【推荐1】Do you ever speak with your mouth full of food? Do you talk on the phone loudly when you are on the bus? If you do, then perhaps you should take Etiquette（礼仪）and Social Skills classes. These classes will teach you good manners（礼仪）and how to behave（表现得体）in social situations.

A person who teaches classes like these is Maggie at Dongfang School, and her students are aged between six and twelve years old. She thinks this is the best time to teach kids. “At this age they are very easy to teach,” Maggie says. “When they get older, its harder for them to break bad habits. Children at this age want to be courteous. You can see that they’re trying.”

Maggie teaches the children how to speak on the phone and how to walk, as well as telling them about table manners. These classes have become popular because parents want well-mannered children but they are too busy to teach manners at home.

So, what do the children actually think of these classes? The classes have been popular with most of the children and their teachers at school have noticed that they are treating（对待）each other with more respect（尊重）. They also feel the skills they have learned will be useful to them in the future.

Maggie believes that such skills can be life-changing. “We’ll have more and more well-mannered children. Slowly our world will become better and better.”

Almost everyone in the middle school hopes to go to a senior high school.     1    . In order to help you better adapt(适应) to the high school life, you need to make some preparations in advance(事先).

Being one step ahead can help you a lot.     2    . Of course, you can also go to a summer school. There you will not only learn the lessons ahead of time but also get used to the teaching methods of senior high school teachers.

    3    . In junior middle school, most students are more dependable on teachers while in high school most students are more likely to learn independently, eagerly and actively. Besides, there is more knowledge to gain and it becomes more difficult. As a result, some top students in junior middle school may feel discouraged(气馁的) in high school.     4    , you will find it easier to adapt yourself to the high school life.

Get some learning experience from high school students. If you happen to know some high school students in your neighborhood, try to make friends with them.     5    

Of course, if you know which school you will be in, you can go and have a look around the school. To experience the school culture is a good way for you to get ready.

China’s 71-metre-tall Leshan Buddha (佛像), the largest stone Buddha in the world, re-opened to the public after experts carried out emergency restoration on the 1,300-year-old statue. The repair (修理) project started in October last year and the scaffolding (脚手架) was removed in late March after experts mended the cracks (裂纹) on the statue. Tourists are once again able to see the entirety of the towering (高耸的) sitting Buddha from the Min River by the mountain.

The Buddha was built in 713 AD during the Tang Dynasty at the meeting point of three rivers, the Min River, Qingyi River and Dadu River. The statue is based on the image of Maitreya, which is regarded as the future Buddha. It is next to the Lingyun Temple on Lingyun Mountain in Leshan. Lingyun Temple means the “cloud side” temple in Chinese, and the name means the high altitude (海拔高度) of the huge statue. It is said that in ancient times, many boats sailed past Leshan, and therefore the monks at the Lingyun Temple decided to build a Buddha statue to save living creatures. It took them about 90 years to complete the religious and artistic masterpiece. The statue is so great that people from all over the world come to visit and admire (欣赏) the wonderful work.

A worker said the Buddha had some cracks on its face, chest and stomach after being out in nature for more than a thousand years. The damage could have caused rocks to fall and endanger the tourists. An expert said the latest repair was not “systematic restoration”, but a “scientific and research project”. The repair project could lay foundation for the future overall protection of the Buddha, the expert told Xinhua News Agency.