【推荐3】Welcome to The Most Beautiful Family (最美家庭). Let’s meet the family today—a family of teachers.

I’m Bob. This is my wife Linda. We are 66 years old and teach in a senior university (老年大学). I teach Chinese painting and she teaches English. Our daughter and son, Mary and Alex are teachers.

I’m a Chinese teacher. I work (工作) in Green Middle School. My husband Alan is an art teacher in my school. We have two children—Annie and Frank. They are in my school, too. Annie is in Grade 7.

I’m Eric. I’m a student from Class 9, Grade 7 in Green Middle School. My father Alex is a P.E.teacher in No.1 Middle School. My mother Helen teaches children ping-pong. I have a sister, Alice. She likes playing ping-pong. One day, I want to be a math teacher because I like children and math very much.

Zhixing is eleven years old. He is in Grade Five. He spends most of his free time in front of his computer on weekends. But Zhixing is not playing games or surfing the Internet. The boy is interested in basic(基本的) computer coding(编程). “I signed him up(报名) for coding lessons about one and a half years ago. I think it may be an important skill. He wants to learn it. I’m happy that he’s enjoying it,” says Zhixing’s mother.

Tao Mingshun’s 13-year-old son learns coding, too. The boy and his classmates find the games and other activities(活动) in the weekend classes “a bit difficult but fun”. Many students are excited to learn coding now. I think there will be more students learning it one day.

【推荐3】Elon Musk was born in 1971, in South Africa. Little information is known about his early life, but it clearly wasn’t happy. His parents divorced when he was ten, and Elon lived with his father. It seems there was a large number of strict rules around, and not a lot of love, and he was also bullied (欺凌) at school. He thinks all these difficulties made him strong, however and worries that his children have too few problems in life.

Elon left South Africa in 1989. He finished university in Physics and Economics in the US, and started a PHD in Physics, but left school without finishing it after only two days. The Internet was developing quickly, and Elon wanted to catch the chances it offered. In a short time, he made $187 million from setting up and selling Zip2, which invented online city guides, and Paypal. He used the money for new technology and space travel.

Musk’s car company, Tesla, makes electric cars that car fans would be crazy for. His company Space X successfully sent its Falcon 9 rocket into space in 2012. There are so many people interested in private rockets (Amazons Jeff Bezos is another famous one), but Musk’s rockets were the first to dock (对接) with the International Space Station. In 2018, a bigger rocket, the Falcon Heavy, took a Tesla Roadster into space!

Musk now has several companies on the go, and a great number of projects (项目) including AI, solar energy, and a new tunnel-boring(隧道挖掘) machine (that idea came while he was stuck in traffic). His tunneling company is called The Boring Company.