don’t listen to people who say the young people today often think only of themselves. It’s not true at all. More and more people in the USA volunteer to spend their school holidays working for others. And they don’t do it for money. Here are some of their stories.

Alice Hamilton, 17

I’m going to help the Forest Centre build new hiking paths in the mountains. It’s going to be terrific—I’ll spend the whole summer living in the tent and breathing the clean mountain air. I’m going to sleep under the stars. It’ll be a nice sport, and I’ll be able to do something good at the same time.

Jason Moore, 18

This summer, I’m going to volunteer with Special House Program. They build good, low-cost houses and sell them to families that are not very rich. They’ll teach me what to do, so I’ll help people and also have a chance to learn how to build houses.

Trish Anderson, 16

I’m going to teach kids who have trouble reading. I’ll work for a program called Reading For Life. Every day, I’m going to help kids choose and read books that they like. I want to be a teacher and I love children and reading, so this is going to be a great experience for me.

【推荐2】As Internet users become more dependent on the Internet to store information, are people remember less? If you know your computer will save information, why store it in your own personal memory, your brain? Experts are wondering if the Internet is changing what we remember and how.

In a recent study, Professor Betsy Sparrow conducted some experiments. She and her research team wanted to know the Internet is changing memory. In the first experiment, they gave the subjects 40 unimportant facts to type into a computer. The first group of people understood that the computer would save the information.The second group understood that the computer would not save it. Later, the second group remembered the information better. People in the first group knew they could find the information again, so they did not try to remember it.

In another experiment, the researchers gave people facts to remember, and told them where to find the information on the Internet. The information was in a specific computer folder（文件夹）. Surprisingly, people later remember the folder location（位置） better than the facts. When people use the Internet, they do not remember the information. Rather, they remember how to find it. This is called “transactive memory（交互记忆）”.

According to Sparrow, we are not becoming people with poor memories as a result of the Internet. Instead, computer users are developing stronger transactive memories; that is, people are learning how to organize huge quantities of information so that they are able to access it at a later date. This doesn’t mean we are becoming either more or less intelligent, but there is no doubt that the way we use memory is changing.

【推荐3】Every day in China, about 200 million children go to school. Many of them take school buses. What should we do to keep these students safe on the road?

On April 5, the State Council (国务院) published new rules about school bus safety. These new rules are stricter than the old ones.

Under the new rules, local governments must make sure that students go to nearby schools or boarding schools to reduce traffic risks. Also, local governments must help kids in the countryside reach their school buses.

From now on, school buses have a speed limit of 80 km/h on highways and 60 km/h on normal roads. While on the road, other cars must let school buses go first.

The new rules also say that school buses must never be overloaded (超载的).

There are many other rules as well. A school bus must have more than seven seats. On each bus, there must be at least one adult to keep an eye on the kids. Each school bus must have a fire extinguisher (灭火器), a first aid kit and a GPS.

Last year, a series of school bus accidents happened in China. To stop such accidents, the Central government decided to strengthen the rules for school buses.

The most serious accident happened in Gansu in November, when a nine-seat mini bus crashed. There were 62 children inside, and 21 of them died.

【推荐2】Can you imagine a five-year-old boy writing and playing music on a child-sized violin? This was true of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a gifted boy who grew up to be one of the most creative composers (作曲家) of all time. Then you might think that the life of this child was easy all the time. Read on. Decide for yourself.

Mozart was born in January of 1756 into a musical family. His father, Leopold Mozart, recognized the talent of his child and devoted himself to teaching him. Later, Mozart toured Europe, putting on concerts for the people of high social positions. He could listen to any piece of music once and then play it from memory. He could play the piano or the violin with his eyes covered. What's more, music that Mozart wrote at the age of five was as good as works by many adult composers.

Mozart earned a living by selling his compositions, giving concerts and providing music lessons for the wealthy. Some of the operas Mozart wrote, such as The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni, are still performed today. He composed 41 symphonies(交响乐). However, none of them earned him much money, and he spent far more than he was able to earn. Mozart often waited until the last moment to work on pieces that had been asked for.

By the spring of 1791, Mozart was ill and sad. He was deeply in debt(债务). His health, which had never been good, was becoming even worse. A stranger asked Mozart to write a musical piece for a funeral( 葬 礼 ). Mozart agreed, but then began to fear that it was being written for his own death. His fears turned out to be true. Mozart died in December of 1791, at the age of 35.