1 . Kenny Li is waiting patiently at a coach terminus (终点站) in Kowloon on a misty and cold Hong Kong morning.

He is planning to have lunch in the city of Zhuhai, which on a normal day would take him about four hours to reach by road. But today the journey will take just over 30 minutes, because today is not a normal day.

Kenny is one of scores of passengers — including the correspondent(记者)—who are queuing for a seat on one of the first cross­border coaches to travel over the newly­opened Hong Kong­Zhuhai­Macao Bridge.

The 55 km bridge and 6.7 km undersea tunnel link Hong Kong’s Lantau island to Zhuhai on the southern coast of Guangdong Province and Macao.The mega structure is supported by three cable­stayed bridges and designed to withstand typhoon­force winds.

It took more than eight years to build and, according to ambitious plans hatched(策划)in Beijing, will help form a high­tech and economic region, namely Greater Bay Area, to rival New York, San Francisco and Tokyo bay areas.

But those lofty aims feel fairly irrelevant to the band of eager passengers who have assembled at the Kowloon coach terminus on Wednesday morning.This group wants something different from the HZMB, as it has become known. For just HK $120 for a single trip ticket, we can be part of history.

“I was the first person to get the ticket three days ago, ” says Li, as he waits patiently for the coach to arrive.

Other passengers are similarly excited.YW Cheung and his wife bought the tickets on Sunday as soon as he heard about the news about coach companies running the bridge service.

“I want to take the first coach to cross the bridge, ” he said. “We will meet friends in Zhuhai and eat out with them, and then we will go to Macao.”

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome onboard Flight SP432 from Beijing to Hong Kong. We are currently third in line for take-off and     1    to be in the air in about ten minutes. At this time, your portable electronic devices must    2     “flight mode” or    3     until an announcement     4    upon arrival. Smoking     5     throughout the flight. Thank you for your cooperation. Enjoy your flight!

…

Ladies and gentlemen, as we start our descent, please    6     your seats and tray tables are in their full upright position. Make sure your seat belts are securely     7    and all carry-on luggage    8     underneath the seats in front of you or in the overhead bins. Thank you!

5 . Should I stay or should I go? An LED device for driverless cars aims to give pedestrians at a crossing the power to communicate with cars, signaling for them to stop or drive on.

Blink, created by researchers at the Royal College of Arts and Imperial College London, turns the awkward dance of eye contact and hand gestures that happens when a car slows down while someone is waiting to cross the road into something driverless cars can understand.

Blink combines an organic light display with the windscreen and windows of a car and uses light signals to show pedestrians when the car is aware of their presence. If the car detects a pedestrian,a figure lights up.

If a pedestrian raises a hand as a stop sign, the figure turns green, directing the pedestrian to cross, and the car is prevented from moving forward. If they place a hand out to the side to signal for the car to go forward, the figure turns red and the car continues.

But George Filip at the University of Nottingham, UK, isn’t certain it is a good idea to give pedestrians control over driverless cars. He says cities could end up crowded because pedestrians keep stopping cars.

“Producers should wait until the novelty of driverless cars has worn off before creating car pedestrian communications systems,” he says.“ We need to learn how people actually communicate with autonomous cars.”

The idea is to help people feel more comfortable around driverless cars, says Blink cocreator Raunaq Bose. “It effectively gives pedestrians the car stopping powers of lollipop men and women.”

The team hasn’t yet tested the device on a driverless car, but Bose says several automotive companies have expressed interest.

    1     ( sit ) back in my seat, I can’t believe that I’m about to travel along the railway that many foreign experts claimed was “impossible”. The train has been racing along     2     ( steady ) since it left Xining.

I was one of the people     3     came from all parts of China to work on this railway. Taking years to complete the Qinghai - Tibet Railway is a record of all of our efforts to overcome     4     most difficult challenges. How     5     ( protect ) the ecosystem was among the top concerns . The first landmark     6     ( catch ) my eye is the Qingshuihe Bridge, the world’s longest bridge built over permafrost. To prevent damage to wetlands and grasslands, 675 bridges     7     ( build ) between Golmud and Lhasa.

Tanggula Station,     8     ( locate ) at over 5,000 metres above sea level, is the highest railway station in the world. To make sure we stayed healthy, several oxygen - making stations were constructed. Passing Cuona Lake, I feel a sense of pride and     9     ( achieve ). Along the lake we built a twenty - kilometre wall to protect the lake     10     construction waste.

I’m proud that we built our “impossible” railway. It truly is an extraordinary “Sky Railway”.