【推荐3】Booking museum tickets this past summer was not easy. Visitors often found that tickets for the following week had been fully booked.

Across China, museum halls were filled with visitors during the summer vacation. To many museum workers, such crowds had not often been seen before. So, what was behind this “museum craze (狂热)”?

Part of the reason is a growing interest in traditional Chinese culture, according to Guo Sike. He is a worker in the Confucius Museum in Shandong Province.

The Confucius Museum saw many of these tours. In order to meet their needs, it had several different activities. For example, there were exhibitions to show people the Kong family's traditions.

The Shaanxi History Museum in the city of Xi’an also saw an increase in visitors. The museum can only allow 12,000 people to visit each day. Visitors could wear the performers’ costumes (服装) and learn to sing the opera.

“Museums are bridges. They connect the past, present and future,” said Yang Chaoming, a professor at Shandong University. “More and more people wish to better learn about traditional Chinese culture through museum visits.”

【推荐2】From red apples and yellow lemons to blueberries and green melons, fruit comes in many different colors. Why do different kinds of fruit have so many colors?

According to Lu Wei from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, fruit colors actually come from their different pigments(色素). These pigments appear in different numbers, depending on the fruit’s environment. This causes the fruit to turn a certain color.

To find out how environment affects fruit colors, Chinese scientists studied more than 280 different fruit colors, including white, red, blue, purple and black.

They found that red fruit is easy to grow in cooler places. Blue and purple fruit mostly grows in warm places. These fruit always grows a lot in just one area. The scientists also found that the closer the fruit is to the equator(赤道), the darker its color will be.

Animals have also had an effect on the fruit colors. Animals eat fruit and drop the seeds in other places later. This helps the fruit spread and grow in different places. Therefore, in order to attract animals, some fruit develop colors that are easy for animals to see. For example, birds can see red more easily than humans can. Therefore, there may be more red fruit in areas where birds live.

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【推荐3】Ink wash painting (水墨画) is an old and beautiful Chinese art. This special drawing technique is created with a brush, dipped into ink, then in water before being painted onto rice paper or silk. As you can see, the paintings are created just in black and white. It is said that the technique was invented by an artist named Wang Wei.

Ink wash paintings often feature trees, flowers, landscapes, animals, birds and people. Also, they often go with Chinese poems. The painting style does not put high importance on a precise description of a real scene or object. They are often improvised (即兴的) works from beautiful scenery (风景). Therefore, this type of painting is hard to copy. Today there are many new Chinese artists that use the traditional Chinese ink wash technique to draw new sceneries and pictures.

The first ink wash animation (动画) in China came out in 1960. It’s called Little Tadpole Looking for Mummy. All the animals, plants and rocks in the film are drawn with ink and brush. The film is about 15 minutes long. But it took lots of work. Without computers, the artists had to draw everything by hand. One second of animation needs 24 pictures! Little Tadpole Looking for Mummy won prizes at home and abroad. From then on, ink wash painting and animation becomes more popular in China. People in the world get to know more about ink wash since then!