2 . POETRY CHALLENGE

Write a poem about how courage, determination, and strength have helped you face challenges in your life.

Prizes

3 Grand Prizes:Trip to Washington, D. C. for each of three winners, a parent and one other person of the winner’s choice. Trip includes round-trip air tickets, hotel stay for two nights, and tours of the National Air and Space Museum and the office of National Geographic World.

6 First Prizes:The book Sky Pioneer:A Photobiography of Amelia Earhart signed by author Corinne Szabo and pilot Linda Finch.

50 Honorable Mentions:Judges will choose up to 50 honorable mention winners, who will each receive a T-shirt in memory of Earhart’s final flight.

Rules

Follow all rules carefully to prevent disqualification.

■Write a poem using 100 words or fewer. Your poem can be any format, any number of lines.

■Write by hand or type on a single sheet of paper. You may use both the front and back of the paper.

■On the same sheet of paper, write or type your name, address, telephone number, and birth date.

■Mail your entry to us by October 31 this year.

3 . I was never very neat, while my roommate Kate was rather organized. Each of her objects had its _______, but mine always hid somewhere. Over time, Kate got _______ and I got messier. She would push my dirty clothing over, and I would lay my books on her tidy desk. We both got _______ of each other.

One evening _______ broke out. Kate came into the room. Soon, I heard her shouting, “Take your shoes away! Why under my bed!” Deafened, I saw my shoes flying at me. I started shouting. She shouted back louder.

The room was filled with _______. We could not have stayed together for a single minute but for a phone call. Kate answered it. From the end of her conversation, I could _______ right away her grandma was seriously ill. When she hung up, she quickly hid under her covers, sobbing(呜咽). _______, that was something she should not go through alone. All of a sudden, a feeling of sympathy rose up in my heart.

Slowly, I collected the pencils, took back the books, _______ my bed, cleaned the socks and swept the floor, even on her side. I was so buried in my work _______I even didn’t notice Kate had sat up. She was watching, and her tears dried. I looked up into her eyes. She smiled at me, “Thanks.”

Kate and I stayed roommates for the rest of the year. We didn’t always __________, but we learned the key to living together: giving in, cleaning up and holding on.

4 . Here are some libraries in Shandong province.Have a look and visit them in your spare time.

Shandong Provincial Library

Shandong Provincial Library, well known for its long history and luxurious collections,is one of the top 10 libraries in China.The library holds 6.12 million volumes.It has 44 service stations,with an average daily reception of 5,000 visitors.It also exchanges documents and literature works with Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom at irregular intervals.Opening Hours: 8:30 am-7:00 pm, closed every Monday afternoon (except for national holidays)

Add:2912, Erhuan East Road, Licheng district (at the intersection of Hualong Road)

Qingdao Library

Qingdao Library is a cultural landmark in Qingdao.It is an intelligent and modern library with 100 staff and 1.23 million volumes.It consists of a total of 32 halls and rooms, as well as newly-developed lecture halls, exhibition centers and electronic reading rooms, with more than 1,900 seats.The library remains open every day.

Opening Hours:8:30 am-5:30 pm

Add:109 Yanji Road, Qingdao, East China's Shandong province

Lijin Library

Lijin Library was founded in 1956 and rebuilt in 1993.It has 56,000 books, more than 1,000 bound volumes of newspaper, 5,000 bound volumes of journals, 120 thread-bound（线装的）ancient Chinese books and more than one TB of digital books.The library has three service stations, receiving more than 92,000 visitors every year.

Opening Hours: From Monday to Sunday 8:00 am-11:00 am; 2:00 pm-5:00 pm

Add:568 Jin'er Road, Lijin county, Dongying city, East China's Shandong province

5 . Clothing rental is a hot new industry and retailers (零售商) are demanding to get on board in hopes of attracting green shopper.

But is renting fashion actually more environmentally-friendly than buying it, and if so, how much more? Journalist and author Elizabeth Cline investigated (调查) this question and concluded that it's not as sustainable as it seems.

Take shipping, for example, which has to go two ways if an item is rented — receiving and returning. Cline writes that consumer transportation has the second largest carbon footprint of our collective fashion habit after manufacturing.

She writes, ''An item ordered online and then returned can send out 20 kilograms of carbon each way, and increases up to 50 kilograms for rush shipping. By comparison, the carbon impact of a pair of jeans purchased from a physical store and washed and worn at home is 33.4 kilograms, according to a 2015 study by Levi's.''

Then there's the burden of washing, which has to happen for every item when it's returned, regardless of whether or not it was worn. For most rental services, this usually means dry cleaning, a high impact and polluting process. All the rental services that Cline looked into have replaced perchloroethylene (氯乙烯), a carcinogenic (致癌的) air pollutant, still used by 70 percent of US dry cleaners, with alternatives, although these aren't great either.

Lastly, Cline fears that rental services will increase our appetite for fast fashion, simply because it's so easily accessible. There's something called ''share washing'' that makes people waste more precisely because a product or service is shared and thus is regarded as more eco-friendly. Uber is one example of this, advertised as ''a way to share rides and limit ear ownership.'' and yet ''it has been proven to discourage walking,bicycling, and public transportation use.''

Renting clothes is still preferable to buying them cheap and throwing them in the dustbin after a few wears, but we shouldn't let the availability of these services make us too satisfied. There's an even better step — that's wearing what is already in the closet.

6 . Pearl S. Buck was a very popular American writer of her day. She was famous for her books about China. Pearl was born in 1892 in West Virginia, America, but she spent almost half of her 81-year-long life in China.

Pearl spent her youth in Jiangsu Province, China. She learned to speak Chinese before she could speak English. Her mother had travelled widely in her youth and liked literature very much. After being educated by her mother and by a Chinese teacher, Pearl S. Buck went to school in Shanghai at the age of fifteen. She continued her education in the United States at a Woman’s College to study psychology（心理学）. After graduation in 1914, she returned to China. In the 1920s, her family moved to Nanjing, where she taught English and American literature at a university.

As a writer, Pearl S. Buck’s book, The Good Earth, appeared in 1931 and sold quite well in its first year. It has been translated into over thirty languages. In 1938, she became the third American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. By the time of her death in March, 1973, Pearl had published more than seventy books.