French novelist Jules Verne (1828—1905) is often called the father of science fiction. Although he was not a great traveler himself, his characters travelled to the moon (in From the Earth to the Moon), under the sea (in Twenty thousand leagues under the sea), into a volcano (in A journey to the centre of the earth), around the world (in Around the World in Eighty Days) and to many other places.
　　Jules Verne was born in the French city of Nantes in 1828. When he was a boy he ran away from home to work on a ship. However, his father soon found him and brought him home. After that he decided that any future travel he did would be in books. In 1847 his father sent Jules to Paris to study to be a lawyer. Even though he was busy writing, Verne passed his exams in 1849 with high marks.
　　When Jules told his father he did not want to be a lawyer, his father was very angry. He stopped sending his son any money, so Jules had to earn a living by his writing. Over the next few years he wrote many stories and plays, which brought him only a little money. Then, in 1856, he met Honorine de Viane, a rich, young widow with two children. The couple married the next year.
After his marriage, Verne worked as a businessman in Paris. However, he was not very successful at his job and spent most of his time writing books and doing research for the next one. In 1863 he published his novel Five Weeks in a balloon and the following year he published A Journey to the centre of the earth which made him famous. His books became so popular and earned him so much money that he was able to leave his job and work full time on his writing.
In his Lifetime, Jules Verne wrote more than 50 books and he became a rich man. Many of this imaginative novels have been turned into films.
【小題1】When Jules Verne was brought home by his father, he decided that ________.

Arthur Miller (1915—2005) is universally recognized as one of the greatest dramatists of the 20th century. Miller's father had moved to the USA from Austria-Hungary, drawn like so many others by the “Great American Dream”. However, he experienced severe financial hardship when his family business was ruined in the Great Depression of the early 1930s.
　　Miller's most famous play, Death of a Salesman, is a powerful attack on the American system, with its aggressive way of doing business and its insistence on money and social status as indicators of worth. In Willy Loman, the hero of the play, we see a man who has got into trouble with this system. Willy is “burnt out” and in the cruel world of business there is no room for sentiment: if he can't do the work, then he is no good to his employer, the Wagner Company, and he must go. Willy is painfully aware of this, and at a loss as to what to do with his lack of success. He refuses to face the fact that he has failed and kills himself in the end.
　　When it was first staged in 1949, the play was greeted with enthusiastic reviews, and it won the Tony Award for Best Play, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was the first play to win all three of these major awards.
　　Miller died of heart failure at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, on the evening of February 10, 2005, the 56th anniversary of the first performance of Death of a Salesman on Broadway.
【小題1】Why did Arthur Miller's father move to the USA?

A well-dressed man entered a famous jewelry shop. He explained that he wished to buy a pearl for his wife’ s birthday. The price didn’t matter, since business had been very good for him that year. After examining a nice black one that costs $5, 000, he paid for the pearl in cash, shook hands with the jeweler, and left.
A few days later the man returned and said that his wife liked the pearl so much that she wanted another one just like it. It had to be exactly the same size and quality as she wanted a pair of earrings made. "Can you give me any advice on how to get such a pearl?" said the man. The jeweler regretfully replied, "I would say it’s exactly impossible to find one exactly like that pearl."
The rich man insisted that the jeweler advertise in the newspapers, offering $25,000 for the matching pearl. Many people answered the advertisement but nobody had a pearl that was just right.
Just when the jeweler had given up hope, a little old lady came into his store. To his great surprise, she pulled the perfect pearl from her purse." I don’t like to part with it." she said sadly, I got it from my mother, and ,my mother got it from hers. But I really need the money.
The jeweler was quickly to pay her before she changed her mind .Then he called the rich man’s hotel to tell him the good news .The man, however, was nowhere to be found.
【小題1】The man said he wanted to buy a pearl for _____.

Mark was walking home from school one day when he noticed that the boy ahead of him had tripped and dropped all the books he was carrying, along with two sweaters, a baseball bat, a glove and a small tape recorder. Mark knelt down and helped the boy pick up the scattered articles. Since they were going the same way, he helped to carry part of the burden. As they walked, Mark discovered the boy’s name was Bill, that he loved video games, baseball and history that he was having a lot of trouble with his other subjects and that he had just broken up with his girlfriend.
Mark went home after leaving Bill at his house. They continued to see each other around school, had lunch together once or twice, and then both graduated from junior high school. They ended up in the same high school, where they had brief contacts over the years. Finally the long-awaited senior year came. Three weeks before graduation, Bill asked Mark if they could talk.
Bill reminded him of the day years ago when they had first met. “Do you ever wonder why I was carrying so many things home that day?” asked Bill. “You see, I cleaned out my locker because I didn’t want to leave a mess for anyone else. I had stored away some of my mother’s sleeping pills and I was going home to commit suicide(自殺). But after we spent some time together talking and laughing, I realized that if I had killed myself, I would have missed that time and so many others that might follow. So you see, Mark, when you picked up my books that day, you did a lot more. You saved my life.”
【小題1】What happened to Bill on his way home from school?

I first met Annie Mae, a maid (女仆), at my parents-in-laws’ in 1959. She prepared and    36    meals in her quiet, gentle way and then returned to the kitchen to read her Bible (《圣經》) while we     37   . She was a devoted Christian. I found this increasingly true     38    I came to know her more by observation than by conversation.
My husband and I     39    visited his parents. Each time I saw her eating    40   , reading her Bible, I wanted to sit down with her and just talk.    41   , whites didn’t do that with blacks then, and I had to    42    the practice.
In 1965, I decided to     43    the furniture and return to my home state with my two     44    when my husband wanted a divorce (離婚).
Annie Mae asked if she could buy the boys’    45   . When I answered     46   , she asked the price. Then, she asked if she could     47    a little money each month. She was    48   , and I knew her well.
Then each month, an envelope     49    us from Annie Mae with 2 or 3 dollars. A year passed. Annie Mae’s    50    payment arrived along with the following note:
Dear Mrs. Holladay,
I am sending you my last payment of three dollars for the beds     51   . I told my two sons they could now put the beds     52    and sleep in them, for they are now paid for and rightfully    53    us.Thank you for your     54   .
Annie Mae
I read the note two or three times, my eyes filled with tears. Had I only known earlier, I would have said, “Use them now. Don’t     55    until you pay for them.”

Jean is a bright young lady who comes from a rich and famous family. She goes to a good university and has everything that money can buy. Well, almost everything is good. But the problem is that Jean’s family are so busy that they can hardly find time to be with her. So Jean spends a lot of time on her QQ. She likes being anonymous(匿名), talking to people who do not know about her famous family and her rich life. She uses the name Linda on QQ and has made a lot of friends who she keeps in touch with quite often.
Last year Jean made a very special friend on QQ. His name was David and lived in San Francisco. David was full of stories and jokes. He and Jean had a common interest in rock music and modern dance. So it always took them hours to talk happily on QQ and sometimes they even forgot their time. Of course, they wanted to know more about each other. David sent a picture of himself: He was a tall, good looking young man with big, happy smile. As time went by, they became good friends and often sent cards and small things to each other.
When Jean’s father told her that he was going on a business trip to San Francisco, she asked him to let her go with him so that she could give David a surprise for his birthday. She would take him the latest DVD of their favorite rock singer. But when she knocked on David’s door in San Francisco, she found that her special friend was a twelve-year-old boy named Jim!
【小題1】Jean spends a lot of her time on QQ because she is _________.

12-year-old John Thomas Robertson is a born train fan. "I’ve liked trains probably from the day I was born," he told Good Morning America. "When I was very little," he said, "my grandpa got me a train model. I would just watch it go round for hours and hours."
When Robertson finally had the opportunity to ride on a train, he felt great. His journey was so mind-blowing that he couldn’t keep it to himself: he decided to take all his classmates to go on a ride with him. When he found that some of his classmates couldn’t pay the fare, he collected cans (罐子) and bottles and raised more than $1,000 for them.
That trip was such a happy one that he made it a yearly action. "It never gets boring for some reason; it’s just fun," he said. "It really lets people get away from their busy life and have fun.
Every October, Robertson takes a new group of children to ride on the train —but now, he has a problem. Several disabled children were refused because the train was not accessible (可用的) to disabled people. "He was angry to think that children of his own age couldn’t ride a train," his mother said.
But he wouldn’t say no: he recently sent a letter to the train office for help. To his surprise, the leader, Ty Pennington, accepted the letter in person. He said that he and his workers would work on making a train accessible to disabled people.
【小題1】The first time John Thomas Robertson took a train, ________.

An old farmer lived on a farm with his young grandson. Each morning Grandpa was up early to read his Bhagavat Geeta. His grandson wanted to be just like him and tried to imitate him in every way he could.
One day the grandson asked, "Grandpa! I try to read the Bhagavat Geeta just like you but I don't understand it, What good does reading the Bhagavat Geeta do?"
The Grandfather quietly turned from putting coal in the stove and replied, "Take this coal basket down to the river and bring me back a basket of water."
The boy did as he was told, but all the water leaked out (漏出) before he got back to the house. The grandfather laughed and said, "You'll have to move a little faster next time," and sent him back to the river with the basket to try again. This time the boy ran faster, but again the same took place. He told his grandfather that it was impossible to carry water with a basket.
The old man said, " You're just not trying hard enough,"  So the boy again dipped the basket into the river and ran hard, but when he reached his grandfather the basket was again empty. he said, "See Grandpa, it's useless!"
"So you think it is useless?" The old man said, "Look at the basket."
The boy looked at the basket and for the first time realized that the basket was different. It had been transformed from a dirty old coal basket into a clean one inside and outside.
"You might not understand or remember everything, but when you read it, you will be changed, inside and out. That is the work of Krishna in our lives."
【小題1】We can learn from Paragraph 1 that the grandson_________.

When middle-aged Alex quit his job and made up his mind to become a self-employed writer， no one could tell for sure whether he would succeed or not. He found a cold storage room in a building, set up a used typewriter and settled down to work.
After a year or so, however, Alex began to doubt himself. He found it was difficult to earn his living by selling what he wrote. But Alex determined to put his dream to the test—even though it meant living with uncertainty and fear of failure. This is the shadowland (虛幻世界) of hope, and anyone with a dream must learn to live there.
One day Alex got a call,“We need an assistant, and we’re paying $6,000 a year.” $6,000 was real money in 1960. It would enable Alex to get a nice apartment ,a used car and more. Besides, he could write in his spare time. As the dollars were dancing in Alex’s head, something cleared his senses. He had dreamed of being a writer--full time. “Thanks, but no,” Alex said firmly and swiftly, “I’m going to stick it out and write.”
After Alex got off the phone, he pulled out everything he had: two cans of vegetables and 18 cents. Alex put the cans and cents into a paper bag, saying to himself, “There’s everything you’ve made of yourself so far. I’m not sure I ever felt so low.”
Finally his work was published in 1970.Instantly he had the kind of fame and success that few writers ever experience. The shadows had turned into focus of attention.
Then one day, Alex found a box filled with things he had owned years before. Inside was a paper bag with two cans and 18 cents. Suddenly he pictured himself working in that cold storage room. It reminds Alex, and anyone with a dream, of the courage and persistence(堅毅) it takes to stay the course(持續(xù)到底) in the shadowland.
【小題1】Why did Alex give up his job?

When Jackie Robinson walked onto Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, New York, on April 15, 1947, he changed baseball forever. As the first African American to play in the Major League in modern times, many believe he changed the country forever.
Robinson was born in 1919. He lived in a time when rules controlled what African Americans could do. He was a top athlete, playing football, basketball and baseball. But playing for a major league team was off limits to Robinson because of his race.
Branch Rickey, president and manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, signed(和…簽約)Robinson in 1947. He believed that Robinson not only had the skills, but the courage to face the challenge of becoming modern baseball’s first black player.
It wasn’t easy. Robinson sometimes faced boos(噓聲)from fans. But he became a star, anyway. In 1962, he became the first African-American player chosen to enter the Baseball Hall of Fame. In 2005, he was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award can give to an American.
By breaking baseball’s color barrier(膚色障礙), Robinson opened the door for many to follow his footsteps, not only in baseball, but in other areas of life as wall. After he stopped playing the game, Robinson worked as a manager for a coffee company. He wrote a newspaper column(專欄). He also started a bank.
【小題1】According to Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson was _____________.