3 . The Renaissance(文艺复兴)is generally considered to have started in Florence, Italy around the years 1350 to 1400. The start of the Renaissance also was the end of the Middle Ages.

Humanism

In the Middle Ages people thought that life was nothing but hard work and war. However, around the 1300s, the people in Florence , Italy started to think that people should be educated and that things like art, music, and science could make life better for everyone.

Florence, Italy

At the start of the Renaissance, Italy was divided up into a number of powerful city-states. One of the major city-states was Florence.

In the late 1300s, Florence had become a rich city. Wealthy businessmen had the money to hire artisans (工匠). This inspired competitions among artists and thinkers. Art began to flourish (繁荣)and new thoughts began to appear.

Petrarch and Humanism

Francesco Petrarch is often called the “Father of Humanism”. He studied poets and philosophers from Ancient Rome such as Cicero and Virgil. His ideas and poetry became an inspiration to many writers and poets throughout all of Europe as the Renaissance spread.

Giotto di Bondone

Giotto was a painter in Florence, Italy. He was the first painter to break away from the standard Byzantine style painting of the Middle Ages and try something new. Giotto is said to have started the Renaissance in art with his new style of realistic painting.

Dante

Another major contributor to the start of the Renaissance was Dante Alighieri.   He lived in Florence and wrote the Divine Comedy in the early 1300s. This book is considered to be the greatest literary work ever written in the Italian language.

New Ideas Spread

This new way of thinking and style of art quickly spread to other wealthy Italian city-states. This early part of the Renaissance is often called the Italian Renaissance. Italy would become wealthy through trade and their new ideas soon spread throughout all of Europe.

6 . Badminton was known in ancient times; an early form of the sport was played in ancient Greece. In India, the game was called “Poona” during the 18th century, and British Army officers stationed there took a competitive Indian version back to England in the 1860s, where it was played at country houses as an upper class game. Isaac Spratt, a London toy dealer, published a booklet, “Badminton Battledore — a new game” in 1860, but unfortunately no copy has survived.

The new sport was launched in 1873 at the Badminton House, Gloucestershire, owned by the Duke of Beaufort. During that time, the game’s official name became “Badminton”.

Until 1887 the sport was played in England under the rules popular in India. The Bath Badminton Club standardized the rules and made the game applicable to English ideas. The basic regulations (规则) were draw up in 1887. In 1893, the Badminton Association of England published the first set of rules according to these regulations, similar to today’s rules. They also started the All England Open Badminton Championships, the first badminton competition in the world, in 1899.

Badminton World Federation (BWF) was founded in 1934 with Canada, Denmark, England, France, the Netherlands, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, and Wales as its founding members. India joined as a member in 1936. The BWF now governs international badminton and works in cooperation with regional governing bodies to improve the sport of badminton around the world.

While originated in England, international badminton has traditionally been controlled by a few Asian countries, plus Denmark from Europe. China, Indonesia, South Korea and Malaysia are among the nations that have consistently produced world-class players in the past few decades and influenced competitions on the international level.

7 . Once Popular Sports in Ancient Capital Xi'an

The ancient capital Xi'an in Northwest China's Shaanxi province is holding the National Games. As the capital of 13 dynasties throughout Chinese history, the ancient city has never been far from sports. Starting from the Western Zhou Dynasty to the Tang Dynasty, the city has held many sports events.

Cuju: Origin of modern soccer

Cuju was an ancient Chinese competitive game involving kicking a ball through an opening into a net. As the ancestor of soccer, it first appeared in the renowned ancient Chinese historical work Zhan Guo Ce（“Strategies of the Warring States”）, which describedCuju as a form of entertainment among the general public. Later, cuju was commonly played in the army for military training purposes, during the Han Dynasty.

Jiaodi: Chinese-style wrestling

Sumo, known as Japan's “national sport”, actually started in ancient China. Sumo was called jiaodi or jiaoli in ancient times. Ancient jiaodi,a Chinese-style wrestling, was performed by athletes wearing ox horns and wrestling with each other imitating wild oxen. During the Sui and Tang dynasties, jiaodi was highly favored by emperors. In the Tang Dynasty, jiaodi was part of military training and a kind of entrainment and athletic sports.

Jiju: Ancient polo

Jiju is a sport which uses a stick to hit balls while riding on a horse, pretty similar to modern polo. It was popular in the royal court and among common people in the Tang Dynasty. There were many fields for playing polo in the court and it was also a major military training program in the army. In the Tang Dynasty capital, there were formal polo courts, such as the stadium pavilion in Chang' an palace.

Archery

During ancient times, the origin of archery was closely related with hunting and defense. Ancient archery was not only an athletic event,a military training program, and an entertainment activity, but also part of education. As early as in Zhou Dynasty, the archery was listed as one of the six practical disciplines, also called the Six Arts, becoming an important and competitive form.

8 . Balmoral Castle

Balmoral Castle, which started in the late 1300s. is the private residence of the Queen. It has remained a favourite residence for the Queen and her family during August and September.

Some 85,000 people visit Balmoral each year, and the estate maintains and restores footpaths throughout the property for visiting hikers.

Windsor Castle

Windsor Castle is an official residence of The Queen and the largest occupied castle in the world. The castle was the inspiration for the Royal family’s surname.

William the Conqueror built the castle in 1080 and it has remained a royal palace for over 900 years. Windsor is the oldest royal home in Britain and, covering 13 acres, it’s the largest castle in the world that is still lived in.

Each year, the Order of the Garter ceremony is held at Windsor Castle, and the Queen occasionally hosts a “dine and sleeps”, for politicians and public figures.

The Palace of Holyroodhouse

Founded as a monastery (修道院）in 1128, the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh is The Queen’s official residence in Scotland. It was also the home of many Scottish royals.

The Queen holds receptions, state functions, and investitures(授职仪式）within its walls, and each year during Holyrood Week Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip invite 8» 000 Scottish guests to the Garden Party.

St. James Palace

St. James’s Palace was built between 1531 and 1536 and was home of kings and queens of England for over 300 years. The palace was built by Henry VU on the site of the Hospital of St. James, Westminster. After the destruction by fire of the Palace of Whitehall in 1698, all monarchs until William W lived at St. James's for part of the time.

9 . Chinese paleontologists have identified at least two new species of massive dinosaurs that once wandered the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwestern China some 130 million years ago.

The newly-revealed bones belonged to a group of long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs that include titanosaurs, according to the study published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports.     1    . And the notable species like the Patagotitan mayorum estimated to be as long as 37 meters long.

The two dinosaurs revealed in Thursday’s study are the first of their kind of be found in the Turpan-Hami Basin in Xinjiang. Their discovered adds to the evidence that the region hosted rich biodiversity during the Cretaceous period that ended some 66 million years ago, according to the researchers.

Wang Xiaolin, the study’s lead author, told Sixth Tone that they unearthed the fossils between 2008 and 2016 in the vast areas of the Gobi Desert in the Turpan-Hami Basin.     2    .

“There are just so many pterosaur fossils in the region, even their eggs and embryos,” said Wang, a paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleo-anthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “    3    . So we didn’t have the time to deal with the dinosaur bones discovered at the same time.”

Although a large desert now, Wang assumed that the basin was once home to a huge lake and rich vegetation, supporting billions of prehistoric animals.

One of the dinosaurs mentioned in the study, although incomplete, is thought to be of a large animal stretching over 20 meters. Researchers have named it Silutitan sinensis, after the ancient Silk Road trade route that crossed Xinjiang.

    4    . The Hamititan is estimated to be at least 17 meters long, researchers said.

“It’s very difficult to find complete fossils of large dinosaurs,” Wang said, explaining that the Gobi Desert’s environment weathers fossils quickly.

Researchers also found several other dinosaur bones in the region, but the specimens offered scant information by which to be identified, according to die study.