When the dog named Judy spotted the first sheep in her life, she did what comes naturally. The four-year-old dog set off racing after the sheep across several fields and, being a city animal, lost both her sheep and her sense of direction. Then she ran along the edge of cliff( 悬崖) and fell 100 feet, bouncing off a rock into the sea.
    Her owner Mike Holden panicked and celled the coastguard of Cornwall, who turned up in seconds . Six volunteers slid down the cliff with the help of a rope but gave up all hope of finding her alive after a 90-minute search.
    Three days later, a hurricane hit the coast near Cornwall. Mr. Holden returned home from his holiday upset and convinced his pet was dead. He comforted himself with the thought she had died in the most beautiful part of the country.
    For the next two weeks, the Holdens were heartbroken . Then, one day, the phone rang and Steve Tregear, the coastguard of Cornwall, asked Holder if he would like his dog bark.
    A birdwatcher, armed with a telescope, found the pet sitting desperately on a rock. While he sounded the alarm, a student from Leeds climbed down the cliff to collect Judy.
    The dog had initially been knocked unconscious(失去知觉的)but had survived by drinking water from a f resh scream at the base of the cliff. She may have fed on the body of a sheep which had also fallen over the edge. “The dog was very thin and hungry,” Steve Tregear said , “It was a very dog. She survived because of a plentiful supply of fresh water,” he added.
    It was ,as Mr. Holden admitted, “a minor miracle(奇迹)”.

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Welcome to the Electronic Village to explore new ways of language teaching and learning.

    Reading can be a social activity. Think of the people who belong to book groups. They choose books to read and then meet to discuss them. Now, the website BookCrossing.com turns the page on the traditional idea of a book group.
    Members go on the site and register the books they own and would like to share. BookCrossing provides an identification number to stick inside the book. Then the person leaves it in a public place, hoping that the book will have an adventure, traveling far and wide with each new reader who finds it.
    Bruce Pederson, the managing director of BookCrossing, says, “The two things that change your life are the people you meet and books you read. BookCrossing combines both.”
    Members leave books on park benches and buses, in train stations and coffee shops. Whoever finds their book will go to the site and record where they found it.
    People who find a book can also leave a journal entry describing what they thought of it. E-mails are then sent to the BookCrossing to keep them updated about where their books have been found. Bruce Peterson says the idea is for people not to be selfish by keeping a book to gather dust on a shelf at home.
    BookCrossing is part of a trend among people who want to get back to the “real” and not the virtual(虚拟). The site now has more than one million members in more than one hundred thirty-five countries.

    Nothing could stop Dad. After he was put on disability for a bad back, he bought a small farm in the country, just enough to grow food for the family. He planted vegetables, fruit trees and even kept bees for honey.
    And every week he cleaned Old Man McColgin's chicken house in exchange for manure(肥料). The Smell really burned the inside of your nose. When we complained about the terrible smell, Dad said the stronger the manure, the healthier the crops, and he was right. For example, just one of his cantaloupes filled the entire house with its sweet smell, and the taste was even sweeter.
    As the vegetables started coming in, Dad threw himself into cooking. One day, armed with a basket of vegetables, he announced he was going to make stew(炖菜).Dad pulled out a pressure cooker and filled it up with cabbages, eggplants, potatoes, corns, onions and carrots. For about half an hour. the pressure built and the vegetables cooked. Finally, Dad turned off the stove, the pot began to cool and the pressure relief valve sprayed out a cloud of steam. If we thought Dad's pile of chicken manure。was bad, this was 10 times worse. When Dad took off the lid, the smell nearly knocked us out.
    Dad carried the pot out and we opened doors and windows to air out the house. Just how bad was it? The neighbors came out of their houses to see if we had a gas leak!
    Determined, Dad filled our plates with steaming stew and passed them around it didn’t look that bad, and after the first wave had shut down my ability to smell, it didn’t offend the nose so much, edible, and we drank up every last drop of soup.

Grandparents Answer a Call

    As a third-generation native of Brownsville, Texas, Mildred Garza never planned to move away. Even when her daughter and son asked her to move to San Antonio to help with their children, she politely refused. Only after a year of friendly discussion did Ms. Garza finally say yes. That was four years ago. Today all three generations regard the move as a success,giving them a closer relationship than they would have had in separate cities.
    No statistics show the number of grandparents like Garza who are moving closer to adult children and grandchildren. Yet there is evidence suggesting that the trend is growing. Even President Obama’s mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, has agreed to leave Chicago and move into the White House to help care for her granddaughters. According to a study by grandparents.com, 83 percent of the people said Mrs. Robinson’s decision will influence grandparents in the American family. Two-thirds believe more families will follow the example of Obama’s family.
    “In the 1960s we were all a little wild and couldn’t get away from home far enough or fast enough to prove we could do it on our own,” says Christine Crosby, publisher of Grand,a magazine for grandparents. “We now realize how important family is and how important it is to be near them, especially when you’re raising children.”
    Moving is not for everyone. Almost every grandparent wants to be with his or her grandchildren and is willing to make sacrifices, but sometimes it is wiser to say no and visit frequently instead. Having your grandchildren far away is hard, especially knowing your adult child is struggling, but giving up the life you know may be harder.