A music concert “Echoes of Ancient Tang Poems” jointly performed by iSING! Suzhou and the Philadelphia Orchestra was staged at Kimmel Performing Arts Center in Philadelphia on Jan. 6.

Another concert featuring Tang poetry was    1    (successful) held at the Lincoln Center in New York on Jan. 7. Fifteen iSING! Suzhou singers from 10 countries led by Liao Guomin performed songs    2    (write) by young composers from 6 countries. The songs included many well-known    3    (poem) from the Tang Dynasty, such    4    Luo Binwang’s Singing of Goose and Li Bai’s Quiet Thoughts by Night.

The iSING! Suzhou International Young Artists Festival    5    (set) up in Suzhou in 2014 as China’s first international vocal (声乐) art festival. Over    6     past eight years, the festival has attracted outstanding young singers from all over the world, spread    7    promoted Chinese and classical music, and enhanced cultural exchanges between China and the West, becoming a cultural card for Suzhou to go    8    (globe).

The performances were also held to commemorate(纪念) the    9     (fifty) anniversary of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s China tour in 1973. The Philadelphia Orchestra, as the first American orchestra    10    (visit) China, bridged the two nations in the field of culture.

2 . We may weep for the dodo, but could and should we bring this lovely bird back from the dead? De-extinction is the science of restoring lost species and it has been in the news for decades.

The story in modern times began in 1990 when Michael Crichton published his science fiction novel Jurassic Park, in which he imagined a world where scientists were able to bring dinosaurs back to life. Crichton imagined that polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology could be a way to amplify (放大) tiny quantities of dinosaur DNA and thus build a living embryo.

Sadly, biologists soon realized that DNA in fact breaks down super-fast; even after 100 years, DNA from museum skins of dodos was decayed (腐烂) beyond repair. They could be sequenced (测定序列) using massive computational power, but then only with considerable uncertainty. And even if you capture a DNA sequence, there’s still the problem of how you get living cells to read that sequence and express proteins that make the dinosaur or the dodo.

But why would anyone want to see mammoths, or something like them, roaming (漫游) present-day Siberia? Well, they were undoubtedly amazing beasts. As well as hunting them, our distant ancestors painted their likenesses in caves across Europe. Fascinating as they may be, there's some ecological justification for the project too.

It was this diversity of land surface, broken up by heavy limbs and randomly fertilised by faeces (排泄物), that supported so much flora (植物群). Without the mammoths, that diversity disappeared. Return them and landscapes would once again be with a variety of species, including flowers and bushes.

True, it’s not de-extinction in the sense of bringing a long-dead species back to life. Instead it’s more like making a “dodo” by engineering a modern pigeon, its closest relative, to become huge and flightless. The result would be a big, fatty pigeon that, whether it looked like a dodo or not, would probably fulfil some of its ecological roles.

As a palaeontologist, I would of course love to see living dinosaurs, mammoths and dodos. In some ways, though, I am relieved that the optimistic claims for cloning and genetic technologies have not been borne out. The slowdown gives us time to consider the outcomes—and hopefully avoid some of Michael Crichton’s more fevered imaginings.

3 . A moment occurs in the exchange between professor and student when each of us adopts a look. My look says, “What, you don’t understand?” Theirs says, “We don’t. And we think you’re making it up.” We are having a problem. Basically, we’ve all read the same story, but we haven’t used the same analytical approaches. It may seem at times as if the professor is inventing interpretations out of thin air.

Actually, the truth is that as the slightly more experienced reader, the professor has acquired over the years the use of a certain “language reading”. Besides, he has grasped three professional tools-memory, symbol and pattern. These items separate the professional readers from the ordinary ones.

English professors are cursed with memory. When reading a new book, I constantly seek out connections and inferences, recalling faces and themes from past readings. I can’t not do it, although there are plenty of times when that ability is not something I want to exercise. This does not necessarily improve the experience of popular entertainment.

Professors also read and think symbolically. Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise. We ask: What does the thing over there represent? The kind of mind that works its way through undergraduate and then graduate classes in literature and criticism tends to see things as existing in themselves while also representing something else. This tendency to understand the world in symbolic terms is enhanced by years of training and rewards the symbolic imagination.

A related phenomenon in professorial reading is pattern recognition. Most professional students of literature learn to take in the specific detail while seeing the patterns that the detail reveals. Experience has proved to them that life and books fall into similar patterns. Literature is full of patterns, and your reading experience will be much more rewarding when you can step back from the work, even while you are reading it, and look for those patterns.

5 . How do people cope with (应付) climate change? According to a new study led by University of Arizona researcher Sabrina Helm, there are two climate change coping groups: adaptive approach coping and maladaptive avoidance coping.

About 70 percent of survey respondents belonged to the first group - the adaptive approach coping. They tended to have higher levels of environmental concern and were more likely to engage in environmental protection activities. The remaining 30 percent were in the maladaptive avoidance coping group. They were less likely than those in the first group to feel guilt or personal responsibility for climate change. They were less likely to take action on climate change or believe that their actions would make a difference.

The researchers wondered whether people in the adaptive approach group - who tend to feel more climate-related stress - would have worse mental health overall, since previous studies have linked environmental stress to negative mental health outcomes.

Surprisingly, Helm said, they found no differences between the two groups regarding overall health, anxiety or depressive symptoms.

There also were not significant differences in the demographic (人口统计的) makeup of the two groups when it came to factors such as race, income, education level or employment status. The fact that the demographics of the two groups were so similar suggests that targeting climate-change-related messaging based on demographic information alone might not be the most effective strategy, Helm said. While it might be tougher to do, determining a person’s climate change coping group could be more useful for those attempting to communicate environmental issues and what people can do to make a difference.

“If you think in terms of messaging about climate change, very often you look at social demographic targeting, and that’s not very useful because those two groups should probably be receiving different kinds of messaging,” Helm said. “Those who are already taking action on climate change need encouragement to continue that behavior, while those who are in the maladaptive avoidance coping group need to be encouraged to start doing something.”

8 . Many studies have shown the learning-by-teaching effect. Students who spend time teaching what they’ve learned show better understanding and ability to remember knowledge than students who simply spend the same time re-studying. But why does teaching help?

Researchers did a study to test their idea that teaching improves the teacher’s learning because it forces the teacher to find back what they’ve learned. They asked 124 students to spend ten minutes studying a text with numbers on a topic which is completely new to them. They told the students they could take notes while studying, but would teach the material afterwards without notes. After studying the text, the students were divided into four groups. In one group the students spent five minutes giving a lesson on the study material without notes. The other groups either spent the same time completing arithmetic (算术) problems, teaching with a script (讲稿) or writing down all they could remember from the text—a form of recalling practice. A week later, all the students took a surprise test of their knowledge and understanding of the text.

The important finding is that the teaching-without-notes group and the recalling-practice group performed better than the group that completed arithmetic problems and the group that taught with a script.

The researchers said the result shows that the benefits of the learning-by-teaching method are caused by recalling practice; that is, the learning-by-teaching method works only when the teaching includes recalling the taught materials.

The new findings have a practical suggestion for how the learning-by-teaching method is used in education. In order to make sure that students learn and remember an educational material, they should internalize (内化) the material before presenting it to others, rather than depend on notes during the presentation process.

Standing in the National Speed Skating Oval, China’s former speed skating world champion Wang Beixing had mixed emotions. She was jealous of those young athletes who had the chance     1     (skate) on the new rink (溜冰场). And she felt very glad as the testing program in the venue,    2     (know) as the “Ice Ribbon”, was going as smoothly as the athletes skated on the gleaming ice.

Following the     3     (success) testing program on snow in February, the “Experience Beijing” ice sports testing series for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympics,    4     (consist) of five Olympic events and two para events, got underway     5     April 1 and 10 in five different competition venues, including the National Speed Skating Oval     6     the 36-year-old Wang Beixing works as the stadium’s sports director.

“The testing program in the ‘Ice Ribbon’ had three     7     (priority). First is the ice. We need to make sure the ice will be     8     perfect quality during the Winter Olympics, Wang said. “The second would be the competition facilities including the safety cushions, training equipment and so on, which     9     (be) mostly relevant to the athletes, and we want feedback from them, “Thirdly, we also need to drill on the operation teams,” she said. “    10     (certain), I feel very glad because the competition went well and I am satisfied with the result of the rehearsals.”