Growing up inPuerto Rico, our family was no different from so many others. My parents got married after my father came back when the war ended. Both of my parents were struggling with the hard economic realities of the time. But somehow, they found time to cherish those cultural values that shaped our everyday life.

     In our daily life, we celebrated together with our friends or family members every birthday, every graduation, and all holidays with music and dancing, typical foods. When we visited our family in the countryside－a trip that took about two hours in a car, with five children fighting as to who would get a window or the front seat－we would break into a song, and somehow the trip would turn into one full of happiness and fun. We would sing not only interesting children’s songs but also beautiful love songs－songs about the love of the country though we didn’t understand the meaning of the words many times.

     I came to Philadelphia for the first time in 1973 to do a residency (实习) in family medicine. I remember the many hours of work. I was facing issues of life and death and suffering the clearly social unfairness and issues of poverty and race. These were all aggravated by my feeling of cultural differences.

      An important turning point in my life happened one Saturday night when I attended a concert of Puerto Rican singer and composer  Antonio Cabán Vale. The music showed my familiar rhythms, and the words spoke to my heart. I had found a space to express, celebrate, and share my culture in Philadelphia. Therefore, I believe diversity is seen as an advantage and not as a disadvantage. As a Puerto Rican, I am a mixture of races and I believe in my strength because of this.

My color television has given me nothing but a headache. I was able to buy it a little over a year ago because I had my relatives give me money for my birthday instead of a lot of clothes that wouldn’t fit. I let a salesclerk fool me into buying a discontinued model. I realized this a day later, when I saw newspaper advertisements(广告) for the set at seventy-five dollars less than I had paid. The set worked so beautifully when I first got it home that I would keep it on until stationssigned offfor the night. Fortunately, I didn’t get any channels showing all-night movies or I would never have gotten to bed.

Then I started developing a problem with the set that involved static (静电) noise. For some reason, when certain shows switched into a commercial (商业广告), a loud noise would sound for a few seconds. Gradually, this noise began to appear during a show, and to get rid of it, I had to change to another channel and then change it back. Sometimes this way would not work, and I had to pick up the set and shake it to remove the sound. I actually began to build up my arm muscles (肌肉) shaking my set.

When neither of these methods removed the static noise, I would sit helplessly and wait for the noise to go away. At last I ended up hitting the set with m y fist, and it stopped working altogether. My trip to the repair shop cost me $62, and the set is working well now, but I keep expecting more trouble.

I’ve learned several foreign languages as an adult and was able to learn French to fluent conversation in 17 days.

In 2005 I stayed with a French friend in a French village. No one in the village spoke English and my friend refused to speak English as well. I set up a way where I did the same things every day.

In the morning, I practiced writing vocabulary for 2 hours. I believe writing things out is the best way to memorize things.

While writing, I would listen to French learning MP3s. It’s really helpful to hear other students make mistakes that you can learn from, just like a regular classroom environment.

I had lunch with my French friends every day. As they refused to slow down when speaking to me in French, it was to learn or to starve!

In the afternoon, I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in French. Reading the children’s books you read as a child is a great way to learn new languages. Firstly, the language used is simple and secondly, knowing the story helps you to guess the meaning of new words and avoid using a dictionary.

I spent an hour writing basic essays about things that always get asked like “Where are you from?” “What do you do?”, which I had my French friend check for errors. By learning ready-made answers, you practice what you learned and build up your confidence.

Another good tip is to learn the filler words, which people say between sentences but have no real meaning, allowing you to buy time in conversation.

After 17 days I went to Paris, where I met a girl in a coffee shop. When I told her I had been learning French for 17 days, she insisted that I had lived in France for at least a year.

My color television has given me nothing but a headache. I was able to buy it a little over a year ago because I had my relatives give me money for my birthday instead of a lot of clothes that wouldn’t fit. I let a salesclerk fool me into buying a discontinued model. I realized this a day later, when I saw newspaper advertisements for the set at seventy-five dollars less than I had paid. The set worked so beautifully when I first got it home that I would keep it on until stationssigned off for the night. Fortunately, I didn’t get any channels showing all-night movies or I would never have gotten to bed.

Then I started developing a problem with the set that involved static noise. For some reason, when certain shows switched into a commercial, a loud noise would sound for a few seconds. Gradually, this noise began to appear during a show, and to get rid of it, I had to change to another channel and then change it back. Sometimes this technique would not work, and I had to pick up the set and shake it to remove the sound. I actually began to build up my arm muscles shaking my set.

When neither of these methods removed the static noise, I would sit helplessly and wait for the noise to go away. At last I ended up hitting the set with my fist, and it stopped working altogether. My trip to the repair shop cost me $62, and the set is working well now, but I keep expecting more trouble.

When my brother and I were young, my mom would take us on Transportation Days.

It goes like this: You can’t take any means of transportation more than once. We would start from home, walking two blocks to the rail station. We’d take the train into the city center, then a bus, switching to the tram, then maybe a taxi. We always considered taking a horse carriage in the historic district, but we didn’t like the way the horses were treated, so we never did. At the end of the day, we took the subway to our closest station, where Mom’s friend was waiting to give us a ride home — our first car ride of the day.

The good thing about Transportation Days is not only that Mom taught us how to get around. She was born to be multimodal(多方式的). She understood that depending on cars only was a failure of imagination and, above all, a failure of confidence — the product of a childhood not spent exploring subway tunnels.

Once you learn the route map and step with certainty over the gap between the train and the platform, nothing is frightening anymore. New cities are just light-rail lines to be explored. And your personal car, if you have one, becomes just one more tool in the toolbox — and often an inadequate one, limiting both your mobility and your wallet.

On Transportation Days, we might stop for lunch on Chestnut Street or buy a new book or toy, but the transportation was the point. First, it was exciting enough to watch the world speed by from the train window. As I got older, my mom helped me unlock the mysteries that would otherwise have paralyzed my first attempts to do it myself: How do I know where to get off? How do I know how much it costs? How do I know when I need tickets, and where to get them? What track, what line, which direction, where’s the stop, and will I get wet when we go under the river?

I’m writing this right now on an airplane, a means we didn’t try on our Transportation Days and, we now know, the dirtiest and most polluting of them all. My flight routed me through Philadelphia. My multimodal mom met me for dinner in the airport. She took a train to meet me.

When I was six, Dad brought home a dog one day, who was called “Brownie”. My brothers and I all loved Brownie and did different things with her. One of us would walk her, another would feed her, then there were baths, playing catch and many other games. Brownie, in return, loved each and every one of us. One thing that most touched my heart was that she would go to whoever was sick and just be with them. We always felt better when she was around.

One day, as I was getting her food, she chewed up(咬破) one of Dad’s shoes, which had to be thrown away in the end. I knew Dad would be mad and I had to let her know what she did was wrong. When I looked at her and said, “Bad girl.” She looked down at the ground and then went and hid. I saw a tear in her eyes.

     Brownie turned out to be more than just our family pet. She went everywhere with us. People would stop and ask if they could pet her. Of course she'd let anyone pet her. She was just the most lovable dog. There were many dines when we'd be out walking and a small child would come over and pull on her hair. She never barked (吠) or tried to get away. Funny thing is she would smile. This frightened people because they thought she was showing her teeth. Far from the truth, she loved everyone.

     Now many years have passed since Brownie died of old age. I still miss the days when she was with us.

Every day my husband parked his car in the same open-air car park in Zimbabwe. On this particular day, he had been running to his car with a pile of office papers under his arm. As he opened the car door, he suddenly lost control of his body. He felt a stabbing pain in his arm, and became totally breathless and lost consciousness. As he fell down, half in, half out of the car, his last thought was “what a way to die”.

A young woman getting into her own car in the deserted car park noticed what was going on and at once ran to my husband's aid, trying to bring his life back. Realizing time was important, she tried to move my husband to her car, calling the guard at the gate.

Fearing an ambulance would take too long to arrive, she felt it better to get to the hospital as quickly as she could. She raced through traffic lights sounding her car's horn and rushed into the hospital, calling out, "I have an unknown man here who I think is having a heart attack."

Having realized he was in capable hands, the woman returned to the car park, found his keys on the ground, collected his papers and piled them in the car. Having seen my husband come out of a certain building each day, the security guard thought he knew where he worked. The young woman managed to locate his colleagues and they in turn contacted my niece, who waited for me to return home so she could break the news to me.

After careful tests it turned out that my husband's disease had nothing to do with heart. We were naturally eager to find the kind stranger who had come to his aid. After some weeks we discovered where the young woman worked. She was overjoyed when my husband walked into her office with a huge bouquet (束) of flowers. She said she required no thanks, and preferred to remain anonymous (匿名的).

It was the graduation day at the university where I work and a beautiful day quite unlike the first graduation I attended as a young professor. On that cold day years ago, as we watched the students walking into the hall, one of my colleagues turned to me and said, “Graduation will be one of the happiest and one of the saddest time of your life. ” At my inquiry, he answered, “Because the students you have gotten to know have to leave.”

As years went by, my previous confusion about my colleague’s words no longer existed. When I came across naughty students, I have had to rethink why I chose to be a teacher. It obviously isn’t the money. Once a former computer science student of mine called me, asking me if I wanted to have a change. He was working at Nintendo Corporation. His salary was higher than my current one, though I have more education and have worked for over a decade. With my programming skills, he said he could get me hired. I thanked him, but declined his kind offer.

A few days before this current graduation, while working on final grades, I found a note a student had slipped in with her homework. She thanked me for being her teacher and said the things she had learned in my class — not about math, but about life — would be things she would remember long after the math skills had faded away. As I finished reading, I remembered why I had become a teacher.

Now, on this sunny graduation day, as I again observed the sea of blue hats and gowns, I did so with renewed dedication (奉献) and a deeper sense of satisfaction — I will always be grateful that I am a teacher.

 You always have to understand what you are good at, and what you are not good at. Or if you are interested in something you always have to master it first.

 Finally, my cousin brought the help. When I waked up I was happy that I did not die. It was pretty insane what happened to me.

D

You are watching a film in which two men are having a fight. They hit one another hard. At the start they only fight with their fists. But soon they begin hitting one another over the heads with chairs. And so it goes on until one of the men crashes through a window and falls thirty feet to the ground below. He is dead！Of course he isn't really dead. With any luck he isn't even hurt. Why? Because the men who fall out of high windows or jump from fast moving trains, who crash cars of even catch fire, are professionals. They do this for a living. These men are called stuntmen. That is to say, they perform tricks. There are two sides to their work. They actually do most of the things you see on the screen. For example, they fall from a high building. However, they do not fall on to hard ground but on to empty cardboard boxes covered with a mattress (床垫). Again, when they hit one another with chairs, the chairs are made of soft wood and when they crash through windows, the glass is made of sugar! But although their work depends on trick of this sort, it also requires a high degree of skill and training. Often a stuntman’s success depends on careful timing. For example, when he is "blown up" in a battle scene, he has to jump out of the way of the explosion just at the right moment.

Naturally stuntmen are well paid for their work, but they lead dangerous lives. They often get seriously injured, and sometimes killed. A Norwegian stuntman, for example, skied over the edge of a cliff (悬崖) a thousand feet high. His parachute (降落伞) failed to open, and he was killed. In spite of all the risks, this is no longer a profession for men only. Men no longer dress up as women when actresses have to perform some dangerous action. For nowadays there are stuntgirls too！