She is a great Chinese woman. She has spent almost all her life in Dunhuang, studying and protecting the 1,600-year-old Mogao Grottoes (莫高窟). People call her “the Daughter of Dunhuang”. Her name is Fan Jinshi.

Born in 1938, Fan grew up in Shanghai. After graduating from the Department of History, Peking University in 1963, she came to Dunhuang and worked at Dunhuang Academy (研究院). She became head of the Academy in 1998.

When Fan first came to Dunhuang, it was a poor village and life there was really hard. Although she missed her life in Shanghai, she stayed. She and some workers put doors on the caves, planted trees and controlled the number of visitors. “The longer I’ve stayed here, the deeper my love has grown for Dunhuang, “ Fan said.

Fan started many projects to protect the Mogao Grottoes. One of them is “Digital (数字的) Dunhuang”. It gives people a new way to see the caves without destroying them. Under Fan’s leadership, Dunhuang Academy has grown into the world’s largest organization for Dunhuang studies.

From a 25-year-old girl to a white-haired lady, Fan has spent over 55 years in Dunhuang. Her great work was widely noticed. She was honored as one of CCTV’s “People Who Moved China 2019”. Now 86-year-old Fun Jinshi lives a peaceful life.

Fan wrote a book named Dunhuang Is Where My Heart Belongs: Fan Jinshi’s Self-Narration. It came out in 2019. In the book, she talks about her personal experiences and her relationship with the Mogao Grottoes. If you want to learn more about her, you should read it.

3 . From the moon to Mars, scientists have been looking for water—the key to life—in the solar system for decades. Recently, they have turned to Jupiter (木星)!

On April 14, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) JUICE spacecraft successfully lifted off from French Guiana in South America. JUICE, short for “Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer”, will collect data from Jupiter and its three moons, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

The three moons are believed to have big oceans of liquid water (液态水) under their icy shells (壳). According to ESA, the water on these moons could be six times as much as the amount in Earth’s oceans. The mission (任务) “will change our understanding of the solar system”, wrote Scientific American.

In 1998, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft found that Europa might be ejecting (喷射) water as far as 160 kilometers into space. That gave scientists the idea of studying the icy moons of Jupiter.

The oceans under these moons are likely to be tens of kilometers deep. But they are also trapped under tens of kilometers of ice, making it very difficult to study them. Although JUICE cannot land on the surface, it has lots of high-tech equipment to study the moon’s environment, including spectral imaging (光谱成像) tools and radar (雷达). “They could give more data on things like the thickness of the oceans, their salt content (含量), and their distance from the icy shells above,” reported Phys.org.

“The main goal is to understand whether there are habitable (适合居住的) environments among those icy moons and around a giant planet like Jupiter,” JUICE team member Olivier Witasse said during a press conference (发布会) on April 6.

4 . Which is the Safest?

People often wonder where the safest seat in an airplane would be in case of a crash (碰撞), but what about a car accident?     1     Unluckily car accident happens much more often.

People might only take the problem of seats seriously in a highway. And it is widely believed that the closer the seat is to the driver, the more dangerous it will be.     2     The things may be different when they come to statistics (统计数字). According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the U. S., accident statistics show the middle seat in the back is the best choice.

    3     The main reason is that in a side-impact (侧面碰撞) crash the outer seats are closest to the possible point of impact. So the person in the middle of the back seat sits further from that possible point.

Is the back seat always the safest in a car accident?

As with most studies, guess what, there’s another idea.     4     For example, the back seats are still proved to be the safest for children under 9 years old. At the same time, the statistics also show that for passengers aged 55 and older, the situation is quite different. The back seat may be less safe than the front one. In fact, when in the back seat, older passengers faced the highest risk of being seriously hurt than any other age group. Not surprisingly, the researchers say more study is needed on that finding.

With the temperature rising, spring is a good time to go out and travel far away.

Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei bid farewell to his friend in this season. The poem A Farewell Song describes his     1     (experience).

No dust is raised on the road wet with morning rain,

The willows by the hotel look so fresh and green.

I invite you to drink a cup of wine again;

West of the sunny pass no more     2    (friend) will be seen.

The poem begins with beautiful scenes in a spring morning. After the rain, the road is clean     3     any dust, and the willows by the hotel are fresh and green.

On this morning, Wang has to say good bye to his friends-Yuan Er who would leave for a remote place     4     (call) Anxi, in today's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

Wang hopes that his friend Yuan will     5     (safe) return from Anxi, although he knows that he might not see each other again. Even with this knowledge, the poet is not willing to show much sorrow for Yuan’s departure. Instead, he     6     (want) to take the time to cherish their friendship and invites Yuan     7     (drink) to a cup of wine.

In the poem, Wang uses the technique of exchanging roles. On the surface, the poet says goodbye to his friend.     8     the fact is that the two likely have no chance to see each other again. So it is that Yuan says goodbye to the poet as well.

Wang is also good at     9    (use) the technique to convey his feelings. For example, he wrote “I know my brothers would, with dogwood (茱萸) spray in hand; Climb up mountain and miss me so far away” in the poem Thinking of my Brothers on Mountain Climbing Day to express missing     10    (he) brothers when climbing a mountain.

6 . What does it feel like being stung (叮咬) by a bee? What about being hit by a fallen apple? Can you think out of the box when such things happen? Well, for an 18-year-old Mikaila Ulmer from the US, her first bee sting at the age of 4 was a special experience. It encouraged her to make a difference and turned her into an entrepreneur (企业家).

The bee sting scared Mikaila, but it also made her interested in the bee. She soon learned how important bees are for the planet and how they are at risk of dying out.

At not even 5 years old, Mikaila wanted to do something to help save the bees. With her parents’ help, she set up a lemonade stand (柠檬水摊) in her front yard. She used her grandmother’s homemade lemonade recipe (食谱) and add a little bit of honey to it. The money from every lemonade she sold went to bee protection groups.

But Mikaila wanted to do more. She made her special recipe into a product, called Me and the Bees Lemonade. At age 10, she went on a TV show with her dad to try to get funding (资助) and public attention. It worked. Now, more than 10 years since her first lemonade, she sells five different drink products at many restaurants and stores across the country.

In 2020, Mikaila brought out a book about her experience as an entrepreneur called Bee Fearless, Dream Like a Kid. As she explained to CNBC, “I always say that it’s important to dream like a kid and that (as a kid) it’s the perfect age to start finding out what you enjoy and trying new things and taking risks.”

Tom likes to spend time with his grandfather. One day, Tom saw his grandfather sitting alone under a tree. He walked over to him and asked, “Grandpa, what are you doing?”

Grandpa replied, “I’m just _________ life.”

Tom asked. “Grandpa, what is life? Can you tell me about it?”

Grandpa asked Tom to sit down next to him. Then he said, “When I was young, I always dreamed of doing something _________ such as changing the world. As I grew older, I learned that changing the world is a very difficult task. I was unable to do it, _________ I decided to change my country. I thought compared to changing the world, changing the country was a much simpler and smaller thing. But that was not the _________. Many years passed and I became a middle-aged man. My life experience told me the _________ was wrong. Changing the country wasn’t as easy as I _________. At the time, I thought that if I wanted to change something, I should first _________ changing my family and close friends.”

“Did you _________ this time?” asked Tom. “No, I failed again. Now, in my 60s, I _________ understand that if I had thought of changing myself, I could have done it,” said Grandpa.

Grandpa looked at Tom and said softly, “Tom, __________ not to make the same mistake. Change yourself before you change anything else. Then everything else will change accordingly.”

8 . Su Shi isn’t a strange name to us, as we learn his ci in textbooks. Su is one of the most popular ancient writers. He was good at almost all kinds of writings and art, including poems, ci and prose (散文) as well as calligraphy (书法) and painting. But Su was not only respected for his talents, but also for his positive attitude towards life.

When he was young, he passed the imperial examination (科举考试) and got a degree of Jinshi. After that, he became an official. Unluckily, Su was demoted (贬谪) to serve in far areas because of other officials’ bad words about him. But he was not too discouraged.

First, he went to Huangzhou, in today’s Hubei. There he tried to enjoy life in the countryside. He farmed a piece of land which he called Dongpo. This is why people call him Dongpo. It is also said that he invented Dongpo Pork, a famous Chinese dish, during this period. Many of his poems were written there, too. Including Tune: Calming the Waves. Its line “Impervious to wind, rain or shine, I’ll have my will (归去! 也无风雨也无晴)” showed his open-minded attitude.

Su was also demoted to Danzhou, in today’s Hainan. At the beginning, he couldn’t get used to the hot and wet weather. He couldn’t understand the local language. Instead of getting sad, he set up schools and got along well with the locals. Many people traveled from far places to visit him.

“Su is a great optimist (乐天派), a friend of people, a prose master.” writer Lin Yutang said in his book about Su.

9 . Do you want to control a robot? Have you ever been in an artificial intelligence (AI，人工智能) courses? Do you have such lessons at your school? Zhang Ruixuan, a 10th grade r from Beijing 101 Middle School, is such a lucky boy.

“This term we have learned coding (编程) through a programming language called Python. It’s very useful.” said Zhang. Using Python to code is a basic skill for training AI models. In recent years, Python has been tested in high school graduation (毕业) exams in places like Beijing, Jiangsu Province and Anhui Province.

In fact, AI, education in schools has become more and more popular in many places. Zhejiang Province (省) is a typical example. In 2020, Zhejiang added AI education into textbooks from Grade 5 in primary school all the way to senior high school. In the city of Wenzhou, the government is planning to build 1,000 AI experimental schools by 2025.

“With the development of technology, our textbooks have been changing all the time” said Shang Yin, an IT teacher from Beijing 101 Middle School. “The courses are keeping up with the times and teaching students necessary skills.” “In the future, AI knowledge will be required everywhere, in more jobs, at schools, in daily life and so on.” Shang added.

10 . Science and technology will continue to develop. Nature and Business in 2023 have made their predictions. Let’s have a look.