About 50 million kids are headed back to school, lugging backpacks filled with heavy textbooks. An education can 1 as much as 30 pounds, making back-to-school a backbreaking ordeal(折磨).

    And it's not just the weight of textbooks that 2 a serious strain(扭伤) — those books can put a dent(凹痕) in your wallet as well — so we 3, what if we didn't have textbooks?

    The 4 of textbooks has skyrocketed more than 800%, since 1978. Right now, the 5 college student spends about $1,200 on books if they buy them all. 65% of students said they skipped the bookstore because textbooks were too 6, preferring a more digital route.

    So with 14. 8 million high school kids across the country, schools are 7 spending more than $7 billion dollars a year on textbooks. For one fifth of that cost, schools could 8 their students with tablets. “Nowadays you can get a tablet for $100 so it's very 9,” says Frank Portanova, Assistant Principle at Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, NY.

    Portanova says his students were paying $500-$600 dollars a year on school books 10. But going all digital has hidden costs, and public schools would send taxpayers a heavy check.

    Archbishop Stepinac High School (a private institution) went digital and spent $1 million dollars in upgrades — adding wireless 11points to accommodate the 750 students downloading any given textbook, at any given time.

    So we'd 12 tons of paper every year if we stopped printing textbooks, but what about the content itself? Would it pay to choose plastic over paper?

    Last year, that all-digital school in New York saw its 13 rate drop from 12 percent to 6.1 percent.Failure rates in college could drop as well. 82% of students surveyed said they would feel better about their performance, if an online text was 14.

    A cheaper, more customized(定制) 15 with higher success rates maybe result in a few less trips to the doctor's office.

    UNICEF says more than 3,700 children across West Africa have lost one or both parents to Ebola. Doctors Without Borders Axelle Vandoornick said, “The growing number of Ebola orphans is a crisis of its own. There are many orphans. This is again when we talk about crisis in a crisis; this is one of the consequences at a social level. There are more and more orphans.”

    Child care services in Sierra Leone are almost non-existent. Ministry of Health Social Services officer Doris Mansare is in charge of running Kailahun's first Ebola orphanage. She said, “It's difficult for us to find family members, so this short-term care center was established to basically insure that we get the children from the treatment center, those that are cured from the Ebola virus and also those that are with their parents, but then are negative. We bring them to the short-term care center for three or four days, then they are reunited with family members at their separate locations. These three siblings were living alone after both parents died of Ebola. Their village rejected them. We have children who are unaccompanied and living alone in their family home, about 50 of such children, who are living alone.”

    Vandoornick said. “It can be hard to find surviving family. Ebola is wiping out entire families because the infection inside the families is the highest. A mother kissing her child, a father taking his daughter in his arms, and when you have one suspected case in one family, soon after we have basically all members of the family.”

    The fate of many of these children is unclear. Some of their parents are still sick, kept in isolation at one of Sierra Leone's Ebola case management centers. Doris Mansare said she hopes the new center will help the growing number of orphans, but she worries about their future. “We are having more orphans, more unaccompanied children and children will become vulnerable in the future; some will not be able to cope with the care givers where we place them, and what can happen is that it will lead to other child protection issues like they becoming street children,” said Doris Mansare. Vandoornick hopes there will be many child care centers set up across Sierra Leone.

    Freshmen are always fearful when learning they are to live with a roommate of a different race assigned by the computer casually. They are full of worry at the uncertainties. Now several studies have found that sharing a room with a man of another race is a mixture of hope and fear. It decreases prejudice and forces students to make friends with those of different races, meanwhile causes more conflicts.

An Ohio State University study found that black students living with a white roommate saw higher academic success at college. Sam Boakye — the only black student on his freshman year floor — said “if you're surrounded by whites, you have something to prove like a good score in study.”

    However, researchers also observed problems in this case. According to two recent studies, compared with two white roommates, roommates of different races may experience such big conflicts that one has to move out and live separately.

    Grace Kao, a professor at Penn said she was not surprised by the findings. In her opinion, this may be the first time that some of these students have lived with someone of a different race.

    At Penn, students are not asked to mention race when applying for their housing. In this way, students are thrown together randomly.

    “In the past two years, I've experienced roommate conflicts between interracial students,” said one Penn resident advisor (RA). To give a better picture, she added that some conflicts provided more multicultural acceptance, but some showed unpleasant differences. Besides, these conflicts have also occurred among roommates of the same race.

    Kao said it was unscientific to conclude from any one of the above studies, saying scientists must study more students' background characteristics.

    There are more foreign companies, varieties of food from different regions of the world, and I can see more artists and exhibitions from different countries coming to Shanghai.

    “Living in Shanghai means living on the edge of China's future and  (move) the speed of light,” one of my friends told me.

    “Get used to the speed. It makes New York feel slow.”

    Meanwhile, I am making friends from all over  world. My British friends share their Chinese experiences with me when we have afternoon tea at Sinan Mansions. Sometimes, I share my adventures  Russia with my American friends. We (attract) by global culture and ideas.

    I still remember the first time I met one of my best friends, Hans from Belgium. When he knew where I came from, he  (sudden) spoke in the Wenzhou dialect.

    That shocked me. He told me  he had many friends from Wenzhou,  he can speak a little “Wenzhou hua (dialect of Wenzhou)”.

    I love Shanghai because I had my best experiences since my school days. I like history and architecture. The cultural diversity and the high-speed development of Shanghai are even  (astonishing). The most important thing is that I am excited to know and understand more about my hometown I live in Shanghai. What a fantastic city!

1. 时间、地点、任务、活动；

2. 老人们的反应；

3. 简短评论。

注意：

1.  词数100左右；

2.  可以适当增加细节，以使行文连贯；

3.  报道的标题和记者姓名已给出。

Student Volunteers Brought Sunshine to the Elderly