The Olympics play    1     significant role in the sports calendar. The extraordinary sporting event took place in the year 776 BCE. At that time, only Greek men were allowed    2     (take) part. The modern Olympics were first held in 1896, in Athens. A Frenchman, Pierre de Coubertin,     3     dream was that the Olympics would help people of different racial origins and from different cultures live side by side in peace,     4     (bring) the Olympics back to life. In the history of the Olympics, a lot of sportspeople deserve     5     (praise). Among them the boxer Cassius Clay and the track and field athlete Jessica Ennis-Hill are     6     (extreme) excellent. Cassius Clay draw     7     (people) attention during the 1960 Rome Olympics, when he won the light heavyweight gold medal. Jessica Ennis-Hill’s story is a remarkable example of how hard work and    8     (devote) can lead to outstanding performance in sports.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics appealed    9     the whole world to join in the Olympic spirit and build a better future for humanity with the slogan “One World, One Dream”. Another     10     (history) moment for China came when Beijing successfully hosted the 2022 Winter Olympics after winning the election in 2015.

7 . Every day people joined archaeologists and artists in finding some of the year’s most dramatic discoveries. Below are some examples of 2023.

“Naughty pupils”-ancient punishment method resurfaces

Archaeologists discovered 18,000 ink-carved pieces of pottery-known as “ostraca”—at the site of Athribis early this year, and among them were hundreds of fragments(碎片)with a single symbol repeated front and back.

Those scribbles(潦草的文字)are evidence of ‘naughty “pupils” being made to write lines, according to researchers a Germany’s University of Tuebingen. The fragments also included receipts, school texts, trade information and lists of names.

Van Gogh peers out in hidden portrait

There is one more known van Gogh’s self-portrait in the world, and it was hidden behind a painting of a peasant woman. People made the discovery when they took an X-ray of one of his portraits from 1885 and discovered the artist’s own image behind layers of cardboard and glue. While X-rays often reveal how artists-changed their compositions, the full self-portrait of van Gogh came as a huge surprise, who was known to reuse canvase(画布)to save money.

Another treasure collection from Sanxingdui

The Sanxingdui archaeological site has produced thousands of relics. The latest discovery, reported by Chinese state media in June includes 3,155 objects, a turtle shell-shaped box and a sacrificial altar among them. A team has been digging six places of the site, turning up more than 13,000 objects so far. Last year, the relics they uncovered included a golden mask, ivory artifacts(手工艺品)and a jade knife. The Sanxingdui culture still remains mysterious, as it left behind no written records or human remains, though many believe it to be part of the ancient kingdom of Shu, which ruled along the upper stream of the Yangtze River until it was conquered in 316 BC.

9 . Football has found its way to the most remote corners of the globe, becoming one of the hottest topics of the day     1     . According to the International Football Association, it was the origin of football as a sport.

Cuju became popular during the Warring States Period.     2    .

During the Han Dynasty, the popularity of Cuju gradually spread from the army to the royal courts and upper classes. Football matches were often held inside the Imperial Palace. A type of court called “ju cheng” was built especially for Cuju matches.     3    .

The sport was improved during the Tang Dynasty. First of all, the feather-stuffed ball was replaced by an air filled ball with a two layered hull(外壳)     4    . One was made by setting up posts with a net between them and the other consisted of just one goal post in the middle of the field.

The popularity of the sport exploded during the Song Dynasty due to social and economic development, extending to every class in society. At that time, professional Cuju players were quite popular, and the sport began to take on a commercial edge. Cuju organizations were set up in large cities called Qi Yun She or Yuan She-now known as the earliest professional Cuju club——whose members were either Cuju lovers or professional performers.

    5    .   And the 2,000 year old sport finally faded away from about the 16th century.

10 . Before humans stored memories as zeroes and ones, we turned to digital devices of another kind — preserving knowledge on the surface of fingers and palms.

When Mogao Caves was uncovered in 1900, an aging drawing was lifted from a trove of religious manuscripts. The drawing illustrates a mnemonic (助记符号) system, a way of projecting knowledge onto the hands so it can be studied, memorized, and stored in a pocket. Around the same time this mnemonic was made, a monk named Bede halfway around the world was developing a different system of manual knowledge. These two systems are perhaps the earliest examples of manual mnemonics.

Beginning roughly twelve hundred years ago, we started using the hand itself as a portable (便携的) place of knowledge, a place to store whatever tended to slip our mental grasp. The hand became an all-purpose memory machine.

In different times and places, hands provided mnemonic maps of sound. As early as the thirteenth century, Chinese scholars were projecting syllable charts (音节图表) onto the palms and fingers. The so-called “Guidonian hand” owes its name to the eleventh-century Italian music teacher, Guido d’Arezzo. Arranging the different pitches in a scale onto the joints, he developed this technique to help students learn “unheard melody most easily and correctly”. Other thinkers in Europe, perhaps inspired by Guido, developed systems for learning the sounds of language.

Then questions arise. First, what makes the hand so popular as a mnemonic prop? A large part of the answer, surely, involves portability. The hands are always, well, ready to hand. A further advantage stems from how hand mnemonics offer both visual and kinesthetic (动觉的) routes to memory: They are both seen and felt.

It’s also hard to determine when and why hand mnemonics faded out. Hand mnemonics are still used to teach the “right-hand rule” in physics classrooms and remain especially popular in medicine. Today, we increasingly store our “thoughts” in virtual realms (领域), but we sometimes still reach for that original “digital” repository (存储库) in our pockets.