You may think you cannot live through summer without air conditioners. But in ancient China, hand fans were almost the only help for people       1     (drive) the heat away.

Chinese people started to use hand fans over 2,000 years ago. The fans came       2     different shapes, such as round and square and they were made from various materials. Palm leaf fans were cheap and easy to make. Feather fans showed the owner’s high status. Sandalwood fans     3     (send) out a fragrant smell.

    4     (late), hand fans became more than something     5     could cool you down. They developed into art works, in which tuanshan and zheshan were the most common.

Shaped like     6     full moon, tuanshan was usually made of silk. They had beautiful embroidery(刺绣) featuring birds and flowers on them. Females, especially     7    (woman) in the royal palace,liked to use them. Poets in ancient China often compared a woman’s abandoned fate to tuanshan. A poet wrote during the Qing Dynasty, “If only life were as     8     (beauty) as when we first met, why should the autumn wind bother to pity deserted painted fans?”

Meanwhile, men, especially the literati (文人), used zheshan. The literati liked them because they could paint and write poems on them.     9     was a way for them to show off their talent in literature, painting and calligraphy. Almost anything could     10       (paint) on zheshan, but the most popular ones usually featured landscapes.

In China, the history of people planting and using bamboo dates back to as far as 7, 000 years ago. As early as the Shang Dynasty, bamboo was used for food, clothing, housing, transportation, musical instruments and even weapons. Since then it     1     (use) in many aspects of people’s daily lives.

The     2     (apply) of bamboo in science and technology is thrilling. In 51 BC, Li Bing, in Sichuan,     3     (lead) the local people in building the Dujiang Weirs, the first irrigation (灌溉) network in the world, in     4     bamboo played an important role. The world’s oldest water pipe was also made of bamboo. During the Han Dynasty, the people in Sichuan     5     (success) sank a 1600-metre-deep well with thick bamboo ropes. This technology did not spread to Europe     6     the 19th century, and it was by using the technology     7     the Americans drilled the first oil well in Pennsylvania in 1859.

In Chinese culture, bamboo is well-known as     8     of the “four gentlemen” in plants. To many distinguished men, bamboo is a symbol of goodness and honesty. It is always closely     9     (connect) with people of positive spirits. Bamboo culture always plays a positive role in encouraging people to hold on when     10     (face) tough situations.