Liu Wenwen is the first suona player to study for a doctor’s degree in China. On social media platforms, Liu’s name is often followed by a video of her    1    (perform) at a concert in Sydney. The audience    2    (impress) by the unfamiliar instrument and the music.

Both of Liu’s parents’ families     3    (play) suona for generations. But it takes time and hard work    4    (become) a musician. “To avoid disturbing the neighbors, my parents would take me to a park to practice at 4 a.m. everyday.” Her primary school classmates laughed at her,    5    (say) her whole family was engaged only in “weddings and funerals”. These are the two major     6    (occasion) where the instrument is played in China.

She found suona music beautiful    7    the first time in 2008, when entering Shanghai Conservatory of Music to learn the instrument systematically from Professor Liu Ying,    8    top player. “The music played by Professor Liu was amazing,    9    was quite different from what I’d heard before,” she said.

Speaking of the popular video, Liu said, “I felt my hard work paid off. I trained for over 20 years,    10    (probable) just to win cheers for traditional Chinese music on the international stage.”

2 . Do our musical preferences say something about our personality or how we view relation- ships with others? According to new research, they just may.

In the study, 469 participants listed their favorite songs about falling in love, breaking up, parental love or anything else related to relationships. Then, they filled out questionnaires to define their attachment (依恋) style in relationships — whether they feel confident,   anxious and avoidant.

Researchers matched words of these songs with the questionnaires. According to the analysis, participants who see themselves as worthy of love preferred songs with sweet themes, while those who tend to worry liked songs expressing more sad themes, and those who often drop out of social relationships chose songs with avoidant themes.

According to the lead author, Ravin Alaei from the University of Toronto, this is the first study that examines how song words play a role in music preferences. “One reason why people turn to music is that it can embody what they think, feel, and do in relationships and song words especially matter for that,” he said. “People enjoy having their feelings and thoughts spoken back to them.”

To extend their findings, the researchers pulled together 823 most popular songs from 1946 to 2015. After rating how much these songs’ words showed different attachment themes, they compared songs from 1946 to 1965 with those from 1990 to 2015. They found more recent popular songs were more likely to have avoidant attachment words or themes than older popular songs. Alaei believes this can show a trend (趋势) toward more avoidance in relation-ships — Perhaps because people are less connected than they used to be. “We’ve become more individualistic, and we feel lonelier than people used to several decades ago,” he said.

What does this mean? It may mean that we can reflect (沉思) on our interpersonal relationships with people around us when we want to listen to a kind of music over and over again.

More than 27 million Chinese people watched the first online concert of the Irish pop band Westlife on Friday night. The concert held in London was live streamed on WeChat Channels,     1    (impact) the Chinese audience with hit songs such as Seasons in the Sun and My love, as well as one of the most popular Chinese song     2    stirred the emotion for Chinese fans.

In addition     3     their good Mandarin pronunciation in the Chinese song, the band shared their experiences of visiting China     4    (react) to the excited audience through their interactions.

For the first time, the band performed the Chinese song, The Road to Ordinary. Up to now the video of this song    5    (play) on the band's official WeChat Channels account over 72 million times , with the figure       6    (gradual) rising.

The choice of The Road to Ordinary was a joint decision     7    (make) by Westlife and the WeChat team, taking into consideration     8    series of factors including the song's popularity, the band's temperament(气质) and the context of cultural exchange in the grand global    9     (perform).

“Music is all about feelings, and we pass this feelings to others and make people happy.” Westlife extended thanks to Chinese fans after the    10    (fascinate) online concert and posted on its official Sina Weibo account.

8 . Music can make us feel happy or peaceful, energize us to dance, or move us to tears. As an orchestra (交响乐) conductor, Amy Andersson brings music to life, allowing people to experience the feelings that music can bring

She started to sing in the school Andersson, fell in love with music as a child. choirs in the first grade, began studying the piano at 7, and started composing at 9. Her school had no orchestra, but she bought many recordings of great orchestras and conductors and listened to them for hours every day.

During a concert, the audience see the back of a conductor and the arm movements she or he makes to lead the orchestra. What the audience do not see is all the work the conductor has done beforehand to prepare for the performance

Months before a concert, Andersson studies a piece of music by playing it on the piano. She decides how she wants each part to sound. Should it be fast or slow? Loud or soft? She reads about the composer's life and reviews historical events that have influenced the composer. Her goal is to recreate the music as the composer wanted.

While conducting, Andersson uses her whole body to express how the music should sound and feel. Her movements are dramatic (生动的) when the music is energetic, gentle and peaceful.

Each instrument makes a special sound. Although it is not necessary for conductors to know how to play all the instruments, they must be familiar with the sound of each instrument. To help young musicians understand how to play the music, Andersson will tell them to imagine a ship being hit by waves or a calm, leisurely (悠闲) walk.

Andersson has seen the audience at her concerts applauding (鼓掌) together in rhythm. She i happy to know that she and the musicians have brought joy into ordinary days.

The erhu is a traditional Chinese musical instrument. It is the most popular of the huqin family.

The modern erhu developed from xiqin, which was played by many ethnic minorities (少数民族) during the Tang Dynasty. In the Song Dynasty,     1     (musician) began to use this type of huqin     2     (perform) different kinds of music, and it became quite a popular instrument.     3     the rise of some forms of folk art, the art of erhu developed quickly during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. It became     4     important accompanying instrument in     5     (variety) folk music. Now it is used in both traditional and modern music, such as in pop, rock and jazz. It has even become a solo (独奏的) instrument. One of the most famous musical pieces played on the erhu     6     (be) The Moon Over a Fountain.

As the erhu was     7     (main) played by common people and the playing skills were passed down by oral tradition, there are few written records about the erhu that can     8     (find). To study the history and the     9     (develop) of the erhu, historians usually turn to ancient paintings. The earliest pictures of this instrument were discovered in Yulin Caves and Eastern Thousand Buddha Caves in Gansu Province,     10     five erhu pictures were discovered.