More than 20 years ago, when Gao Zhongtai was a reporter in Wuxi, East China’s Jiangsu province, he started     1    (follow) news about the research and development of China’s deep-sea     2    (man) submersibles at the China Ship Scientific Research Center.

The Wuxi-based center, China’s largest ship and ocean engineering research institute, is behind the success of the country’s three deep-sea manned submersibles: Jiaolong (Sea Dragon), Shenhai Yongshi (Deep Sea Warrior) and Fendouzhe (Striver).

Gao     3    (conduct) interviews with the key scientists and engineers. However, his reporting was never going to get the story behind the story, or the intricate details about the research and development.

That is why Gao, in his 60s, wrote the book Shenqian (Diving Deep),     4    (publish) earlier this year, in which he recorded how scientists and engineers     5    (develop) the world’s most advanced deep-sea manned submersibles in the last 20 years,     6    (start) from scratch.

Before Shenqian, Gao published nonfiction works like Dying to Survive, about a leukemia patient trying to save himself and other cancer patients by illegally     7    (buy) generic drugs from India, and history novels set in the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 BC) and the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). He is also a TV series screenwriter.

Since Fendouzhe, China’s most advanced deep-sea manned submersible, successfully traveled to the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, the deepest natural frontier on Earth, in 2020, Gao has always wanted     8    (write) a book about this feat.

Although he had been following the news for decades, he still found it difficult     9    (understand) the science and technology used on deep-sea manned submersibles. He spent a great deal of time trying     10    (figure) out. To better discuss the motivation of exploring the ocean, he also researched more about the sea.

China earlier on Thursday successfully launched Tianhe from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site,     1     (start) a series of key launch missions    2    aim to complete the construction of the station by the end of next year.

The construction of the space station and a state-level space lab,    3    (be) key goal to fulfilling the three strategic steps in China’s manned space program and    4    important   leading project for building China’s    5    (strong) in science, technology and aerospace.

China’s most adventurous space attempt, the multimodule space station named Tiangong, will have three main components — a core module    6    (attach) to two space laboratories — with a combined weight of nearly 70 tons. The core capsule, named Tianhe, is 16. 6 meters long     7    has a diameter (直径) of 4. 2 meters. The craft’s weight is equal    8    the combined weight of 15 standard-size automobiles.

The capsule will be     9     (centre) to the space station’s future operations, given that astronauts will live there and control the entire station from inside. It will     10     (use) to host scientific and technological experiments too. The entire station is expected to become fully operational around the end of 2022 and is set to work for about 15 years.