Hello. This is a programme from the BBC Learning（学习） English Archive（档案馆）. It was first broadcast（广播） in April 2008 on the BBC Learning（学习） English website. We hope you enjoy it. Hello. This is 6 Minute English.

  I'm Jackie Dalton. The focus（焦点） of today's programme is life stories told in a rather（宁可） unusual（ 不平常的） way. I'm joined by Callum Robertson who helped explain some of the language that comes up today. Hello, Callum. Hi, Jackie. And as ever, I'm going to start with a question for you.

  The question is, who said 'happiness（幸福） in intelligent（聪明的） people is the rarest thing I know'? Was it William Shakespeare（莎士比亚(1564-1616）, Oscar Wilde, or Ernest Hemingway? It doesn't sound like Shakespeare. I don't think it's witty（ 机智的） or funny enough to be Oscar Wilde, so I would guess it the writer Ernest Hemingway. That's right. It's the American writer Ernest Hemingway.

  And we're going to be talking about him today because in the 1920s he bet（打赌） ten dollars that he could write a complete story in just six words. And he wrote 'for sale（ 卖）, baby shoes, never worn'. Very powerful（强有力的）, isn't it? Powerful six-word story. And he won his bet. And now an American online magazine called Smith is asking its readers to sum（概括） up their own lives in just six words and is putting them all together in a book called 'Not Quite What I Was Planning'.

  We're going to hear the magazine's editor（编辑）, Larry Smith, listen out for the adjectives（形容词） he uses to describe the entries（入口处）. In a couple（夫妇） of months we got 15,000 entries（入口处） and I was just blown（吹） away. Funny, poignant. I really believe that everyone has a story. So 15,000 people wrote in with their life stories summed up in six words. Some nice words there that we often use when we're describing stories.

  'Poignant' was one of them. 'Poignant', yes.