1 . The Great Wall in China is one of the greatest wonders of the world and also a UNESCO World Heritage site. Different sections of the Great Wall have distinctive landscapes, and in this flower-blooming season, which one would you prefer to take a tour of?

Badaling Great Wall

The Badaling Great Wall is located in the northwest suburb of Beijing. It extends in all directions and therefore got its name as Badaling. Due to the strategic importance of Badaling, it was the place where the military fought in the past.

Mutianyu Great Wall

The Mutianyu Great Wall, 70 kilometers from urban Beijing, is known as the best part of the Great Wall. With a unique architectural style, it expresses the essence of the Great Wall of the Ming Dynasty(1368-1644). The ancient architecture and the beauty of nature is blended into one harmonious whole, giving rise to Mutianyu’s reputation as having the most unique beauty anywhere along the ten-thousand-mile-long Great Wall.

Simatai Great Wall

For anyone intent on experiencing a section of the Great Wall that keeps a more antiquated air, the Great Wall at Simatai remains one of the best options. It is also the only section of the Great Wall that provides a night tour for tourists. It is said that since the Ming Dynasty, there has been a tradition that people holding palace lanterns visit this section.

Jiankou Great Wall

The Jiankou section is one of the most dangerous parts and mountain hikers usually call it “the wild Great Wall”. With a total length of 7,952 meters, the Jiankou Great Wall was built during the Ming Dynasty and was neglected, becoming damaged over time. It is much preferred by photographers due to its primitive appearance.

6 . Online scams (诈骗) are targeted at people from all walks of life.     1    , and no one can stay safe without learning how to avoid them. Here are some of the tips to keep you safe from online scams.

1. Accept that online scams exist

Every time you start dealing with an unknown person or a contact online, you must consider it a possibility that you're dealing with a scammer.     2    . Nothing in this world comes free, and everything has a price. So, if one fine morning you receive an email message about winning a million-dollar prize, chances are very high that it's an ugly trap.

2.Choose passwords carefully

You must choose difficult passwords while updating them from time to time.     3    . And always avoid using the same password for different accounts.

3. Don't click what you don't know

A classic style followed by scammers is to send you Trojan horses in emails or messages.     4    . In addition, you can use a Virtual Private Network that blocks access to bad pages and pop-ups.

4.    5    

If you ever have doubts in your mind about the intentions of an unknown person, you should first carry out an in-depth search online based on the basic information they share. If you ever receive a request for money from a friend, always call them up to check first.

7 . English and Chinese have for a long time been the languages most studied around the world but the line up of other languages of study is ever-changing.

In 2020, Spanish overtook French as the second most learned language on the popular language learning app Duolingo. This could be explained by a number of factors. The Spanish-speaking community is increasingly influential in the US and Latin America is seen as increasingly influential worldwide. It could be that for many people in the US there's a practical need to speak Spanish domestically (国内地) that has overridden the wish to speak French for travel.

Asian languages are also increasing in popularity. There's recently been great interest in Japanese from China, as well as from some African countries including Chad and Ethiopia. We can mainly relate this growing interest to Japan's cultural output and general attraction to its unique culture. Not to mention the Olympics getting the interest of language learners from around the world.

What's striking is that Chinese is now a more popular choice than Russian for language learners.That's probably because the increasing global influence of China means it is seen as a more useful language to speak compared to Russian. Over 100 million learners are thought to be studying Chinese worldwide with interest from the UK, US, India and Africa. It's interesting to see a relatively new superpower overtake a more established one — in language terms at least.

It's hard to judge the cultural influence of a country but the number of people spending time learning more about it through its language is surely a sign that it is exerting influence.

8 . When everything is going wrong, there's nothing like listening to a few bars of your favorite sad song. But why do we find pleasure in sad music? This puzzled two researchers at the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany who set out to explore our strong feeling for sad songs in a world where entire industries exist to help us remove sadness from our lives.

Their study — based on a survey of more than 770 people around the world and published this month in the journal, PLOS ONE — discovered sad music can create positive emotions, like peacefulness and kindness, and that choosing the tearful ballad on your music player offers three benefits.

The biggest turned out to be that sad songs allow you to feel sadness without any of its “real-life contexts.” In other words, you can safely explore what it's like to be a little blue without experiencing the great pain of losing a loved one, for example.

“Emotion control” was another important benefit. Many of those surveyed said that when they were in a bad mood (情绪), experiencing sadness through music made them feel better afterwards and provided an emotional improvement. That may be because the songs help them to express and let go of their emotions, researchers noted. “Sad music promotes and creates a space for reflection and reexamination of personal experiences, thoughts and feelings,” one of the researchers added

The benefit of “empathy” (同理心) made the listener feel good by allowing him to share the sadness of another human being through the song. When we're having social problems, like when we're feeling lonely, homesick or missing someone, the sad songs can offer comfort by showing someone else shares our state of mind, the study found.

So it turns out that Elton John was right: Sad songs do say so much.

9 . As the temperatures drop, now is the perfect time to start thinking about a winter snow holiday. As you'll want to know the places where snow falls during the coldest months, we're here to help with our pick of the best snowy places to visit this winter.

LOFOTEN, NORWAY

With much fewer people around, it's a great time of year to experience the fishing villages. There's plenty going on, too. Take a wildlife and nature trip to experience spectacular landscape and birdlife and join in a Northern Lights hunt after the sun sets.

WHISTLER, CANADA

If you want snow, the Whistler town is your place. The largest skiable area in North America, Whistler covers 32 square kilometers over 2 mountains. It's so perfect for snow activities that it co-hosted the 2010 Winter Olympics.

HARBIN, CHINA

Nowadays, there are many artists, sculpture (雕刻) fans from Asia, Europe, North America, Africa and Oceania gathering in Harbin to join in sculpture competitions. The sizes of the sculptures keep growing. Almost half century, the city's natural resource of ice and snow has been fully explored to provide joy and fun for visitors to the city.

LAPLAND, SWEDEN

Of course, this list wouldn't be complete without a shout out to Lapland. Deep inside the Arctic (北极的) Circle，Lapland makes for a perfect family winter getaway. It’s home to the unusual Ice hotel where you can sleep on a bed made of ice in a hotel constructed entirely out of, you guessed it, ice! It's also the location of the Abisko National Park, known as one of the best places in the world to see the Northern Lights.

10 . To solve a big environmental problem, chemists in the Czech Republic have been thinking small. Really small. Their new minirobot has one purpose: to help clean up tiny bits of plastic polluting waterways across the globe.

Each new robot is no bigger than the tip of a sharpened pencil. They are magnetic (有磁性的) and shaped like stars. When sunlight hits them, they produce chemical reactions that push them through water in a specific direction. When they find a piece of plastic, they stick to it and start to break it down. When the light goes out, they let go and are free to be used again.

“This work is great,” says Douglas Blackiston at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. He’s a biologist who did not work on the project but knows about such devices. He’s been designing robots out of living cells, including some that might help with pollution cleanup. Speaking of the new one, he mentions that, “These robots can eat plastic. They chew it up. Or they can recover it and be collected with a magnet. Scientists love robots with all these capabilities. ”

Chemist Martin Pumera at the Czech University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague led the project. He studies ways to build microrobots. About a decade ago, he says, scientists began developing tiny bots that could move themselves in water. Then, they had to find them a mission and thought “Let’s make them do something useful.” Since then, Pumera has focused on the problem posed by microplastics, which are everywhere—from the bottom of the ocean to air blowing onto ice atop mountains. They’ve turned up in drinking water, both bottled and tap water, and some studies estimate that trillions of pieces of plastic end up in the world’s waters. The plastic has many sources, from drinking straws and shopping bags to laundry and cleaning wipes. Plastic doesn’t easily degrade or fall apart, and that’s always been one of its appeals.

Pumera says his final goal is to make cheap and environmentally friendly robots that can be used anywhere in the world.