1 . In 1943, a jury (评审委员会) of top scholars and scientists elected James Yen one of “the ten greatest revolutionaries of our time”, listing him along with Albert Einstein and Orville Wright. Yet all he did was teaching Chinese farmers to read.

Born in Sichuan in 1890, James Yen graduated from the Yale University in 1918. After this, he went to France to support Chinese workers who had been sent to help the Allies in World War I. Working to help and teach them to read and write letters, Yen realized how much they needed education. Therefore, he wrote a simple literacy (读写能力) book which used only 1000 basic characters. In the 1920s, inspired by his experiences, Yen organized the National Association of Mass Education Movements. Its purpose was to bring literacy to the Chinese masses.

For 4000 years, reading and writing in China was only done by scholars. Everybody knew, including the farmers themselves, that farmers were incapable of learning. That thoroughly deep-seated point of view was James Yen’s first “impossible” challenge to overcome. The second challenge was the Chinese language itself, consisting of many characters, each character having rich meanings. The third challenge was the poor technology and inconvenient transportation. How could James Yen reach the 350 million farmers back then? These were impossible odds, an impossibly huge goal.

Yet he made it and then expanded his goal: teach the rest of the Third World to read. Practical reading programs started pumping out literate people like a gushing oil well in the Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Kenya, Indonesia, Bangladesh and India. People became literate. For the first time in their entire history, they could access the accumulated knowledge of the human race.

What’s the secret of James Yen’s success? He tried to do something that seemed impossible. He worked long hours. And he started with what he had in front of him and gradually took on more and more, little by little.

3 . The Japanese animation (动漫) director Hayao Miyazaki, a workaholic auteur generally considered to be one of the art form’s most accomplished masters, has been trying to retire since 1997. “I know I’ve mentioned I’m retiring many times in the past,” he told a press conference, “So I know that many of you might think, ‘oh again’. This time is for real.” Cut to 2023: The release of Hayao Miyazaki’s final “final” film, The Boy and the Heron.

With The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki wanted to go back even further to his childhood. Indeed, the film’s opening scene is inspired by Miyazaki’s experience of growing up during World War Two. Much like an infant Miyazaki, Mahito is evacuated from Tokyo to live in the relative safety of the countryside. It is here, tormented (折磨) by grief, living miserably with his father and his father’s new wife, that he meets the nominal Heron: a half-man, half-bird creature who mockingly tells Mahito that his mother is still alive. It is around this point, as the fish chant for Mahito to “join us”, as the frogs climb over his face, that The Boy and the Heron takes a turn for the strange. Having followed the Heron, Mahito finds himself stranded somewhere between life and death.

How do we live? It is a question that has haunted Miyazaki, a director always torn between optimism and despair, for most of his career: How do you live—as one character in The Boy and the Heron describes it—in “a foolish world filled with murder and thievery”? Perhaps, without getting into specifics, the film’s ending suggests another interpretation: Legacies, successors, even art itself, none of it actually matters. All that matters is that people—Miyazaki’s family, his friends, even the audience—continue to live on, to engage with the real world rather than retreat into fantasy.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Those are the words of Thomas Alva Edison, one of the greatest     1     (inventor) in the history of the United States.

Edison, who grew up in the Midwest, was     2     (large) self-educated. He earned 1,093 patents in his lifetime, including the lightbulb. Being     3     successful businessman, Edison often reworked existing technology, making it more practical for widespread use.

Edison was born on February 11, 1847, a day that     4     (celebrate) as National Inventors’ Day today. The Thomas Edison Center, which was created in memory of Edison, is at Menlo Park in New Jersey. It is said that the seven years Edison spent at the lab he created in New Jersey were the most     5     (product).

“Menlo Park is the birthplace of     6     (record) sound. It was in Menlo Park     7     Edison invented the phonograph (留声机) in 1877. The invention led to the 30-year-old Ohio native’s international fame. From then on, he was known     8     the “Wizard (奇才) of Menlo Park.”

A phonograph was the first device that was used     9     (reserve) sound. It was the precursor (先驱) to record albums and CDs. The original model had no volume knob (旋钮), so listeners would have to control the sound by     10     (place) a sock in the machine. That’s where we get the expression “put a sock in it”, which means “stop talking”.

7 . Travis Gienger set a record for growing the world’s heaviest pumpkin, which weighed about 1,247 kilograms, in 2023. The middle-aged man was named the winner on Monday of the 50th Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Half Moon Bay, California. He won the same con test in 2022, whose pumpkin weighed 1,161 kilograms. The past world record for the heaviest pumpkin was set by a grower in Italy who produced a 1,226-kilogram pumpkin in 2021. “I was not expecting that,” Gienger said. He added that it felt good to win the world record.

Gienger is a teacher at Anoka Technical College in Anoka, Minnesota. He teaches agriculture and growing methods. And he has been producing pumpkins for nearly 30 years like his elders, especially his father, who used to raise pumpkins in the home property, which got him interested in planting. Gienger later devoted himself to working the land to plant.

Gienger first competed in Half Moon Bay’s yearly con test in 2020. He won three of the city’s last four pumpkin contests. “I put in the work so that I can put a smile on people’s faces, and it’s just so nice coming out here to see everyone in this town,” Gienger said.

Gienger, who grew the pumpkins on the farm, had given his plants more care. This included watering them up to 12 times a day and feeding or fertilizing them, a little more than usual. Those contributed to his greater success in 2023.

The pumpkin champion won a $30,000 prize for growing the biggest pumpkin and setting a world record. Gienger’s pumpkin would be shown along with the second-place winners at the city’s upcoming Pumpkin Festival. At the event, visitors would be able to look at the pumpkin prize and take pictures with the growers.

In the United States, pumpkins are popular throughout the autumn. During the US holiday Halloween, on October 31, many people turn them into “jack-o’-lanterns”. A jack-o’-lantern is a pumpkin that has been carved, usually to show a frightening or funny face.

A 13-year project has finally come to a close. British artist Kirstie Macleod came up with The Red Dress idea     1     (explore) identity, culture and tradition through embroidery (刺绣).

After passing through the hands of 343 artists across 46     2     (country) , the final piece was assembled (拼装) into a lovingly made and beautifully designed floor-length dress. It is made from 84 pieces of silk, all of     3     were hand-embroidered by artists around the globe. They were from South Africa, Mexico, Egypt, Kenya, Japan and beyond.

The artists were encouraged to create     4     work that expressed their own identities while adding their own cultural and traditional experience. Among the artists     5     (be) refugees (难民) who escaped from the war, craftsmen who are carrying on age-old traditions     6     people who learn the art for the first time.

“Initially the project     7     (intend) to produce a dialogue of identity through embroidery and combine diverse cultures,” Kirstie Macleod says. “However, over the 13 years, the dress has also become a platform for self-expression and an opportunity for voices     8     (hear).” The finished dress was worn by several of the artists who helped create the piece,     9     (bring) an added sense of completion to the project. Now, the completed and     10     (full) assembled red dress is going on tour to be displayed at galleries and museums across the globe.

Yang Jiang was a well-known Chinese playwright, translator, and author. She belonged to     1     unique and beautiful existence in Chinese literature. She was the first Chinese academic     2    (translate) Miguel de Cervantes’ Spanish novel Don Quixote to Chinese and at that time, her translation     3     (honor) as the recreation of the original work       4     the basis of loyalty.

Yang was born into a rich family in 1911,     5    (original)named Yang Jikang. After eventually     6     (graduate) from Soochow University, she enrolled at the graduate school of Tsinghua University. She met her husband there, Qian Zhongshu, another acclaimed writer in China.

Other than translations, Yang     7     (author) many plays, novels, and essays during her writing career. Her short novel Mr. Wang,     8    (write) in 1984, was selected as an article in the textbook. In 1986, she got the Civil Order of Alfonso X the Wise, a famous Spanish civil order, for her     9     (achieve) in Don Quixote. Her bestseller was We Three in 2003,     10     sales exceeded 180,000 copies in two months. Yang passed away in 2016, at the age of 105.