1 . Many small American towns are known for their beautiful scenery, but very few have something special to offer. The following are known for their unique styles.

This attractive town is known as“The Lost Luggage Capital of the World”thanks to the unclaimed luggage center, where lost items such as snow skis, instruments and engagement rings are for sale. In addition to the store, which has become one of Alabama’s top tourist and shopping attractions, the city’s parks and heritage centers are popular places to visit.

Hope is a city in southern Dickinson County, Kansas, with a population of 317.It’s the home of Klipsch Museum of Audio History, President William Jefferson Clinton’s birthplace and several antique shops. Hope’s motto,which is also the name of the town’s song, is “There will always be ’Hope’ in Kansas”.

Although its population is just over 10,000,Branson hosts over 9 million visitors each year. When the best-selling novel, The Shepherd of the Hills, written by Harold Bell Wright, was released in 1907, readers rushed to the Ozark hills to experience its famous views. Now tourists also get to visit the World’s Largest Toy Museum, the world’s largest Titanic Museum Attraction and the record-breaking theme park, Silver Dollar City.

Leavenworth is a European-inspired destination, offering a collection of outdoor activities all year long. It welcomes almost 2million tourists each year and is home to the Nutcracker(胡桃夹子)Museum, which has more than 7,000 nutcrackers from around the world. Many of its visitors travel to the village in December during its annual holiday festival to see it light up with more than one million Christmas lights.

3 . Accompanied by typical Jin opera music, a red-faced performer with a long beard showed up at the hall of a high school in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province. All the students in the hall stood up and craned (伸长) their necks to get a better look. In their eyes, Jin opera was something from the past.

They are not alone. It goes without saying that kids nowadays are much more familiar with popular music than traditional opera, which is why performing artist Wu Lingyun, together with his colleagues, goes to campuses to promote the art.

Wu Lingyun is best known for his role as Guan Gong, a general during the late Han Dynasty period.

Wu began playing the role in 1985, at the age of 21, and has been associated with it ever since.

Wu was significantly influenced by his parents, both of whom are also famous Jin opera performers. With a natural talent for performing and great effort, Wu was soon recognized by audiences and later awarded the Chinese Drama Plum Blossom Award in 2000, the highest award for Chinese drama performing arts.

Given Wu’s considerable fame, one might think he would now prefer to enjoy a life of leisure. However, this is far from the case. Deep down, Wu has a big dream. He pictures a growing future for Jin opera. Wu expected more chances for more people to get to know about the art, hoping Jin opera could become a worldwide art.

Wu has also made some changes to the traditional art to bring it up-to-date.“Jin opera should keep pace with the times if we want to bring it back to life and get the young generation to accept it,“ he says. “An art without life can never survive”“

In China, there are 44 national-level intangible cultural heritage items related     1     tea, including the art of making Biluochun,     2     type of green tea. With a history of about 1,000 years, Biluochun,     3     translates as “green spiral spring (碧螺春)”, is made from tender tea shoots. It is known for its spiral-like     4     (appear).

To make this tea, the tea trees and fruit trees     5     (plant) together. The practice, passed down from ancestors, guarantees the     6     (tea) fruity and sweet taste.

Traditionally, Biluochun is produced     7     (entire) by hand. About 1 kilogram of leaves     8     (pick) from a big tea tree produce only 0.1 kilogram of tea after processing.

Biluochun must be processed soon after. Tender tea shoots are placed in a heated iron pan and stirred (搅拌) quickly. A person needs to be particularly attentive     9     (adjust) the level of heat to judge the condition of the tea by smell. Next     10     (come) the shaping process. By stirring, shaking and rubbing the tea leaves in the pan at 100℃, they begin to dry and develop a spiral form. The entire process usually takes about 40 minutes. Every minute matters, or the tea will not taste good.

“There is no place like it on the planet. The large amount of     1     (creative) we find in Dunhuang spans (跨越) a thousand-year period,” said Neil Schmid, resident scholar at the Dunhuang Academy.

Due to its great significance, China has recently launched     2     cultural heritage platform supported by blockchain technology to share digital materials of the Dunhuang Grottoes (石窟).

The platform was     3     (joint) developed by the Dunhuang Academy and Chinese tech giant Tencent. On this platform, people around the world can     4     (permit) to use more than 6,500 pieces of high-definition materials in real-time.

Previously, visitors     5     (need) to wait for a week to get such permission. But the establishment of the digital platform helps online visitors get out of otherwise complex procedures and have     6     (easy) access to Dunhuang.

In addition, online visitors are welcome to use these digital materials     7     (design) their own cultural and creative products. In this way, designers can not only receive profit     8     their work, but also spread awareness of Dunhuang in creative ways.

“This is a pioneering project for     9     (offer) digital resources services in the cultural relic field,     10     could promote sustainable development of resource use,” said Luo Jing, an official with the National Cultural Heritage Administration.

10 . A huge crowd has gathered to watch China’s new scientific research ship enter the water for the first time. This ship, equipped with on-board labs and the latest scientific kit, will eventually explore the world’s oceans. But it is also going to help China plunge beneath the waves: it will serve as a launch-pad for submarines that can dive to the deepest parts of the ocean. “Humans know much less about the deep oceans than we know about the surface of the Moon and Mars. That’s why I want to develop the facility for ocean scientists to reach the deep seas,” says Prof. Cui Weicheng.

He is the dean of deep sea science at Shanghai Ocean University but he has also set up a private company called Rainbow Fish, which built the new research ship and is busy developing submersibles. One of its unmanned subs reached a depth of 4,000m (13,000ft) in its most recent trial. But Rainbow Fish’s ultimate goal is manned exploration and it plans to take humans to the very bottom of the ocean the Mariana Trench, in the Pacific, at a depth of nearly 11,000m (36,000ft). He shows me around a life-size model of the submarine and explains that there is room inside for a crew of three, who will be protected by a thick metal sphere.”At the moment, we are in the design stage, so we are testing several extremely high-strength materials for it.” It will have to bear immense pressures from the crushing weight of water above. If there are any weaknesses, the submarine will implode. The deepest ocean is a place few people have ever experienced first-hand. The first dive to the Mariana Trench was carried out in 1960 by US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss engineer Jacques Picard. Their vessel, the Bathyscaphe Trieste, creaked and groaned as it made the descent, taking nearly five hours.

The only other manned expedition was carried out by Hollywood director James Cameron, who took a solo plunge in a bright green submarine in 2012. Rainbow Fish wants its sub to be next. The team insists its venture isn’t about politics and that it is looking to collaborate with American, Russian and European scientists. It is, though, a commercial operation. The company plans to charge people to use its research ship and submarines, and is targeting three groups, says managing director Dr. Wu Xin. “The first is definitely the scientists who are interested in studying deep-sea science and technology. The second group is offshore companies and oil companies. The last one is tourists and adventurers [who] want to go down themselves to have a look at what’s going on there,” he says. This kind of entrepreneurial approach may be a new model for science in China. Deep-sea research is a difficult, high-risk activity — and much of the ocean remains unexplored. But Cui, who hopes to be the first Chinese person to reach the Mariana Trench, believes that China could be the nation to truly open up this final frontier.