In recent years, shared vegetable plots (地块) have been appearing in Shanghai’s suburban districts as more white-collar workers turn to farming to relax and escape the pressures of city life.

Among these individuals     1    (be) Yang Rui, who, on weekends, drives his family from their home in downtown to the All-Happy City,     2     shared ecological farm in Minhang, where he has rented a 20-square-meter vegetable plot for 1,600 yuan per year. The family tends carrots, lettuce and other vegetables they have planted. When they aren’t around during the week,     3    (professional) take over the work and perform whatever chores     4    (need).

This farm has about 200 members, some of     5     even raise chickens and ducks that wander in the fields.

    6    (found) by Chen Yougui in October, the shared farm has an area of 13.33 hectares     7     comes with shared vegetable plots and leisure areas. According to Chen, the monitoring system     8    (cover) the entire farmland allows members to view their vegetables and fields remotely through their phones. The farm also uses technology to ensure that the chickens and ducks raised     9     customers don’t go missing or end up in someone else’s plot — each animal comes with its own QR code.

Chen notes that many of his customers are parents who rent plots     10    (primary) to teach their kids about science and nature and how farming works.

Winter in Quebec, Canada is very different from that in England. When I first arrived, I was     1     (slight) worried about the winter. I couldn’t imagine     2     it would be like to have 3 metres of snow, and what on earth I was going to do when the weather was so bad. However, here, life goes on as usual. Trains and buses continue, and people socialise and even better.     3     number of new sports take over.

For me, skiing means downhill skiing, in ski resorts (度假胜地), with ski lifts taking you up the mountain. Before     4     (arrive), I did not know there were in fact different     5     (type) of skiing. Imagine a sunny but cold day, and you have taken a chairlift to the top of a mountain     6     (cover) with snow. An hour seems like a few minutes, as you carve your way down a run to the bottom, and then do it all again. It is my new favourite sport.

Ice skating on a frozen (结冰的) lake is another     7     (excite) sport for me. Once I could hardly stand on a pair of ice skates, but now I am able to make laps (圈) of the 3 km route on the lake,     8     is frozen during January and February.

Indeed having 3 metres of snow was a bit frightening. School     9     (cancel) once because of a big snowstorm, but I was     10     busy enjoying all these cool sports that winter finished too soon!

Experts on child development agree that children learn and develop through everyday experiences. Because food and cooking are such fundamental components of our day-to-day lives,     1     (introduce) cooking to children at a young age is essential to their experiential learning.

Children like playing make-believe and enjoy inventing a variety of characters while    2    (absorb) in imaginative play. Cooking games are an excellent way to stimulate imaginative play. Children can act out real-life situations and behaviors through pretend play and improve     3    (they) in creativity. Furthermore, pretend play in the kitchen helps kids learn things like problem-solving, creative thinking, visual     4    (recognize), and so on.

Various cooking games for children that are available online     5    (be) more than just a fun pastime activity. They provide a number of educational benefits as well. Free online cooking games urge kids    6    (try) new things and think outside the box by letting them experiment    7    ingredients, recipes, and preparation methods.    8    (addition), many free cooking games online require kids to perform various kitchen tasks or read the recipes and then follow the instructive tips. When kids take the initiative and finish a task, they feel proud of     9    they have undertaken. Playing free cooking games online can also help kids learn essential skills, teach them    10     to be safe in the kitchen, and increase their general knowledge about the world.

For the public, cultural activities are gradually becoming necessities of     1     (they) lives. For Liu Ziqi,     2     eight-year-old museum lover in Beijing, this winter vacation has proved a rather busy one, as she made a to-go list for newly opened exhibitions in the Chinese capital. The museums are changing their forms these days     3     (attract) more people.

During the seven-day Spring Festival holiday     4     (start) from Jan. 21, museums in Beijing received 1.01 million visits, up 34 percent year on year. Like Liu, more and more young people, some not     5     (necessary) big fans of museums, chose to spend some of their leisure time in a museum.

“There were more special exhibitions and more joint exhibitions, especially the one     6     the National Museum and the Palace Museum,” Liu said,     7     she was asked about the most notable change during her latest museum visit.

A     8     (profession) museum tour guide for over 10 years, Bai Xuesong observed that more visitors were expecting specialized introductions to the ins and outs behind the cultural relics. “Visitors     9     (begin) asking questions, and sometimes we couldn’t give an answer,” Bai said, adding that this indicated a change in the relationship between tour     10     (guide) and visitors — from “teaching” to communication and learning.

Good morning, and welcome to your tour of Bob and Betty’s Ice Cream Factory. Here you’ll learn a lot about how ice cream     1     (make)! Let’s begin.

In this room, cream will be taken out of our large refrigerators first. Then the cream     2     (put) into this machine. While the cream is mixing, sugar will be poured ( 倒 ) slowly into the cream by our ice cream makers.

Today we are making banana nut ice cream. Right now, different kinds of nuts are being chopped (切碎) in a large chopper. It’s a very expensive machine, but it chops nuts very quickly.

When the nuts and bananas are ready, they     3     (add) to the sugar and cream in a special machine that     4     (invent) by Betty a few years ago.

The ice cream     5     (keep) in a large cold room until it     6     (send) by trucks all over the country.

That is the end of our tour. Thank you for visiting our factory, and now we’d like to invite you to go to our tasting room, where our delicious ice cream can     7     (enjoy) by all our visitors.

Last Sunday morning, my classmates and I participated in an orange-picking activity     1     a local farm.

Well known for its organic farming, the farm     2     (locate)at the foot of a hill 20 kilometers from our city. It is home to a     3     (vary)of fruit trees, whose branches were laden with lovely fruits. We got there at 8: 30 am and began to work as soon as we arrived. We wore gloves and carried baskets with us. Some put ladders against the trees to pick golden orange while others were busy     4     (deliver)oranges and packing them into boxes.

Bathed in the warm sunshine, we were talking and laughing     5     (happy)while working. At the break time, the farmer invited us     6     (taste)the lovely oranges we picked. They were the best fruits     7     we had ever eaten. At 11:30 pm we stopped working and     8     (head)back home.

We felt     9     (please)although all of us were tired when we got home.     10     provided us with a precious opportunity to get close to nature and learn how to harvest fruits. We also realized the value of labor.