1 . If you go to Beijing and Shanghai, you can see the same and the different points between them. In some ways they look the same, in some ways they look different. Both of them have tall buildings and wide streets, although some buildings in Shanghai are taller than those in Beijing. They are both important in China. Beijing is the capital of China. There are more places of interest there, but Shanghai is the biggest city in China. Now they are becoming more and more important in China.

2 . Once a king felt unhappy and asked a clever old man how he could find happiness.

“That’s very easy,” the old man said. “You just put on the shirt of a happy man and you’ll be happy.”

The king thanked the old man and began to look for a happy man. He visited many countries and met kings, doctors and others. But they all said they were not happy.

One day he saw a poor farmer working in the fields. The man was singing all the time and looked very happy indeed (确实). The king went up to him and asked, “Are you happy, my good man?”

“Yes, quite happy,” answered the farmer.

“Can you sell me your shirt?” asked the king.

“My shirt?” the farmer said in surprise. “But I don’t have one. In fact I never had one.”

3 . We each have a memory (记忆力). That’s why we can still remember things after a long time. Some people have very good memories and they can easily learn many things by heart, but some people can only remember things when they say or do them again and again. Many of the great men of the world have got surprising memories.

A good memory is a great help in learning a language. Everybody learns his mother language when he is a small child. He hears the sounds, remembers them and then he learns to speak. Some children are living with their parents in foreign countries. They can learn two languages as easily as one because they hear, remember and speak two languages every day. In school it is not so easy to learn a foreign language because the pupils have so little time for it, and they are busy with other subjects, too.

But your memory will become better and better when you do more and more exercises.

When Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu (712～770) wrote this poem, he was living in Chengdu. Sometimes he went to farm in the field. The poem shows his care for farmers.

The very first word, “good”, shows the poet’s joy and love for the spring rain. The rain is good indeed, as it knows the right time to come. Here the poet uses personification (拟人), as if the rain were smart enough to know that it should come in time for the farmer’s busy plowing season.

When the rain comes, it appears during the night. Unlike the thunder and lightning of summer storms, the quiet spring rain makes its contributions without being known.

In the night sky, the clouds look dark and heavy, showing that there will be enough rain during the night. Then the poet imagines: tomorrow morning, all of the flowers in the city will bloom after the rain.

9 . What is a “cat coffee shop”? Well, it is a cafe that has cats. People can touch the cats, play with the cats and drink coffee there.

It seems that there are more pet cats around us today. And that’s true. There are 58,100,000 pet cats in China according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The number of cat owners in China is the second largest in the world after the United States. One important reason is that more young people are taking cats as pets. Maybe that’s because cats are clean pets and you don’t have to walk them. More cats bring more jobs. Many people now work at pet shops and hospitals.

But cats can be problems, too. Some people throw their pet cats away. The cats become homeless. They can pass on diseases. They also hunt and kill other animals like birds and frogs.

So in Japan and Australia, the governments take homeless cats to animal hospitals. Doctors operate on them. So the cats can’t have babies. In this way, the number of cats will not go up.

10 . Charles Delali Adegah is from Ghana, a country in Africa. He loves the Chinese language. He says he enjoys learning the language and it helps him live a better life.

As a Chinese language student, Charles was lucky to study in China for free. When he went back to Ghana, he worked as a translator for many companies. Later, Charles went on to study the language. Now, he teaches at a Confucius Institute (孔子学院) in his home country.

In Ghana, many people have similar stories as Charles. China and Ghana are close friends. Many companies in Ghana do business with Chinese people and expect (要求) that their workers can speak Chinese. So, learning Chinese can help the people there find good jobs and make more money to live a better life.

The people also say that Chinese, though difficult, is such a beautiful language that learning it helps them know more about China. At the Confucius Institute, they can also learn Chinese kung fu, songs, dance, and so on.

At the same time, many Chinese people in Ghana also come to learn local languages. This brings them closer to the Ghanaian people. They live and work well with the people there.

Language is like a bridge between China and Ghana. It helps people in the two countries learn more about each other and work for a better tomorrow together.