From Edmonton, the train headed southeast across the great Canadian Prairie. At school, Daiyu and Liu Qian     1     (learn) that Canada’s population is only slightly over thirty-seven million. However, they did not anticipate seeing such an open country, and were truly     2     (amaze). They went through two wheat-growing provinces,     3     they saw a bunch of farms that covered a very large area.

After another day on the train,     4     (eventual) they were back in an urban area, the city of Winnipeg. From there, they travelled through the night, and woke up in Ontario —a land of forests and lakes. The train thundered on, through the rolling hills. The     5     ( bush) and maple trees outside their windows were red, gold, and orange, and there was frost on the ground,     6     (confirm) that autumn had arrived in Canada. Night came again, and the train turned south     7     Toronto.     8     they woke up the next morning and     9     (pull)back the curtain, they could see the wide stretch of Lake Huron—one of the four Great Lakes on Ontario’s southern border. It was not until 9: 30 a. m. that they finally reached     10     capital of Ontario, Toronto.

7 . For students or teachers who are planning an educational trip to China, or parents who want to arrange educational and meaningful things to do in China for children, here we offer travel tips on what to do and learn for educational tour in China.

▶How to make dumplings. Dumpling is the most common food in China, and it has so many fans in the world for its deliciousness, and has become a must-order food in a Chinese restaurant for foreigners. Dumpling in China is easily home-made food, and most families would make it by themselves. While having an educational trip to China, you could learn how to make dumplings.

▶How to make Chinese traditional handicrafts (手工艺品), like Chinese knots (结), and paper-cutting. Small fine Chinese traditional handicrafts are very beautiful and have blessings (祝福) for life, thus people would like to make them and put them in houses. Chinese knot is made by strings through special weaving, and it has blessings of safety, health and happiness, and you could hang it in houses or cars. Chinese paper-cutting is pasted on window glass, and used to decorate houses in Spring Festival, and it could be designed into different shapes, such as animals, flowers, and letters. You could totally get this two skills, and make Chinese knot and paper cutting to decorate houses.

▶How to make terracotta warriors (兵马俑), china, and pottery. When visiting Terracotta Warriors, you would admire its greatness and excellent skills. But please remember, you could make your own terracotta warriors and bring them home. Outside the Terracotta, there are stores for you to experience how to make terracotta warriors. Besides terracotta warriors, you could also go to experiential stores to learn how to make china and pottery.

8 . Alaska’s Mendenhall glacier (冰川) is about 20 minutes by car from Juneau, the state capital. It is one of the area’s most popular sites for tourists. But climate change has caused the ice to melt and the glacier to retreat (消退). That means it is losing more snow and ice than it gains. Researchers say the Mendenhall glacier retreated about 800 meters between 2007 and 2021.

Mendenhall pours down from rocky land between mountains and into a lake filled with icebergs. Special signs mark the glacier’s retreat, showing where the ice once stood. Experts estimate that by 2050, people will not be able to see the Mendenhall glacier from the visitor centre that was built for it. That is already the case at some other glacier visitor centres in Alaska.

The melting glacier leads to questions for the Alaskan tourism industry. How can tourism leaders help protect the glaciers for visitors to enjoy? And should there be limits on the number of tourists to the area?

Tourism is an important part of Juneau’s economy. About 1.6 million cruise ship (游轮) passengers are expected to stop in Juneau. On especially busy days, 20,000 people arrive each day to a city that has only 30,000 full-time residents.

Manoj Pillai is a cruise ship worker from India. He recently got off his ship and went to see the Mendenhall glacier. “The glacier is so beautiful now,” he said. But he wondered what it must have looked like 10 or 20 years ago and what it would look like in the following days.

People have many reasons to want to visit Alaska, and all the visitors help the state’s economy. But in Juneau, tourism officials are questioning whether the city and surrounding areas can deal with so many visitors each year. City leaders and major cruise lines have agreed to a daily five-ship limit for next year. But critics worry that may not do much to reduce tourist numbers because the ships themselves keep getting bigger. Some Juneau residents say they would like one day a week without ships.

9 . Students of United States history often learn that Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts and Jamestown in Virginia were the earliest settlements in North America. But more than 50 years earlier, the Spanish had settled in the far northeastern corner of Florida in what is now the city of St. Augustine.

The Spanish controlled St. Augustine from 1565 until 1821, except for a brief period of English rule between 1763 and 1783. St. Augustine became part of the United States in 1821when Spain turned its Florida territories, which were too costly for Spain to keep, over to the United States.

Today, St. Augustine is a small town, covering 27.7 square kilometres and has a population of about 15,000. And even with centuries of Spanish rule, it is difficult to see Spain’s influence on St. Augustine because most of the buildings from that time are long gone.

The oldest structure in St. Augustine is Castillo de San Marcos. It is a fort (要塞) built by the Spanish in 1695 to protect against English attacks.   The fort is now a national monument.

The city was once a popular place for wealthy Americans to escape the difficult winters in northern US states. In the 1870s, businessman Henry Flagler, a founder of Standard Oil, decided to build three world-class hotels for rich visitors. They were Hotel Ponce de Leon, Hotel Alcazar, and Hotel Cordova. But the rich did not stay long. Within 20 years, the rich discovered that Palm Beach on the other side of Florida had even better weather.

Today, Hotel Ponce de Leon is Flagler College and Hotel Alcazar houses city offices and a museum. Only Hotel Cordova, the smallest of the three, is still a hotel but is now called Hotel Cas a Monica.

Still, visitors remain a main source of income for the city. More than three million people visited the St. Augustine area between July 2021 and June 2022. Many stay for just the day, but the city hopes to bring in even more visitors as St. Augustine becomes more widely known as the oldest continuously occupied US city.

10 . A walk along the Beijing Central Axis, joining the dots of the Drum Tower, the busy Nanluoguxiang Lane, the Jingshan Park and the Forbidden City — this was Zhao Xianghan’s maiden city-walking journey in the spring of 2022. Since then, the 21-year-old student from the Beijing Foreign Studies University has remained a city-walk enthusiast (爱好者), believing it to be the best way to “rediscover a city”.

With the increasing different kinds of travel choices, traditional group tours can no longer satisfy people who are looking for a more personalized and differentiated travel experience and hoping to explore every part of the city in a more immersive (沉浸式的) way. It is written in a blog on social media platform WeChat, which has got more than 100,000 views. Compared with tightly-scheduled travel plans and picture-taking tours, city-walking focuses on the free, relaxing and spontaneous (自发的) experience, read a recent article by the People’s Daily.

The city-walk culture to experience urban life with no transportation means other than one’s legs and feet has made sensations on different social media platforms. According to a report from China’s lifestyle-sharing platform Xiaohongshu, in the first half of 2023, searches about city-walk increased 30-fold from the previous year.

Netizens also share their city-walking experience on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo. One post recommended a classic city-walk path from Wukang Road to Fuxing Park in Shanghai. “The path offers a look into the culture and landscape of Shanghai in different historical stages as well as its beautiful natural scenery,” it wrote.

Following his experience in Beijing, Zhao hasalso explored Wuhan, Hangzhou and other cities through city-walking tours. “City-walk is all about doing whatever you want in your own exploration of a city, and it is actually a kind of slow-paced and low-carbon lifestyle that I relate to so much,” said Zhao.