1 . The daughter of a romantic poet and occasional freedom fighter, Ada Lovelace had a famous but absent father. She never knew Lord Byron, as just weeks after her birth in 1815, he divorced her mother Isabella Milbanke Byron and left to fight in the Greek War of Independence. In an effort to prevent Ada from developing her father’s unpredictable temper, Isabella decided that her daughter should devote her life to study.

Ada studied hard despite the fact that society did not encourage women pursuing interests in science. Her life changed when she met inventor Charles Babbage at a party. As he demonstrated a working section of his mechanical calculator, Ada was taken in by how it worked and wanted to know more. Impressed by the 17-year-old’s obvious passion, Babbage became her tutor. Ada married in 1835 and became a mother, but she continued to take an active interest in study, socialising in intellectual circles with the likes of Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday.

Ada stayed in contact with Babbage, who in 1837 had proposed a new machine, the analytical engine. In 1843, Ada was asked to translate a French text written by engineer Luigi Menabrea about Babbage’s new design. After completing the translation, Ada was encouraged by Babbage to write her own notes on his work.

After nine months of hard work, Ada presented Babbage with a detailed list of notes that was three times longer than the original article. In her calculations, Ada wrote what are considered the first ever computer algorithms to be used in a new type of machine. She essentially provided the first ideas for computer programming in what was a groundbreaking proposal on the potential of computers.

Ada died of cancer aged only 36 and her work was largely recognised until the 1950s when her notes were republished. In 1979 the US Department of Defence named a programming language ‘Ada’ in her honour.

As is known to us, there are lots of great people in China.

March Boedihardjo, a nine﹣year﹣old math genius (天才) from Hong Kong, will attend the Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) and become the    1    (young) college student in the city. The university will create a    2    (special) designed five-year course which will see him get a Bachelor's and Master's degree. The university thought long and hard about whether or not    3    (admit) March. HKBU president, Professor Franklin Luk, announced at a press conference, “The decision was made after a two-month    4     (discuss) among various departments of the university and March's parents.”March also met the press and raised     5     victory sign when he entered the meeting room. He seemed very confident.

There has been worry from educators that    6    (attend) university so young, March will miss out on    7     (society) skills. His new classmates will all be ten or more years older than he is. March said this will not be a problem as he has already had experience of studying with older students. He has already spent two years in England,     8     he passed advanced math exams with A grades. “My schoolmates in Oxford University were over 18 and we often    9     (talk) about mathematics problems. I think I won't have problems in communicating    10     people older than me, ”said the nine﹣year﹣old.

7 . On September 7, 1930, Yuan Longping was born in Beijing. Fluent in English, his mother often read Friedrich Nietzsche's works to him. Influenced by his mother, Yuan Longping liked English, geography and chemistry at school. After graduating from university, he became a teacher in the countryside of Hunan in 1953.

With lots of crop failures, nationwide hunger hit China in the 1960s, making many people live a bad life. Yuan was sad and felt he must do something. Since the climate in Hunan was not friendly to growing wheat. He decided to devote himself to studying how to increase the production of rice, a basic food for over 60 percent of Chinese people. From then on, he began a lifelong connection with rice.

Yuan Longping succeeded in growing the world's first high production hybrid rice (杂交水稻) variety in 1973, which could reach a yield of over 500 kg per more than 200 kg than before. For the next four decades, he continued to work on the research of hybrid rice. In 2020, hybrid rice developed by his team achieved 1,500 kg per mu in two growing seasons, a new world record.

Nowadays, the hybrid rice is grown in almost half of China's rice fields and its production accounts for 60 percent of the total rice production in China. The hybrid rice production is 20 percent more than the common kinds , the yearly increase of which feeds up to 100 million people.

In 2019, Yuan Longping, known as the “Father of hybrid rice”, was awarded with Medal of the Republic, China's highest honor.

Yuan Longping's biggest dream in life was to develop more hybrid rice varieties, which could be grown all over the world to help solve the global food problem. So far, the hybrid varieties he developed have been grown in over 40 countries, including the USA, Brazil and India.

Yuan Longping,     1     agricultural scientist in China,     2     (die) on Saturday at a hospital in Changsha, Yuan spent his life     3     (research) rice and was a household name in China,     4     (know) by the nickname “Father of Hybrid Rice. ”

He came up with an idea for hybridizing rice in the 1960s,     5     a series of natural disasters had made China suffer a great famine that caused many deaths. Hybrid rice recorded an annual yield (产量)about 20 percent higher than     6     of conventional rice strains. Because of his great work, China     7     (feed) nearly one-fifth of the world's population     8     less than 9 percent of the world's total land now.

Yuan is     9     (wide) popular and respected among his students. "Although Mr Yuan passed away, the content and goal of our previous work will not change. We will transform grief into     10     (strong) and carry on the work he left undone, Wang Shigang, one of his students, told the Global Times on Sunday.