1 What happens in a supermarket?
2 Well, first, you will pick up a basket or a trolley.
3 What’s the difference between a basket and a trolley?
4 A basket is used for just a little shopping.
5 A trolley has wheels and is used when we have a lot to buy.
6 Then when we have chosen which we want, we go shopping.
7 Modern supermarkets have food from all around the world.
8 The food is arranged in sections containing similar foods and supplies.
9 You walk up and down the sections choosing what you want.
10 In big supermarkets, the choice can be very large.
11 You can buy clothes and household items in some supermarkets.
12 When you have finished, you go to the checkout.
13 Here you take all your shopping out of the basket or trolley.
14 The checkout person will then put the items across a machine.
15 The machine tells you how much to pay.

1 Children from all around the world are basically the same.
2 Their needs are similar wherever they live.
3 Of course they need food, parents and love.
4 However, as children grow older, their needs may differ according to their culture.
5 In some countries, children go to school from the age of three.
6 In other cultures, children may never go to school at all.
7 When they are babies, they all eat or drink milk.
8 When they are older, their food becomes the same as their parents.
9 This naturally is different in different parts of the world.
10 In the west, children learn to use knives and forks and spoons.
11 In the east, they use chopsticks and spoons.
12 Children will leave school and start work at different ages.
13 Their education will depend on many things including cultural background.
14 It does not matter if they are from east or west, most people think children are beautiful.
15 It is a shame it changes as they get older.

1 Some people say that music is the universal language.
2 Music bridges culture better than language does.
3 Almost everyone in the world knows about classical music.
4 Classical music is the kind written by Beethoven, Bach, Wagner, Tchaikovsky etc.
5 These composers came from different countries.
6 But their music spread around the world.
7 Today we can buy all kinds of music to listen to.
8 Popular music, also called pop music, generally appeals to teenagers.
9 Rock, jazz, blues, opera, soul and folk music are specialest kinds of music.
10 However, they can appeal to all kinds of people in all countries.
11 In the 1960s and 1970s, the Beatles from England were the most famous musicians.
12 Their music influenced young people around the world.
13 Although they no longer create music like Beethoven etc., the Beatles’ music is still loved and performed.
14 Today there is such a wide variety of music to choose from, that it seems difficult.
15 It maybe best to try all the different kinds available.
16 Then we can buy and enjoy the ones we like most.

1 Most countries produce a few famous writers.
2 Which writers can you think of from your country?
3 How many writers do you know from other countries?
4 How many are 20th century writers?
5 Perhaps we know the old writers best.
6 In China, everyone has heard of Shakespeare.
7 He was an Englishman, but he died in 1616.
8 So for 400 years, people have remembered Shakespeare.
9 What about American writers?
10 Do you know which are American and which are British?
11 Sometimes it is difficult to know.
12 But most of the famous writers before the 20th century were British.
13 Russia has produced some very famous writers too.
14 Most of the Russian writers are famed for their passion and romance in their books.
15 France also has produced some great writers.
16 And China?

1 How many musical instruments can you think of?
2 Can you named anyone famous for playing what you chose?
3 How many are from the 20th century?
4 Before then, most famous musicians were also composers.
5 Composers were more famous than the players.
6 Is that the case today?
7 Most of famous musicians before the 20th century played in orchestras.
8 Today, many of the most well-known musicians belong to the rock and pop world.
9 If they create their own music, are they also composers?
10 Yes, they are. But their work is different to that of Beethoven etc.
11 Is Michael Jackson as famous as Beethoven?
12 Will his work last as long?
13 Modern musicians and composers usually do not stay famous for more than a year or two.
14 Today’s fame is often short lived.
15 But the famous will earn lots and lots of money.
16 It is interesting to compare musicians like Beethoven and Michael Jackson.
17 It is difficult to say which is the best because they are so different.
18 Each one was famous because they gave the public the right thing at the right time.

1 How many hours a day do you watch television?
2 In many modern western countries, the average is 4 hours per day.
3 Many people think it is too much, do you agree?
4 What are the benefits of watching TV?
5 Its impact since it became popular is tremendous.
6 It is only since the second half of the 20th century that it became available to most people in the west.
7 In China it is less than that.
8 But now it is so popular that it can be seen every where.
9 What do most people like to watch on TV?
10 Well, it can be different according to their age.
11 Movies, of course, are popular.
12 As is the news and the weather reports.
13 Soap operas are also very popular in deed.
14 Some soaps as we call them have been running for over 40 years.
15 Name some soaps from your own country’s television networks.
16 Today, due to satellite broadcasting, we are able to get programs from all over the world.
17 In Europe, for example, people can see CCTV.
18 Did you know that?

1 When television became popular, people thought the radio would not survive.
2 As we all know today, that was wrong.
3 In fact, most people in the west listen to radio more than they watch TV.
4 Do you believe that?
5 Well, they listen in the morning when they are getting ready to go to work.
6 They listen when they are driving their cars.
7 Some listen when they are walking in the street.
8 Sometimes we see people with walkmans.
9 But we don’t know if they are listening to radio or to their own music.
10 For many many years, we learned about new music only from the radio.
11 Today perhaps television programs like MTV are taking over.
12 Have you heard of the BBC and VOA?
13 Then you probably know these from learning English.
14 Many students in China use the radio to help them study language.
15 Although there are television stations like CCTV9 which can help, radios are cheap to buy and easy to carry around.
16 So radio still has some advantages over television.

1、Why is it called a newspaper?
2、Because it contains news of course.
3、But Modern newspapers contain much more than just news.
4、They have competitions and puzzles and advice.
5、They are one of the oldest forms of mass communication.
6、They are printed in virtually every language in the world.
7、Newspapers find their way into almost every home in the world.
8、Some print pictures in color today.
9、Some are more like magazines than newspapers.
10、Front page news is a term from newspapers, which has come into our daily language.
11、Try to think of all the kinds of newspapers there are, what about company newspapers, local 12、newspapers, national and international financial newspapers?
13、There are too many to know them all.
14、But we can know the importance of newspapers.
15、How many uses do you know for old newspapers?

1、I like school, I hate school.
2、Why do people feel like that.
3、Which are you, a lover or a hater?
4、Do you or did you enjoy school and learning?
5、So what makes a school good or bad?
6、Perhaps it is the teachers.
7、If you have good caring teachers, you will enjoy learning.
8、Or is it the classmates that make it good or bad?
9、Why do we spend so many years at school?
10、It should prepare us for our adult life.
11、Was your school successful at doing that?
12、People can have very strong ideas about what school should and shouldn’t do.
13、Whether schools are to prepare us for adult life or further education, they are important.
14、So it maybe just a matter of luck if we get to a good school or not.
15、That luck, however, can change our whole life.

Most people do not go to university.
Some say it is only the lucky ones who go there.
Probably we all will agree that to go to university is special.
Have you heard of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Stanford?
Some universities become world famous.
Universities often produce famous men and women.
They become leaders in politics, business, science and art.
But university is not just about learning.
It is here where people make life long friends.
Whilst university, people make decisions that affect their whole lives.
Universities produce medicines and science, technology and research that can benefit human kind.
Some universities are so big that they are like a whole town.
We call this a campus.
But not all universities are campus universities.
Some are spread around a city or a town and do not group everyone together in the same place.
Whichever they are, they all play an important part in the present and future of the world.

If we try to think of the most important inventions, electricity will surely be on the list.
For the last 100 years, it has played an important part in the development of the modern world.
It affects everyone’s life in one way or another.
It is probably present the moment we are born and it stays with us throughout our lives.
When the electricity goes off, we call it a power cut.
Major power cuts in cities can have disastrous results for commerce and for life.
Try to think of all the things, organizations etc. that truly depend on electricity.
In fact, it is probably more difficult to think of those not dependent on it.
We also call electricity power, which shows how important it is.
We could say that we take electricity for granted.
In the modern world, the making of electricity is a major concern.
Its production can harm our environment.
Because of this, scientists and engineers are researching new ways of making it.
Without it, our lives will change dramatically.
And it is unlikely to be for the better.

What exactly is the environment?
It’s the world around us.
You mean the sky and trees and things like that.
Well, yes. But it can be even closer to home.
In fact, your home is an environment.
So it is anything that is around us, yah?
Yah. But most people today think of it as nature.
That’s what I thought at first.
Well, it has become very important today to think of the natural environment.
Is that because we are afraid of what is happening in nature?
Sure. It is really only in the last 50 years that we have realized what harm we are causing to the natural environment.
But the damage was started long before that, wasn’t it?
I suppose it’s started with industrial revolution about 300 years ago.
That’s not very long, if you think how old the world is.
No. But most of the environmental damage had been increasing dramatically over the past 100 years.
Yes. But now we are aware of it, we are doing our best to rectify it.

50 years ago, no one talked about acid rain.
Then we didn't really know the harm it was causing to the world.
Today almost every adult and school child is aware of acid rain and its effects.
It affects people all around the world.
Even those who are not responsible for its creation suffer from it.
It is caused mostly by the burning of fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are coal, gas, oil and peat and create carbon when they are burned.
Carbon is both necessary and dangerous in our world.
Plants and trees need carbon dioxide, CO2, to breeze.
Carbon monoxide, CO, however, is poisonous to us.
When carbon and other elements get into the air, they mix with water in the clouds.
The clouds move around the world and produce rain.
This rain is like an acid and it destroys trees, plants, rivers and fish when it falls.
The more trees it destroys, the more difficult it is for nature to redress the balance.
The burning of fossil fuels must be controlled in order to assist in the prevention of acid rain.

Some people say the earth is getting warmer.
They blame something called greenhouse gasses.
The greenhouse gasses destroy the higher atmosphere that keeps our planet from getting too hot.
CFCs are the gasses that cause one of the biggest problems in global warming.
CFCs destroy some of the ozone that is in the higher atmosphere.
The ozone layer helps us by filter out some of the harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun.
These rays can cause skin cancer in humans.
These rays can also help to heat up our planet.
Over the polar ice caps, we now have holes in the ozone layer.
These, people believe, contribute to world’s global warming.
One of its effects could have is to speed up the melting of the polar ice caps.
If these melt too quickly, the level of the sea will rise too fast for us to control it.
The effect of a rise in the height of the sea will be dramatic.
Many of the world’s major cities will be under sea water.
So, global warming can be very dangerous to our future environment.

El Nino, which is not an English name, is playing an important part in our lives.
We often hear people talk about the strange weather we are having nowadays.
The changing weather patterns are not fully understood yet.
El Nino is one which is not clear in scientist’s minds.
It is a sort of warming of the seas that move around the earth.
Many strange weather phenomenon are blamed on El Nino.
But this may not be the real case.
Global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer, acid rain etc. can all have an effect upon the weather.
What are these effects that everyone is talking about?
Tropical storms are appearing in non-tropical areas.
Some parts of the world are heating up too much and crops are failing, deserts are extending, turning arable land into unfarmable land.
Floods are coming to areas that have never experienced than before.
Unnatural weather occurrences are happening everywhere.
We are not certain what the long term effects will be.
It is certain, however, that we must pay attention to these occurrences.