Duan Jiayang, a 12-year-old student of a primary school in Fujian, learns the skills to take care of vegetable fields.

“I learned how to place the mulch film (地膜),” he says. “It’s not easy.”

Many parents pay much attention to their children’s good results. They do everything for their children. So many students are poor at the basic skill in their daily lives. “For example,” a teacher says, “some parents would do the schools’ cleaning instead of their children. “Now colleges, middle schools and primary schools pay more attention to teaching students practical skills.”

A primary school has a class about the skill on one of its schoolyards. Students plant fruit and vegetables on an area of land about 4, 000 m² in size. In the days coming up to the May Day holiday, students at the school worked together in the fields. They planted watermelons, carrots and corn. The school hopes that students will understand the food is quite precious (珍贵) so that they will better know the difficulties that their parents went through.

根据语篇内容, 选择最佳选项。

①carrots   ②flowers   ③watermelons   ④corn

It is true that people with better education are usually able to get better-paid jobs. In other words, they have more chances to choose a good job while people with little or no education don’t.

It seems that the purpose of education is to make people get jobs. But this isn’t accepted by all people. Some people may think that a person should spend the best years of his life getting education only for a way of living. This was probably one of the earliest reasons of education. In fact, if education is just a way of making a living, people don’t need to spend so much time at school. People can get education for a living in a short time. Subjects like history and geography need not be taught to everyone. Even language and maths need not be taught in detail (详细地) either. Here it is clear that education is much more than teaching a man to get a way of living.

Education is well-rounded and it is mainly for improving a man. It is not only to teach him to speak, read and write, but also to develop his creative thinking and other abilities. After that, it is to make him a wise man and thankfully enjoy the achievements of humans. Education is to make a man lead a better life. Educated people are expected to be able to listen to good music, read good books, watch good plays and take an interest in the world.

I would agree that making a good living is an important reason for education, but certainly not the most important or the main reason.

The school life of a small farm in Mexico is different from ours.

On the small farm, there are no schools. A bus is the school. The driver of the bus is the teacher. It’s a school bus, but it doesn’t take the children to school. It just goes around from place to place, and sometimes it comes to this farm. The bus just stays (停留) here for three weeks. The farmers call it a school on wheels (轮子). Every time the bus comes, the farmers run to it, they are so happy. They warmly welcome the school bus.

When the bus is on the farm in the morning, he teacher teaches the small children. In the afternoon, the bigger children come to have their lessons because they must work in the morning. At night, the fathers and mothers come to school. They want to learn, too. How the farmers hope that some day they can have a real school on their farm!