Have you ever asked yourself why children go to school? You will probably _______they go to learn language, geography, history, science and all _________subjects. That is quite true. But _________do they learn these things?

We send our children to school to _________them ready for their future work and life. Nearly _________ they study at school has some practical use _________ their life, but is that the _________ reason they go to school? There is _________ in education than just learning facts. We go to school above all ___________how to learn, __________ when we have left school we can go on learning. If a man really knows how to learn, He will __________ be successful, because whenever he has to do ____________ he will quickly teach himself how to do it in the best way. The uneducated (未受教育的) person on the other hand, is __________ unable to do it, or does it badly. So the purpose of schools is not just ____________ languages, geography, science and so on, but to teach pupils the ____________ to learn.

Have you ever taken the train from Beijing to Shanghai or the train from Shanghai to Beijing? Then how much do you know about the Beijing-Shanghai railway?

The Beijing-Shanghai railway was completed in 1968. The line runs 1,462 kilometers between China’s two main cities and passes through five provinces and the city of Tianjin.                                     

Since opening, it has been one of the busiest lines in our country. Ten trains run on the Beijing-Shanghai railway every day. Five of them are non-stop. Now trains can travel at 250 kilometers per hour at most and the time of the travel is only 10 hours.

China has become one of the countries with high-speed train services. Trains run at the speed of 200 kilometers per hour on 6,003 kilometers of track (轨道), and on some parts, the highest speed can be 250 kilometers per hour. The 6,003 kilometers of track serves both high-speed passenger trains and low-speed cargo (货物) trains.

Railway operators (驾驶员) have to deal with the problem of the speed gap between the two kinds of trains to make sure they both run safely.