2 . In 2016, Luncz and her colleagues realized that Brazilian capuchins (卷尾猴) produced stone flakes (小薄片) from the rocks they used to pound (击打) food and dig without necessarily meaning to. It made the team wonder whether the artefacts (人工制品) really reflected any technical planning by those early humans.

Since then, Luncz and her colleagues have been studying tool use in long-tailed macaques (猕猴) on the islands of Phang Nga Bay in Thailand (泰国的攀牙湾). The team set up motion-activated cameras (动作感应摄像头) to study the behaviour of the wild macaques. During 100 hours of footage (镜头)，the team witnessed monkeys accidentally creating flakes as they struck nuts between two stones and then leaving the broken stones to find new, whole stones.

This is almost exactly what the capuchins did in the earlier study. The team then compared 1119 stone flakes from the macaques’ nut-cracking sites with artefacts found at hominin (古人类) sites in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. The monkeys’ thin, flat, wide stone flakes—ranging from 1.3 to 7.9 centimetres in length—were “almost the same” with flakes that were associated with ancient humans up to 3.3 million years ago, says Tomos Proffitt, another member of the research team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

The findings could challenge the current understanding of early stone technology, says Proffitt. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all of the old material is not intentional,” he says. “But what our study shows is that we can’t be 100 per cent certain that every single flake in the early Stone Age archaeological record was intentionally made. There may be a component within that record that’s unintentional.”

Tea drinking has been a traditional custom among native Beijingers. Teahouses formed in the Tang Dynasty,took off in the Song Dynasty and were recorded in YuanQu    1     ( write) in the Yuan Dynasty. As society developed,private teahouses, tea bars and teahouses with diverse features    2     ( create). Teahouses often served as centers of social interaction where people came to discuss personal affairs or even    3     ( politics) issues.

There are different types of teahouses including Pure Teahouses, Teahouses for Storytelling, Chess Teouses,etc. In Pure Teahouses, people do nothing but drink tea, most of    4    are unoccupied persons or the young from the rich family. Teahouses for Storyelling,    5    ( normal) in the afternoon and night, are welcomed by people with an interest in novels, pingshu and storytelling. Chess Teahouses are popular among those interested in playing chess.In the Qing Dynasty, there were also Chess Teahouses that served scholars and    6    (official) near Shichahai.

The tea culture has regained its popularity after a long term of dcline. In recent years teahouses with local characteristics    7     ( appear) in Beijing with the performance of Beijing Opera, or the combination of tea culture, folk customs    8    arts.

Laoshe Teahouse, for example, is widely famous in and beyond China    9    a cultural symbol in Beijing, where a large number of tea fans gather,    10    (enjoy) its rich tea culture.

4 . The Curious Origins of the Dollar Sign

The dollar sign is among the world’s most powerful symbols and represents far more than U.S. currency. Yet despite its common appearance in various languages, the origins of the dollar sign remain far from clear. And the dollar sign was in use before the United State was born.

In 1520, the Kingdom of Bohemia began making coins using silver from a mine in Joachimsthal —which is roughly translated from German into English as Joachim’s valley. Logically, the coin was named the Joachimsthaler, which was then shortened to Thaler, the word that proceeded to spread around the world. It was the Dutch variation, the Daler, that made its way across the Atlantic in the pockets and on the tongues of early immigrants, and today’s American-English pronunciation of the word “dollar” still has its echoes. However, it is no straightforward answer to the question of where the dollar sign ($) sprang from.

One of the origin stories links it back to the Bohemian “Thaler”, which featured a huge snake on Christian cross (基督教十字架). It was an indirect reference to the story of Moses, who was a prophet in the Bible, winding a bronze snake around a pole in order to cure people who’d been bitten. The dollar, so it’s said, originated from that sign.

Yet the most widely accepted theory in fact involves coins used in Spain, and it goes like this: In the colonies, trade between Spanish Americans and English Americans was lively, and the PESO was legal money in the U.S. until 1857. It was often shortened to the initial “P” with an “S” hovering beside and a little above it. Gradually, thanks to the careless and untidy way of writing by time-pressed merchants, that “P” combined with the “S” and lost its curve, leaving the vertical stroke like a stake down the center of the “S”.

Wuxi city,     1    (know) as the “Home of the Erhu”, is also     2     birthplace of many erhu masters.

    3    (wander) around Wuxi, you can often hear the melodious sound often erhu, which was     4    (origin) called Huqin, a musical instrument of ethnic groups in northern China. It     5    (date) a thousand years back to the Tang Dynasty. With the development of opera and operatic arts, the huqin was renamed the erhu,     6     gradually spread throughout China as a bowed string instrument.

The erhu plays a leading role in many Chinese folk orchestras, just as the violin does in Western orchestras. The erhu and the violin also have similar structures, both composed     7     a body, a bridge, strings and a separate bow.

Up to now, as an oriental folk instrument, erhu     8    (inspire) more and more people with its collision with western musical instruments. In many international concerts, it can be seen playing on the same stage with     9    (vary) western instruments, such as piano, violin and guitar.     10     this interaction brings are not only the new possibilities for music creation, but also richer auditory enjoyment to the audience. If you are interested, you might as well find a piece of erhu music and listen to it.

Oracle bones (甲骨) were believed to be first unearthed in Anyang, once called Yin, the capital of the Shang Dynasty. Villagers then had little idea of what they had found and sold the bones to drugstores as     1    (tradition) Chinese medicines. The medicines gained the notice of historians. The discovery     2    (follow) by a series of archaeological excavations (挖掘).

Over the past 120 years, major systematic excavations have been carried     3    . A relic site museum has been built at the Yinxu site,     4    (recognize) as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Discovering the oracle bones and inscriptions helped explore the cultures of Xia and Shang dynasties,     5     trace the origins of the Chinese civilization.

The content of the inscriptions emphasizes the respect for ancestors and other core Chinese values     6     have been passed on until today. It     7    (appeal) to not only scholars but also those outside the circles of archaeology. Chen Nan, a professor at Tsinghua University’s Academy of Arts and Design, has energized the life of these ancient symbols by     8    (feature) them in the biaoqingbao (emoticons) he developed.

“They represent the     9    (clue) to our cultural lineage (传承), ” Chen says. “I feel     10     our responsibility to communicate about the charm of the primitive inscription with the younger generations and foreigners.”

The earliest written evidence of a soccer-like game comes from China. During the second and third centuries B.C., Chinese soldiers took part in an activity that involved kicking a ball into a small net. Historians think the game was a skill-building exercise for the soldiers.

In ancient Greece and Rome, teams of up to 27 players played a soccer-type game. In Britain hundreds of years later, during the thirteenth century A.D., whole villages played against each other. With hundreds of people playing, these games were both long and rough. Kicking, punching, and biting were common and allowed.

In 1331, English King Edward II passed a law in an attempt to put a stop to the popular but violent game. The king of Scotland spoke against the game a hundred years later. Queen Elizabeth I, during the late 1500s, passed a law that called for a week of jail for anyone caught playing “football”, or soccer, as we call it. But the game could not be stopped.

Two hundred and fifty years later, people in Britain were still playing a game we would recognize as soccer. A well-known English college Eton developed a set of rules in 1815. A number of other colleges soon agreed to use the same rules, and those schools played against each other. Finally, 50 years later, a formal association was formed to oversee the playing of the game and its rules. In 1869, a rule against handling the ball with the hands transformed the game into the sport of soccer that is wildly popular all around the world.

8 . Personally, there is nothing I love more than asking “stupid” questions, especially the ones that have no right answers. I remember once asking some kids what time it was, at home, in Singapore, and finally on the Moon. After a long giggling silence, finally a shy girl ventured (试探地说) to say that it was “every time” followed by an energetic Einstein who shouted it was “no time”. Both kids shared that week’s Noble Prize, because no humans live in that distant world and time is a human construct.

As a matter of fact, we are all good at asking questions by nature, but sadly as we age, we get accustomed to the world around us and take things for granted. We became more results-oriented (注重结果的) and concentrate our efforts on success. If something is working, don’t fix it or worry about the cause; just relax and go with the flow. Conventional wisdom may work well, but that does not mean it is always right. Throughout history, it has been those who have questioned conventional wisdom and those who have challenged our common-sense notions of the world that have been the ones to have ushered in (开) the major advancements of human civilization.

In 500 BC, the ancient Greeks wondered whether the Earth was round because sailors on the sea had noticed that the farther south they went, the more different stars they saw in the sky. Why was the sky changing? Nearly 2,000 years later, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei became interested in this question and ended up demonstrating the “crazy” concept of heliocentrism (日心说), in which the Sun lies at the center of the universe while the Earth revolves (旋转) around it at 30 kilometers per second. But if the Earth is spinning around so quickly, why aren’t we being thrown off of the surface of the planet? The answer to this question would not end up being revealed to us for another century.

People like routine, but past performance is no guarantee of future results. While those who challenge conventional wisdom tend to be subjected to abuse, the progress of humankind would have otherwise been impossible without these persistent people and their “stupid”questions.

10 . You may have seen them standing alone in a farmer’s field. With thin arms and a strange smile, they stand guard over the crops day and night.     1    

Scarecrows have been around since at least the time of the ancient Egyptians. Back then, farmers covered wooden frames with nets to protect wheat fields.     2     Around 2500 BCE, the Greeks made the first human-like scarecrows. They added a face which was similar to that of the Greek god Priapus.     3     The Romans later copied this design and brought it to Europe.

Centuries after the Romans marched through Europe, people around the world were creating their own scarecrows. In Japan, scarecrows were shaped like people in raincoats and straw hats. In Germany, scarecrows were made to look like witches.

    4     In the oldest book of Japanese literature, The Kojiki, a scarecrow named Kuebiko appears. Though he can’t walk, Kuebiko is a kind of all-knowing god. In the mid-19th century, writer Nathaniel Hawthorne brought scarecrows into literature with the short story “Feathertop.” In this tale, a witch who prays to the Devil brings a scarecrow to life.

Then there is the most famous scarecrow. His name is simply “Scarecrow,” and he appears in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In the children’s novel, Scarecrow joins Dorothy, Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion on an adventure to meet the wizard of the magical land of Oz.     5    

Aside from these examples, scarecrows have featured in rock songs and as characters in comic books. On Halloween, they are brought out as scary decorations. Both practical and creepy, scarecrows continue to capture our imagination.