Help 110年國中教育會考

On Teachers’ Day, we thank our teachers for their hard work. We also celebrate this day to remember Confucius, the great Chinese teacher from 2,500 years ago. Well, that’s everything we’re taught about Teachers’ Day. But, the first Teachers’ Day was not on Confucius’s birthday, and it was not about thanking our teachers.

In 1930, Mr. Tai Shuang-qiu and other teachers celebrated the first Teachers’ Day in Nanjing. But there was nothing to celebrate. Teachers were paid very little and not respected. These teachers took this chance to shout out their problems. They had Teachers’ Day on June 6 because the date was easy to remember and near the end of the school year. This action by Mr. Tai and the other teachers was welcomed and followed by teachers from other cities. In 1939, the government made Teachers’ Day a national holiday. However, it was on August 27, the day when Confucius’s birthday was celebrated. Not everyone hailed this decision: Teachers’ Day was never about Confucius, and Confucius couldn’t speak for all the teachers either.

One funny thing was that the government was wrong about the date of Confucius’s birthday. In 1952, people found out he was in fact born on September 28. That was when we started to celebrate Teachers’ Day on Confucius’s real birthday

In Darayya, a city in Syria, there’s a library, and it has 15,000 books on almost every subject you can think of. However, it is different from any libraries you know: It is a secret underground library, and only people in Darayya know where it is.

Over the years, war has shaken Darayya badly. Every day, houses are bombed and people are killed. Stores are closed one after another, and so are schools. To help the kids in Darayya with their learning, Anas Ahmad, a 19-year-old student, and his friends decided to build a library. They built the library under the ground to keep it safe from bombing. But it is dangerous to collect books for the library. Often, Ahmad and his friends look for books in houses that were bombed. They need to be careful because they may be killed in another bombing.

You may ask, “In a place like Darayya, would people be interested in books?” “Just like the body needs food, the mind needs books,” says one library user. In the library, people enjoy their time of reading and forget about the terrible world above, so their life doesn’t seem so hard. Through reading, they are able to dream of a better life after war.

Usually I wouldn’t cross the park at this time of night. But walking around the park would take more time, and it was raining so hard that I couldn’t even see clearly what was right before me. So I entered the park. And that was the first stupid thing I did tonight.

Soon after I walked into the park, I saw a man under a tree up ahead. My heart fell. The stories I’d heard about the park 38 into my head at this moment. Anyone with a clear mind would just turn back. But me? No. I did 39 stupid thing: I decided to hurry past him.

Just when I was passing the man, he raised his head and gave me the strangest smile ever. I got scared and started running. “Hey!” the man shouted from behind. “Wait!” He was running after me!

I ran like crazy. I had hoped the trees would keep some rain off. And they 40 . But they also made the park look even darker. I couldn’t see what was ahead of me. Then, I ran into something. It was the man!

“Don’t kill me!” I cried.

“What? I 41 to give back your bag! You dropped it,” the man gave me my bag.

Now, I felt saying that to the man was the stupidest thing I did tonight.