1 . 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.

Pizza is certainly one of the world’s favourite     1     (food). But where does pizza come from? And who made it the first time?

In fact, people have been making pizza for a very long time. People     2    lived in the Stone Age cooked grains on hot rocks to make dough(生面团)—the basic ingredient of pizza. Over time, people used the dough as a plate,    3    (cover) it with various other foods. They had developed the world’s first pizza. In    4    early 16th century, European explorers had tomatoes     5    (bring) back from the Americas. Tomatoes are a standard ingredient in pizza today. At first, however, most Europeans thought they were     6    (poison).    7     (actual), only the leaves and roots are. For about 200 years, few people ate them. Slowly, people learned that tomatoes were safe    8    (eat), as well as tasty. In the early 19th century, cooks in Naples, Italy, started the tradition of putting tomatoes on baking dough. The flat bread soon became popular with poor people all over Naples. In 1830, cooks in Naples took another big step    9    pizza history—they opened the world’s first pizza restaurant. Today, up to five billion pizzas    10    (serve) every year around the world.

In the course of culture development throughout history, kite, as an art, has presented a spectacular display in     1     (vary) of forms in the blue sky. China is the birthplace of kite in the world, and Henan and Shangdong where people worship birds and the sun were the first     2     (create) kite. In Kaifeng, some ancient kites     3     (origin) called “Hao” in the past are still kept. As an old saying goes, “On the third day in the third lunar month, Hao flies up to the sky.” It is     4     time, usually bright and clean, around the Pure Brightness Day     5     people come out to fly the kite by the river. Guys fly kite and girls play swings in the spring wind.

Kite     6     (use) to be plain white without any color or pattern. The name “Hao” implies the meaning of kite. Hao means the sky and the sun. The constitution of character “Hao” also shows that the sun is at the     7     (high) end of the sky. Therefore, there is a     8     (believe) that flying kite at the time when the land starts warming up can gain access     9     sun light. The activity which was very famous in the past     10     (lose) its popularity recent days. However, its culture implication as a symbol of life remains the same at all time.

5 . The discovery of the ruined palace in the Mosul Dam reservoir on the banks of the Tigris River inspired an archeological dig that would improve understanding of the Mittani Empire, one of the least-researched empires of the ancient Near East, a team of German researchers said. “The find is one of the most important archeological discoveries in the region in recent decades,” Kurdish archeologist(考古学家) Hasan Qasim said.

The palace would have originally stood just 65 feet from the river on a terrace(梯田). A terrace wall of mud bricks was later added to make the building stable. Ivana Puljiz, an archeologist from the University of Tübingen’s Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies, describes the palace, known as Kemune, as a carefully designed building with mud-brick walls up to 2 meters (6.6 feet) thick.

The team also found wall paintings in shades of red and blue, which were probably a common feature of palaces at the time but have rarely been found preserved. “Discovering wall paintings in Kemune is an archeological sensation,” Puljiz said in a press release, “Kemune is only the second site in the region where wall paintings of the Mittani period have been discovered.”

Ten clay tablets covered in cuneiform, an ancient system of writing, were also discovered and have been sent to Germany for translation. “From the texts we hope to gain information on the inner structure of the Mitani Empire, its economic organization, and the relationship of the Mittani capital with the administrative centers in the neighboring regions,” Puljiz added.

Archeologists first became aware of the site in 2010 when water levels in the reservoir were low, but this is the first time they have been able to dig. However, the site was submerged(淹没) shortly after the dig, Puljiz said, adding“It is unclear when it will come out of water again”.

6 . “How do they walk in these things?” complains Jack Lemmon, walking with difficulty in his heels, newly dressed as his another identity Josephine, in the film “Some Like It Hot”.

High heels were, in fact, originally designed for men — and had an extremely practical purpose. Soldiers on horseback wore them in 10th-century Persia, according to Elizabeth Semmel hack of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. The heel helped keep them stable as they stood up in their stirrups ( 马镫) and took aim at enemies with bows and arrows (cowboy boots still use heels in this way). Over time, heels appeared on the shoes of male nobles across Europe. Yet from the mid-17th century, heels became associated with supposedly “feminine” qualities, and so became women’s wear. Until the mid-20th century heels were heavy, heavy things. After the Second World War, techniques and materials used in aircraft engineering were applied to shoes, creating the stiletto ( 细高跟). The high, narrow heel requires a thin metal pole, strong enough to bear the wearer’s weight yet flexible enough to allow the shoe to move.

Shoemakers have searched actively for a right heel. They aim to reduce the angle created by a high heel, which forces the few square centimeteres of the ball of your foot to bear the entire weight of your body. Joan Oloff, a podiatrist-turned-shoe-designer, makes footwear lined with memory foam ( 泡沫) to absorb the shock of each painful step. The bottom part of the shoe is crafted to support the arch of the foot and distribute the wearer’s weight more equally. Antonia Saint Dunbar, an entrepreneur, makes shoes with a heel cup and strips inside to stop the foot slipping around and getting blisters ( 水泡). And growing numbers of companies make shoes with adjustable heels: two inches for the boardroom, four for the nightclub, none for home.

However, the wisest are stepping down altogether: in 2016, for the first time, more British women bought trainers than heels.