（2016·新课标卷III））On one of her trips to New York several years ago, Eudora Welty decided to take a couple of New York friends out to dinner. They settled in at a comfortable East Slide cafe and within minutes, another customer was approaching their table.

Sitting on a sofa in her room, Welty, a slim figure in a simple gray dress, looked pleased with this explanation.

＂I don’t make them up,＂ she said of the characters in her fiction these last 50 or so years. ＂I don’t have to.＂

Beauticians, bartenders, piano players and people with purple hats, Welty’s people come from afternoons spent visiting with old friends, from walks through the streets of her native Jackson, Miss., from conversations overheard on a bus. It annoys Welty that, at 78, her left ear has now given out. Sometimes, sitting on a bus or a train, she hears only a fragment(片段) of a particularly interesting story.

Trevor Baylis，the inventor has a swimming pool just inside his front door and a hot tub(盆)on the front. This energetic former stunt man(替身演员),with a training in structural engineering and a swimming-pool business, heard some TV talk about the difficulty of sending out warnings of Aids in Africa because without power or batteries, radios were useless.

So he invented a clockwork(发条)wind-up radio: turn round the handle for 60 seconds and you can hear the whole of The World At One and The Arches. He got mentioned in a BBC programme. There was a meeting with Nelson Mandela and an OBE from the Queen. There are his spots on radio and television.

As a Junior High school dropout from Hendon in London, however, he wants to do something to help all the inventors less lucky than him. He wants to set up an Academy of Invention.

“I’ve learned something in my 62 years,” he says. “I don’t mind anybody looking down on me, as long as they don’t expect me to be looking up. If someone’s got a problem with me, it’s their problem. They say, ‘You’re rather strange .’ Well, if being strange means you live in a house with an indoor swimming pool and a hot tub on the front, let’s be strange. People may think I am out of the trees, but to believe convention(惯例)is something that prevents answer. You may give a conventional person a problem, they’ll come up with a conventional answer. Conventional people can’t deal with the questions of unconvention .”

11-year-old child Tanishq Abraham is in the news for graduating from college with three different degrees. The talented kid from California made headlines last year as well, for completing high school at the age of ten.

Last week’s graduation ceremony was attended by Tanishq’s parents- his mother Taji, a doctor, and his father Bijou, a software engineer. They cheered for Tanishq as he was awarded associate degrees in math and physical sciences, general science, and language studies. He wore a rainbow colored scarf that his grandmother had made specially for the occasion.

“The assumption is that he’s the all-time youngest,” said college spokesman Scott Crow. “But we don’t have all the records to completely confirm. He was beyond doubt the youngest this year.”

Tanishq said that he wasn’t frightened by the fact that his classmates were all twice his age, especially because he was well-received. “A lot were really happy that there was a kid in their class,”   he said. And his parents were pretty low-key about the whole affair, being used to all his accomplishments since a young age. “Even in kindergarten, he was a few years ahead.” Taji said. “It just went from there.”

Interestingly, Tanishq has been home-schooled by his mother. He’s also been taking classes at the American River College since he was seven years old.

You’d probably think that Tanishq is done with books for his life, but he actually has no plans to stop learning. “I want to become a doctor,” he said after the ceremony. “But I also want to become a medical researcher, and also the president of the United States.” In a tweet, he showed that he hopes to win the Nobel Prize some day in medicine or research. In the meantime, he plans to spend his summer on a family vacation and a Calculus II course.