【推荐1】BEIJING—Twelve years after joining the national team. Fan Kexin finally stood up on the highest podium (领奖台) at the Olympic rink (溜冰场). Together with teammates, the 28-year-old new Olympic champion won the mixed team relay gold medal on February 5 at the Beijing Winter Olympics. It was also the first gold for the host country at the Beijing Games, which received congratulations from the central leadership.

Fan, the leading figure of the Chinese women’s short track speed skating team, has long dreamed of winning Olympic gold. “I’ve been waiting for this gold medal for 12 years. I’ve waited for it for so long,” Fan said after the victory, in tears. “I have always believed in the team. From the day I entered the national team, I have always believed in my teammates.”

Fan was born in September 1993 in Qitaihe, a city in Northeast China’s Heilongjiang province, which is a cradle for a number of world-famous short track speed skaters, including China’s first Winter Olympic gold medalist Yang Yang and four-time Olympic champion Wang Meng.

Fan didn’t turn to skating as a child, but chose dancing like many other girls. However, the relatively high training costs ended her hope of becoming a dancer, as her family ran into financial difficulties.

Since 2003, when Fan was selected by her first coach, Ma Qingzhong, to train as a short track speed skater, she worked hard at training, getting up every day at 4 am for a one-hour training session before going to school. “We didn’t have to call her in the morning as she could get up herself,” Fan’s mother, Nie Gulling, recalled. “She was always reluctant to leave the rink and wanted to train more.”

Fan’s career was put into a dangerous situation when she was diagnosed with severe anemia (贫血) in 2008. Her parents asked her to give up the sport, but Fan insisted on carrying on and returned to the rink the following year.

The Olympic gold in Beijing came after Fan’s persistence (毅力), as well as that of the whole team. “We’ve been experiencing tough training in the past four years. Every day when we finished training, we’d have blood in our throats. But at the moment we won, I thought it was all worth it. We’ve made it,” Fan said after the victory.

【推荐2】Sports are as important as studies for students because they help students to stay focused and enjoy working.     1     Here are some best sports for students to play at school.

    2     About 250 million players in over 200 countries play this sport. The rules in football allow each team to have eleven players on the field at a time. The sport can be played almost everywhere. It is certainly a good sport for the students in the school.

Another excellent sport for students is basketball.     3     Each team has five people playing in the ground. The players compete against each other in a court (球场) to achieve the main goal of shooting a basketball through the defenders (后卫).

Volleyball is also a team sport in which two teams of six players are separated by the net. Each of the team tries forcefully to score points by grounding the ball on the other team court under organized rules.     4    

It is generally agreed that softball developed from a game called indoor baseball, first played in Chicago in 1887. It is played with a larger ball on the smaller field.     5     When the weather is bad, softball is a very good indoor sport for students.

You can include these best sports for students to play at school to keep them energetic and do better in their studies.

【推荐2】Babies appear to know how to help those in need, according to researchers who studied signs of altruism in almost 100 children.

Researchers who wanted to see whether children would give up their food to a stranger without encouragement found the kids did just that — even when they were hungry.

The scientists recruited 96 19-month-old children. During the experiments, a child and a researcher sat across from each other. In the control group of the first set of experiments, researchers threw a piece of fruit onto a plate where they couldn’t reach, but the child could. They then waited. In contrast, researchers in the test group pretended to drop the fruit on the plate, then tried and failed to reach it. This signaled to the child that the adult wanted the food.

Among the control group, only 4 percent of the children gave the piece of fruit to the researchers, compared with 58 percent, or over half, in the test group.

Next, the team explored if children would still be generous when it was at a cost to themselves. The first set of experiments was repeated with a separate group of kids before their lunchtime, when they were likely to be hungry. Similarly, 37 percent of the test group handed over their fruit, compared with none in the control group.

The experiments were repeated four times. Researchers got similar results each time. Babies with siblings (兄弟姐妹) and babies from Latino or Asian families shared more of the fruit, the team also found.

Carter Morgan, lead professor of the study, said, “We often think of babies as selfish. But here we find that they are willing to help others even when it comes at some ‘cost’ to the self.”

Addressing why children with siblings or from certain cultural backgrounds were more likely to share their fruit, Morgan said, “We believe this partly reflects what social psychologists call ‘ interdependence’, which stresses on the importance of interpersonal connections and adjusting to others. These social experiences that shape attitudes towards sharing appear to have an effect very early in life.”

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【推荐3】The ruins of a huge Maya city have been discovered in Guatemala with the help of the remote sensing technique LiDAR, according to the National Geographic on Thursday.

This breakthrough was possible thanks to LiDAR sensors, which can survey landscapes in 3D by reflecting laser pulses off the ground from unmanned air vehicles and others. LiDAR is exceptionally useful for detecting archeological sites (考古遗址), as it gets through jungles and other features that hold up exploration on the ground. The technique has been the activator (催化剂) of many discoveries in recent years. For instance, major finds at Angkor, Cambodia and Caracol, Belize can explain what it did.

This large lost city envelops sites like Tikal, Holmul, and Witzna—known for their temples and pyramids—but shows that these famous heritage areas are the tip of the iceberg of this lost urban network.

Hidden under the jungles of the Maya Biosphere Reserve, more than 60,000 human-made features—homes, canals, highways, some of which can even reach the modernized standard—have been identified by an international cooperation of researchers headed by the PACUNAM Foundation, a Maya cultural and natural heritage organization. Those have experts rethinking the outlines and complexity of the Maya empire.

These ancient peoples obviously established these imaginative cultures based on their known relics, but the new research has shown that the scale of this lost society is far beyond what experts had imagined. The findings will be explored in an hour-long documentary called Lost Treasures of the Maya Snake Kings, premiering (首映) Tuesday, February 6 on the National Geographic Channel.

“There are entire cities we didn’t know about now showing up in the survey data,” said Francisco Belli, one of the lead archeologists on the project. “There are 20,000 square kilometres more to be explored and there are going to be hundreds of cities there that we don’t know about, and we will push the frontiers,” he added.