Do you know the pretty girl? Her name is Tian Wei. She was born on April 5, 1986. She was from Beijing. She had two big eyes and short hair. She was good at Chinese. And she loved writing.

She was unlucky. When she was in Grade 8, she was seriously ill. Her doctor said she would lose her life anytime. But she wasnˈt afraid of death. She kept on studying and writing. She died on August 13, 2007. She smiled till the end of her life.

Tian Wei had a great dream. She hoped that people could read her book in the bookshops. In March, 2009, her only book Hua Tian Ban Mu came out. it had more than five thousand words. In her book she said, " Iˈm always aching. If possible, Iˈll let my right eye weep but the other one smile."

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It was my dream to become a pop singer when I was a teenager. But I might have never made my dream come true if I hadn’t been encouraged by one of my art teachers.

 As a twenty-year-old boy, I was greatly discouraged and resolved to give up my dream. What I always got from people around me was that I’d never become a famous pop singer. Besides, I wasn’t good-looking.

 I wrote an e-mail to my teacher and told him that I wanted to give up singing. My teacher e-mailed me back and we made an appointment to meet on the weekend. We met each other at a cafe near our college and ordered two cups of coffee and some dessert. He talked with me in a relaxing way for a while and then asked me if I had made up my mind. I nodded.

 He opened the suitcase that he brought and took out a few paintings, asking me what I thought about them. Though confused, I looked at them carefully, feeling that they were worthless. “They are not good,” I said. He then took out some other paintings to me. I looked over the second group

of paintings and became surprised at the talent they showed. “These are really good. Who painted them?” I asked.

 “They were all painted by me. But I painted the good ones in my forties. Before that nobody would say I had a gift for painting, but I never cared, for it was my dream to paint. If I had given up at your age, you would never see the good ones,” he said.

 I felt ashamed at what I had though and decided to keep following my dream no matter what happened. I released my first album just a few years later. Now I’m always busy singing all over the country and always say to the young, “Never give up.”

(1) What did the writer want to be when he was a teenager? (No more than 8 words)

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(2)What does the underlined word “resolved” probably mean (1 word)

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(3)Why did the writer’s teacher decide to meet him? (No more than 10 words)

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(4)What did the writer decide to do after hearing his teacher’s advice?(No more than 10 words)

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(5)What can you learn from the passage? (No more than 20 words)

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Learn from mistakes

      The best way to learn something is to make mistakes first. Thomas Edison, who invented the light bulb, told his colleagues: “Of the 200 light bulbs that didn’t work, every failure told me something I was able to incorporate into the next attempt.” Benjamin Franklin, the US statesman and scientist once said: “I haven’t failed. I have had 10,000 ideas that didn’t work.”

      Both these people understood that failures and false starts are the condition of success. In fact, a surprising number of everyday objects had their beginnings in a mistake or a misunderstanding. Post-it notes, packets of crisps and even bread are all unexpected inventions. In 2600 BC, a tired Egyptian slave invented bread when the dough rose during his sleep. And crisps were first cooked by a chef in the USA when a customer complained that his fried potatoes were not thin enough.

      In 1968 Spencer Silver was trying to develop a strong adhesive when he accidentally invented a very weak glue instead. His colleague, Art Fry, decided to use it six years later, in 1974, to hold his bookmarks in his books and the post-it note was invented.

      Successful businesspeople have often made big, expensive mistakes in their past. When an employee of IBM made a mistake that cost the company $600,000, Thomos Watson, the chairman, was asked if he would fire the man. “Of course not,” he replied. “I have just spent $600,000 training him. I am not going to let another company benefit from experience.”

      The important thing to remember is that you need to learn from your mistakes. If you don’t, then there is no sense in making them.

Almost everybody in America will spend a part of his or her life behind a shopping cart（购物手推车）. They will, in a lifetime, push the chrome-plated contraptions many miles. But few will know—or even think to ask—who it was that invented them.

Sylvan N. Goldman invented the shopping cart in 1937. At that time he was in the supermarket business. Every day he would see shoppers lugging（吃力地携带） groceries around in baskets they had to carry.

One day Goldman suddenly had the idea of putting baskets on wheels. The wheeled baskets would make shopping much easier for his customers, and would help to attract more business.

On June 4, 1937, Goldman’s first carts were ready for use in his market. He was terriblyexcited on the morning of that day as customers began arriving. He couldn’t wait to see them using his invention.

But Goldman was disappointed. Most shoppers gave the carts a long look, but hardly anybody would give them a try.

After a while, Goldman decided to ask customers why they weren’t using his carts. “Don’t you think this arm is strong enough to carry a shopping basket?” one shopper replied.

But Goldman wasn’t beaten yet. He knew his carts would be a great success if only he could persuade people to give them a try. To this end, Goldman hired a group of people to push carts around his market and pretend they were shopping! Seeing this, the real customers gradually began copying the phony（假冒的） customers.

As Goldman had hoped, the carts were soon attracting larger and larger numbers of customers to his market. But not only did more people come—those who came bought more. With larger, easier-to-handle baskets, customers unconsciously bought a greater number of items than before.

Today’s shopping carts are five times larger than Goldman’s original model. Perhaps that’s one reasonAmericans today spend more than five times as much money on food each year as they did before 1937—before the coming of the shopping cart.