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.

The government has awarded $5 million to three different local nonprofit organizations. The money will     1    (distribute) over a four-year period and is aimed at helping approximately 1, 000 homeless people in the county of Arvada.

One agency,     2    (base) in Woodbridge, is expected     3    (receive) $1. 5 million. The agency director says that they will focus their resources on     4    (educate) the homeless. “We will probably build another school-home with this money,” he said. “A school-home is exactly     5     it sounds like. It is a school and a home. We have already built four school-homes throughout the county. We get the homeless off the street,     6     we educate them so they don’t have to return to the street. We teach them how to be gardeners, painters, carpenters, bricklayers, electricians, and air-conditioning repairmen.”

“You wouldn’t believe     7     success that we have had. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, our office air-conditioning went out. My secretary called a repairman. To our surprise, the repairman     8    (be) one of our first homeless students. He now owns his own air-conditioning business, plus two houses, two cars and a boat! He has a dozen employees. He’s doing better than I am. He fixed our air-conditioning     9     free. I think I might sign up for the air-conditioning class     10    (I). ”

10 . There has been a very serious decline in the numbers of shallow-water fish as a result of overfishing. People still want to eat fish, so the fishing industry must look at other sources, especially the deep waters of the Atlantic.     1    

Conservation measures will have to be put in place if these deep-sea fish are to survive. Research on five such species shows that numbers have declined by between 87 percent and 98 percent.     2     Many species could well disappear completely if the present trend continues. These are species that have been swimming in our oceans for hundreds of millions of years.

The problem is emphasized by the fact that the decline in numbers happened in less than twenty years. Deep-sea fish take a long time to reproduce and normally live for many years.     3     The average size of such fish also declined, with one species showing a 57 percent decline in average size. This is of particular concern, as large fish tend to produce more offspring than small ones.

    4     The deep-sea species have been caught as if they were the fast-breeding (快速繁殖) fish like sardine and herring. It is like killing elephants as if they reproduced at the same rate as rabbits.

The damage done by overfishing goes beyond the sea environment. Millions of people make a living in the fishing industry.     5     Measures must be taken to not only conserve ecosystems, but also sustain livelihoods and ensure food security.