Asia is the birthplace of the world's three ancient civilizations: ancient China, ancient India and Babylon. Each

1. The Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China is an ancient defense project with the longest construction time and the largest workload put into a landmark, extending to a total length of more than 50,000 kilometers. Only when you have been to the Great Wall and experienced its majesty can you truly say you have visited China.

2. Angkor Wat, Cambodia

The Angkor Wat in Cambodia is one of the largest religious (宗教的）sights in the world, built on a site measuring 162.6 hectares. It was built by the Khmer King Suryavarman II in the early 12th century in Yasodharapura (present-day Angkor), the capital of the Khmer Empire, as his state temple and eventual mausoleum(陵墓）。

3.Taj Mahal, India

The Taj Mahal is an ivory-white mausoleum on the south bank of the river Yamuna in the Indian city of Agra. It was constructed in 1632 by Mughal emperor Shah as the tomb of his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. The Taj Mahal was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983 for being “the jewel of Muslim art in India and one of the universally admired masterpieces of the world's heritage”.

4.The Senso-ji, Japan

The Senso-ji is an ancient Buddhist temple in Asakusa, Tokyo, Japan. It is Tokyo's oldest temple, and one of its most significant. Close to the temple is a five-story pagoda, Shinto shrine, the Asakusa Shrine, as well as shops with traditional goods in the Nakamise-dori. The Sensoji temple is dedicated to Kannon Bosatsu(观音菩萨）, the Bodhisattva of compassion.

Imagine this: you are twenty-one years old and a promising graduate student at one of the top universities in the world. One day, your doctor tells you that you have an incurable disease and may not have more than twelve months to live. How would you feel? What would you do? Here is what Stephen Hawking thought:

（There did not seem) much point in working on my PhD-I did not expect to survive that long. Yet two years had gone by and I was not that much worse. In fact, things were going rather well for me and I had got engaged to a very nice girl, Jane Wilde. But in order to get married, I needed a job,and in order to get a job, I needed a PhD.

Instead of giving up, Hawking went on with his research, got his PhD and married Jane. Nor did he let the disease stop him from living the kind of life he had always dreamt of. He continued his exploration of the universe and travelled around the world to give lectures. As his disease has disabled him, Hawking has to sit in his now-famous wheelchair and speak through a computer. He talked about his theories and thoughts on some of the greatest questions: What is time, how did the universe begin,and what exactly are black holes?

Hawking became famous in the early 1970s, when he and American Roger Penrose made new discoveries about the Big Bang and black holes. Since then, Hawking has continued to seek answers to questions about the nature of the universe. In 1988, he wrote A Brief History of Time, which quickly became a best-seller. Readers were pleased and surprised to find that a scientist could write about his work in a way that ordinary people could understand. The book sold more than 5.5 million copies in 33 different languages.

BEIJING-China has seen reduced desertification and increased forest coverage since 1978, thanks to the Three-North Afforestation Program (TNAP).

Constructed in the northeast, north and northwest China, TNAP is a national program fighting against soil erosion and wind-sand damage by planting sand-fixing forests. The area of sand-fixing forests has increased by 154 percent in the past 40 years, contributing to the reduction of desertification by around 15 percent, according to a report jointly released by the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (NFGA)and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Over the past 40 years, TNAP increased the forest area by 30.14 million hectares and raised the forest coverage rate from 5.05 percent to 13.57 percent in the regions it covers, said Liu Dongsheng, deputy head of the NFGA.

“China's desertification area has obviously reduced since 2000 due to the construction of the Three-North affor-estation and people's increasing awareness of environmental protection,” said Zhu Jiaojun, head of the Institute of Applied Ecology in the northeastern city of Shenyang. Three-North protective forests helped reduce sandstorms by fixing the sources of sand on the ground, Zhu said.

The program also played a role in preventing sandstorms in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. Official data showed the time of sandstorms per year dropped from 5.1 days in 1978 to 0.1 days in 2015.

Body language is a part of non-verbal language. It includes things like the way you stand, gestures, facial expressions, and even small things like a nod of the head. We frequently communicate both bodily and verbally and about 70% of what we communicate may be non-verbal.

There are many ways to learn to understand body language but we must be aware that it is frequently connected to a culture. Still, since most of us live in one area where body language may be similar among people, it's important to know that you can communicate a lot by how you gesture. A person in much of the US who sits with hands crossed over the chest, and with legs crossed,may be sending a message that they're really not open to talking.

Eye contact is another key element of non-verbal contact in much of the Western world. Looking someone in the eyes enough but not too much may indicate that you're direct and frank.

How we gesture can tell people the level of confidence we have, or if we're a little too insistent on our opinions. Huge gestures may mean we have something to prove. Moderate gestures may simply suggest we're involved and confident in what we have to say.

Even the way you turn your head, shrug, yawn, look at your watch may all be forms of non-verbal communication that send clear signals to other people. Looking at your watch when you're in a meeting with your boss can send the message that you're bored.

If you really think your body language is improper or needs improvement, opening this book on non-verbal communication can help. You can also compare your gestures with those in the video to see if you are sending right messages.Confident body language common to a culture can be learned and may make you appear more confident or direct.