Colour words are widely used in both Chinese and English cultures. People use them to show conditions, views and feelings.

Yuebai （月白）, gielan （伽蓝） and shiging （石青）... These are ________ old Chinese people called different kinds of blue in the old times—light or deep. Yuebai is not white. It’s a kind of blue close to the color of ________.

Old Chinese people generally ________ colors into basic colors and mixed colors. There were five basic colors: blue, red, yellow, white and black. People could mix them together to get mixed colors.

Colors have special meanings in Chinese culture. In old China, color was a symbol of social ________. For example, yellow stood for power. It was a color for the emperors（皇帝）. Officials of different ranks（等级） wore clothes of different colors. Purple clothes were ________ for officials of the top three ranks while blue was for those who were in the two lowest ranks.

Many beautiful color names come from famous works of literature and show how old Chinese people understood the beauty of ________. For example, dongfangjibai （东方既白） is a light blue color. It comes from a work by Su Shi. The color blue describes the color of the sky ________ the sun rises. Like this, the ________ color taoyao comes from The Book of Poetry （《诗经》）. This color describes blooming peach（桃） trees.

________, people in the West also use colour expressions to show their feelings and describe the world. Red is often used to express ________ feelings. They may say they are red hot when they are very angry. Pink is a color for good health. This probably comes from the ________ that many babies born with a pink color are healthy. Green is a color for trees and grass. It is said that the Greeks first connected green with ________ caused by envy. This might be because when a person is full of envy, his or her body ________ too much bile （胆汁）, giving his or her skin a greenish colour. The expression “a black sheep of the family” refers to an ________ member of a family or a group if he is always a trouble-maker. Black outs were common during World War II. During black outs, all the lights in a city were turned off. This could make ________ difficult for enemy planes to find a target（目标） on the ground in the dark of night.

The moment that Jiang Mengnan received the 2021 Touching China Person Award, she said she most wanted to express her thanks to her parents.

Born in 1992 in Hunan Province, Jiang’s world has been silent since she was 6 months old when ototoxic drugs(耳毒性药物) she was given damaged her hearing. So Jiang’s parents, both middle school teachers, taught her to learn to speak and understand lip reading.

Jiang put her hands on the throats(喉咙) of her parents when they talked and felt the vibration(震动) of the vocal cords to learn to speak. When reading Pinyin, she carefully looked at the lips of other people’s pronunciations to know the formation of each syllable. Mastering a single word can take at least 1, 000 tries for Jiang and different people’s mouth movements added difficulty to her social communication when it came to lip reading.

Through lip reading and self-study, she was able to keep up with learning and was accepted by Jilin University’s School of Pharmacy(药剂学) with a high score of 615 on the college entrance examination. In 2018 she was accepted as a PhD at Tsinghua University’s School of Life Sciences.

Jiang’s story is one victory over difficulties. More importantly, her experience can help encourage the disabled to struggle for success. From her they know they have no need to feel discouraged, as they can do the same or even better than the so-called healthy people around them. Just as the saying goes, “________” All challenges are gifts.

We often describe someone who cannot keep a secret as “a big mouth”. It turns out that this might not be his fault（过错）.

Researches have shown that keeping a secret may be quite a difficult thing. According to Asim Shah, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine, US, people find it hard to keep a secret because they often have an impulse （冲动） to share it with someone. Another US scientist Anita E·Kelly also noted that keeping a secret could cause stress. People who were told secrets could suffer from serious mental problems like depression （压抑）, anxiety, and body aches.

Since secrets are so easy to get out, why do people still share them? Asim Shah explained that people often feel it will help them keep a person as a friend. Another reason is that people will have a sense of guilt （内疚） when keeping a secret from close people. A sense of distrust can develop when close people do not share secrets with each other.

Asim Shah added that some people easily let secrets get out. But this doesn’t mean you can only share secrets with quiet people instead of talkative people. A quiet person may be someone who keeps everything inside. But if you tell such a person a secret, he may also feel stressed, and then talk about the secret.

Asim Shah suggested in order to tell whether it’s right to share a secret with someone, you’d better put yourself in their shoes. Think about how you would feel when a person complains to you about why you give out a secret. Besides, if you accidentally give out someone’s secret, you should come clean about it. Let the person know that his secret isn’t so secret any more.

As the only child of her family, Rena often felt lonely in her youth. But that all changed when she turned ten. On her birthday, her grandmother bought her a gray puppy. She named it Chloe.

From the very start, Rena and Chloe were always with each other. Every bit of love Rena gave, the little dog returned ten times. “She is my best friend. She’d lick （舔） my face forever unless I stop her,” Rena always said.

But when Rena was 14, her father got a new job which required him to work from home. So the house had to keep quiet all the time. However, Chloe was very yappy. So the parents decided to give up Chloe.

Rena was so sad, but she could do nothing about the matter. She had to leave it at the local animal center and hoped that it would find a new home with people who loved her as much as she had.

Twelve years had passed since Rena last saw Chloe. Rena grew up, got married, and had a child of her own. But in the bottom of her heart she still felt her family was quite incomplete. Remembering the joy that Chloe had brought her as a kid, Rena wanted her daughter to experience the same feeling. And then one day she saw a post on Facebook. It said an elderly dog needed a new home. The dog in the photograph looked a lot like Chloe— and she was also named Chloe. Immediately she decided: She would adopt（收养） this dog.

When she met the new Chloe, Rena was surprised to find it seemed so familiar. And the dog appeared to feel the same way about Rena. “She ran up to me and started licking my face,” she said. “I was crying. I just knew that it was my Chloe.”

Rena’s mom remembered there was a way to test: Their Chloe had been fixed a microchip（芯片） as a puppy. They found the ID number, then Rena took the new Chloe to the vet to be scanned. Sure enough, she also had a microchip and the numbers were a perfect match.

76. 假如你叫李华，你的英国笔友David给你发了一封电子邮件，想了解你进入九年级以来学校生活方面的情况。请你认真阅读下面的邮件，根据邮件的内容及你的实际情况用英语给David写一封邮件。

Thank you so much for your email. I’m very happy to tell you about my school life. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

How about your school life? Please write to me soon.

Best wishes,

Li Hua