some people have very good memory and can easily learn quite long poems by heart. there are other people who can only remember things when they have repeated them again and again. the famous english writer, charles dickens said that he could walk down any long street in london and then tell you the name of every shop he had passed. many of the great men of the world have wonderful memories. a good memory is a help in learning a foreign language. everybody learns his own language by remembering what he hears when he was a small child, and some children----like boys and girls who live abroad with their parents----seem to learn two languages as easily as one. in school it is not so easy to learn a second language because the pupils have so little time for it, and they are very busy with other subjects as well. a man's mind is rather like a camera, but it takes photos not only of what we see but also what we feel,hear, smell and taste. when we take a real photo with a camera, there is much to do before the photo is finished and is readyfor us to show to our friends. in the same way there is much work to be done before we can keep a picture forever in our minds.

memory is the diary we all carry about us. we keep things we have experienced in this diary.