5 . “May 17, 2157

Dear diary,

Today, Tommy found a real book!...”

“What’s it about?” Margie asked.

“School.” replied Tommy, turning the yellow pages.

“Why would anyone write about school? I hope they can take my geography teacher away.”

“It’s not our school. This is the old sort that they had centuries ago.”

“Anyway, they had a teacher.” Margie said, reading the book over his shoulder.

“Sure, they had a teacher, but it wasn’t a regular teacher. It was a man.”

“A man? How could a man be a teacher?”

“Well, he just told the boys and girls things and gave them assignments and asked them questions.”

“A man isn’t smart enough.”

“Sure, he is. My father knows as much as my teacher.”

Margie wasn’t prepared to argue about that. She said, “I wouldn’t want a strange man in my house to teach me.”

Tommy laughed. “The teachers didn’t live in the house. They had a special building and all the kids went there.”

“And all the kids learned the same thing?”

“Sure, if they were the same age.”

“But my mother says a teacher has to be adjusted to fit the mind of each boy and girl it teaches and that each kid has to be taught differently.”

“If you don’t like it, you don’t have to read the book.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” Margie said quickly.

They weren’t even half-finished when Margie’s mother called, “Margie! School!”

“Not yet, Mamma.”

“Now!” said Mrs. Jones.

Margie said to Tommy, “Can I read the book some more with you after school?”

“Maybe,” Tommy said.

Margie went into the schoolroom, right next to her bedroom, and the mechanical teacher was on waiting for her.

The screen was lit up, and it said, “Please insert yesterday’s assignments in the proper slot.”

Margie was still thinking about the old schools they had when her grandfather’s grandfather was a little boy. All the kids from the whole neighborhood came, laughing and shouting in the schoolyard, sitting together in the schoolroom, going home together at the end of the day. They learned the same things, so they could help one another on the assignments and discussed them.

And the teachers were people…

8 . There was a time, Wang Fuchun remembered, when all the people on Chinese trains looked more or less the same. In the late 1970s, when he started taking his photographs, everyone seemed to wear green suits and caps. The “green-skinned” trains crept between China’s main towns and cities. On board, all was chaos. Life seemed to explode on the train as if it were a stage. He did not care what seat he had, for he was on the move.

China, too, was on the move. China was rushing to the modern world, and the trains, showed it. Steam was fading; the green-skinned trains acquired fans, then air-conditioning. Then came express trains, then high-speed rail. And the passengers, too, changed. They began to wear jeans; by the 1980s they let their hair grow. The 1990s brought in a fashion for T-shirts with favourite stars. People wanted a look that was unique; they became individuals. His book Chinese on the Train, published in 2001, caught the brief span when old and new crashed.

Many slow trains had been replaced by high-speed models, as comfortable and quiet as hotels. The aisles were clear, the windows sealed. In the ordinary seats, everyone’s nose was buried in their tablets and their phones.

Over 40 years he reckoned he had ridden on 1,000 trains and covered more than 100,000 kilometres, on every line in China. He found he could not sleep properly without the clank of rails beneath him. He took about 200,000 pictures. He liked to place two of his photographs side by side. One was of a green-skinned train in 1998, with a merry line of passengers grinning out of the window. The second picture showed a pair of newly-weds (新婚夫妇) in 2015 in front of a Harmony high-speed train, holding the character for “double happiness”. He liked the message of hope. He was proud of what China had achieved.

What could the school of 2050 look like? Undoubtedly, the biggest development we     1     (see) in recent years is the advancement of technology. On entering the classroom, biological recognition scanning will allow students to check in,     2     (simplify) the busy registration process. Teachers will be able to automatically sort out the attendance data, fill in perfect record, and manage     3     (track) the patterns for being late.

For the school of the future, there will be no need to wrestle with heavy     4     (curtain)or dust- covered blinds; we’ ll have smart glass. Windows can automatically adjust     5     (them) color to make up for external brightness, protecting both our eyes and screens.

As summer temperatures continue to rise, the general trend for 2050 is warmer, drier summers as well as warmer, wetter winters and air-conditioned classrooms,    6     will be-come the norm(常态). But they will be    7     (clean), more flexibly and sustainable(可持续的), with built-in air purifiers to remove toxins and dust from the air.

    8     2050,3D printers will have become a standard appliance, both in the home and at school. As    9     learning aid, they will have become essential, allowing teachers more flexi-bly to explain difficult concepts.

Students will be able to     10     (physical) operate objects for better information process-ing, visual perception, and cognitive(认知的) learning.

10 . By 2050 we’ll be able to send memories, emotions and feelings across the Internet.     1     Teenagers will love it. Instead of putting an emoticon (表情符号) at the end of every sentence, they will use an emotion: anger, happiness, or excitement.

I’m talking about telepathy (心灵感应), really. We’ll still communicate the traditional way.     2     Our children will wonder, What is a keyboard? We will enter the age of the “brain net”.

Medicine will develop fast, too. We will have cured certain forms of cancer, and we will have begun to treat the disease like the common cold. We’ll live with it. It will no longer be deadly.     3     Technology will help in this respect.     4     Smart toilets will perform liquid biopsies (液体活检) to discover cancer cells. Smart objects like phones will check us over automatically.

    5     By 2050 I think we’ll be able to grow many of the important organs (器官) of the body and, rather than allow the organs we’re born with to become old and weak, we’ll replace them. That’s all coming. And it doesn’t take much imagination to realise it.