2 . Tom Sawyer Play Is an Adventure

A 35-minute hand-clapping, foot-stomping musical version of a Mark Twain favorite returns with this Tall Stacks festival.

“Tom Sawyer: A River Adventure” has all the good stuff, including the fence painting, the graveyard, the island and the cave. It is adapted by Joe McDonough, with music by David Kisor. That’s the local stage writing team that creates many of the Children’s Theatre of Cincinnati’s original musicals, along with the holiday family musicals at Ensemble Theatre.

This year Nathan Turner of Burlington is Tom Sawyer, and Robbie McMath of Fort Mitchell is Huck Finn.

Tumer, a 10th-grader at School for Creative and Performing Arts, is a familiar presence on Cincinnati’s stages. He is a star act or of Children’s Theatre, having played leading roles in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “The Wizard of Oz,” and is fresh from Jersey Production “Ragtime”.

McMath is a junior at Beechwood High School. He was in the cast of “Tom Sawyer” when it was first performed and is a Children’s Theatre regular, with five shows to his credit. This summer he attended Kentucky’s Governor’s School for the Arts in Musical Theatre.

Note to teachers: Children’s Theatre has a study guide demonstrating how math and science can be taught through “Tom Sawyer.” For downloadable lessons, visit the official website of Children’s Theatre.

It doesn’t impress like George Washington’s plantation on the Potomac, but Lincoln’s home in downtown Springfield, Illinois,     1     （prove）irresistible to visitors since it opened to the public. Beautifully restored（修复）to its 1860 appearance, the house was Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s home for 17 years. In 1844 they bought it     2     $1,200 and some land from Charles Dresser, who performed their     3     （marry）ceremony in 1842.

When the house was built, it was much     4     （small）than it is today. Mary’s niece wrote, “The little home     5     （paint）white.” It was sweet and fresh. Mary loved it. She was extremely pretty, and her house was a reflection of     6     （she）, everything in good taste and in perfect order.

Although Mary loved flowers,     7     she nor her husband was known as a gardener. A long- time neighbor said they never planted trees and only kept a garden for one year. Mary’s sister, Frances Todd Wallace, often came over     8     （plant）flowers in the front yard.

    9     Lincolns enlarged the house to a full two-story in 1856 to meet the needs of their growing family. Three of the four Lincoln sons were born here. After Lincoln was elected President of the US in 1861, they rented the house and     10     （sell）most of their furniture.

7 . You’ve got mail…and it’s a postcard

Paulo Magalhaes, a 34-year-old Portuguese computer engineer, loves to open his mailbox and find a brightly colored picture of Rome’s Colosseum. Or Africa’s Victoria Falls. Or China’s Great Wall.     1    

“I often send postcards to family and friends.” he says to China Daily, “but you can imagine that after a while, you never receive as many as you send, and you realize that not everyone is into it.     2    ” Seeking other like-minded souls, however, Paulo started looking in a somewhat unlikely place: online. Many would say the Internet is a place for people who have given up on the traditional postal service, but Paulo’s hunch(直觉)paid off.

Today his hobby has developed into the website postcrossing.com, a social network that has grown to 575,217 registered users in 214 countries and regions since he started it 10 years ago.     3    Running the website has almost turned into a full-time job.

Language is certainly a barrier for many people. For postcrossing to work worldwide, a common communication language is needed so that everyone can understand each other. As cool as it may be to receive a postcard written in Chinese, the concept doesn’t work if one doesn’t understand it.     4     So a common language is required and in postcrossing that’s English since it’s widely spoken.

“Many people in China have limited exposure to English.     5     That said, we know of many postcrossing members, including Chinese, who have actually improved their English skills through their use of postcrossing,” Paulo says.

9 . The United States rose to global power on the strength of its technology, and the lifeblood that technology has long been electricity. By providing long-distance communication and energy, electricity created the modern world. Yet properly understood, the age of electricity is merely the second stage in the age of steam, which began a century earlier.

"It is curious that no one has put together a history of both the steam and electric revolutions." writes Maury Klein in his book The Power Makers, Steam, Electricity, and the Men Invented Modern America. Klein, a noted historian of technology, spins a narrative so lively that at times it reads like a novel.

The story begins in the last years of the 18th century in Scotland, where Watt perfected "the machine that changed the world". Klein writes, "America did not invent the steam engine, but once they grasped its passwords they put it to more uses than anyone else. "

Meanwhile, over the course of 19th century, electricity went from mere curiosity to a basic necessity. Morse invented a code for sending messages over an electromagnetic circuit. Bell then gave the telegraph a voice. Edison perfected an incandescent bulls that brought electric light into the American home.

Most importantly, Edison realized that success depended on mass electrification, which he showed in New York City. With help from Tesla, Westinghouse's firm developed a system using alternating current, which soon became the major forms of power delivery.

To frame his story, Klein creates the character of Ned, a fictional witness to the progress brought about by the steams and electric revolutions in America during one man's lifetime. It's a technique that helps turn a long narrative into an interesting one.