The Lantern Festival falls on the 15th day of the st lunar month, usually in February or early March in the solar calendar.    1     (date) back to the Western Han Dynasty (202 BC-8 AD), it    2    (become) a grand festival with great significance. Till today, the festival is still held each year around the country.

In the daytime of the festival,     3    (performance) such as dragon dances, lion dances, land boat dances and beating drums while dancing     4     (stage). At night, lanterns of different colors and shapes are it up in the streets, attracting crowds of people. Children will hold self-made or bought lanterns to walk on the streets,     5    (extreme) excited. People also like solving lantern riddles that day. Lantern owners write riddles on a piece of paper and post them on the lanterns. If visitors have solutions    6     the riddles, they can pull the paper out and go to the owners to check their answers. If they’re right, they will get    7     small gift as a reward. Besides, the festival is a day    8     (appreciate) the full moon and eat yuanxiao.

Some aspects of the festival are fading nowadays,     9     people still see the Lantern Festival as a chance to spend with family and wish for    10    (happy).

2 . We have been doing cultural and environmental studies to understand the area. We work with local people who live there, work there and know the land. Wherever we can, we avoid disturbing cultural heritage sites.

Consult with the natives

    1    , we consult with those for whom the cultural heritage site has significance. We work with them to preserve its value – for example by relocating artefacts – and we make sure we rehabilitate the land the right way afterwards. Where possible, we also enable native peoples to maintain access to sites of cultural significance to maintain their connection and customary practices.

    2    

We will fully cooperate with the Inquiry by the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia. We are also continuing to support the government of Western Australia in the review of the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 (WA). We are committed to engaging with the rest of the industry, Traditional Owners, and federal and state governments across a number of areas relating to cultural heritage approvals and processes, and the broad contribution of the resources sector to Australia.

Avoid Disturbance

    3    , we look for ways to avoid disturbing it. This could be by adapting the design of a mining project to exclude significant sites from the mining lease, or mining around areas. Where we cannot avoid a site completely, we work with Traditional Owners to find ways we can preserve its cultural value.     4     so they can coexist with our activities, working with archaeologists to excavate and conserve artefacts, or recording oral history and other information for future generations.

Site Conservation

    5    . This can include fire management, feral animal management, erosion control, installation of protective and interpretative signage, auditing, monitoring and measuring the condition of sites, and managing public access.

4 . Every month, Zhang Lingling holds a party with her friends in a KTV room. At the party, all the people wear hanfu—a type of dress worn by the_________ Han people—and sing songs that are _________ by traditional instruments or inspired by ancient poems. “I’m _________ by the clothes, songs and games based on traditional culture. I’m not buying the items just because they are Chinese—they just satisfy my aesthetic needs,” she_________ China Daily.

Like Zhang, there are many young people who have a_________for traditional Chinese culture. _________ the reason behind this fascination with traditional culture, Ji Fangfang, a professor with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said it’s_________traditional culture is the best way for young people to_________their national identity.

_________some prefer inheriting (继承) traditional Chinese culture, others are creating on it to be more__________to the young generation. Pop culture__________ Yu Yang is one of them. When he made a (an) __________of products featuring the ancient God of Fortune, the god wore __________ Chinese shoes and a cap, and had a microphone in his hand. “Pop culture is a __________ language. I hoped more people would accept and love my work and __________Chinese culture through my art pieces,” he said in an interview with China Daily.

6 . In America, we have a thing called stand-up comedy. This popular form of entertainment consists of a comedian standing up at the front of a club, holding a microphone, and telling jokes. Of course, comedy is popular in Chinese culture as well, but the performances are quite different from the style in the US. In China, it’s called cross-talk, which usually involves two guys engaging in an entertaining dialogue.

It’s believed that cross-talk came into being in the Qing Dynasty as a bit of a by-product of the imitation shows that were a popular form of entertainment in the Song Dynasty. After the PRC was established in 1949, this comedic art became more and more popular. Today, it’s still heavily featured in the CCTV New Year’s Gala programmes in China. The 1990s was the golden age of cross-talk; even foreigners studied the art of cross-talk. Mark Roswell, a Canadian named Da Shan in Chinese was relatively unknown in his native land but was a superstar in China. At the turn of the century, cross-talk began to decline, and many well-known actors left the stage.

There are four skills that are essential in cross-talk: speaking, imitating, teasing, and singing. Most of the time, it is performed with two actors—one serves as the lead actor while the other plays a support role. However, sometimes it is performed simply as a one-man show, and at other times there are several actors. In order to criticize something, the humor involved in cross-talk is satirical.

7 . In early February, an old stove with rich vivid images (zaotou painting) took center stage at a village Spring Festival gala in Haiyan county, Zhejiang province.     1     . They feature historical and legendary figures, animals and flowers, which are painted in bright colors and have a way of drawing attention from admiring viewers. Zaotou is a part of a kitchen stove in the shape of a square or rectangle, on which are some images showing the beauty of nature and humanity.

    2    . In ancient time, villagers would hire bricklayers (瓦工) to build a mud stove in their new home and then painted pictures on a day of good fortune.     3    . They whitewashed (粉刷) the mud-made stove with lime-water, sketched out the patterns based on the shape of the stove, applied the final coat of paint and even created a three-dimensional effect.

At first, simple tools had been used to produce such art, including a selection of brushes, rulers, and paint. With people’s aesthetic appreciation growing, watercolors were used, mostly red, yellow and blue, the three auspicious (吉祥的) ones to the Chinese people.     4    . No matter what material is available, the stove painting is always symbolic and harbors good wishes for the owners.

Now many people are devoted to the inheritance and popularization of zaotou painting and more and more support has been received from various sides including local authorities.     5     .

9 . Christmas cards are a big tradition in the English-speaking world. In 2017, people in Britain sent and received about 900 million cards. That’s an average of about twelve cards for every person, from tiny babies to the oldest grandparents. The number of cards that are sent around Britain causes an annual headache for the postal service. Each year, the postal service has to take on seasonal staff to help with the extra mail, and postal sorting offices are stretched to their maximum capacity and sometimes beyond it.

In 1994, before the age of email and social media, the service handled about 1.6 billion cards! In spite of advertisements telling people to “Post Early for Christmas”, few people got round to sending their cards off before December 10th; and from that point on, the postal service slowed down. Until the age of faxes, emails and social media, the pre-Christmas period often caused a lot of problems for firms, as “urgent” letters and documents took several days to reach their destinations by post, which were slowed down by the mass of Christmas mail!

During the month of December in Britain, a house with no Christmas cards is like a pub with no beer. For the most part, however, people of all faiths and of no faith join in the tradition of celebrating Christmas as a festival, whether they do so for religious reasons or not. Every British home at Christmas is merrily decorated not just with hollies, but also with a display of Christmas cards received from friends, family members, neighbors, employers and a variety of other people. In some places, the number of Christmas cards people receive is seen as a measure of their status among their friends and neighbors.

As for the subjects of Christmas cards, the range, today, is enormous. At one time, two principal themes predominated (占多数): the Christmas story, with pictures of the biblical scenes; and “traditional Christmas”, with imaginary scenes of Christmas which included burning wood fires and happy-looking parents and kids sitting together. Today, while “traditional Christmas” is favored by most people, there is no limit to the variety of pictures on cards.

While more and more people send e-cards to their friends and family members, you can’t hang an e-card on the wall, and you can’t decorate a room with rows of e-cards. Sending and receiving Christmas cards is still best done by “snail mail” which includes a real card and a real envelope. It’s much more fun.