Attention Teachers: Here is a great exercise for students.

What are your favorite foods? A lot of people in other countries may not know about them. Why not share the recipes with them?

Go to this page, write your recipes down and send them.

Send as many as you like! Share your recipes with the world!

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The mayor of the Austrian city of Graz has decided to ban people from speaking on mobile phones on all public transportation.

Siegfried Nagl said that he was “fed up” with hearing other people’s conversations on buses, trams and trains.

People need “peace and quite” sometimes, Nagl said.

Citizens of Graz will still be allowed to send SMS messages and use the Internet on public transportation.

Source: Deutsche Presse-Agentur

Words

to be fed up: to have had enough, to be tired of.

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Ashley Qualls is only 17, but she has earned more money than her parents.

Ashley started Whatever Life, a site that designs web pages, when she was 14.

She later left school to work fulltime on her site.

Her mother now works for her company. Ashley also bought a new house for her family from the money she has earned through her site.

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China has announced plans to tidy up the world’s highest mountain in 2009.

According to a report on The Associated Press, China will limit the number of visitors and remove garbage from Mount Everest.

Environmentalists say that mountain climbers may have left as much as 120 tons of garbage on the mountain.

Words

to tidy up: to clean up.
to limit: to set a limit, number.
environmentalist: a person who works to protect the environment.

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Germany was reunited as a country in 1990. However, a new East German hotel named Ostel has opened in Berlin.

For $50 a night anyone who is nostalgic for the past can relive what it was like to live in East Germany before 1989. There are pictures of East German leaders and several East German souvenirs throughout the hotel.

The hotel was started by two former East German circus performers.

Words

nostalgic: wanting or desiring things of the past.
relive: to live or experience again.

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The oldest tree in the world has been found in Sweden.

It is a spruce tree which is more than 9,500 years old.

It was previously believed that some 5,000-year-old pine trees in North America were the oldest.

The tree has provided scientists with lots of information about the history of the climate in the region.

Words

previous: existing or happening before.

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The world’s biggest sporting event came to a close on Sunday evening in Beijing.

The Chinese capital handed over the Olympic flag to London, which will host the games in 2012.

The Beijing Olympics will be remembered as an historic sporting event in which many great champions performed and many records were broken.

Words

to hand over: to give property or control to someone else.

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The people of Iceland took the day off from work on Friday to watch their men’s handball team defeat Spain.

It has been called the greatest sporting success in Iceland’s history. Iceland has a population of 300,000 people.

(Iceland lost to France in the final on Sunday. However, Icelanders are thrilled that their team is bringing home a silver medal.)

Words

thrilled: very happy.

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Of all of Michael Phelps’s victories in the Beijing Olympics, the closest was in the 100-meter butterfly race.

The official statistics claim that Phelps beat Serbia’s Milorad Cavic by .01 of a second. However, there had been some debate as to whether Phelps had really won the race.

Omega, the company in charge of keeping time of the races, is also one of Phelps’s sponsors.

This weekend Omega released photos of the race which showed Phelps arriving at the finish line just ahead of Cavic.

Words

in charge of: under the control of, in the care of.

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Japan has stunned the United States, the defending Olympic champions, by winning the gold medal in women’s softball.

Softball has the same rules as baseball, except that the ball is thrown underhand.

Softball will not be played at the London Olympics in 2012.

Words

to stun: to shock, to surprise.
defending champion: the person or team which won an event the last time it was held.
underhand: below the shoulder.