It is well known that English learning is fairly important to the student, but also it is a money hunter. The Graph of Annual Expenses aims to show us the fact that daily study has constituted a yearly large sum of money. That is, students are, day by day, challenging the knowledge from a sea of reference hooks, cassette tapes, CDs and even VCD.

Buying books is always the biggest sum of a student's expense, which has ranged from 10 to 60 RMB yuan during the latest decades. What' s more evident, it can be found in 1999 that VCD is beneficial for students to better their English. Perhaps VCD may help students to improve listening comprehension. Therefore, they have spent 50 RMB yuan to buy VCD.

No one can deny the fact that CDs have something to do with learning English. In most situations, they are helpful to improve our understanding of foreign cultures, which are often considered difficult and tedious for students to learn form the textbooks. CoMPAred with this, listening tapes is rather boring, so in 1999 a student spent less than 20 RMB yuan to buy tapes.

However, much money does not mean obtaining a better acquisition of a foreign language. In a long run, I am determined to make full use of available tools to master English, and try to make all the books, CDs, VCDs well - worth their expenses.

Dietary Changes and Health Care

As is shown in the graph, China's food distribution has taken great changes from 1960's to 1990's Acocrding to this statistics of cereals, vegetable, meat, and fruits, the number of those who eat rice, flour or vegetable has greatly decreased in the past four decades. In contrast of this the number of those who eat oil or meat has sharply increased. From such dietary changes, we can perceive the rapid improvement of our people' s living standard.

Why does this improvement occur? The direct reason is the fact that the Chinese people have attached much importance to their health care. Nationally, China's economic growth is booming, and more people are getting richer. Individually, everyone's consumption of food is increasingly varied. In particular, most of people are reluctant to eat much vegetable, but much meat and oil in their diets.

In my view, the changes of China's dietary distribution seem to be both positive and negative. The positive aspect is that China' s economical growth has given rise to the higher level of dietary standard, with most of people living rich and happy. But the negative aspect is that, I'm afraid, less eating vegetable will lead to poorer health, such as lacking vitamin nutrients in one's body. Therefore, we think it necessary for the Chinese to be aware of the balanced diets: Loth vegetable and meat, which may gain us healthier bodies in the new century.