2 . It was a simple letter asking for a place to study at Scotland's oldest university which helped start a revolution in higher education. A 140-year-old letter written by a lady calling for her to be led to study medicine at St Andrews University has been discovered by researchers. Written by Sophia Jex-Blake in 1873, the seven-page document, which urged the university to allow women to study medicine at the institution, was released yesterday on International Women's Day.

The document was discovered buried in the university archives by part-time history student Lis Smith, who is completing her PhD at St Andrews Institute of Scottish Historical Research. She said, "We knew that Sophia Jex-Blake and her supporters, in their effort to open up university medical education for women, had written to the Senatus Academicus（校评议委员会）at St Andrews in an attempt to gain permission to attend classes there, but we didn't know documentary evidence existed. While searching the archives for information about the university's higher certificate for women, I was astonished to come across what must be the very letter Jex-Blake wrote."

In the letter, Sophia and her supporters offered to hire teachers or build suitable buildings for a medical school and to arrange for lectures to be delivered in the subjects not already covered at St Andrews. Although her letter was not successful, it eventually led to the establishment of the Ladies Literate in Arts at St Andrews, a distance-learning degree for women. The qualification, which ran from 1877 until the 1930s, gave women access to university education in the days before they were admitted as students. It was so popular that it survived long after women were admitted as full students to St Andrews in 1892.

Ms Jex-Blake went on to help establish the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874. She was accepted by the University of Berne, where she was awarded a medical degree in January 1877. Eventually, she moved back to Edinburgh and opened her own practice.

A clay pig     1     (find) in Lianhe Ruins in Sichuan province in 2019. It is estimated to be about 3,000 years old.     2     makes this finding unusual is its adorable appearance. The clay pig looks exactly like the green pig from The Angry Birds movie.     3     (it) cute image has left the Chinese netizens surprised and delighted, with many people joking that The Angry Birds character has traveled back in time to prehistoric days. The topic     4     (attract) 400 million views and 290,000 discussions since the pig was discovered.

    1     January 23, Wuhan went into lockdown. This was done to stop a deadly virus from spreading further across the nation. It’s one day before the Chinese New Year’s Eve and a major travel day for people     2     (plan) to return home for the holidays. This documentary is dedicated to all those who’ve been battling COVID-19     3     (tireless) to keep the epidemic at bay. Their efforts in safeguarding (保卫) humanity from the virus will always     4     (remember).

5 . Sometimes it’s hard to let go. For many British people, that can apply to institutions and objects that represent their country’s past-age-old castles, splendid homes… and red phone boxes.

Beaten first by the march of technology and lately by the terrible weather in junkyards (废品场), the phone boxes representative of an age are now making something of a comeback. Adapted in imaginative ways, many have reappeared on city streets and village greens housing tiny cafes, cellphone repair shops or even defibrillator machines (除颤器).

The original iron boxes with the round roofs first appeared in 1926. They were designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect of the Battersea Power Station in London. After becoming an important part of many British streets, the phone boxes began disappearing in the 1980s, with the rise of the mobile phone sending most of them away to the junkyards.

About that time, Tony Inglis’ engineering and transport company got the job to remove phone boxes from the streets and sell them out. But Inglis ended up buying hundreds of them himself, with the idea of repairing and selling them. He said that he had heard the calls to preserve the boxes and had seen how some of them were listed as historic buildings.

As Inglis and, later other businessmen, got to work, repurposed phone boxes began reappearing in cities and villages as people found new uses for them. Today, they are once again a familiar sight, playing roles that are often just as important for the community as their original purpose.

In rural areas, where ambulances can take a relatively long time to arrive, the phone boxes have taken on a lifesaving role. Local organizations can adopt them for l pound, and install defibrillators to help in emergencies.

Others also looked at the phone boxes and saw business opportunities. LoveFone, a company that advocates repairing cellphones rather than abandoning them, opened a mini workshop in a London phone box in 2016.

The tiny shops made economic sense, according to Robert Kerr, a founder of LoveFone. He said that one of the boxes generated around $13,500 in revenue a month and cost only about $400 to rent.

Inglis said phone boxes called to mind an age when things were built to last. “I like what they are to people, and I enjoy bringing things back,” he said.