With his wrinkled fingers, Wang Qiming put traditional makeup on the faces of young performers before dawn, making final preparations for the shehuo parade (游行庆祝).

The shehuo parade, a time-honored performance enjoying widespread    1    (popular) in rural areas across China,    2    (date) back to about 2, 000 years ago when sacrificial (祭祀的) activities were performed to pray for a good harvest. Later on, as dancing and singing became part of the parade, it developed into a folk custom    3    (stage) during the Spring Festival and Lantern Festival    4    (remove) bad luck and bring a fresh start in the new year.

Wangmazui is in Longxian county,    5    (previous) known as Long Zhou, which is famous for shehuo parades    6    (feature) authentic performances and simple yet delicate facial makeup. The county was named the hometown of shehuo performances by the Chinese Folk Literature and Art Association in 2013.

More than 100 shehuo festivities are held in Longxian every year, each of    7     involves dozens or hundreds of villagers. Participants usually perform on horses     8    pickup trucks, showing different performances including stilt (高跷) dances and land boats.

Wang, 65, has clear    9    (memory) of the annual performances when he was a child. “My family has been engaged in shehuo performances     10    generations, ” he said. “I started to watch the show in my childhood, and now I joined them by making face-painting. ”

Chopsticks, or kuaizi in Chinese, are a pair of small equal-length sticks, usually made of wood, used for eating. We Chinese eat    1    chopsticks. It is believed the first chopsticks    2    (develop) over 5,000 years ago in China. Excavated (出土) from the Ruins of Yin near Anyang, Henan province, dating back to roughly 1,200 BC was the    3    (early) evidence of a pair of chopsticks made out of bronze. Chopsticks,    4    are roughly uniform in size throughout China, can be made of a variety of    5    (material), including bamboo, wood, plastic, silver and gold.

Chopsticks play    6    important role in Chinese food culture. Chinese chopsticks are usually 9 to 10 inches long. They are round on the eating end which symbolizes heaven, and the other end is square which symbolizes earth. This is because    7    (maintain) an enough food supply is the greatest concern between heaven and earth.

There is an old Chinese custom making chopsticks part, of a girl's dowry (嫁妆) since the    8    (pronounce) of kuaizi is similar to the words for “quick” and “son”.

Chopsticks are     9    (frequent) used in daily life. They have become more than a kind of tableware and have established a set of etiquette (礼仪) and customs of    10    (they) own.

New Year in Chinese eyes is a family reunion. However, in foreigners' eyes, it is not only a kind of homesickness, but a spring migration(迁徙).Every year     1     (see) the largest annual mass migration on the planet     2     one sixth of the world's population travel home to celebrate     3     their families. That is around a billion people     4     (make) 3.5 billion journeys in a 40-day period. Meanwhile, over 250 million rail journeys are made across China during the festival.

Last year, 5.6 million rail tickets    5     (sell) in a single day. Every new year in the heartland of industrial China thousands upon thousands of motorcyclists brave the weather and hit the road, determined to make     6     home.

The Chinese New Year     7     (celebrate) is also known as the Spring Festival. It lasts 15 days. It is the main holiday of the Chinese calendar. In modern China,     8     (search) for work, many people have to move away from home. And they will travel home to be with the loved ones during the Spring Festival. In Chinese New Year, modern and     9     (tradition) customs are brought together when the Chinese celebrate the Spring Festival. Nowadays, not only does China have the     10     (fast) growing modern cities in the world, but the landscapes are also truly diverse.