What is the “taste” of Spring Festival? For most Chinese, it     1     (meaning) red lanterns at the doors, lucky characters on the walls and paper-cuts on the windowpanes.

    2     people in Yu County, Hebei Province, their special paper-cuts are an important tradition during the Chinese New Year. Zhang Haiquan, 56, is the     3     (five)-generation (一代人) leader of the northern school for Yu County paper-cutting. Zhang’s childhood memories are     4     (fill) with paper-cuts. “Then my friends and I     5     (will) make the paper-cuts and sell them to buy firecrackers.”

Now, he is happy to share his artwork     6     families and friends, sending his best wishes for the Spring Festival.

Dating back to     7     6th century, the art form is a traditional handicraft (手工艺品) that includes cutting designs into paper.     8     plays an important role in Chinese festivals and ethnic (民族的) activities. The cultural meanings have made it     9     of the richest Chinese folk arts.

Opera characters, historical     10     (story), plants and animals, lucky patterns and activities from our daily lives all become the subjects of paper-cuts that beautify window panes across China during the Spring Festival. It increases the festive atmosphere (气氛), and expresses good wishes for the next year.

As a Canadian, I have been very interested in Chinese since very young.     1     the age of 12, I entered a Chinese writing competition. I tried     2     (real) hard but I failed to win a prize. I     3     (think) that learning Chinese was a huge challenge and lost confidence in myself.

One day, a book called Journey to the West caught     4     (I) eyes. In the book, Monkey King needs to borrow a fan to cross the Mountain of Flames.     5     he fails twice, he doesn’t give up and finally makes it.

Strongly encouraged by Monkey King, I kept     6     (work) hard on Chinese. Still, I met some problems along the way, but I found learning Chinese was     7     exciting challenge for me. Last week, I     8     (give) the third prize in a Chinese writing competition. I wasn’t the     9     (great) one in the competition, but I learned to face challenges bravely.

The journey of learning Chinese is like climbing towards the mountain top, sometimes up, sometimes down. The experiences can cause me pain, but also fill my life with     10     (happy). I will continue on my journey, looking forward to playing a role in developing communication between the East and the West in the future.

Yellow, orange, red and green—the colors of leaves make autumn     1     colorful season! Who paints all these colors? The leaves     2    .

There are millions of (数百万的) little color “bags”     3     a leaf. They are green, yellow and orange. In summer, the green ones are very busy. They catch sunlight     4     change water and carbon dioxide (二氧化碳) into sugar—the food for the tree. They cover all the other colors in the leaf.

When it is very cool in autumn, the tree has a rest and gets ready for winter. The leaves don’t need water to make food any more.

Without water, the green bags start to go away. The other colors—yellow and orange come out. The leaves don’t really “turn” a certain color. They just lose their green.

What about red leaves? They look red     5     they have some sugar in them. They “steal (偷)” some food from the tree!