Prior to coming to China, my only experience with Chinese cooking was in America. America’s most famous popular Chinese dish is General Tso’s chicken,     1     (consist) of fried chicken covered in a sweet sauce flavoured with hot red peppers. Later, I had the     2     (please) of experiencing authentic Chinese cuisine in different places of China. We dined in restaurants which were     3     (elegant)decorated and the food really satisfied our appetite. Culture and food go hand in hand and Chinese cuisine is     4     case in point.

As traditional tea processing techniques and their     1    (associate) social practices in China were recently included on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, the world is paying more attention to Chinese tea.

Southwest China’s Sichuan province has the     2    (early) history of tea growing in China, with one place in particular standing out: Mengding Mountain in Ya’an. The average annual temperature there is 14.5 degrees, and the year-round mist and rain is     3    (benefit) to the forming of nitrogenous (含氮的) substances in tea     4    (leaf).

Its superior natural and ecological conditions, along with a     5    (high) developed production process, contribute     6     the quality of Mengshan tea.

    7    (origin) in the Han Dynasty (206BC-AD24), the tea has more than 2,000 years of history. Since the year 742 during the reign of the Xuanzong Emperor of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), Mengshan tea     8    (serve) as a gift for the royals.

A traditional green tea,     9     includes five varieties, is represented by Mengding Ganlu. Famed as one of the 10 most famous teas in China, the technique for making Mengshan tea was listed     10     the national-level intangible cultural heritage in 2021.

A “Growth Mindset” Can Lead to Success

The most successful people are fond of telling us about their passion for their professions. And passion has been believed to be essential to not only their success, but also their happiness.

Unfortunately,     1     some people have a clear “calling” from a young age, many still leave education without knowing their vocation in life. They may spend their whole life without having ever discovered a career that truly     2     (interest) them. In the past ten years, the researcher     3     (demonstrate) that some people tend to see their abilities as “fixed”—they believe that they are either born with a talent for something or they don’t have it completely. What can they do?

Some answers come from the work of Paul O’Keefe. In his mindset theory, the most basic foundation of passion is having an intense interest in     4     you’re doing. Meanwhile, people also have the capacity to cultivate new interests outside their normal fields.     5     (consider) arts students looking at a piece about science, or “techy” students reading an article on literary criticism(文学评论).     6     the students have very little initial curiosity about the subject, with the growth mindset, they will change their ratings of the interest in that new subject after reading the piece.

In addition, a person’s mindset can also determine how long they would be interested in more difficult content and     7     they would plan to deal with the content or not. In one experiment, after     8    (show) a video about black holes, people had to read a challenging academic paper on the subject. The people with the growth mindset maintained their interest: they were     9     (willing) to know about the black holes despite the difficulties of grasping the technical material. By contrast, the flame of interest quickly burnt out in those with the fixed mindset. “Within the span of seven minutes they went from saying ‘this is fascinating’     10    saying ‘no, I’m done,’” says O’Keefe.