Imagine a world with no more wild animals: no elephants, no giraffes and no lions.
To some people, that thought is too terrible, so they are doing something about it. Being surrounded by wild animals — feeding them and caring for them — is all Tiffany Soechting has ever wanted to do all her life. And that is exactly what she does.
Soechting is the human “mother” to the 500 animals that live on her family’s wildlife farm. On the farm, she cares for creatures from every continent except Antarctica (南极洲).
Visitors get a chance not only to see these creatures there, but also to feed them, And the animals are not against that. For them, people and the special vehicles used on the farm are part of their natural environment. “When you come here, the animals are walking around freely like they would if they were in their native homeland. And you can touch them,” said Soechting. “For the most part, the majority of them were born and grew up here. But even when we bring them in — like if we bring a new male in the rest of the herd (兽群) is comfortable with what is going on.”
Tourists are not the only people to visit the farm. Many schools come for field trips all throughout the year, so it is a place of education as well as conservation. But for Soechting, the farm is simply home, and it has been for many generations.
As the animals walk peacefully around, it is easy to forget that a busy city is just a few minutes away. Tiffany Soechting and the 500 animals do not seem to give it a second thought.
1. What does Tiffany Soechting do?2. What can visitors do on Soechting’s family farm?
3. How do animals feel about the visit?
4. Apart from animal conservation, what else can people do on the farm?
5. What does the sentence “Tiffany Soechting and the 500 animals do not seem to give it a second thought” in the last paragraph mean?
On October 23, 2018, President Xi Jinping announced the opening of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge (HZMB) in Zhuhai, Guangdong province.
The HZMB,
The project
The HZMB will make
I was traveling with my husband and three teenage sons, in the United States. We ordered our food at a fast-food place, and with my meal I also wanted a blueberry pie. My husband is the chatty one in the family and likes to socialize, so he started to a conversation about the place where blueberries grow with the girl. She answered, with some anxiety, “They grow on trees.”
The whole family’s jaws dropped! How could this girl not know where blueberries grow? We tried not to embarrass her, and just took the opportunity to teach her a little about how blueberries grow, on small shrubs on the ground. She seemed to appreciate learning something new. We can’t know all the same things, as you’ll see from the next thing I’m going to tell you.
In 2002 our family made a short trip to a coffee plantation. The road to the plantation was narrow filled with hairpin bends. I worried about hitting another car. We didn’t, lucky us! When we finally got to our destination, we learned a lot about the plantation and coffee production, but we didn’t see any coffee plants. Where were they? We decided to ask one of the people working there. “So where are the coffee plants? We can’t see them anywhere.”
She reached out her arm and caught a twig right next to us and explained, “This is the coffee plant and these little things will be coffee beans.” I looked around in embarrassment, as we were surrounded by coffee plants! She explained that coffee plants aren’t big and that they have to grow in the shade of other bigger plants. I appreciated her lesson.
We love our coffee, but I’m sure most of my countrymen would not be able to recognize a coffee plant among other tropical plants if asked. Our jaws can drop at different things, depending on geographical locations, at what we know and don’t know. Never take anything for granted!
1. What topic did the author’s husband discuss with the girl? (no more than 5 words)2. How do you understand the underlined part in Paragraph 2? (no more than 10 words)
3. How was the way to the coffee plantation ? (1 word)
4. What did the author learn from the worker? (no more than 15 words)
5. What inspiration do you get from the story? Please express it in your own words. (no more than 20 words)
