Online Class Notes (Mike)

Write a story about a time when you were in a difficult situation and your phone (or another electronic device) helped you. (可以参照下文)

A few months ago, I was on a camping holiday with my friend, Jack. One day, we went for a walk in some woods. We stopped to have lunch and sat down in some long grass. At that moment, Jack jumped up.

‘Ow! My leg!’ he said. He showed me his leg. There was a large red mark on the skin and it was very painful.

‘Was it a snake?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t see anything,’ he replied.

Fortunately, my mum is a doctor. We took a photo of Jack’s leg on my phone and sent it to her. A few moments later, she called. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It isn’t a snake bite. It’s probably an insect.’

‘So is it an emergency?’ I asked.

‘No, it isn’t,’ she replied. ‘You don’t have to go to hospital.’

And she was right: the next day, Jack’s leg was fine.

My hometown.

YiBin is in the southwest of SiChuan, it is in the summer very hot, in the winter very cold.The city has a population of around 4500000, in YiBin has so many delicious food like YB borbecue,featured pastry,YB ran noodles and famous liquor Wuliangye.YB has junction of the three rivers so call it “The first city of Yangtze river.l love YB because there is my hometown, my kids’ memory.

My Hometown

Yibin is in the southwest of Sichuan, it is very hot in the summer and cold in the winter. The city has a population of around 4, 500, 000. Yibin has so many delicious food, like YB barbecue, special pastry, YB burning noodles and famous liquor Wuliangye.

YB has junction of the three rivers so call it “The first city of Yangtze river. l love YB because it is my hometown, it has a lot of my childhood memory.

My Hometown

My hometown is a city in the southwest of Sichuan called YB. The summer months are usually sweltering hot and the winter can be cold/freezing. The population is about 4.5 million.

YB is known for its delicious food, such as ABC. There is a large area full of bamboos, locals call it “Bamboo Sea”. Locals make bamboo rafts there/The bamboo industry (竹子产业) is booming in YB. The bamboo see supports a lot of people’s lives.

YB is where three major/big rivers meet/converge, therefore, it is called “The Greatest City Along Yangtze River”.

I haven’t been home in 6 months, I really miss my hometown and its people. I wish I could go back during Mid-Autumn Festival. 

Hippo-Roller

Many women and children in Africa spend between three and nine hours a day carrying water to their homes. They use 20-litre plastic buckets, which they carry on their heads. The buckets are very heave and often cause back and neck injuries. So engineers Pettie Petzer and Johan Jonker designed a ‘rolling wheel’ which can carry ninety litres of water and is much easier to move. 33,000 ‘Hippo-Rollers’ have been made and delivered to remote villages in Africa. The results are good: women have more time to look after their families, the children have more time at school, and there are fewer injuries.

LifeStraw

There are 780 million people in the world who don’t have clean safe drinking water. This fact led the Swiss company Vestergaard to invent a special kind of straw that allows people to drink dirty water without getting ill. The LifeStraw is a long thin tube that cleans the water as it passes through into somebody’s mouth. LifeStraw is very light and can clean up to 1,000 litres of water before you need to replace it. LifeStraw was used to help people after the Haiti earthquake, and floods in Pakistan and Thailand.

AidPod

When Simon Berry was travelling in Zambia, he noticed that he could buy Coca-Cola in the remotest villages. But in these same villages the people had no medicines and, because of that, one in five children were dying before their fifth birthday. He had an idea. ‘Why don’t they bring medicines when they deliver the Coca-Cola?’ So he invented the AidPod, a triangular packet of medicines that fits between the bottles in a crate of Coca-Cola. Berry has experimented with a number of designs for his AidPod and is testing his ideas in Zambia. If his plan works, he hopes to do the same thing in other African countries, and save thousands of lives.

On 24 November 1971, at Portland Airport, a man wearing a suit and a raincoat bought a one-way ticket for the evening flight to Seattle. He checked in and got on the plane. The name on the ticket was Dan Cooper, but that wasn’t his real name.

When the plane had taken off, he put on sunglasses and gave the flight attendant a note. The note said that Cooper had a bomb in his suitcase, that he would use it if necessary, and that he was hijacking the plane. He showed the flight attendant the bomb and told her that when the plane landed in Seattle, he wanted $200,000 and four parachutes. He told her that he would let the passengers leave the plane.

When the plane landed, the police gave Cooper the money and the parachutes, and the plane took off again with just Cooper and five members of the crew. The flight attendant said that Cooper wasn’t nervous, he didn’t get angry, and he seemed to be a nice, polite man. Cooper ordered the pilot to fly low, at about 3,000 metres, towards Mexico. Twenty minutes after taking off, Cooper opened the back door and jumped out of the plane with a parachute and the money.

That was the last time anyone saw Cooper. The police launched an investigation and searched the area where Cooper had jumped – but they found nothing. Ten years later, an eight-year-old boy found some of the money (only $6,000) on a beach nearby. The rest of the money is still missing. Over the years, the police have interviewed hundreds of suspects, but they haven’t made any arrests. The real identity of Cooper and what happened to him remain a mystery to this day.

Grammar

there be: 表示存在

There are many delicious food in YB

There are 10 boys and 12 girls in our class.

There are one TV, two computers and three chairs in this room.

There are fish and coral in the ocean.

There is a rumor that SH will be locked down again.

Vocabulary

Be famous for = be known as/for

childhood (n) 童年

child (n) children – childhood
teen (n) 青少年 – teenhood 青春期
adult (n) – adulthood (n) 成年期

neighbor – neighborhood (n) 街区

major (adj.) 重大的，主要的，大的

coral (n) 珊瑚

certainly (adv.) 确实，无疑

communications (n) 传播学，传媒，通讯
communicate (v) 沟通
communication (n) 沟通
I need to communicate with my boss every week.

remote (adj.) 远的，偏远的
a remote village
remote area 偏远地区

urban (adj.)城市的
suburban (adj.) 郊区的
suburb (n) 郊区

sub- 亚，第二的，下一层的

conscious (adj.) 意识的
subconscious (adj.) 潜意识的，

sub-culture (n) 亚文化

title (n) 标题，头衔
subtitle (n) 字幕

submarine (n) 潜水艇

subway

rural (adj.) 乡下，农村地区
village (n) 村庄，村子

journalist (n) 新闻记者

complain (v) 抱怨，发牢骚，投诉
Stop complaining! You are annoying.

conversation (n) 谈话，对话

relative (n) 亲戚

fortunate (adj.) 幸运的，走运的，运气好的
fortunately (adv.) 幸运的是，
It started to rain when I got out today, fortunately, I had an umbrella in my bag.

bring (v) 带，运输，携带

complete (adj.) 完全的，全部的
(v) 完成，做完
I need to complete my homework/project.

storm (n) 暴风雨

few (adj.) 很少的 – many ： 可数名词 many people/apples/cars
little (adj.) 很少的- much：不可数名词 much money/milk/air

own (v) 拥有
owner (n) 主人

emergency (n)  紧急情况，例外情况

emergent (adj.) 紧急的
This is an emergent package.

A village without phones
The UK is not a big country, and it certainly is not a poor country. So you probably think communications are very good and everybody can use the internet and mobile phones. But this is not true. In some remote parts of the country, communications are very bad.

Staylittle is a village in the centre of Wales. In 1965, a journalist wrote about the village in a newspaper. He said, ‘it is miles from anywhere’（去哪儿都得好几英里）. He also complained that the telephone lines in the village did not work well. That was a long time ago, but communications in the village have not changed very much. You cannot use a mobile phone in Staylittle because there is no signal. There are also problems with the telephone lines. When the villagers make phone calls, they often hear other people’s conversations at the same time!

The people who live there are tired of these problems. ‘You need good telephone lines these days,’ said one woman. ‘Last month I tried to buy something online. Unfortunately, the company refused to bring it here. That was because I couldn’t give them a phone number.’ Other people have stopped using their phones completely. They’ve started writing letters to friends and relatives instead, just like in the past.

The British government （英国政府）is spending money to improve internet connections in remote parts of the country. For this reason, most of the people in Staylittle hope that communications will get better soon. But in fact they have become worse recently（最近）. A few days ago, there was a bad storm in the area. Because of this, most of the telephone lines to Staylittle have stopped working completely. Now the village has only got one telephone, in the post office.

A few houses in the village have internet access. Their owners can get online and send emails. However, it isn’t a good idea to use email in an emergency. ‘Imagine there’s a fire,’ said one man. ‘You can’t email the fire station and hope that they read it. You need to phone them!’