1 . What foods do you use to celebrate with your family? Do you eat something special on your birthday or holidays? Among the Hopi people, many foods for special celebrations are made from corn.
The Hopi people are Native Americans who live in Black Mesa, Arizona, USA. They grow special types of corn with long roots (根), which help the corn reach water in the ground in the hot and dry desert (沙漠).
The Hopi use each color of corn for something different. For example, blue corn is used to make some traditional Hopi foods. Piki is one Hopi food made with blue com. It is like a paper-thin, rolled pancake.
| A．The Hopi people have a long history. |
| B．Corn is also used in Hopi ceremonies. |
| C．There are different types of corn as well. |
| D．Corn plays an important role in the Hopi diet. |
| E．Some Hopi today still live as they did hundreds of years ago. |
| F．White corn is used to wish a baby good health and long life. |
| G．But both groups still practice Hopi spirituality and other traditions. |
2 . Here are some wonderful festivals around the world that happen in spring. If you want to know more about them, please click Here or visit http://wws.buddhanet.netlfestival.Htm
SongKran — Thailand
Dates: 13th — 15th, April
In Thailand, people celebrate a festival called Songkran, when people bead out to the streets with water guns to spray (喷洒) everyone who walks past. It’s a very important traditional celebration in the country.
Naghol — Vanuatu
Dates: Every Saturday from April to May
Every year, villagers come together to celebrate the harvest of yams (甘薯), an important part in the people’s diet in Vanuatu. The festival is most famous for its “land diving ceremony”. During the ceremony men and boys dive to the ground from high wooden towers with only two thin vines (藤) tied to their feet.
Cherry Blossom Viewing — Japan
Dates: The cherry blossom season is different from year to year depending on the weather.
The festival is well-known. The Japanese celebrate the days when the flowers finally blossom. Only a few days later, the petals (花瓣) fall to the ground, like pink snowflakes. That means the traditional festival only lasts for several days. In Japan, almost everyone has picnics in the parks to view the flowers.
Sinhalese New Year — Sri Lanka
Dates: 13th or 14th, April
Just like in many other countries in South East Asia, this is the time when people celebrate the traditional New Year, an ancient celebration which marks the end of the harvest season and is one of two times of the year when the sun is straight above Sri Lanka. There are a lot of delicious foods during the celebration.
1. What will most likely happen to a tourist walking in the street during SongKran in Thailand?| A．He will get wet. | B．He will hurt his feet. |
| C．He will be treated to delicious foods. | D．He will see some petals falling. |
| A．Thailand. | B．Vanuatu. | C．Japan. | D．Sri Lanka. |
| A．It is a traditional festival. | B．It is a very famous festival. |
| C．Its date is different every year. | D．It provides visitors with delicious foods. |
| A．On TV. | B．In a report. | C．On the Internet. | D．In the newspaper. |
3 . On April 18—the International Day for Monuments and Sites, China Daily’s digital employee Yuanxi and Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes’ official virtual cartoon figure Jiayao together introduced an interactive digital platform (平台) that hosts a virtual copy of the Mogao Grottoes’ Library Cave (藏经洞) to the world.
The platform was developed jointly by the Dunhuang Academy and the Chinese tech firm Tencent. It uses gaming technologies to show the historical scenes of the Library Cave in the digital world.
The Library Cave in Mogao Grottoes was discovered in 1900, with more than 60,000 cultural relics dating from the 4th century to the 11th century unearthed. It was one of the most important archaeological discoveries in the 20th century.
On the platform, visitors can role-play and “time travel” to ancient dynasties and talk with eight historical figures: The public can enter the platform through the Digital Dunhuang website and its WeChat mini program.
In the digital age, the model of “culture+ technology” has been introduced to facilitate the development of Chinese culture. The digitalization rate of China’s precious cultural relics is now over 70 percent, according to the 2022 China Digital Collection Industry Research Report released by iResearch.
Institutions such as the Palace Museum have also started online digital services of their own. Artificial intelligence (AI) technology allows the public to view the interior of the buildings through the Palace Museum’s WeChat mini program.
The Ministry of Culture and Tourism has also encouraged the development and transformation of cultural intellectual property (知识产权) by digital means. China Central Television has created a series of digital collections with different Dunhuang themes, such as the Dunhuang divine deer (神鹿) Youyou. It was created based on the image of the nine-colored deer from Dunhuang murals (壁画). The public can see the divine deer on CCTV’s own digital platform.
1. Which of the following statements about the virtual copy of the Mogao Grottoes’ Library Cave is true?| A．It was developed by the Dunhuang Academy alone. |
| B．The public can have access to it through Wechat mini program. |
| C．It has applied the latest time-traveling and gaming technology. |
| D．It was unearthed in 1900 with more than 60,000 cultural relics. |
| A．To show the latest gaming technologies. |
| B．To help cultural institutions make a profit. |
| C．To promote the development of Chinese culture. |
| D．To encourage people to explore Chinese cultural relics. |
| A．By listing figures. | B．By making comparisons. |
| C．By giving a definition. | D．By giving an example. |
| A．China’s new way in rebuilding Mogao Grottoes’ Library Cave. |
| B．China’s success in promoting the digitization rate of cultural relics. |
| C．China’s interactive digital platform in developing Dunhuang culture. |
| D．China’s latest advances in the development of cultural intellectual property. |
4 . Any visitor to the Chinese Culture Week being held at the University of Tehran (德黑兰) would be amazed by the Chinese tea, food, and various artworks, like Chinese knotting and traditional paper cutting-all displayed by Iranian students learning Chinese.
“Chinese knots are believed to bring good luck and act as charms that can keep evil spirits away,” Zeinab Ghafourian, a 19-year-old senior studying Chinese at the Confucius Institute (孔子学院) of the University of Tehran, told Xinhua on Tuesday.
The Chinese Culture Week, which started at the university last Saturday and will last till Wednesday, aims to introduce Chinese culture to more Iranians. The event displayed a range of artworks that contain different elements of Chinese culture, produced by Iranian professors and students at the university.
On the reasons why she chose to study the Chinese language, Ghafourian said that she has been interested in East Asian cultures even since childhood. “In addition, the Chinese films have become more and more popular,” she said.
Most importantly, because of Iran’s good ties with China, mastering the Chinese language offers better jobs in the Iranian job market compared to other languages, she explained.
The Iranian and Chinese people have a lot in common in culture, as they have been connected through cultural and economic exchanges via the ancient Silk Road in the long past.
“Due to China’s increasing global influence, as well as its friendly and expanded relations with Iran, learning about the country and its language are becoming very important,” said Hamed Vafaei, the Iranian director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Tehran.
1. What do we know about the Chinese Culture Week?| A．Visitors could make Chinese artworks by themselves. |
| B．Chinese knots are common among Iranian students. |
| C．It aims to introduce Chinese cultureto more Iranians. |
| D．All atworks displayed were produced by Chinese students. |
| A．Mastering the Chinese offers better job chances. |
| B．She has been interested in East Asian cultures. |
| C．She would like to study in China in the future. |
| D．Chinese films gain great popularity in Iran. |
| A．Excited. | B．Indifferent. | C．Doubted. | D．Positive. |
| A．The Ancient Silk Road Connects Iran and China |
| B．The Chinese Language has Become a Necessity |
| C．Chinese Culture Week Promotes Chinese Culture |
| D．More Iranian Students Love Learning Chinese |
5 . Thailand has several unique holidays. One of them is King’s Birthday, which is a national holiday. On this day, each city is decorated with bright colored lights, and in the evenings the Thai walk around together looking at the decorations. Traditional dishes and family favourties are eaten, and meals always include steamed whole chicken with hot pepper dipping sauce and sliced roast pig’s head.
New Year’s Day is also important in Thailand. Brown eggs are boiled and then cooked in soy sauce, sugar, fish sauce and five spices. These eggs represent good life in the coming year. The Thai will also eat special egg rolls, dipped in namplaprig, a sweet and sour sauce. Decorations for the New Year include fruit like bananas, coconuts, pineapples and papayas.
Songkran is a three-day water festival that comes in April. For this holiday, people douse each other and everything they have with water in thanks for rain and in the hope of good luck. April is the hottest month in Thailand, so this festival is refreshing and fun. The celebrations also include a big dinner, at which curries, usually yellow ones, and long noodles are eaten. These noodles symbolize long life.
Loy Krathong is a November holiday that involves making bamboo boats and putting lighted candles into them. As these little boats float down the river, they are supposed to carry away sin and pay honor to the spitits of the water. After watching the boats, people eat a large meal that includes grilled chicken, fish, coconut and egg yolks. No matter what they are celebrating, Thai holidays always include family and good food.
1. What would be the best title for this passage?| A．Songkran and Loy Krathong in the coming Year. |
| B．How the King Celebtates His Birthday |
| C．Special Acitivities on Holidays |
| D．Festivals in Thailand |
| A．Roasted pig’s head and grilled chicken | B．Long noodles served with dipping sauce |
| C．Towns decorated with colored lights. | D．Dinner tables filled with traditional eggs. |
| A．Long life. | B．A good life in the coming year. |
| C．Bad deeds carried away. | D．Decorated tables with kinds of fruit. |
| A．In April | B．In November |
| C．On the King’s birthday. | D．After people enjoy a large meal. |
6 . Food festivals are a common occurrence in the UK and take place in all sorts of places and at all sorts of times. Whatever your taste, there’s a food festival to match — no matter how specialized.
1. Meatopia
This three-day, London-based festival takes place at the end of August and is a meat lover’s paradise. In addition to a range of legally sourced meat products, from juicy burgers to tender steaks, attendees can listen to live music, watch butchery demonstrations, and attend informal meat-based workshops.
2. The National Honey Show
If you have a sweet tooth, then it could be that the National Honey Show, which started in 1921 and is the largest event of its kind, is the place for you to be. This three-day event attracts many local entries who showcase their sweet golden honey, some of which is sold globally.
3. The Orange Sauce Festival
Have you heard about a festival that is devoted only to orange sauce? Held in Cumbria, this sweet, fragrant festival has been running for 3 years. What attracts people most is a competition to find the best homemade orange sauce. There are thousands of participants from over 30 different countries across the globe, bringing their local snacks to share here.
4. The Ginger and Spice Festival
If you’d prefer something with a little more kick to it, then you could attend The Ginger (姜) and Spice Festival held in Market Drayton. Unlike other food festivals, it celebrates its town’s historic connection to Robert Clive, who returned from India with ginger. Because of this, they specialize in baking gingerbread, but also sell a range of traditional spices from mild to hot.
1. What do Meatopia and the National Honey Show have in common?| A．Both of them last for three days. | B．Both of them hold workshops. |
| C．Both of them originated from London. | D．Both of them have a long history. |
| A．The Meatopia. | B．The Ginger and Spice Festival. |
| C．The National Honey Show. | D．The Orange Sauce Festival. |
| A．It has something to do with a historic figure. |
| B．The ginger used in the festival is from India. |
| C．It sells spicy food. |
| D．The food is cooked by Robert Clive. |
7 . In 1947 a group of famous people from the art world decided to hold an international festival of music, dance and theatre in Edinburgh. The idea was to reunite Europe after World War Ⅱ.
It quickly attracted famous names such as Alec Guinness, Richard Burton, Dame Margot Fonteyn and Marlene Dietrich as well as the big symphony orchestras (交响乐团). It became a fixed event every August and now attracts about 400,000 people yearly.
At the same time, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (the Fringe) appeared as a challenge to the official festival. Eight theatre groups turned up uninvited in 1947, believing that everyone should have the right to perform, and they did so in a public house that had been disused for years.
Soon, groups of students firstly from the University of Edinburgh, and later from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham were making the journey to the Scottish capital each summer to perform plays by little-known writers in small halls.
Today the Fringe, once less embraced, has far outgrown the festival with around 1,500 performances of music, dance and theatre on every one of the 21 days it lasts. And yet as early as 1959, with only 19 theatre groups performing, some said it was getting too big.
A paid administrator (管理人员) was first employed only in 1971, and today there are eight administrators working all year round and the number rises to 150 during August itself. In 2004 there were 200 places housing 1,695 shows by over 600 different groups from 50 different countries. More than 1.25 million tickets were sold.
1. Why did some famous people hold an international festival in 1947?| A．To honor heroes of World War Ⅱ. |
| B．To introduce young theatre groups. |
| C．To attract great artists from Europe. |
| D．To bring Europe together again. |
| A．They came to take up a challenge. |
| B．They thought they were also famous. |
| C．They wanted to take part in the festival. |
| D．They owned a public house there. |
| A．accepted. | B．checked. | C．allowed. | D．controlled. |
| A．To prove different groups have come to the festival. |
| B．To show administrators are busy in August. |
| C．To prove the tickets of the festival sell well. |
| D．To show the festival has grown rapidly. |
8 . Dunhuang Academy together with Huawei launched a brand-new technology-driven tour experience at the Mogao Grottoes on the evening of April 8. Using Huawei’s newly-released Hetu artificial intelligence platform, coupled with the output of the Digital Dunhuang project, visitors to the Mogao Grottoes can enjoy a fantasy experience prior to entering the attraction.
Zhao Shengliang, director of the Dunhuang Acadcmy, said that it has been cooperating with Huawei since March 2019. Using Huawei’s latest Hetu technology, visitors are able to see the detailed contents of the Dunhuang Art Murals (壁画) outside the caves, through their Huawei mobile phones. This will reduce the time tourists spend inside the cave, aiding the protection of the cultural relics, while at the same time helping to increase the amount of information visitors can obtain. It is also considered to be a new way of promoting Dunhuang Art.
The Dunhuang Academy has used digital technology to preserve the research and exploration of Dunhuang Grottoes since the early 1990s. It has collected a wealth of data and has realized the goal of sharing of digital Dunhuang globally. It has played an important role in the protection and research of cultural site, as well as promoting the development and progress of related work.
The Huawei Hetu platform unites Dunhuang’s study findings, high-resolution images of the site’s murals and virtual, three-dimensional models with the real Mogao Grottoes. It has not only re-created the real tour of the scenic spot, but also developed a new way of digitally experiencing the grottoes. When people visit the site, they not only have the experience of seeing the real grottoes, but they can appreciate the admirable artworks more clearly and in greater detail.
In the future, Dunhuang Academy will continue to cooperate with Huawei to create more colorful virtual content to enrich the experience of Mogao Art on the platform, helping people around the world get to know Dunhuang Art better.
1. Which is NOT the advantage of the Hetu technology?| A．Help to protect the cultural relics. | B．Reduce the time visitors spend inside the cave. |
| C．Decrease the cost of the visitors. | D．Provide more information for tourists. |
| A．About a year. | B．10 years. | C．More than 30 years. | D．90 years. |
| A．The Dunhuang Academy. | B．The digital technology. |
| C．Dunhuang Grottoes. | D．The development and progress of related work. |
| A．Hopeful. | B．Opposed. |
| C．Indifferent. | D．Doubtful. |
| A．Huawei Newly Released Hetu Al. |
| B．Dunhuang Grottoes Attract Tourists. |
| C．Dunhuang Academy Preserves Grottoes Well. |
| D．Al Tech Helps Tourists Enjoy Dunhuang’s Art. |
9 . People from East Asia tend to have more difficulties than those from Europe in distinguishing facial expressions and a new report published online in Current Biology explains why.
Rachael Jack, University of Glasgow researcher, said that rather than scanning evenly (均匀的) across a face as Westerners do, Easterners fix their attention on the eyes.
“We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions,” Jack said. “Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, whereas Easterners favor the eyes and overlook the mouth.”
According to Jack and her colleagues, the discovery shows that human communication of emotion is more complex than previously believed. As a result, facial expressions that had been considered universally recognizable cannot be used to reliably convey emotion in cross-cultural situations.
The researchers studied cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions by recording the eye movements of 13 Western Caucasian and 13 East Asian people while they observed pictures of expressive faces and put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry, or neutral. They compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using their particular eye movement strategies.
It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes and made significantly more errors than Westerners did. “The cultural difference in eye movements that they show is probably a reflection of cultural difference in facial expressions,” Jack said. “Our data suggest that whereas Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion. Easterners use the eyes more and mouth less.”
In short, the data show that facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotion. From here on, examining how cultural factors have diversified these basic social skills will help our understanding of human emotion. Otherwise, when it comes to communicating emotions across cultures, Easterners and Westerners will find themselves lost in translation.
1. What does the discovery show about Westerners?| A．They pay equal attention to the eyes and the mouth. |
| B．They consider facial expressions universally reliable. |
| C．They observe the eyes and the mouth in different ways. |
| D．They have more difficulty in recognizing facial expressions. |
| A．To get their faces impressive. | B．To make a face at each other. |
| C．To classify some face pictures. | D．To observe the researchers’ faces. |
| A．They do translation more successfully. | B．They study the mouth more frequently. |
| C．They examine the eyes more attentively. | D．They read facial expressions more correctly. |
| A．The Eye as the Window to the Soul | B．Cultural Differences in Reading Emotions |
| C．Effective Methods to Develop Social Skills | D．How to Increase Cross-cultural Understanding |
10 . Located at the foot of the Wudang Mountains in China’s Hubei Province is the home of 64-year-old Marc Verlant, which possesses a fascinating collection of Chinese artifacts. The artfully arranged decorations such as miniatures (微缩模型) of ancient Chinese towers, traditional wooden carvings and Chinese paintings clearly convey that the house owner is trying to creatively explore and develop a better understanding of Chinese culture.
As a keen enthusiast of martial arts, Chinese architecture and history, this Frenchman is currently savoring his 19th year of living in a rural Chinese-style environment and finds it pleasant to live here. “Wudang is like my second home, and some locals say that I am almost a native of Wudang,” said Verlant.
The Wudang Mountains, a UNESCO world cultural heritage site, are considered “the cradle of Tai Chi” and are home to numerous palaces and temples that show the wisdom and beauty of ancient China’s architecture. In 2004, to treat his body after an accident, Verlant moved here to learn Chinese martial arts, and gradually fell in love with martial arts as well as Wudang’s culture. For him, it all started when his French-language student, who was a local tour guide, aroused his interest in local culture. For years, he volunteered as a foreign-language interpreter and tour guide in the Wudang Mountains, sharing Wudang’s culture with tourists from across the world. During the past two decades, he has witnessed and experienced the rapid development of this mountainous region. “When I first arrived in Wudang, there was neither the high-speed railway nor the shuttle bus, and many foreigners didn’t know how to come here, ” he recalled.
The Frenchman’s enthusiasm inspired those around him. “I learned a lot about Wudang from Marc, and his positive attitude toward life also influenced me to be more outgoing and energetic,”said his wife, who is a native of Shiyan City, where the Wudang Mountains are located.
1. Why does the author mention the decorations of a house?| A．To sing the praises of traditional Chinese artifacts. |
| B．To highlight its owner’s insights into Chinese art. |
| C．To show its owner’s passion for Chinese culture. |
| D．To suggest the perfectly-matched decorating style. |
| A．Adjusting. | B．Exploring. | C．Rebuilding. | D．Enjoying. |
| A．He worked as a tour guide while teaching. |
| B．He contributed to the promotion of Wudang’s culture. |
| C．He became energetic under the influence of martial arts. |
| D．He offered great help to the development of the local economy. |
| A．A tourist attraction—Wudang. |
| B．An encounter with martial arts. |
| C．A journey of intercultural communication. |
| D．A French enthusiast of Wudang’s culture. |
