For thousands of years, people have told fables (寓言)     1     (teach) a lesson or to pass on wisdom. Fables were part of the oral tradition of many early cultures, and the well-known Aesop’s fables date to the     2     (six) century, B. C. Yet, the form of the fable still has values today,     3     Rachel Carson says in “A Fable for Tomorrow.”

Carson uses a simple, direct style common to fable. In fact, her style and tone (口吻) are seemingly directed at children. “There was once a town in the heart of America,     4     all life seemed to enjoy peaceful existence with its surroundings,” her fable begins,     5     (borrow) some familiar words from many age-old fables. Behind the simple style, however, is a serious message     6     (intend) for everyone.

    7     (difference) from traditional fables, Carson’s story ends with an accusation instead of a moral. She warns of the environmental dangers facing society, and she teaches that people must take responsibility     8     saving their environment.

The themes of traditional fables often deal with simple truths about everyday life. However, Carson’s theme is a more weighty     9     (warn) about environmental destruction. Carson proves that a simple literal form that has been passed down through the ages can still     10     (employ) today to draw attention to important truths.

One of the largest research libraries in the world, the British Library has added 16 Chinese online novels to the collection.     1     (cover) themes of science fiction, history, reality and fantasy, these works are viewed     2     the classics of Chinese online literature from the past 20 years.

The library houses more than 170 million     3     (collection), the cultural relics of different civilizations from throughout history included. The library usually selects works     4     (base) on their popularity or by considering an item’s value. Readers can check the information about the 16 books on the library’s website     5     borrow printed copies.

As one of the current pillars of mass cultural consumption,     6     began with “fastfood” romances, fantasies and mysteries, the Chinese online literature industry     7     (mature) quickly during its fast development over the last two decades.

In 2019, 10 online novels, including Great Power, Heavy Industry,     8     (be) added to the collection of the shanghai Library.And between 2020 and 2022, 144 online novels like Battle Through the Heavens and Lord of Mysteries were entered into the collection of the National Library of China.

“It’s     9     (true) unexpected to me that online fiction can be added to the collection of     10     foreign library. It feels like the path of online novel writing is becoming ever wider,” Yi Qianchong adds.

5 . People of every culture tell each other fairy tales and the same story often takes a variety of forms in different parts of the world. The universal appeal of these fantastical tales is frequently owed to the idea that they contain warning messages: in the case of Little Red Riding Hood, to listen to your mother, not wander away from the path, and avoid talking to strangers. “It might be what we find interesting about this story is that it's got this survival-relevant information in it,” says anthropologist Jamie Tehrani at Durham University in the UK. But his research suggests otherwise. By exploring how fairy tales have changed and evolved as they spread between cultures, he believes he has discovered what truly makes them appealing.

His analysis focused on Little Red Riding Hood in its many guises (变体), which include another Western fairy tale known as The Wolf and the Kids. Exploring academic collections for variants of these two tales and similar stories from Africa, East Asia and other regions, he ended up with 58 stories recorded from oral traditions.

First he tested some assumptions about which aspects of the story change least as it evolves, indicating their importance. Folklorists believe that events are more central to the story than characters; however, Tehrani found no significant difference in the rate of evolution of events compared with that of characters. “Certain events are very stable because we recognize them as being crucial to the story but there are lots of other details that can evolve quite freely,” he says.

Neither did his analysis support the theory that the middle section of a story is the most conserved part. He found no significant difference in the flexibility of events at the beginning, middle and end. But the really big surprise came when he looked at the warning elements of the story. In his analysis, such elements were just as flexible as seemingly unimportant details. What, then, is important enough to be reproduced from generation to generation?

The answer, it would appear, is horror: horrifying aspects of the story turned out to be the best preserved of all. In many European versions, for example, the wolf feeds Red Riding Hood a meal made from the remains of her grandmother. “There’s this brilliant Italian one where the wolf says there’s some tortellini (意式饺子), but of course those are her grandmother's ears,” says Tehrani. In East Asian variants, a group of sisters spend the night in bed with a tiger and awake to hear it eating the bones of the youngest one. “Those kinds of features are very common in lots of versions of the story,” says Tehrani.

Why are these details treated with such respect by generations of storytellers, when other features are readily substituted? Tehrani has an idea: “In an oral context, a story won't survive because of one great teller. It also needs to be interesting when it's told by someone who's not necessarily a great storyteller.” Maybe dining on the remains of a relative is so fascinating that it helps the story remain popular, no matter how badly it's told.

Found poetry is a type of poetry made up of other existing written or spoken materials. Since these materials already exist, the poet just“found” the poem within them.     1       (create) or “find” this kind of poetry, a poet might take words and phrases from another piece of work,     2    he might rearrange the entire contents of a piece of work. Similar     3       other kinds of poetry, found poems can be written in a variety of styles. Found poetry should not     4       (confuse) with parallel poetry, a type of poetry that relies on the poet writing a     5     (complete) new poem in the style of another poem or poet.

Generally, the structure of a found poem,     6     is fairly flexible, has no certain rules. Found poetry might be in the style of an epic or ballad, or it might follow the haiku or limerick poetry formats. Some poets might prefer rhyming verse poems, and     7       might write blank verse poems. The styles of sonnets, odes, and narrative    8     （poem） can all be represented with found poetry. As long as the existing materials allow for it,     9     found poet can create any style of poem he wants, and some poets might even welcome the challenge of     10     (apply ) the existing materials to create a certain style of poetry.

8 . The poem When This is Over is now an educational tool which is studied like the works of Homer. Professional writer Laura Fanuc wrote the poem to cheer herself up. To her surprise, it went popular online. That’s the old news.

The new news is that the poem has become an education assignment for a humanities class in the South Bronx. It has inspired about 80 sixth graders to write their own version (版本).

The students are enrolled in the American Dream School, a charter school for English language learners and immigrant students. Teachers Daniel Zauderer and Niki DeGiorgio introduced their class to the poem, assigning them to study it with the aim of cultivating gratitude through poetry. These students stay at home with laptop computers, through which they connect with their classmates and teachers.

Fanuc’s poem is basically a list of everyday activities she can’t do because of social distancing, and that shall never take for granted again. It ends with an inspirational message of hope that we all will rise from this ordeal (磨难) to be better people.

The teachers challenged the students to brainstorm what they had taken for granted and what they hope people will learn, and to express themselves in a poem of their own. The class followed Fanuc is format (格式), reworking the poem. The students showed some love for DeGiorgio and Zauderer in their version of the poem, with the line: “Seeing my teachers face to face.”

“Working remotely during this pandemic is tough some days,” DeGiorgio said in a Face book post. “What brings me hope and joy is the beautiful hearts, minds and words of my students.”

The colour was rushing to his cheeks, and his eyes were wide open,     1     (shine) with joy, and in the centre of each eye, right in the very centre, in the black pupil, a little spark of wild excitement     2     (dance) slowly. Then the old man took a deep breath, and suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, an explosion seemed to take place inside him. He threw up his arms and yelled ‘Yippeeeeeeee!’ And at the same time, his long     3     (bone) body rose up out of the bed and his bowl of soup went flying into the face of Grandma Josephine, and in one fantastic leap, this old fellow of ninety-six and a half, who     4     (be) in bed these last twenty years, jumped on to the floor and started doing a dance of victory in his pajamas.