【推荐2】

The 31st International University Sports Federation(FISU) Summer World University Games were held from July 28, 2023 to August 8, 2023 in Chengdu, which were more than just medals and sports.

A total of 6,500 student athletes from 113 countries and regions competed at the Chengdu FISU Games. Besides showing their skills in different sports, these athletes also learned about many sides of Chinese culture. Each night in the athletes’ village, for example, they could experience activities such as trying on hanfu, playing Chinese chess and playing traditional Chinese music.

They also had the chance to meet one of China’s national treasures: the giant panda. On July 31 in a special area of Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, overseas athletes met the 6-year-old Zhi Ma, the panda who inspired (启发) the design of Rongbao—the mascot (吉祥物) of the Games. They were really excited as most of them first met with a giant panda in person. “They are much cuter than they are in videos,” Mario Del Basso, a water polo athlete from Italy, said to China Daily. To attract the attention of the giant pandas, many athletes also made an effort to learn how to say “come here” in the local Sichuan dialect (方言).

Chinese and foreign athletes also made good friends during the Games. During the mixed team event in a men’s doubles match, Chinese athlete Tan Qiang beat Brazilian badminton player Welton Menezes easily. But the image of Menezes’s worn-out shoes stuck with Tan. He asked for Menezes’s shoe size immediately after the match and gave his own pair of new shoes to Menezes. “I am very grateful for Tan’s help,” Menezes said. “It’s a great pair of shoes and I love it. After I go back to Brazil, I will also wear the shoes for training.”

This event not only provides a stage for competition, but also serves as a platform for cultural exchange and the development of friendship, showing China’s positive attitude to the world.

【推荐1】China and Nepal have announced a new exact height for Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain in 2020. The two countries reported that Everest’s peak (顶峰）stands 8,848.86 meters tall.

There had been argument over the actual height of the peak and worried that it might have shrunk (萎缩) after a major earthquake in 2015. The earthquake killed 9,000 people and damaged about 1 million buildings in Nepal. It also caused an avalanche (雪崩) on Everest that killed 19 people.

Everest’s height was first announced as 8,842meters by a British team around 1856. But the most widely accepted height has been 8,848 meters, which was decided by India in 1954.

In 1999, an international team used GPS technology to come up with a height of 8,850 meters. But in 2005, a Chinese team reported a height of 8,844.43 meters because it did not include the mountain’s snow top.

A Nepal government team of climbers and researchers climbed Everest in May 2019. The team used GPS and satellite equipment to measure (测量) the peak and snow height at the top of the mountain.

A survey team from China then carried out (进行) measurements in the spring of 2020, when all other climbing activities had stopped because of COVID-19.

Nepal’s climbing community welcomed the end of disputes（争论) over Everest’s height. “This is a milestone in mountain-climbing history which will finally end the argument over the height and now the world will have one number,” said Santa Bir Lama. He is president of the Nepal Mountain-climbing Association.

The first people to officially climb Everest were New Zealand’s Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepal’s Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. They reached the peak in May of 1953. Since then, the mountain has been climbed 10,184 times by 5,789 people.