Miss Aur1ie lived alone on the farm all her life. She had never thought of marrying, and she had never been in love. At the age of twenty she was asked to marry somebody, but she did not accept, and at the age of fifty she had not yet lived to regret...
At seven o'clock the coffee was made and the pan was on the back of the stove, hot and ready to cook dinner. Jim was never late. Della doubled the watch chain in her hand and sat on the comer of the table near the door. When she heard his steps on th...
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one or two at a time by bargaining at the grocery, at the bakery and the butcher's until one's cheeks burnt. Three times Della counted it. One dollar...
Fear had gripped the nation, indeed the whole world. An unknown deadly virus had infected thousands of people and was spreading quickly. There was no cure and the number of cases was rising every day. In the media, SARS seemed to be the topic of ever...
Modem hospitals are clean and safe and doctors can cure many diseases. But it was not always so. For a long time, health care was often dangerous and risky. Treatments were neither scientific nor effective, and many patients suffered deadly infection...
A Wang Lin is a carpenter who lives in eastern China with his wife and son. Two years ago, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He was getting weaker and suffered from constant pain in his chest. The doctors told him that the treatment he needed would...
On the subject of reading, Francis Bacon, who lived at about the same time as Shakespeare, wrote these words: Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. This good advice shows how it is possible to re...
Many language learners think that the best way to learn a language is to spend time in a country where the language is spoken. In the past, studying abroad was a distant dream for most people. Nowadays, however, it has become easier to find both oppo...
Learning a language is obviously more than just memorising words, phrases and structures. When we learnt our mother tongue, we did not receive much formal instruction. Few parents give language lessons to their children! Instead we learnt or acquired...
On a cold November night in 1775, Miss Lucie Manette, who had grown up in England, traveled to France to meet her father, whom she thought was dead. Eighteen years before, her father, Doctor Manette attended to a young peasant boy and girl, who had b...
