1 . Famous American performer Chita Rivera died on January 30 in New York. She was 91 years old. The famed dancer, singer and actor won many awards and honors in her long career on Broadway and beyond.

Rivera first gained wide notice in 1957 as Anita in the original production of the musical play West Side Story. She was still dancing on New York’s Broadway stages a half century later in 2015’s The Visit.

“I wouldn’t know what to do if I wasn’t moving or telling a story to you or singing a song,” she said at the time. “That’s the spirit of my life, and I’m really so lucky to be able to do what I love, even at this time in my life.”

Rivera was born on January 23, 1933, in Washington, D.C. Her father was a musician. He died when Rivera was seven. Her mother was of Scottish and Italian ancestry (血统).

Rivera studied dance as a young girl and was accepted into a highly respected school for ballet. She was 17 when she won her first part in a musical.

She won two Tonys, the highest award for live theater in the United States. Her first came in1984 with the production of The Rink. She won again in 1993 for the play Kiss of the Spider Woman.

The second Tony was an especially sweet victory for the star. Just five years earlier, Rivera had been in a serious car accident that broke her right leg. It could have ended her career. After months of physical treatment to regain her dancing skills, she returned to the stage singing and dancing as energetically as ever. She said, “It never entered my mind that I wouldn’t dance again.”

When accepting a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2018, Rivera said, “I wouldn’t trade my life in the theater for anything, because theater is life.”

2 . For the creatively minded, snow represents a large blank canvas (空白画布) for art. But often, it’s limited to snowmen or other snow statues. Simon Beck had a different idea, and over the course of a decade he has carved a path for himself in the snow art world. He creates large land art by walking across soccer-field-sized areas covered in untouched snow. Combined with light and shadow (影子) , his artistic designs can only be fully appreciated when viewed from above.

Beck, 59, a former map maker turned into a snow artist, thanks to his decision late in life to pursue his hobby.

“I really had no idea how good it would look when I made that first drawing, but it really went beyond my expectation,” he said of his first ever creation that he looked down on from a ski lift.

To create this work, Beck stepped his way through the snow using only snowshoes and a ski pole for measurement with nothing else but the image of a design idea in his head. It was not challenging at all due to his previous work experience. But as his designs developed and became more complex(复杂的), Beck said he began to start drawing them on paper first.   

Beck’s paintings have become a huge hit since his work was first shared.

“Most of the time I had been doing failed careers, and people around me are asking what's the quickest way of getting rid of (摆脱) this person,” Beck said. “And for the first time, I felt people actually wanted me. I felt like a more valued member of society.”

3 . Derek Paravicini is lucky to be alive. Born three and a half months early, he weighed only 0.6 kilograms and almost _______ three times while he was in hospital. _______, Derek’s early birth left him with some disabilities — he is blind; he can’t tell left from right; he can _______ count to ten.

Yet Derek is a _______ talent. The 41-year-old remembers every one of the thousands of pieces of music he has ever heard and can play them without _______ on the piano — even if he only heard the song once. years ago. Because he is blind, he cannot _______ music. All of the music he plays is in his _______. His brain has been described as a perfectly programmed musical _______. When he hears a chord with ten notes in it, he can even _______ all ten, while most professional musicians can only recognise about five.

Derek was two years old before his family discovered his ________. When he was given an old keyboard, he ________ his family by reproducing the songs he had heard outside. His family then arranged for him to go to a school for the ________ where he met a university professor who helped him to ________ his musical talent.

By the age of nine, Derek had ________ at a large concert hall in London with a famous orchestra, Since then, he has appeared on TV shows and travelled the world ________ performances. He has recorded his own CDs and there is even a book about his life.

6 . Michael Morgan was six years old when his father moved a neighbor’s unwanted piano into their living room. “And that’s really where the whole thing started,” he says. “My mother and grandmother had played the piano a little bit, but my father just thought it was a good thing to have in the house.” Young Michael started piano lessons, but it was when he saw a conductor (指挥) leading an orchestra on television that he realized what he really wanted to do.

At age eight, he began reading The Joy of Music by conductor and composer (作曲家) Leonard Bernstein and got to know how to direct with a baton (指挥棒) .

When Michael entered junior high, he joined an orchestra and band and learned to play many instruments. He was just 12 years old when his instructor asked him to compose and conduct a concert piece. And that was only the beginning. Throughout high school, he continued to develop his artistic talent, and after graduating, he headed to Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

Morgan is dedicated (致力于) to offering kids a chance to explore classical music. In his hometown of Oakland, California, he started to volunteer in local schools, conducting student orchestras and talking with kids about music. Later, Morgan developed MUSE (Music for Excellence), a music education program for kids.

He brings musicians from Oakland Symphony into classrooms to teach kids. He also works with teachers in after-school programs to teach students who can’t afford lessons.

Morgan says his work is mostly about providing young people with an entrance into music. “Instruments are a way for kids to express their feelings, and give them an interest they can carry with them through life,” he says.

The audience did not hesitate    1    (applaud)loudly as Beethoven walked out onto the stage for the first time in 12 years . The theatre’s musical director joined him and together the two men took charge    2    the orchestra. For more than an hour, Beethoven jumped about in front of the orchestra,    3    (wave)his arms wildly in the air and madly turning the pages of his score. The whole time, the director stood quietly by his side, skillfully guiding the orchestra through the    4    （amaze）piece of music the world had ever known.

As the final, joyous note    5    (signal)the end of the symphony, the audience jumped to their feet, clapping, cheering and waving their hats. But Beethoven continued,    6    (he)head buried in the score. It was not until Caroline Unger, one of the singers, took his arm and turned him to face the audience    7    the great man realised his symphony was a success.

Later, Caroline remembered that Beethoven was not the only one who got    8    surprise. “The audience was shocked as well,” she said with a broad smile. “Most of the    9    (viewer)had no idea that he was deaf! The one person in the room who didn’t hear the symphony——and never would——was the very man who composed it.    10    a musical genius he is.”

8 . You’ve likely heard of the Group of Seven, artists who travelled the remote landscapes of Ontario to capture their rough beauty by brush. But they weren’t the only artists who travelled rough and painted what they saw!

Fifty years before the Group of Seven. Frances Anne Hopkins was roughing it in a voyageur (船夫) canoe between Lachine (Montreal) and Fort William (Thunder Bay). She was born in England in 1838. She married Edward Hopkins, who worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company, and moved to Lachine, Canada.

In 1860, her husband was promoted to Chief Factor of Montreal, which led to the couple occasionally joining voyageurs on their journeys up the river, sometimes travelling all the way to Fort William by canoe. These trips would take weeks of rough living with the men who paddled the canoe. The couple travelled along the shores of the Mattawa River, where Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park is located today.

While the voyageurs paddled the canoe or set up camp, Hopkins would sketch (素描) what she saw. She documented the lives of voyageurs in her sketches in the same way we might take a photograph. Most of her paintings describing voyageurs were completed after she returned to London in 1870. Many of her works, such as Canoes in a Fog and Running a Rapid on the Mattawa River were displayed at the Royal Academy exhibition in England during her career.

By the time Frances Anne Hopkins began documenting the voyageurs’ lives, the need for them was declining. Faster travel methods such as trains and steamboats were becoming popular, and the demand for canoes was decreasing. However, one could argue that she arrived in the canoe just in time to capture the final years of the voyageurs before they could truly fade away.

9 . According to Gelb, although not everyone is born with the gifts and the capacities of Leonardo Da Vinci, it is possible for any person to use the fundamentals of Da Vinci’s approach to learning to guide us toward the realization of our inner Da Vinci. One typical fundamental is curiosity. Curiosity is “The desire to know is natural to good men.” — Leonardo Da Vinci

The young Leonardo loved being in nature, showed an early gift for drawing and was fascinated by mathematics. Young Leonardo’s Curiosity regarding education and mathematics especially often raised constant unsureness and difficulties for the teachers who taught him and continuously proved them to be wrong. Most children have in them endless amounts of curiosity and sense of wonder. Unfortunately for multiple reasons these qualities are lost as children reach adulthood, not Leonardo though. Perhaps one of his greatest characteristics was his willingness to question accepted knowledge. Leonardo’s Curiosity never faded and fueled the lake of his genius for his entire life. Leonardo’s motives were not money, women or loyalty to any church or person. His pursuits were pure: the long search for beauty and above all: truth.

Leonardo would wonder around asking questions he did not himself yet understand. He always carried a notebook with himself so that he could quickly write down hundreds of questions, ideas, thoughts, impressions and observations as they occurred. He was expectant and reliant only upon himself to answer his own questions. Being modest, he was not afraid to make mistakes and appear foolish. Leonardo accepted the feelings of unfamiliarity and foolishness.

His questions led him to designing a snorkel (水下呼吸器) as well as diving equipment and even a submarine and also inventing flying machines and a parachute. His curiosity took him under the water and into the sky.

10 . At the first exhibition of Henri Rousseau’s paintings in 1886, the public laughed out loud, and critics made fun of his original, unschooled style, one writing "Monsieur Rousseau paints with his feet, and his eyes covered.”

Despite heavy criticism throughout his life, Rousseau kept painting, confident in his gift. He never received formal training in the arts because his family was too poor. For more than twenty years, he worked at the Paris customs office. It wasn’t until the age of 40 that he took up the brush, teaching himself to paint by copying works at the Louvre and studying nature. “Nothing makes me so happy as to observe nature and to paint what I see.” he said.

Though his best-known paintings are of jungle scenes with monkeys, lions, and small woods, Rousseau never left France or saw a jungle. To paint foreign plants and animals, he relied on books, botanical gardens(植物园) in Paris,and his imagination. "When I go into the glasshouse and I see the strange plants of faraway lands,” he once said, "it seems to me that I enter into a dream.”

Rousseau claimed to have invented a new style of painting called the landscape-portrait, in which he paints a background view and then adds a person in the foreground later, as he did in Myself: Portrait-Landscape (1890).

Called a naive (天真) artist due to his childlike, untrained style, Rousseau painted colors one at a time, starting from the top and working his way down. While critics described his works as flat and inexact descriptions of nature, he earned the respect of artists like Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky, who thought Rousseau was onto something new.

Though his work was never accepted by the art world in his time, Rousseau’s paintings hang in museums around the world today. And Rousseau’s original approach to art has inspired countless artists to follow their own unique views.