Throughout the year, 1school organizes charity events and activities. One of 2events of the year is the food drive. For the past few years, this has been a very successful charity event and most of the students have taken part in it. Each school does its food drives a bit 3. However, most of the time the food drives are set up in a similar style.

In my school it usually lasts for 4weeks. Most of the time, students will bring the food 5home. The food 6for a long period of time, such as canned goods and pastas. We 7organize activities outside the school. Some students go door to door around their neighborhood asking 8people are willing to donate some food. Some set up donation boxes in churches and 9areas such as stores or cinemas. The students all work really hard and the members of the community are very supportive.

After that time is over, we will bring the collected food to our local Community Table. The families in our community can go for 10warm meal if they need to. Usually, a group of students go with one of our teachers to deliver the food. I 11food with our teacher last year, and I was surprised to see so many families 12were struggling with hunger in our community.

I was glad that our school was able 13out all of those families. We do this several times each year. 14meaningful event! Sure, we can't change the world, 15we can do our best to make our world a better place.

    Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was a British 1 who wrote beloved classics such as Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield and Great Expectations. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed extremely high popularity during his life-time and his novels and short stories are still 2read today.

    Dickens left Portsmouth as a baby. His 3 childhood was spent in Chatham (1817-1822), a place which he often went back to in his fiction. He was born in a rather rich family. His father, a clerk in the navy pay office, was 4paid. But he often 5expensive things and did not have a skillful plan on finance. This often brought the family to financial embarrassment or disaster.

    Some of his failings and his excitements are dramatized in Mr. Micawber in the partly autobiographical novel David Copperfield.

    David Copperfield is the novel that draws most closely from Dickens' own life. The story traces the life of David Copperfield 6from a cheerful boy to a mature adult. When he is7enough to get married, many ups and downs of life begin to follow him. Readers can find many light-hearted moments, along with many unforgettable characters.

    In 1824 the family reached 8. His schooling ended three years later when he was 15 years old. Then he was sent to manual work in a factory because his father went to prison for debts. These 9deeply affected Charles. Although 10this fall into the working class, he began to learn about the life of the working class and to show sympathy in his writings.

    Deke Duncan is not an ordinary DJ. He's 73 years old and has spent the last 44 years hosting a radio show from his garden shed to a rather small audience.

    In 1974, Deke Duncan created his own radio station in his garden shed. He used high-quality equipment to get that professional radio sound. This was well before the days of the Internet. The only way to reach people with a radio show was by broadcasting it on radio waves. To do this, you needed a licence. Without one, he couldn't broadcast it anywhere outside his house. However, that didn't stop him from following his passion. Every weekend, his radio played pop songs and local news to only one person: his wife! His dream was to one day share his radio show with his home town, Stevenage. With only one listener, it seemed unlikely.

    44 years later, this dream is going to come true. BBC Three Counties, a local radio station for Stevenage and the nearby area, heard of his story. They decided to give him his own one-off radio show. Deke Duncan will have a one-hour show over Christmas, playing not just to Stevenage, but to three counties. "This feels really nice. For the first time in my life, I'm speechless," he told listeners on the BBC Three Counties radio station.

    Even though he has moved to Stockport, Deke has still kept his radio station going. He has hosted the show with friends and still broadcasts for his family. It just goes to show that a lifelong dream can come true if you work for it and keep going, even if it does take 44 years!

My 20-year-old daughter, Ann, living in Philadelphia, sent me a message the other day. "I need socks and shampoo." She was actually asking me to prepare those things for her, but I thought she was playing a cell phone game. I decide not to be a helicopter (直 升 机 ) mother, because experience as a mother and professor has taught me how badly that can result. Instead, I prefer a more hands-off way. From the time Ann turned 16, I don't want to know her work and life schedule any longer.

But that's not what I see at Drexel University where I teach. Most of my students talk to their parents three times a day or more. One student's mother called her son because she didn't hear from him for a few days. The son was in the library so he whispered "hello". The mother doubted that he was drinking, and insisted on asking him to take a picture of himself. Holding a newspaper with that day's date, the son had to take a photo of himself and sent it to his mother in order to prove that he wasn't telling a lie.

I always think that my students should depend on themselves. I tell them that I will not check whether they miss classes and finish homework or not. Because they are independent thinkers and they should take responsibility for their own choices.

But their parents don't treat them like me. I know a mother. She puts her eyes on her son too much. She hopes he will walk by the camera so that she can know what he is doing. Another mother checks her son's credit card daily. However, I never do that. My daughters only come to me with important things when they need my decision. I think that's because I give them space.

 Many parents try to find if their kids are hiding from them. But we have to learn to respect Boundaries (界限), even when technology is so powerful now. So I am going to do my best not to be a helicopter parent.

    In 1994, a Japanese Masahiro Hara invented the Quick Response code (QR 二维码) as a way to increase the amount of information that could be stored on a paper label. Before this, one-dimensional(1D) barcodes had already been used since 1974 when the first barcode (条形码)  was scanned in a supermarket in USA. The first barcodes consisted of two parts: the barcode and the 12-digit number. But the two-dimensional (2D) code made by Mr Hara can hold as much as 7,000 digits or 4,000 characters of text, including all Japanese characters. Many books have QR codes on their back cover which provide information such as the price, the author and the publisher.

    Around 2006, Wang Yue and his team developed the Hanxin Code which can also encode Chinese characters. Short Hanxin Code, instead of long Chinese names, are now widely printed on the large quantity of shoes on trucks and ships. In 2014, Wang Yue's company produced its first self-service QR code reader -- the Smart Box. Now it has become the most popular offline payment in China.

    QR codes can be easily read with any mobile phone that has a camera. So they are now widely used in factories and supermarkets, on various tickets and restaurant cashier tables. On 14 February, 2020, a QR code called 'Health Code' is used in Hangzhou for people to quickly report their health status. Firstly, find an app named Alipay and scan the QR code included. Secondly, provide your name, phone number and ID number. Thirdly, answer some questions about your health status and whereabouts. Then you will get the 'Health Code' with different colour, green for "being healthy". Only with an updated green code, you may be allowed to enter or leave Hangzhou. On 21 February, 2020, a QR code is also used by Ms. Tang to inform her students about the course arrangement.

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    On September 17, 2019, Sarah Thomas has become the first person to swim the English Channel four times without stopping. It was really not easy for her, because she had cancer a short time ago and faced a lot of challenges while swimming.

    On Sunday morning, Sarah began her swimming and finished at 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday.Lewis Pugh, another swimmer, said that Sarah's achievement was "extraordinary, amazing, super-human!"

    The English Channel is the stretch of water between England and France. The Dover Strait, the narrowest part of the Channel, is 18 to 25 miles wide and its depth ranges from 120 to 180 feet. Although it has natural barrier (天险), there is a long history of people trying to swim across the Dover strait between Dover and Calais.However, his record has been kept for many years.

    The Dover Strait is the busiest shipping route in the world. According to the Guinness Book of Records, 600ships travel between Dover of England and Calais of France every day.

    This means that currents in the water can push swimmers away from where they need to be. Swimmers must overcome so many difficulties and they need to be energetic again quickly as they need to keep going even if they are very tired. As a result, Sarah was expected to swim around 80 miles but ended up swimming 130 miles!

    Who knows if it will ever be broken and someone will attempt to break it?