Imagine having the o    1     to sing together with hundreds of other people while you are at home alone. You can do this in a virtual choir. Virtual choir members record themselves while they p    2     alone on video. These videos are uploaded o    3     the Internet, and then they are put together into the video that you can see online—a virtual choir. Anyone can take part in a virtual choir from anywhere—all you need is a video camera and an Internet c    4    . You do not even need a s    5    . A virtual choir helps connect o    6     people together. Many people do not have close friends or contacts who have the same interest in m    7    . Many others do not have the chance to join a local choir. A virtual choir e    8     them to add their voices to those of other individuals and become part of the global community. It has p    9     to be a positive influence on the lives of many people. A    10     one virtual choir member said, “Music helps me to forget my problems. With music, I become someone else.”

2 . Ireland has had a very difficult history. The problems started in the 16th century when England tried to rule Ireland. For hundreds of years, the Irish people fought against the English. Finally, in 1921, the British government was forced to give independence to the south of Ireland. The result is that today there are two “Irelands”. Northern Ireland, in the north, is part of the United Kingdom. The Republic of Ireland, in the south, is an independent country.

In the 1840s the main crop, potatoes, was affected by disease and about 750,000 people died of hunger. This, and a shortage of work, forced many people to leave Ireland and live in the USA, the UK, Australia and Canada. As a result, the population fell from 8.2 million in 1841 to 6.6 million in 1851.

For many years, the majority of Irish people earned their living as farmers. Though many people still follow the routine nowadays, more and more people are moving to the cities to work in factories and offices. Life in the cities is very different from life in the countryside, where things move at a quieter and slower pace.

The Irish are famous for being warm-hearted and friendly. Oscar Wilde, a famous Irish writer, once said that the Irish were “the greatest talkers since the Greeks”. Since independence, Ireland has revived its own culture of music, language, literature and singing. Different areas have different styles of old Irish songs which are sung without instruments. Other kinds of Irish music use many different instruments such as the violin, whistles, etc.

Tu Youyou, a c    1     and patient scientist, was born in Ningbo, China, on 30 December 1930, and graduated from Peking University Medical School in1955. After she graduated, she worked at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing. In 1967, the Chinese government f    2     a team of scientists with the o    3     of discovering a new treatment for malaria, and Tu Youyou was among the first researchers c    4    . In the b    5    , Tu Youyou went to Hainan, where malaria was more c    6    , to study malaria patients. In 1969, she became the head of the p    7     in Beijing, and decided to review ancient Chinese medical texts to find traditional b    8     treatments for the disease. Her team examined over 2,000 old medical texts, and evaluated 280,000 plants for their medical properties. From their research, they discovered and tested 380 d    9     ancient Chinese medical treatments that showed p    10     in the fight against malaria.

Of all the t    1     festivals, the harvest festival can be found in almost every c    2    . This important a    3     festival takes place after all the crops have been gathered in. People celebrate to show that they are g    4     for the year’s supply of food. In a    5     Egypt, the harvest festival was celebrated during the springtime — the Egyptian harvest season. It f    6     a parade and a great feast with music, dancing, and sports. Today, in some European countries, people d    7     churches and town halls with flowers and fruit, and get together to celebrate over a m    8    . During the Mid- Autumn Festival in China, families gather to a    9     the shining moon and enjoy d    10     mooncakes.

8 . Becca was 6 when she was told she had cancer on Sept. 8, 2014. She clearly remembers the bad days of her 26 months of non -stop treatment. Luckily, Becca celebrated her final treatment on Nov. 13, 2016, and she has been cancer-free ever since. But she was thinking about what her life was like while experiencing the treatment.

“I was never able to do much, and that’s what the kids lying in their hospital beds right now experience, asking their mom and dad, ‘When are we leaving? When can I play with my friends?’ So I decided I have to help them.”

In February, 2017, Becca came up with the idea for Knots and Arrows, a company that makes bracelets (手镯) out of swimsuit materials (泳衣布料). Part of the money made from each bracelet goes to the organizations that help people with cancer.

Becca created the company with her father, Gerhard Salmins. Gerhard Salmins once had cancer and already recovered from it. “I would be in the hospital sitting there crying and then my dad would come in and he would play games with me,” she said. “It made me forget about what I was going through” Becca said the name of the organization shows the motto (座右铭) she stuck to through her personal cancer journey.

Her organization has already given thousands of dollars to research organizations and families in need. Becca said she hoped her bracelets would make people remember that great things can result from small changes. “No matter what age you are, what you look like, and how you act, you can make a difference!”she said.

By the Shang Dynasty (around L600-1046BCE), these s    1     had become a well-developed writing system. Over the years, the system developed into different f    2    , as it was a time when people were d    3     geographically, leading to many v    4     of dialects and characters. This, however, c    5     under Emperor Qinshihuang of the Qin Dynasty (221-207 BCE).

Emperor Qinshihuang united the seven m    6    states into one unified country where the Chinese writing system began to develop in one d    7    . That writing system was of great importance in uniting the Chinese people and c    8    . Even today, no matter where Chinese people live or what dialect they s    9    they can all still c    10     in writing.

10 . Medha Pappula, an eighth-grader at Brambleton Middle School, is using her skill set to solve a problem — bullying. She recently earned an award from National Bullying Prevention Center (NBPC) for her anti-bullying (反霸凌) efforts in software development and animation (动画).

Pappula, 13, said she discovered that a classmate had experienced cyberbullying, which was painful for her to learn about. “Even though I didn’t experience it, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, even my worst enemy,” Pappula said.

Then she developed a program that recognizes when digital and text-based messages include bullying language. The program takes a message, and then recognizes signs of bullying and gives a rating to the cyberbullying, the teen said. If the rating is high, she said, “the program can be used to carry out things like removing that message or reporting it.”

Pappula first designed and tested the program for Discord, a popular community-based messaging platform (平台), and said she plans to develop it for even bigger platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

In addition to this program, the NBPC awarded Pappula for a three-minute animated video about Unity Day, which she created and shared on YouTube last October. Unity Day, according to the video, was started by the NBPC in 2011 to raise bullying awareness among school-age children. Schools encourage their students to wear orange on Unity Day, as it is “a color that is connected with safety,” the website reads.

Pappula visited different websites to develop her animation skills several years ago. She spent more than a month creating her 2-D animated video using an animation software called Krita. The effort paid off, as nearly 6,000 people have already viewed the “Unity Day” video on YouTube. Along with being posted to the NBPC webpage, her animation was also shared by Cartoon Network. Moving forward, Pappula hopes to continue to work with the NBPC and to use her skills to lift those around her.