With a continuous 1,300 kilometer-long coastline and beautiful beaches, Wales is a popular holiday destination in the United Kingdom. Most Welsh people live in south Wales in the capital city, Cardiff, and two other big cities: Swansea and Newport.

Language

The official languages of Wales are English and Welsh, and “Wenglish” is a Welsh-English dialect (方言). Everyone speaks English, but if you go to school in Wales you have to learn Welsh until you are 16. Street signs are written in Welsh and English, and villages, towns and cities have an English name and a Welsh name. The Welsh language is one of the oldest languages in Europe and around 20 percent of people in Wales speak Welsh.

Sports

The Welsh enjoy watching and playing sports, especially rugby and football. The modern Millennium Stadium in Cardiff can hold 74,500 people and is where you go if you want to watch a football or rugby match or a concert.

Water sports are popular in Wales. You can go surfing or wakeboarding (尾浪滑水). If you like unusual sports, visit the small town of Llanwrtyd Wells. Every year in this town there is a man versus horse marathon (马拉松) and a bog snorkelling (沼泽潜水) competition.

Food

There are lots of sheep in Wales, so people eat a lot of lamb (羊羔肉). Typical Welsh dishes include “cawl”, which is lamb stew (炖羊肉), sausages and “rarebit”, which is a type of cheese on toast. There are also Welsh cakes, which are small, sweet, round cakes with dried raisins (葡萄干) inside.

Symbols

If you ever go to Wales, you will see dragons everywhere; red dragons are a symbol of Wales. Other symbols include the leek (a long, green vegetable) and the daffodil.

When I woke up on Aug 4, 2016, there was only one thing on my mind: what to wear. A billion thoughts appeared through my brain in the closet (衣橱). Not only was it my first day of high school, but it was my first day of school in a new state; first impressions are everything, and it was important for me to impress the people who I would spend the next four years with.

After carefully hunting my closet, I proudly came out in a dress from Target. The soft cotton was comfortable, and the specially designed shoulders added a little of fun. Yes, this cloth was the one. An hour later, I felt powerful as I headed toward room 1136. But as I entered class, my jaw dropped to the floor.

Sitting at her desk was Mrs Hutfilz, my English teacher, wearing exactly the same dress as me. I kept my head down and tiptoed(踮着脚尖) to my seat. I made it through my simple introduction speech until Mrs Hutfilz stood up, jokingly saying that she liked my style. Although this was the moment I had been afraid of from the moment I walked in, all my anxiety surprisingly melted away, and the students paid attention as I shared my story. My smile grew as I laughed with the students. After class, I stayed behind, talked to Mrs Hutfilz and make a humorous and real communication.

Looking back four years later, the ten minutes I spent afraid of giving my speech were really not worth it. My first period of high school certainly made the day unforgettable in the best way and taught me that Mrs Hutfilz has a brilliant sense of style!

There was one farmer who had a fine olive orchard. He was very hard-working and the garden always did well under his care. But he knew that his three sons looked down on the farm work, and were only interested in getting rich quickly.

When the farmer was old and felt that he would die, he called his three sons to him and said, “My sons, there is a pot of gold hidden in the olive orchard. Dig for it, if you wish it.” The sons tried to get him to tell them the exact place where the gold was hidden, but he said nothing more.

After the farmer was dead, the sons went to work to find the gold. Since they did not know where the hiding-place was, they agreed to begin in a line, at one end of the orchard, and to dig until one of them should find the gold.

They dug until they had turned up the soil from one end of the orchard to the other, round the tree roots and between them. But no gold was to be found. It seemed as if someone must have stolen it, or as if the farmer had been wandering in his intelligence. The three sons were quite disappointed to have all their work for nothing.

The next olive season, the olive trees in the orchard bore more fruit than they had ever given. When it was sold, it gave the sons a whole pot of gold.

And when they saw how much money had come from the orchard, they suddenly understood what the wise father had meat when he said, "There is a lot of gold hidden in the orchard. Dig for it, if you wish it.”

“Look how stupid he is!" a 7-year-old said to her dad Daniel Funke, pointing to a picture of a famous person on the Internet. The photo showed the man writing his name with his pen turned upside down.

Of course, the photo was not the original one. It had been changed to look like him using the pen the wrong way. Funke quickly pointed out the mistake, and his daughter got an on-the-spot education in fake news. By then, however, many people had already shared it on social media.

“The pitfalls of sharing misinformation and fake news can be very serious," says Laeeq Khan, who heads the Social Media Analytics Lab at Ohio University in Athens. Sharing something that’s not true can cost people their lives, he says. Last year, people in India used a messaging app, WhatsApp, to spread fake stories about a kidnapping ring. The lies caused violent attacks in which people died.

Fake news stories hurt people in other ways, too. For example, fake reports lead some parents to refuse vaccines (疫苗) for their children. Yet without vaccines, children can get serious diseases or even die.

“About seven in 10 Americans were telling us that fake news has a big influence on the confidence in our government,” says Jeffrey Gottfried. He’s a journalism and media-research expert at Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. Researchers there did a survey in the United States about the influence of made-up news. About half the people in the survey said they had shared misinformation online. Most of them said they didn’t realize it at the time.

Besides causing serious results, sharing a fake story makes it harder for people to tell what's real. And when people find out a story is not real, they may not trust other information from a person who spread it. Therefore, it's important to do fact-checking before sharing news stories.