In our weekly staff meeting, our editor Ashley was not pleased with the quality of our reporting."Our readership is way down. We need better stories for this Thursday's school newspaper. Does anybody have any ideas?" she said.
I handed her my article about our basketball team beating Deerfield High School the previous night by one point. "Sports stories are fun," she said,"but not good enough for the front page. We need something to really get people 's attention."
After our meeting, we left the newsroom together and heard someone screaming,"Perry is missing!" Perry was a big red parrot and had been our school mascot (吉祥物) for ten years. H played an important role in students' lives, both in and out of class. He had also been a constant presence at school events, inspiring a sense of unity among students.
Everyone gathered around Perry's empty cage, heartbroken. Suddenly, a student from th crowd came over and showed me a photo. "You're a reporter for the school paper, right? I happened to take this yesterday," he said. In the photo was a Deerfield High School basketball player with something large hidden under his shirt around the size of a parrot.
"He must have stolen Perry to get back at us for winning the game!" Ashley cried. We hurried back to the newsroom, agreeing to run the photo on the front page with the headline "Deerfeld Stole Perry." "This is just the story we need. Everyone will read it," Ashley said confidently.
After she left, I took a closer look at the photo. The clock in the background read 4:15 pm, but our game against Deerfield hadn't started until 4:30 pm. Why would the boy have taken Perry before we even played? An uneasy feeling came over me that we might have falsely accused someone.
I went to Perry's usual caretaker to ask if he knew Perry was missing. "He's not missing.
He's retired. He's ready for some quieter days," he said. Learning the truth, I immediately told Ashley and suggested writing a story to say goodbye to Perry.
注意：1.续写词数应为150左右:2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
To my surprise, Ashley insisted on reporting the "Deerfield Stole Perry" story.
