Friends play a very important part in everyone’s life. Friendship     1    (usual) develops during childhood. New friends are made when you progress through school. Those friends     2     you make as a student can usually last long. Friends influence your development, maturity (成熟) and sense of responsibility (责任). A familiar expression is “You can tell a lot about a person by     3    (know) who his friends are.” Friendship     4    (base) on common interests. If you like sports, most of your friends     5    (be) likely to be athletic (竞技的). If you enjoy reading and shopping, most of your friends do     6     same.

Some people call you their friends for the wrong reasons. These people are not really friends. They are superficial (表面的) only “friends” on the outside, not the inside where it counts. Superficial friends only want to be your friends if is to their advantage. True friends are there if you are rich or poor.     7     is easy to have many so-called “friends” if you are rich. By his time you should be able to separate our fiends into the real or the “phoney”.

True fiends are most special. They are also difficult     8    (find). You can consider yourself very     9    (fortune) if you have one true friend. This friend is eager to help you whenever necessary. He or she knows you would do the same for them. A true friend is someone you can talk to about any subject or problem. You and your true friend have good understanding of each other. True friends give you a great deal of     10    (encourage), take your side, and build up your confidence.

After eating a diet of bread, hamburgers and spaghetti for three     1     (month), I began to miss Chinese food. Luckily, in     2     informational city like New York, I have little difficulty     3     (find) a Chinese restaurant. However, the Chinese food, which the locals consider as their favorite, is not exactly the Chinese food I enjoy in Beijing I can always find such so-called “Chinese food” as honey chicken on the menu,     4     I actually have never even heard of it before.

One day, I went to a Chinese restaurant     5     my local friends. After the meal, each of us     6     (give) a dumpling-shaped cookie. Once I bit into it, I realized something not quite right. I found a piece of paper with a message that read, “This fortune’s no good, try another.” At first I     7     (think) it must be a trick of the restaurant. When I told this to my friends, they burst out     8     (laugh) and asked, “Are you really from China?”

But it doesn’t mean there is no place in New York where I can satisfy my stomach. I always head to China Town when I     9     (extreme) miss the food of my homeland.     10     (follow) the hot and spicy smell, I can always find the most Chinese food that excites me in the city.

3 . Learning Chinese could be one of the most important decisions you ever make. Chinese is becoming the language to learn in the 21st century. With the world’s largest population and a rapidly growing middle class, China stands to become the engine of the world’s economy in the coming years. This will make learning Chinese very important for people in many industries, or for those of us who wish to visit China or learn from its culture and history.

There is an ongoing effort to modernize the writing system and standardize the language. An increasing number of people learning Chinese are learning the Mandarin, so unless you absolutely need to learn another dialect (such as Cantonese), be sure you are studying Mandarin.

For native English speakers Chinese is one of the most difficult and most different languages to learn. The vocabulary is wholly unfamiliar and unlike anything we know. In addition, in the Chinese tone system, words are spoken in rising or falling tones, which help to distinguish between them. Furthermore, there is the Chinese writing system — a collection of thousands of individual ideograms (表意文字), or symbols, which represent a word or an idea. These ideograms have no phonetic value — that is to say, we can’t tell how the word is pronounced by how it is written. There is a method to present written Chinese in a phonetic script called pinyin. If you are learning Chinese, you’ll be working with this pinyin system, but the beauty of the traditional writing system shouldn’t be passed up. All these factors make learning Chinese difficult for us. Yet, for a determined learner, there’s always a way to overcome it.

A successful badminton match

5 . Summer Courses 2022

San Diego Seaside College is offering one and two-week English summer courses for high school students from all over the world who want to improve their English. Classes are offered at five levels, from basic to advanced. Students will be tested when they arrive and placed in the level appropriate to their language ability. Each class has a maximum of 14 students.

Tuition Fees (学费)

One-week Course (July 26–August 1): $310

Two-week Course (July 26–August 8): $620

The full payment must be received before the beginning of the courses.

Accommodations (食宿)

We provide housing, including breakfast & dinner, 7 days a week.

Single room: $250 per week

Twin room: $160 per person, per week

You should reserve your accommodations before May 15 and all the accommodation fees must be paid in full before June 15.

How to Apply

Fill out an application form and send it to us at esc@sdc.edu.

Come to our college this summer and make yourself shine at English.

7 . It was a winter morning, just a couple of weeks before Christmas 2005. While most people were warming up their cars, Trevor, my husband, had to get up early to ride his bike four kilometers away from home to work. On arrival, he parked his bike outside the back door as he usually does. After putting in 10 hours of labor, he returned to find his bike gone.

The bike, a black Kona 18 speed, was our only transport. Trevor used it to get to work, putting in 60-hour weeks to support his young family. And the bike was also used to get groceries (食品杂货), saving us from having to walk long distances from where we live.

I was so sad that someone would steal our bike that I wrote to the newspaper and told them our story. Shortly after that, several people in our area offered to help. One wonderful stranger even bought a bike, then called my husband to pick it up. Once again my husband had a way to get to and from his job. It really is an honor that a complete stranger would go out of their way for someone they have never met before.

People say that a smile can be passed from one person to another, but acts of kindness from strangers are even more so. This experience has had a spreading effect in our lives because it strengthened our faith in humanity (人性) as a whole. And it has influenced us to be more mindful of ways we, too, can share with others. No matter how big or how small, an act of kindness shows that someone cares. And the results can be everlasting.

8 . To help you understand what 5G is, and what it means to you, we’ve put together a handy guide here.

What is 5G?

    1    At its most basic level, 5G will be used to make calls, send texts, and to simply get online. But it’s going to be significantly faster than previous generations, and could open the door up to a range of exciting new uses.

    2    

5G will use new higher radio frequencies to send out data, which are less cluttered(挤了)and carry information much faster. While these higher bands(频段) are faster, they don’t carry information as far. That’s to say, smaller multiple input and output antennas (天线)will be used—promoting both signals and capacity(容量).    3    

Why is it better than 4G?

5G is expected to be faster than 4G, with some firms claiming it could be as much as 100 times quicker. The fastest 4G networks can deliver 传输)peak(峰值)download speeds of around 300 Mbit/s.    4    In real life, this could allow you to download a full HD film in less than 10 seconds!    5     It means there will be very little—if any—delay when you carry out tasks on a device(设备). While this will help improve things like gaming experiences, it could also pave(为…铺平道路)the way for safer self-driving cars—in which even a short delay could be life-saving.

Finally, 5G will have a larger capacity, meaning networks will be able to deal with several apps at once. Generally, this should mean that devices have a faster, more stable connection.

When Beethoven was only four, his father decided to make him a musician. Beethoven was made to practice     1     (play) different musical instruments hour after hour. Whenever he did not put his heart into his practice, his father would be strict     2     him.

    3     (fortune), the boy loved music very much and learnt so fast that he was able to go around and give     4     (concert) when he was only 11. When he was 17, he received high praise from Mozart,     5     great Austrian composer. A few years later, Beethoven went to Vienna     6     ( study) under Haydn, another great Austrian composer. Then he     7     (write) a great deal of music, even at his most difficult time. But after one illness, he suddenly found     8     (him) deaf at the age of 31.

However, this didn’t stop Beethoven. During his life, he composed about 30 pieces of music. It is     9     (amaze) that he wrote some of his best pieces after he became deaf, many of     10     are well known and loved all over the world.

10 . If it had not been for Fan Jinshi and her team, the world cultural heritage of Dunhuang Mogao Caves in a remote Chinese desert might have long been destroyed by sand, weather or humans.

Born in Beijing and raised in Shanghai, Fan has spent half a century fighting an uphill battle to preserve the ancient Buddhist wall paintings at Dunhuang, in Northwest China’s Gansu Province. The 1,653­-year­-old Dunhuang Mogao Caves are a huge collection of Buddhist art—more than 2,000 buddha figures and 45,000 square metres of paintings spread among 735 caves. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Archaeologist Fan was sent to Dunhuang after graduating from Peking University in 1963. While in Dunhuang, a remote village in the desert then, Fan lived in an abandoned temple. At first, she did not even dare to go out to the toilet at night. To protect the treasures from sand and dampness, Fan and other workers put doors on the caves, planted trees and started monitoring temperature and humidity in the caves. They also controlled the number of visitors.

In the late 1990s, with tourism booming nationwide since national holidays were extended, the local government planned to go public with Dunhuang Mogao Caves, but found Fan firmly in_their_way.   “The heritage would have been destroyed if it had been listed，” she said.

Dunhuang Academy has now photographed and cataloged online all the sculptures and paintings. “Despite our efforts to minimise damage, we can’t completely stop them from being eroded. But the digital database will last.”

Fan was grateful when her husband joined her in Dunhuang in 1986 after 19 years of separation. Her two sons grew up seldom with her accompany. “I have not been a good mother or wife. With regard to my family, I’m full of guilt，” she said. Fan, 81, retired four years ago as the director of Dunhuang Academy but continues her efforts as a national political adviser.