She hit the decoration w her baton

Yawn (v) to open your mouth wide and breathe in deeply because you are tired or bored. Ex: Alan stretched and yawned. Sneeze (v) air suddenly comes from your nose, making a noise. Ex: I’ve been sneezing all morning. Reflex (n) a movement of your body that happens naturally in response to something. Ex: The doctor tested her reflexes. Sharp (adj) a very thin edge or point that can cut things easily. Ex: Be careful with that sharp axe. Pull away (p.v) to move away from something. Ex: He tried to pull away before the car hit him. Coordination (n) the way in which your muscles move together. Ex: These dancers have poor coordination. Breathing (n) How the body takes in oxygen and expels carbon dioxide from our lungs. Ex: For most of us breathing is automatic. Movement (n) How we move from one place to another. Ex: She is alert to every movement. Digestion (n) How the body turns food into energy for us to use. Ex: His digestion is bad. Blood circulation (n) How blood carries materials such as oxygen and nutrients around our body. Ex: Exercise will improve blood circulation. Helmet (n) a strong hat that protects your head. Ex: Wear a helmet when you ride your bike. Attendant (n) Someone who looks after customers in public places. Ex: We met an attendant in the office. Evidence (n) facts or signs that show clearly that something exists or is true. Ex: The police found the evidence in the crime scene. Twirl (v) To turn around quickly. Ex: He made the ice twirl in his glass. Frilly (adj) Decorative material on a dress or skirt. Ex: She is wearing a frilly dress. Itch (v) Rub or scratch your skin with your nails. Ex: I itch all over my body. Tantrum (n) When a young child gets angry. Ex: He had a tantrum when his sister used his phone. Shriek (v) Short, loud cry or scream. Ex: She shrieked in fright. Balk (v) Protest (because you don’t want to do something.) Ex: Many people balk at this danger. Frustration (n) The feeling of being annoyed or upset because you can’t achieve something. Ex: Don't take your frustration out on me. Proclaim (v) To say something important. Ex: The president proclaimed a public holiday

Cricket A Fun Sport. People around the world play an exciting sport called cricket. In cricket, a batter hits a ball with a large flat bat. The ball is about the same size as a baseball. The Basics. Two teams play a game of cricket. Each team has eleven players. They play on an oval field with an area in the middle called a pitch. The teams take turns batting and bowling, or throwing a ball. Two batters on the batting team stand on each end of the pitch. The team that isn't batting plays in the field. One player on each team is the bowler. The bowler throws a ball to a batter on the other team. The bowler tries to hit three small posts in the ground near the batter. These posts are called stumps. At the top of the stumps are two small pieces of wood called bails. Together, the stumps and bails are called wicket. If the bowler's ball knocks the bails off the wicket stumps, the batter is out. The batter protects the wicket by hitting the ball with his or her bat. If the batter hits the ball, he or she runs down the pitch. If the batter swaps places with the other batter, he or she scores one point. The point is called a run. Nine players on the bowling team play in the field. Their job is to get the balls that the batter hits. They can get the batter out by catching the ball. They can also throw the ball and hit the wicket to get an out. After ten outs, the bowling team gets their turn at bat. At the end of the game, the team with more runs wins. The History of Cricket. In the 1500s, children in England played cricket. By the early 1700s, adults started playing as professionals. In 1788, people created the cricket rules still in use today. Soon, cricket teams formed outside England as well. Then, people created longer cricket matches called Tests for world championships. Cricket teams played once at the Olympic Games in 1900. Some fans hope cricket teams will one day play in every Summer Olympic Games. Cricket Around the World. Today, people play cricket around the world. Ten countries have teams that play in Test matches. That's Cricket! Since its start as a children's game, cricket has been popular. Today, it is followed by billions of fans around the world. You can enjoy cricket, too!

Feliz Navidad, Carlos! School was out for winter break. Carlos and his family packed to go to Monterrey, Mexico. "It's our first trip back since we moved to America," said Carlos. "I can't wait to see everyone!" Carlos sat by the window on the airplane. He saw clouds and blue sky. Then he saw the mountains around Monterrey. "We're almost there!" he said. Carlos's aunt, uncle, and cousins met them at the airport. "Feliz Navidad!" said his uncle. "You are home! This will be a wonderful celebration, now!" They had arrived in time to join in Las Posadas. Candles in paper bags lined the sidewalks. Neighborhood children acted out Mary and Joseph's journey to Bethlehem. Carlos, Selena, and Mateo walked the Posada with their cousins. They knocked on the first door. They sang a song and asked, "May we stay?" They were told "No." They knocked on the second door. They were told "No" again. They knocked on the third door. "Come in!" the neighbors said. A fiesta was inside! There were sweets and hot chocolate for everyone. There was even a piñata! "May I try to break the piñata?" Carlos asked. "I play baseball at my school. I can swing hard." Carlos was blindfolded. He hit the piñata and it split open! Treats and toys spilled out everywhere. They heard a boom and pop pop. "Fireworks!" Mateo yelled. Red, green, and blue lights filled the night sky. "It's so beautiful!" said his cousin. At midnight, the family walked to the old church. Inside, the dark church glowed from the light of candles. It was very quiet. Carlos watched the candles flicker all around him. Back at their uncle's home, they found more food and treats waiting for them. "This Navidad has been the best!" said Carlos. "We are lucky." "We can celebrate with our new friends in America and our family here in Mexico." Carlos, Selena, and Mateo were ready for sleep. But Selena remembered something. "Papa, when will we open our presents?" she asked. "We will each open one tomorrow, and the rest on January 6, Three Kings Day," Papa said. "I hope I get a calendar," Carlos said to Mama. "I'll put a star in December," said Carlos. "So I know when we'll come back for Navidad, again!"

Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast Before March, 2011, I was a photographic retoucher based in New York City. We're pale, gray creatures. We hide in dark, windowless rooms, and generally avoid sunlight. We make skinny models skinnier, perfect skin more perfect, and the impossible possible, and we get criticized in the press all the time, but some of us are actually talented artists with years of experience and a real appreciation for images and photography. On March 11, 2011, I watched from home, as the rest of the world did, as the tragic events unfolded in Japan. Soon after, an organization I volunteer with, All Hands Volunteers, were on the ground, within days, working as part of the response efforts. I, along with hundreds of other volunteers, knew we couldn't just sit at home, so I decided to join them for three weeks. On May the 13th, I made my way to the town of Ōfunato. It's a small fishing town in Iwate Prefecture, about 50,000 people, one of the first that was hit by the wave. The waters here have been recorded at reaching over 24 meters in height, and traveled over two miles inland. As you can imagine, the town had been devastated. We pulled debris from canals and ditches. We cleaned schools. We de-mudded and gutted homes ready for renovation and rehabilitation. We cleared tons and tons of stinking, rotting fish carcasses from the local fish processing plant. We got dirty, and we loved it. For weeks, all the volunteers and locals alike had been finding similar things. They'd been finding photos and photo albums and cameras and SD cards. And everyone was doing the same. They were collecting them up, and handing them in to various places around the different towns for safekeeping. Now, it wasn't until this point that I realized that these photos were such a huge part of the personal loss these people had felt. As they had run from the wave, and for their lives, absolutely everything they had, everything had to be left behind. At the end of my first week there, I found myself helping out in an evacuation center in the town. I was helping clean the onsen, the communal onsen, the huge giant bathtubs. This happened to also be a place in the town where the evacuation center was collecting the photos. This is where people were handing them in, and I was honored that day that they actually trusted me to help them start hand-cleaning them. Now, it was emotional and it was inspiring, and I've always heard about thinking outside the box, but it wasn't until I had actually gotten outside of my box that something happened. As I looked through the photos, there were some were over a hundred years old, some still in the envelope from the processing lab, I couldn't help but think as a retoucher that I could fix that tear and mend that scratch, and I knew hundreds of people who could do the same. So that evening, I just reached out on Facebook and asked a few of them, and by morning the response had been so overwhelming and so positive, I knew we had to give it a go. So we started retouching photos. This was the very first. Not terribly damaged, but where the water had caused that discoloration on the girl's face had to be repaired with such accuracy and delicacy. Otherwise, that little girl isn't going to look like that little girl anymore, and surely that's as tragic as having the photo damaged. (Applause) Over time, more photos came in, thankfully, and more retouchers were needed, and so I reached out again on Facebook and LinkedIn, and within five days, 80 people wanted to help from 12 different countries. Within two weeks, I had 150 people wanting to join in. Within Japan, by July, we'd branched out to the neighboring town of Rikuzentakata, further north to a town called Yamada. Once a week, we would set up our scanning equipment in the temporary photo libraries that had been set up, where people were reclaiming their photos. The older ladies sometimes hadn't seen a scanner before, but within 10 minutes of them finding their lost photo, they could give it to us, have it scanned, uploaded to a cloud server, it would be downloaded by a gaijin, a stranger, somewhere on the other side of the globe, and it'd start being fixed. The time it took, however, to get it back is a completely different story, and it depended obviously on the damage involved. It could take an hour. It could take weeks. It could take months. The kimono in this shot pretty much had to be hand-drawn, or pieced together, picking out the remaining parts of color and detail that the water hadn't damaged. It was very time-consuming. Now, all these photos had been damaged by water, submerged in salt water, covered in bacteria, in sewage, sometimes even in oil, all of which over time is going to continue to damage them, so hand-cleaning them was a huge part of the project. We couldn't retouch the photo unless it was cleaned, dry and reclaimed. Now, we were lucky with our hand-cleaning. We had an amazing local woman who guided us. It's very easy to do more damage to those damaged photos. As my team leader Wynne once said, it's like doing a tattoo on someone. You don't get a chance to mess it up. The lady who brought us these photos was lucky, as far as the photos go. She had started hand-cleaning them herself and stopped when she realized she was doing more damage. She also had duplicates. Areas like her husband and her face, which otherwise would have been completely impossible to fix, we could just put them together in one good photo, and remake the whole photo. When she collected the photos from us, she shared a bit of her story with us. Her photos were found by her husband's colleagues at a local fire department in the debris a long way from where the home had once stood, and they'd recognized him. The day of the tsunami, he'd actually been in charge of making sure the tsunami gates were closed. He had to go towards the water as the sirens sounded. Her two little boys, not so little anymore, but her two boys were both at school, separate schools. One of them got caught up in the water. It took her a week to find them all again and find out that they had all survived. The day I gave her the photos also happened to be her youngest son's 14th birthday. For her, despite all of this, those photos were the perfect gift back to him, something he could look at again, something he remembered from before that wasn't still scarred from that day in March when absolutely everything else in his life had changed or been destroyed. After six months in Japan, 1,100 volunteers had passed through All Hands, hundreds of whom had helped us hand-clean over 135,000 photographs, the large majority — (Applause) — a large majority of which did actually find their home again, importantly. Over five hundred volunteers around the globe helped us get 90 families hundreds of photographs back, fully restored and retouched. During this time, we hadn't really spent more than about a thousand dollars in equipment and materials, most of which was printer inks. We take photos constantly. A photo is a reminder of someone or something, a place, a relationship, a loved one. They're our memory-keepers and our histories, the last thing we would grab and the first thing you'd go back to look for. That's all this project was about, about restoring those little bits of humanity, giving someone that connection back. When a photo like this can be returned to someone like this, it makes a huge difference in the lives of the person receiving it. The project's also made a big difference in the lives of the retouchers. For some of them, it's given them a connection to something bigger, giving something back, using their talents on something other than skinny models and perfect skin. I would like to conclude by reading an email I got from one of them, Cindy, the day I finally got back from Japan after six months. "As I worked, I couldn't help but think about the individuals and the stories represented in the images. One in particular, a photo of women of all ages, from grandmother to little girl, gathered around a baby, struck a chord, because a similar photo from my family, my grandmother and mother, myself, and newborn daughter, hangs on our wall. Across the globe, throughout the ages, our basic needs are just the same, aren't they?" Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)

Ask questions about this text for ESL students, pre A1: Hi Sarah! I read about kids in Japan. More than a million play baseball there, and it's very competitive. They have coaches who teach them how to hit and throw the ball. Japan is an island country with tasty seafood dishes. People wear comfortable clothes with big pockets when they go out. Lastly, my mom is a nurse and she said Japanese nurses are good at taking care of sick people. Write back soon! Take care, Emma

1. Sit down – Sit on a chair or lower your body. Example: "Please sit down and relax." (Сядьте и расслабьтесь.) 2. Lie down – Recline or rest horizontally. Example: "You should lie down if you're tired." (Тебе следует прилечь, если ты устал.) 3. Turn down – Refuse an offer or reduce volume/heat. Example: "She turned down the job offer." (Она отказалась от предложения о работе.) 4. Slow down – Reduce speed. Example: "Slow down! The road is icy." (Сбавь скорость! Дорога скользкая.) 5. Calm down – Become less angry or anxious. Example: "Calm down and tell me what happened." (Успокойся и расскажи, что случилось.) 6. Break down – Stop working (machine) or lose control emotionally. Example: "My car broke down yesterday." (Моя машина сломалась вчера.) 7. Write down – Record something on paper. Example: "Write down the phone number." (Запиши номер телефона.) 8. Put down – Place something on a surface or insult someone. Example: "Put down the book on the table." (Положи книгу на стол.) 9. Bring down – Reduce (prices, temperature) or make someone sad. Example: "The news brought her down." (Новость расстроила ее.) 10. Cut down – Reduce consumption (e.g., food, expenses). Example: "I need to cut down on sugar." (Мне нужно сократить потребление сахара.) 11. Let down – Disappoint someone. Example: "He let me down by not coming." (Он меня подвел, не прийдя.) 12. Shut down – Close a business or turn off a machine. Example: "The factory shut down last year." (Фабрика закрылась в прошлом году.) 13. Knock down – Demolish or hit someone to the ground. Example: "They knocked down the old building." (Они снесли старое здание.) 14. Settle down – Start living a stable life or calm down. Example: "They want to settle down and have kids." (Они хотят остепениться и завести детей.) 15. Go down – Decrease or descend. Example: "The price of gas went down." (Цена на бензин снизилась.) 16. Come down – Move from a higher place or become cheaper. Example: "Come down the stairs carefully." (Спускайся по лестнице осторожно.) 17. Hold down – Keep a job or suppress something. Example: "He holds down two jobs." (Он работает на двух работах.) 18. Burn down – Destroy by fire.

Let's Play Ball! Baseball is an exciting game that is played all around the world. Players hit a ball with a bat. When you learn the rules, you can play the game. What Is Baseball? Baseball is a game with two teams. A team has nine players. Baseball teams play in an open field. Players use a bat, a ball, gloves, and four bases. A pitcher on one team throws the ball to a catcher on the same team. A batter on the other team hits the ball with the bat. The batter runs to first base, second base, and third base. The runner scores one point if he or she reaches the fourth base– home plate. The Story of Baseball. People have played baseball for hundreds of years. Long ago, people from England brought ball games to America. The games were like baseball in many ways. Over time, people made new rules and the games became one game-baseball. Famous Fields. Baseball fans love the fields where their teams play. In Boston, the team plays at Fenway Park. It is the oldest ballpark in America. Wrigley Field is an old ballpark in Chicago. Teams played there over one hundred years ago. They still play there today. Famous Players. Many people think Babe Ruth was the best baseball player ever. He hit 659 home runs with one team. He played for twenty-one years. Jackie Robinson is a hero. He was the first black baseball player to play on teams with white players. People look up to him for being a great athlete. Roberto Clemente played baseball with his team for eighteen years. He was really good at hitting the baseball. He scored 240 home runs for his team. Derek Jeter played baseball for twenty years. He scored 260 home runs for his team. People will always remember him as a great player. Everybody's Sport. Baseball time begins in the spring and goes until fall. Boys, girls, and grown-ups like to play and watch baseball. Many people think it is the best game in the world.

True False. Write + for True, and - for False. 1 point per question. ____ When Odysseus visits the underworld he sees his father. ____ Poseidon destroys Odysseus’s ship when he tries to leave the island of Thrinacia. ____ Odysseus was held captive by Calypso for 15 years. ____ Odysseus plugs his ears with beeswax to avoid being lured by the Sirens. ____Odysseus creates his own raft to escape the island where Calypso resides. ____ To ensure that Odysseus will be the one to marry her, Penelope holds a competition consisting of throwing a spear to hit a target that she knows only Odysseus will complete. Multiple Choice. Circle the correct answer that correlates with the question. 1 point per question. What do Oddyesseus’ men consume that makes them forget about Ithica? Milk. B: Cattle. C. Lotus flower. D: Hog. 2. What creature/s attempts to lure Odysseus and his men to their death by way of song? Sirens. B: Circe. C. Scylla D: Calypso 3. Who promises immortality to Odysseus? Zeus. B: Athena. C. Charybdis. D: Calypso. 4. What does Odysseus disguise himself as when returning to Ithica? A pirate. B. A beggar. C. A prince. D. A demi-god. 5. How does Odysseus escape the Cyclops? Blinds the Cyclops. B. Escapes while the Cyclops sleeps. C. Kills the Cyclops. D. Convinces the Cyclops to allow him to leave. 6. What happens to Odysseus at the end of the Odyssey? He is killed sailing back to Ithica. B. He takes his place as King. C. He returns only to find that he has been forgotten. D. He returns to find Penelope married another suitor.

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