【推荐1】On a summer day, a man sitting under a tree on the bank of a river, watched a group of ducks on the river.

Soon a branch（树枝）with leaves came drifting（漂浮）among them, and they all flew away. After circling in the air for a little time, they landed again on their feeding ground.

Soon another branch came drifting down among them, and again they took flight（飞行）from the river. But when they found the branch drifted by without any danger, they flew down to the water as before.

After four or five branches had drifted by in this way, the ducks gave little attention （注意）to them. At last, they hardly tried to fly out of their way, even when the branches nearly touched them.

The man who was watching all this, now wanted to know who drifted these branches. He looked up the river, and noticed a fox slyly（偷偷地）watching the ducks. “What will he do next?” thought the man.

When the fox saw that the ducks were no longer afraid of the branches, he took a much larger branch, and hid himself behind it. Then he drifted himself with the larger branch. When he was right among the ducks, he caught two young ducks quickly and swam off with them. The rest of the ducks flew away in fright（害怕）, and did not come back for a long time. The fox must have enjoyed a fine dinner for what he had done.

【推荐3】One day a king went to a far place in his country. When he came back, his feet hurt a lot. “There are too many small stones on the roads. They hurt my feet. You should cover (覆盖) every road with leather (皮革),” he told his men. Of course, it would cost a lot of money. One of his men was very smart. He told the king, “Why not cut a little piece of leather to cover you feet?” The king was surprised, and he agreed to the man’s idea. He asked his men to make a pair of leather shoes for him.

Maybe this is not the beginning of leather shoes. But it teaches us a lesson of life: If you want to make this world a happy place to live in, the best way is to change yourself, not the world.