In Ningbo city, a young woman has made the bamboo product brand of her family’s company famous around the world,    1    (help)a fair number of bamboo farmers increase their income.

Wang Xiaoqing, born in the 1990s,    2    (find) that in the US, Chinese bamboo products were popular among customers,    3    many of them carried foreign brands, despite China being the “kingdom of bamboos”. She decided to return to China and build a bamboo product brand after finishing her education abroad in 2013.

In 2018,a bamboo table    4    (produce) by the company of Wang’s family shined at the first Global Bamboo Congress.“    5    fascinates westerners is the Chinese bamboo culture and its long history. It provides a sound foundation for the global    6    (expand) of China’s bamboo industry”, Wang said. Her company is    7    (current) engaged in the design, manufacturing and sales of bamboo products. It produces over 10 million bamboo products each year, 85 percent of which     8     (sell) in the global market.

Serving    9    vice president of the entrepreneurship promotion association for returned overseas students in Ningbo city, Wang plans to contribute more to rural vitalization. “I hope that we can turn villages into more beautiful places and make villagers get     10     (rich),”Wang said.

The Chinese words for “fish” and “plenty” are homonyms. A whole fish,     1     (eat) on the eve of the lunar new year, which     2     (fall) on February 1st this year, represents a wish for abundance     3     (come). Spring rolls, with their fanciful resemblance to gold bars, represent hopes for wealth. Uncut noodles symbolize longevity.

Such     4     (custom) are not unique to the Chinese word. On the Jewish new year, Jews bake a     5     (tradition) enriched bread in a round shape to signify the cycle of life and creation. The bread is smeared with honey,     6     (symbolize) the wish for a sweet year. On New Year’s Day in America, black southerners have long eaten Hoppin’ John,     7     delicious dish of rice and black-eyed peas, coked with salt pork. The peas symbolize coins, and the greens that are usually served as well stand for dollar bill. Some people put a clean coin in the pot. Whoever gets     8     on their plate will enjoy good luck.

    9     anyone actually believes in a causal relationship between eating these foods and receiving the promised benefits or not is unclear. But people have fond memories of observing them with their parents, and want to pass them     10     to their own offspring. Good fortune, as they suggest, lies all around and is always within reach.

The name of Sorrento, a coastal town in Italy, had been put deep in my soul for a long time, mainly through hearing various    1    (performance) of the song “Come back to Sorrento”. After consideration, I finally    2    (pay) a visit to Sorrento during the summer vacation. The town was considerably popular for American weddings and traditional food. One evening, while    3    (wander) on the street, I was attracted by a house. A proud citizen told me that was the restaurant    4    Sophia Loren, the famous actress, once dined. Perhaps what impressed me most about Sorrento was their lemons. The fruit provided the raw materials for lemon soaps on sale everywhere.

I was on a train in Switzerland. The train came to a stop and the conductor’s voice over the loudspeaker     1     (deliver) a message in German, Italian, and French. I’d made the mistake of not learning any of those languages before my vacation.

Everyone started getting off the train and an old woman saw that I was     2     (confuse). She could speak some English and told me that an accident had happened on the     3     (track). She asked me where I was trying to get to, then went and talked to some workers, and came back to tell me that we’d have to get on trains three or four times to get there.

I was really glad she was heading     4     same way because it would have been impossible for me to figure it     5     on my own. So we went from one train station to the next, getting to know each other along the way.

She was really the     6     (sweet) woman. It was a 2.5-hour journey in total, and     7     we made it to the final destination, we got off and said our goodbyes. I had made it just in time to catch my train to Rome. She told me she had a train to catch as well. I asked her how much farther she had to go and     8     turned out that her home was two hours back the other way.

She had jumped from train to train and traveled the whole way just     9     (make) sure that I made it. I was in shock. A woman spent her whole day sitting on trains and taking her hours away from her home just to help out a confused tourist     10     (visit) her country.