It is said that Chinese New Year started in ancient times,     1     the Chinese people were hounded by a mythical beast called the ‘Nian’. The Nian would visit every New Year day to gobble up all their livestock, crops and even people!

    2     (scare) and tormented, the villagers left food     3     their houses for the Nian, in the hope that it would leave them be once it had been fed.

One day, the villagers noticed that the Nian was afraid of     4     but a small child wearing     5     color red. From that day on, red lanterns, firecrackers and scrolls were used     6    (frighten) the Nian away and it never came back!

Each Chinese year    7     (name) after one of the 12 animals on the Chinese Zodiac. The zodiac is a repeating 12-year cycle and is shown as a wheel, split into12 sections, each     8     (contain) an animal. The Chinese Zodiac and its 12 animals all link to certain years of the Lunar calendar. The year 2020 was the year of the rat, 2021 was the year of the ox and 2022 the year of the tiger.

These animals all came to be ranked by a legendary race     9    they all took part in by crossing a river. The rat won the race through trickery and people who are born in the year of the rat     10     (say) to be very cunning.

From first to last, the animals finished in this order: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig.

9 . “The worst gift is a fruitcake,” said Johnny Carson once in his popular TV show. “There’s only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other.” Most Chinese have never heard of Carson, a beloved American television host who died in 2005.     1    

Mooncakes are often dense, cloyingly sweet — and, as Carson suggested, re-gifted. Chinese people usually eat them with their family members. They play a central role in celebrations of the traditional midautumn festival, a popular Chinese holiday that falls on September 10^th.     2    

Despite the outbreak of the pandemic, this year China is expected to produce 437,000 tones of mooncakes, according to iiMedia Research, a consultancy. Sales are likely to reach 24bn yuan ($3.5bn), up by 11.8% compared with last year. As most industries are gradually accustomed to functioning along with the pandemic, the mooncake industry, likewise, is now bouncing back to its pre-pandemic norms.

Most bakeries and restaurants offer mooncakes in their traditional form, with a heavy crust that puts in fillings such as red-bean paste, egg yolks or lotus seed. But expensive fillings, such as shark’s fin and edible bird’s nest, are sometimes added.     3     Some people use these luxurious mooncake packages as a clever bribing way to buy themselves up the ladder towards fame and power. That has led to new concerns over corruption and is out of step with the government’s drive to reduce inequality and control ostentatious (炫耀的) wealth.

Officials, therefore, have been inspecting mooncakes for sale in malls, supermarkets, hotels and restaurants.     4     Whoever sells a mooncake gift set for over 500 yuan must store the transaction data for 2 years in case of investigation.

10 . Remember This

There are a handful of people with uncommonly good memories. But AJ is unique. Her extraordinary memory is not for facts or figures, but for aspects of her own life. Such a memory for autobiographical detail was previously unknown and neuroscientists have coined a new term to describe her condition: hyperthymestic syndrome (超忆综合症).

It would seem initially as though having a memory like AJ’s would make life qualitatively different — and better. Our culture bombards us with new information, yet so little of it is captured and cataloged in such a way that it can be retrieved later. What would it mean to have all that otherwise lost knowledge at our fingertips? It would be a great benefit if it made us more confident and, in some fundamental sense, smarter. To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories, and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing more about the world and about oneself. How many worthwhile ideas have gone unthought because of our memory’s shortcomings?

The greatest geniuses in ancient and medieval times were described as people of superior memories, and there is a long tradition of memory training in many cultures. But over the past millennium, we’ve gradually replaced our internal memory with what psychologists refer to as external memory, a vast superstructure of technological crutches that mean we don’t have to store information in our brains. We have calendars to keep track of our schedules, books (and now the internet) to store our collective knowledge, and photographs to record our experiences. But has anything been lost in this process?

The whole point of our nervous system is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what is about to happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way. Our brains are fundamentally prediction machines, and to work they have to find order in the chaos of possible memories. Our brains receive a huge amount of data but most of this does not need to be reflected upon or remembered.

Not surprisingly, drug companies are searching for chemicals that might halt the tide of forgetting. But this raises some troubling ethical questions. Would we choose to live in a society where people have vastly better memories? In fact, what would it even mean to have a better memory? Would it mean remembering things only exactly as they happened, free from the revisions and exaggerations that our mind naturally creates? Would it mean having a memory that forgets traumas (创伤) ? Would it mean becoming AJ?