3 . Lam Hon-ming, director of the State Key Laboratory at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is a top expert in soybean (大豆) research. Since 1998, Lam’s team has been cooperating with scientists in Chinese mainland. In 2010, he came across Zhang Guohong, an agricultural expert from Gansu, China, at a national soybean conference. With the same major, they hit it off and decided to improve farmers’ lives and promote local agriculture.

Farmers in Gansu depend largely on the weather for their livelihood, mainly on rainfall, which is also a cause of severe poorness in the area. In 2016, they developed three new soybean varieties suited to salty soil and rare rainfall of Northwest China. All received official government approval.

As the land in Northwest China is not suitable for the growth of common varieties of soybeans, local farmers never planted soybeans, and it became a major problem for spreading new soybeans. Lam and Zhang increased communication with farmers through various ways. To ensure farmers’ income, Lam struck a partnership with a Hong Kong food company that will purchase all soybeans at market price when they are harvested.

By 2020, the planting area of the three approved soybeans in Gansu had gone beyond 2.4 million square kilometers, covering 46 of the province’s 80-plus counties, and the output had reached 7.71 million kilograms, adding about 30 million yuan to local farmers’ income.

Zhang said that Professor Lam’s contribution has greatly pushed the poorness relief and agricultural research in Northwest China. “It is hard to keep doing agricultural research with less funding. And it is more difficult to travel from Hong Kong to the poor areas of the Northwest to do agricultural research,” he added. In the future, Lan will continue to work with mainland scientists and lead more “Hong Kong power” into the development of the country’s Northwest.

5 . Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany on 14 March, 1879.     1     Einstein was so smart that at age 16 he wrote his first paper. However, Einstein did badly at school.     2     He ended up at college in Switzerland. His grades meant it was difficult to get a job after college, but a friend found him work finally.

Albert had a great year in 1905, publishing (发表) four scientific papers!     3     One of the things he researched was that energy and mass (质量) are different forms of the same thing. This was explained by his famous equation E=mc². In 1909 Albert was finally made a professor at the University of Zurich. He continued improving his work, and in 1915 he published his theory of general relativity (广义相对论) .

In 1919, one of Albert’s theories was proved, making him the most famous scientist alive!     4    His work changed the way we think about time and space, and also helped with developments like the television.

    5     And in 1933, Albert decided to stay in the USA forever. He became an American in 1940. Sadly, Einstein’s work with atoms (原子) led to the invention of the atomic bomb. Albert spent the rest of his life taking part in activities for world peace. He died in 1955.

6 . An extremely rare manuscript(手稿) signed by English naturalist Charles Darwin is expected to fetch up to $790,00at a Sotheby’s auction next month. The document contains a passage from the famous 1859 work On the Origin of Species, in which Darwin put forth his theory of evolution.

The document was once thought to be a deserted page from an earlier manuscript of the work. But experts now understand it was written in 1865 and sent to the editor of the Autographic Mirror who had requested a signed writing sample from Darwin.

“While some of Darwin's notes and manuscript pages have survived over the last hundred or more years, he was known to keep revising his publications, often throwing away pages from working drafts as waste paper, making them extremely rare,” Sotheby's said in a statement.

On the Origin of Species was voted the most influential academic book of all time in a public poll held during Academic Book Week in 2015.The book offers Darwin's revolutionary idea that species evolve over generations in the process of natural selection.

Darwin backed up his theory with evidence collected during his 1831—1836 voyage on the H.M S. Beagle, during which he observed and collected specimens (标本) from a number of species. On the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, Darwin noted that the finches(鸣雀)on the island were similar to finches on the mainland; however, the availability of different foods in each area had led to differences in beak shapes.

The manuscript will be placed on display at Sotheby's in New York between Nov.30 and Dec 8, and online bids will be accepted between Now.25 and Dec.8.The auction house estimates that the document will fetch between $600,000 and $790,000.

The auction, which is titled Age of Wonder, will also include a first edition of On the Origin of Species and a copy of scientific paper by Darwin and another naturalist.

8 . No two snowflakes are alike?Wilson A.Bentley, a farmer and amateur meteorologist, sought to answer that question, dedicating himself to________flakes of snow for 50 years.

Bentley was born in 1865 and_________on a farm.On his 15th birthday,Bentley’s mother gave him an old_______.It was snowing that day, and the boy________getting a glimpse of a six-sided snowflake with the_______. When he was 17, Bentley asked his parents to buy him a new, better microscope and a camera.His father argued that it was a waste of time. Finally, his father gave in. Bentley built a wooden frame to________the new equipment and then spent 2 years figuring out how to take a picture of a snowflake_________a microscope. On January 15,1885,he did it,creating the world’s first photo of snowflake. Every winter for the rest of his life, Bentley studied snowflakes in a(n)_______room in the back of the house. The process was difficult and cold. (Outdoors, he collected snowflakes on a wooden tray that was painted_______to observe it. Whenever it snowed, Bentley caught and captured flakes, sometimes working all night. He found that most snowflakes had six sides, ______others looked like triangles, or columns—no two were alike.

Bentley_______his snowflakes with anyone who was interested. He wrote articles for scientists and for_______such as National Geographic. Occasionally, he felt_________that few people seemed to care about his work.Still,he________stopped.In 1920,Bentley was elected as one of the first members of the American Meteorological Society, which later________him its first research grant in 1924.

A Respectable Watermelon Expert

China     1    (be) the largest producer and consumer of watermelons in the world since 2018. And Wu Mingzhu, 92 years old now, is the unsung hero who has helped make this possible. It’s fair    2    (say) that about 80 percent of the watermelons served at people’s dining tables every day are the result of great efforts made by Wu and her team over more than 60 years.

Admitted to Southwest Agricultural College in Chongqing in the late 1940s, Wu is an alumnus (校友) of Yuan Longping, the “father of hybrid rice”. After two years of application failures, Wu succeeded in     3    (realize)her dream of starting her career in Xinjiang in 1955. Since then, she has put     4    (she)to growing sweet melons.

Wu’s efforts to grow quality melons began paying off in 1973,     5    she set up an off-season growing base in Hainan. Going and returning between Xinjiang and Hainan     6    (frequent) for many years, Wu developed more than 20,000 of China’s new seed     7    (kind) through off-season growing.

Wu’s contribution has won her many praises. She became     8    member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 1999 and an honorary citizen of Sanya in 2004. In addition, growers call her the “Queen of Melons”.

Now suffering from Alzheimer’s (阿尔兹海默) disease, Wu is often     9    (able)to recognize her former colleagues or even her family members. However, the memory of her melon work     10    (remain) in her mind.