2 . Like reading? Interested in Chinese classical novels? Have a look at the following four books which are we known to most Chinese as Four Masterpieces.

The Water Margin

The Water Margin, also known as All Men Are Brothers in Pearl Buck’s translation, Shui Hu Zhuan in Chinese, is along chapter novel with the Song Jiang Uprising in the late Northern Song Dynasty as the main background and type of heroic legend. It is an immortal (不朽的) novel and has inspired many storytellers. The author of the novel is generally regarded as Shi Nai’an (1296~1371).

Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Romance of the Three Kingdoms is the first full-length historical romance novel in China. Its author is Luo Guan zhong (about 1330~1400), a famous novelist in the late Yuan Dynasty and the early Ming Dynasty. Characters such as Liu Bei, Cao Cao, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei and Zhuge Liang have become household names among the Chinese.

Journey to the West

Journey to the West is the first romantic chapter novel about gods and devils in ancient China. There are 100 copies of Journey to the Westin the existing Ming Publications without the author’s signature. Wu Yuxuan, a scholar of the Qing Dynasty, first proposed that the author of Journey to the West was Wu Cheng’en (1500~1582) of the Ming Dynasty.

The Dream of the Red Chamber

The Dream of the Red Chamber, also called The Story of the Stone, is said to be the greatest masterpiece of Chinese fiction. It is generally believed to be written by Cao Xueqin (about 1715~1763), a writer of the Qing Dynasty. With hundreds of persons and their stories, the story is very complex but also very interesting for its encyclopedic character(百科全书式的人物).

3 . A Look at Four of the World-famous Colleges

University College London, England, AUnited Kingdom

This university was founded with the intent of opening education equally and to all. In 1878, University College London began admitting women using the same admission standards men were held to. The college was the first in the United Kingdom to accept students from any class or religion.

Tuition (学费) for each student comes in at $31,000. This price does include fees for housing, food, travel expenses and insurance.

University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

It opened in 1853 and is known for its outstanding research and teaching programs. Research at the university in the 1970s led to a cochlear implant (人工耳蜗), giving more than 200,000 patients worldwide hearing.

Parents of native students expect to pay $24,500 for the first term’s tuition and another $19,500 for room and board in residential housing.

University of Cambridge, England, United Kingdom

Records of the university reach back to 1209 when the area was an ancient Roman trading post, making it the second oldest university in the UK. Cambridge currently has 21,000 students with around 1,300 of those coming from 65 different countries.

Tuition for the bachelor programs like engineering reaches $31,000.

Sarah Lawrence College, New York, United States

It is known for a diverse student body coming from 53 different countries. The teacher/student ratio (比例) and personalized courses of study attract students from the United States and abroad.

Undergraduates carrying 30 credits will pay $51,196 for tuition. The cost to attend Sarah Lawrence may seem prohibitive to many, but a degree from this honoured college can open many doors for graduates.

4 . In 2017, Yazd, a city in the desert of central Iran, was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Yazd has long been a focal point for creative inventiveness. It is home to an underground refrigeration structure called yakchat   and an underground irrigation system called qanats. In addition, the city has the wind catcher, a cooling architectural element that has been used for thousands of years. And it has the most wind catchers in the world.

These remarkable towers are a common sight standing above the buildings of Yazd. There are two main forces that drive the air through and down into the structures: the incoming wind and the change in buoyancy (浮力) of air. First，as air is caught by the opening of a wind catcher, it is led down to the house below. Then the air flows throughout the inside of the building, sometimes over underground pools of water for further cooling. Eventually, warmed air will   rise and leave the building through another tower or opening.

Some of the earliest wind-catching technology came from Egypt 3,300 years ago. Here, buildings had thick walls, few windows facing the sun, an opening to take in air and an exit opening on the other side known as malqaf architecture. Iran’s wind-catching technology is widely considered to have added structural improvements to allow for better cooling-such as typically combining it with its existing irrigation system to help to cool the air down before releasing it throughout the home.

The structures, which require no electricity to power them, are now drawing scientists back to the desert city to see what role they could play in keeping us cool in a rapidly heating world. Parham Kheirkhah Sangdeh has extensively studied the scientific application and surrounding culture of wind catchers in contemporary architecture at Ilam   University in Iran. He hopes to see Iran’s wind catchers updated to add energy-efficient cooling to existing buildings. “People need to keep an eye on the past and understand why energy conservation is important,” he says.

5 . Today, the Vikings are mostly known as violent pirates (海盗). But they were also traders. At their height, the Vikings attacked, settled or traded on four continents.

All of their travel, trade and warfare were made possible by Viking ships, which were far more advanced than anything else sailing around Europe at the time. The most famous, and most feared, was the drekar. At sea, these ships could move quickly thanks to their large sails. The hulls (船体) of the ships were shallow and fat, which made them ride high in the water. The ships were also light enough that they could be carried from one body of water to another over short sections of land. This greatly extended their range.

But Viking ships weren’t just built for warfare. Another type, called the knarr, had cargo (货物) holds built in the hull. One such cargo ship was capable of carrying 24 tons. The knarrs would have looked similar to the drekars except they were longer, fatter and taller. These were the backbones of the Viking empire, which they used to carry everything from gold coins to spices and fine fabrics.

Both the drekar and the knarr were built using the same method. Traditionally, oceangoing ships have used a keel (龙骨), shaped like the fin of a fish. The keel sinks into the water below the hull. It helps the ship maintain a straight line through the water and counters the force of the wind against the sail, which otherwise might blow the ship over. Viking ships had no deep keel. Instead, they were built fat enough to carry lots of soldiers or pieces of cargo whose weight helped keep the ship planted in the water.

Viking ships were so advanced for their time that they often were the biggest, tallest and most striking ships many people had ever seen. A monk at the St. Omar Monastery, in Franco, wrote this description of a royal Viking ship in 1013.

“On one side lions molded in gold were to be seen on the ships, on the other birds on the tops of the poles indicated by their movements the winds as they blew…”

The Vikings built a wealthy empire through trade as well as robbery and used their wealth to continuously improve their ships.