When you meet a strange Chinese character (汉字) what will you do? Surely, the most reliable way is to look it up in Xinhua Dictionary.

Since its birth in 1953, Xinhua Dictionary has been a must-have book in schools across China. More than 567 million copies had been sold by 2016. So it was even recognized by the Guinness World Records as the “most popular dictionary” that year.

Small as the dictionary is, it means a lot to China. The dictionary was given the name Xinhua by the chief editor Wei Jiangong, and it carried the hope of a country reborn. In 1949, around 80% of China’s population wasn’t able to get education (教育). It was Xinhua Dictionary that had reduced the number to 52% by 1964. To make it easier for illiterate people to understand, the earliest copies had many pictures.

Thanks to Xinhua Dictionary, many Chinese got new chances in their life. Mo Yan, the 69-year-old Nobel Laureate, once mentioned the dictionary in his speech. He said that he was lucky to have a copy of the dictionary after dropping out from school. He learned most of Chinese characters from it, and that helped him write novels and enter a college later.

This important dictionary has also recorded the development of the language and society. It is revised (修订) every five to ten years. Recent copies have included many new explanations. The character “晒” (to dry something in the sun), for example, now has a second meaning: to share. In a way, the dictionary hasn’t just explained characters; it has reflected (反映) the way Chinese people think.

In a noisy restaurant, you can still hear your friend’s voice clearly. You talk happily without paying attention to others’ conversations. That’s because selective (选择性的) attention is helping you.

Selective attention is an amazing ability in our brain. It allows people to choose and focus on (专注于) something in the environment. At the same time, it can filter out (过滤) unnecessary information, so people can focus on one conversation in a crowded place. But how does selective attention work? Researchers from Columbia University did an experiment to study it. The result shows that the brain is selective about the sounds it hears. When a person listens to someone talking, their brain waves (波) change to pick out the features of the speaker’s voice and filter out other voices.

To further understand how selective attention works, the researchers studied two parts of the brain’s listening centre: Heschl’s gyrus (HG) and the superior temporal gyrus (STG). Information from the ears reaches HG first, passes through it and arrives at STG later. In the study, they found the following facts: in HG area, every voice is treated the same way. That is to say, HG doesn’t prefer one voice or another. But in STG area, it’s possible to choose one speaker’s voice and make it louder. The whole process (过程) only takes 150 milliseconds and it happens immediately to a listener. As a result, people can focus on one voice when there are many other conversations around.

“Today’s study is quite important. We want to better understand how the brain helps us to hear so well, as well as create technologies that help people,” said Dr. Mesgarani, the leader of the researchers. With the help of the finding, speech recognition technologies have been improved. The researchers have already developed a new kind of hearing aid that can help collect information more correctly. It could make one speaker’s voice louder over another. They also plan to study more about HG and STG activity in situations that have more speakers.

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6 .

Nobody can say no to a flower world in the real life. That’s why more and more people come to the Huazhao Festival to enjoy the beautiful and busy party in spring.

The Huazhao Festival is the birthday of all flowers and it happens on the 2nd, 12th or 15th day of February of the Chinese lunar calendar (农历). People started to celebrate the birthday of flowers before the Qin Dynasty and it became a festival during the Sui and Tang Dynasties. In the Tang Dynasty, it was one of the three important celebrations all over China.

The Huazhao Festival is rich in customs (习俗). Young people wear Hanfu, a kind of traditional Chinese clothes and have outings. The festival is in early spring, so it’s such a great time to have an outing to enjoy the spring time. Girls put colorful paper-cuts on the flower stems (花茎). They hope they can be as young and beautiful as flowers. Also, people in different places of China plant flowers. They think that flowers planted on that day can grow well. At the festival, the flower fair (集市) is the most popular. There are lots of fun activities in the fair, such as making flower cakes and playing music.

The Huazhao Festival is an exciting party to see the beautiful spring and it also helps people learn more about Chinese traditions. It’s really a wonderful celebration that you can’t miss.

7 . If you visit Wuppertal, Germany, make sure you take the Schwebebahn. It’s a railway that runs for 13 kilometres and carries over 80, 000 passengers (乘客) every day.

The Schwebebahn travels in a very different way. Its 24-metre-long train doesn’t run on the track (轨道), but under it. The track is 12 metres above the river, so as the train goes over the city. Passengers can enjoy the exciting sights freely.

The Schwebebahn didn’t come easy. In the 1880s, the traffic in Wuppertal was so busy that the government had to develop a new way of travelling. At that time, a man named Eugen Langen was trying a railway under the track to carry products for his company. It was successful so later Eugen put this idea into the Schwebebahn. In that way, the space above the River Wupper got fully used. It turned out to be a very good choice. The Schwebebahn gives special travel experiences to passengers. Its stations are as beautiful as art museums, so passengers won’t be bored while waiting in the stations. A classical train also offers all kinds of services, such as food and drinks. What’s more, people can book this train to have parties or even get married in the air! They will never forget this one-hour journey in the air.

Now the Schwebebahn is more than a railway for Wuppertal. It is a symbol of the city.

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9 . “Are we alone? What’s out there?” Looking up at the stars, people have always wanted to learn more about space, and scientists have been working hard to find the secrets of the universe. Here we’re going to go through a timeline of the important moments of space exploration.

The Big Bang Theory is an idea about how our universe began. Many scientists believe that everything in the universe was pressed together and then it separated into smaller pieces very quickly about 14 billion years ago to create the universe. The Big Bang is thought to be the beginning of everything in the universe.

The Hubble Space Telescope was put into space in 1990. Hubble is as long as a large school bus and it weighs as much as two elephants. In order to stay above the atmosphere, it travels around the earth at about 5 miles a second. Hubble is able to get clear pictures of faraway stars. A picture called “Hubble Ultra Deep Field” shows some of the farthest galaxies. Pictures from Hubble help scientists learn more about the universe.

China’s Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope is better known as FAST. It is in Guizhou, China, and it has been used since September 25th, 2016. Its 500-metre dish is the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope. Scientists can use it to search for signals of communication that are not coming from the earth. If scientists find such things, maybe there is life somewhere else in the universe!

Shenzhou-16 manned spaceship was sent into space from Jiuquan on May 30th, 2023. Shenzhou-16 connected with Tianhe Core Module 6.5 hours later, with three astronauts inside it. Surprisingly, one of the three astronauts is a university teacher. In the next months, the three astronauts will do some scientific tests and carry out several spacewalks outside China’s Space Station. Besides, they will give science lessons to students on the earth from the faraway space.

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The Adventures of Tintin was created by the cartoonist Herge. Tintin, a journalist for a newspaper, has been popular with people of all ages. But do you know how Herge created Tintin and his around the world adventures?

In fact, Tintin appeared as a young man of age 15 to 19, with a round face and short red hair just like Herge’s younger brother Paul. Herge grew up together with him. As a result, Paul’s image stayed in his mind and he created a cartoon hero according to Paul.

It’s also believed that a French journalist, Robert Sexe prompted the creation of Tintin. Robert travelled with his best friend Milhoux while Tintin’s small white dog, Snowy, had a similar French name Milou. What’s more, Robert toured the same countries as Tintin did in the first few of Tintin’s adventures.

There is another real-life person in Tintin’s adventures. That’s “Chang”, a friend of Tintin’s. In 1934, Herge started to write about Tintin’s journey to China, but Hergé hadn’t been to the country yet. To know about China, he made friends with Zhang Chongren, a young Chinese student in an art college. With the help of Zhang, Tintin’s adventure The Blue Lotus came out. In this book, Zhang became “Chang” under the pen of Herge, introducing real China to Tintin as well as readers in Europe.

Herge’s works got ideas from his own life. No other stories may cover so much information from the real world like Tintin!