In the 13^th century, the famous Indian traveller, Marco Polo, travelled a long way to China. He saw many wonderful things. One of the things he discovered was that Chinese used paper money. In western countries, people did not use paper money until the 15^th century. However, people in China began to use paper money in the 7^th century.
A Chinese man called Cai Lun invented paper almost 2,000 years ago. He made it from wood. He took the wood from trees and made it into paper. He then put these pieces of paper together and made them into a book.
Now paper still comes from trees. We use a lot of paper every day. If we keep on wasting so much paper, there will not be any trees left on the earth. If there are no trees, there will be no paper. Every day, people throw away about 2,800 tons of paper in our city. It takes 17 trees to make one ton of paper. This means that we are cutting nearly 48,000 trees every day. Since it takes more than 10 years for a tree to grow, we must start using less paper now. If we don’t, we will not have enough time to grow more trees to take the place of those we use for paper.
So how can we save paper? We can use both sides of every piece of paper, especially when we are making notes. We can also use cotton handkerchiefs（手帕） and paper ones. When we go shopping, we can use fewer paper bags. If the shop assistant does give us a paper bag, we can save it and refuse (拒绝) it later.
Everyone can help to save paper. If we all think carefully, we can help protect trees. But we should do it now, before it is too late.
【小题1】When he was in China, Marco Polo __________ .

As we know, paper is made ________ wood , that is to say wood is made ______ paper.

Every morning my father buys a newspaper on his way to work. Every evening my mother looks through magazines at home. And every night, I look at the posters with photos of David Beckham and Yao Ming on my bedroom wall before I go to sleep. Can we imagine life without paper or print?
Paper was first created about 2,000 years ago, and has been made from silk, cotton, bamboo, and, since the 19th century, from wood. People learned to write words on paper to make a book. But in those days, books could only be produced one at a time by hand. As a result, they were expensive and rare. And because there weren’t many hooks, few people learned to read.
Then printing was invented in China. When printing was developed greatly at the beginning of the 11th century, books could be produced more quickly and cheaply. As a result, more people learned to read. After that, knowledge and ideas spread quickly.
Today information can be received online, downloaded from the Internet rather than found in books, and information can be kept on CD-ROMs or machines such as MP3 players.
Computers are already used in classrooms, and newspapers and magazines can already be read online. So will books be replaced by computers one day? No, I don’t think the Yao Ming poster on my bedroom wall will ever be replaced by a computer two metres high!
【小题1】What does the writer do before he goes to sleep’?