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.

I felt lucky to go on a cultural tour to two sites of lost civilisations --- Pompeii in Italy and Loulan in China. Pompeii was founded in the 8th century BC. Then it    1    (take) over by the Romans in 89 BC. Later, a volcano erupted and covered Pompeii with ash(灰).     2    (unfortunate), many people were buried alive and so was the city. It was forgotten for many years until the 8th century when a farmer discovered a stone with writing on it. People started to dig in the area for treasures and had some of them     3    (destroy). Thus, in 1860, the area was put under government     4     (protect) so it could be preserved and studied.

Differently, Loulan,     5    (know) as China’s Pompeii in the desert(沙漠), is believed to have been gradually covered by sandstorms from AD 200     6     AD 400. Around the year 1900 the European explorer Sven Hedin discovered the     7    (ruin) of the Loulan Kingdom. Interestingly, there was     8    ancient water system that ran through the middle of the city. The desert was once a green land with huge trees, but they were cut down,     9     resulted in the city being buried by sand.

They were both important commercial(商业的) cities about 2,000 years ago.     10     was a pity that they disappeared forever.

The four countries that     1     to the United Kingdom work together in some areas. They use the same flag,     2     as the Union Jack, as well     3     share the same currency and military     4    . However, they also have some differences. For example, England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland all have different education systems and legal systems. They also have their own     5    , like their own national days and national dishes. And they even have their own football teams for competitions like the World Cup!