China is widely known for its ancient civilisation which has continued all the way through into modern times,     1    the many ups and downs in its history. There are many reasons     2     this has been possible, but one of the main factors has been the Chinese writing system. 

At the beginning, written Chinese was a picture-based language. It     3     back several thousand years to the use of longgu—animal bones and shells on which symbols were     4     by ancient Chinese people. Some of the ancient symbols can still be seen in today’s hanzi. 

By the Shang Dynasty (around 1600-1046 BCE), these symbols had     5     a well-developed writing system. Over the years, the system developed into different forms, as it was a time    6    people were divided geographically leading to many    7    of dialects and characters. This, however, changed under Emperor Qinshihuang of the Qin Dynasty (221-207BCE). 

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

I was halfway across Indiana headed home to Kentucky when my car broke down. My phone was     1    , too. I managed to get to a gas station, but it was Sunday in the early fall, and there was no     2     on duty. I was working my way through university then and had little money for maintaining the car.

I sat alongside my car for several hours trying to beat the heat when an older gentleman     3     to fuel his car. He asked about my car, and I     4     my predicament (困境). To my     5    , the gentleman told me that he had a daughter my age, and then he opened his trunk and pulled out a tool set.

Right then and there, this total     6     examined my engine, explaining as he worked that my spark plugs (火花塞) hadn’t been changed for so long that they were     7     to function. After about an hour, he pronounced that my car was safe to finish the trip.

    8     came at the hands of a stranger. Soiling his clothes, working on a hot September afternoon, this man     9     a college student from disaster, just because she could have been his     10    .

The virtual choir was the idea of award-winning     1     and conductor Eric Whitacre. Born in the USA on 2 January 1970, Whitacre began studying music at the University of Nevada in 1988. He fell in love     2     Mozart’s classical music when he sang for the university choir. Moved by this music, he said, “It was like seeing color for the first time.” He     3     from university in 1995, and then received a master’s degree in musical composition from the Juilliard School in New York in 1997. Over the next 10 years, Whitacre’s    4     compositions began to become quite popular among choirs and singers. This led to the    5     of the virtual choir. 

In 2009, Whitacre received a video of a girl who was singing one of his works.    6    , he asked his fans to     7     videos, which he then joined together into one performance. His first virtual choir, “Lux Aurumque”, had 185 singers from 12 different countries. It has received millions of     8     on the Internet. Since then, the virtual choir has become a worldwide phenomenon. Whitacre’s next     9     was the Virtual Youth Choir for UNICEF, which was first seen on     10     on 23 July 2014 in the UK. Altogether, 2,292 young people from 80 countries joined in to sing Whitacre’s song “What If”.

Economic development is necessary if we want to improve society. There comes a time when the old must give way to the new, and it is not possible     1     everything from our past as we move towards the future. Finding and keeping the right     2     between progress and the protection of cultural sites can be a big challenge. 

Big challenges, however, can sometimes lead to great     3    . In the 1950s, the Egyptian government wanted to build a new dam across the Nile in order to control floods, produce electricity, and supply water to more farmers in the area. But the     4     led to protests. Water from the dam would     5     damage a number of temples and destroy cultural relics that were an important part of Egypt’s cultural heritage. After listening to the scientists who had studied the problem, and citizens who lived near the dam, the government     6     to the United Nations for help in 1959. 

A committee     7     to limit damage to the Egyptian buildings and prevent the loss of cultural relics. The group asked for     8     from different departments and raised funds within the international community. Experts investigated the     9    , conducted several tests, and then made a proposal for how the buildings could be saved. Finally, a     10     was signed, and the work began in 1960.

Yuan Longping was born in 1930 in Beijing. His parents wanted him to pursue a career in science or medicine. However, what concerned him most was that farmers often had poor harvests and sometimes even had a serious     1     of food to eat. To     2     this crisis, he chose to study agriculture and received an education at Southwest Agricultural College in Chongqing.

After graduating in 1953, he worked as a researcher. Yuan Longping realised that larger fields were not the solution. Instead, farmers needed to     3     yields in the fields they had. How this could be done was a challenging question at the time. Yuan was     4     that the answer could be found in the creation of hybrid rice. A hybrid is a cross between two or more varieties of a species. One characteristic of hybrids is that they usually     5     a higher yield than conventional crops. However, whether it was possible to develop a hybrid of self-pollinating plants such as rice was a matter of great debate. The common     6     then was that it could not be done. Through intense effort, Yuan     7     enormous technical difficulties to develop the first hybrid rice that could be used for farming in 1974. This hybrid enabled farmers to     8     their output greatly.

Today, it is     9     that about 60 percent of domestic rice consumption in China is comprised of crops     10     from Yuan’s hybrid strains, and his strains have allowed China’s farmers to produce around 200 million tons of rice per year. Yuan’s innovation has helped feed not just China, but many other countries that depend on rice as well, such as India and Vietnam. Because of his invaluable contributions, Yuan Longping has received numerous awards both in China and abroad.