1 . A huge fire broke out on 2 September 1666 in London. The fire, known as the Great Fire of London, was the worst fire in the history of London. It burned down more than three quarters of the old city.

The fire started in the very early hours of Sunday morning in the house of the king’s baker. A strong wind blew the fire from the baker’s house into a small hotel next door. Then it spread quickly into Thames Street. That was the beginning.

At that time, most of the buildings in London were made of wood, so it was easy for the fire to spread quickly. By eight o’clock, three hundred houses were on fire. By Monday, nearly a kilometre of the city was burning along the Thames River. On Tuesday, which was considered the worst day, the fire destroyed many well-known buildings, including the old St Paul’s Cathedral.

The fire burned until finally hundreds of buildings in the path of the fire were destroyed to create a firebreak. The fire then died out eventually with nothing left to burn.

4 . The big screen is never short of films about World WarⅡ. When Nazi Germany is featured in these films, cruel Nazi officers and brutal concentration camps most often represent it. But the new Hollywood movie Valkyrie tells a different story, “a chapter of German history which is little known abroad”, according to the German Cultural Minister Bernd Neumann.

Valkyrie is based on a true incident that took place in 1944. Colonel(陆军上校) Stauffenberg had been a loyal soldier for his entire military career. However, after losing an eye, a hand, and three fingers in an Allied bombing, he reached breaking point. The destruction that his country had brought to its European neighbors had become too terrible for the colonel to bear in silence. He hoped that someone would find a way to stop Adolf Hitler, one of the most evil tyrants the world has ever known. Realizing that time was running out, he decided that he must take action himself and joined the German resistance. These men drew up Operation Valkyrie, a plot to assassinate Hitler and to overthrow his Nazi government from the inside. This plot is what the film is named after and focuses on.

The Hollywood star Tom Cruise plays the lead role. “This was a very challenging film to make. We carried a huge responsibility to correctly portray history,” Cruise said.

However, the production has drawn criticism for lacking depth and for simplifying the motives behind the plot.

5 . Despite being First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy usually kept her distance from politics. Yet in 1963, while still recovering from the death of her prematurely born son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, she agreed to join her husband John F. Kennedy on a trip to Texas. Unfortunately, in Dallas on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was shot while sitting next to Jackie, and the pink suit she was wearing became covered in her husband’s blood.

Jackie tightly held her husband on the way to Parkland Memorial Hospital, attempting to tend to his badly hurt head. John’s vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, had been in a separate vehicle in the same procession, and he and his wife Lady Bird proceeded to the hospital as well. Lady Bird later described how she saw, “in the president’s car, a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms lying on the back seat. I think it was Mrs. Kennedy, lying over the President’s body.” She even kneeled on the blood-covered floor to pray. However, the time of his death was marked as 1 p.m.

Later, Jackie found a change of clothes waiting for her. She wiped off her face, but would later recall for a magazine writer: “One second later, I thought, ‘Why did I wash the blood off?’ I should have left it there; let them see what they’ve done.”

With this in mind, Jackie decided not to change her clothes, even as she agreed to be present as Johnson took the oath (誓词) of office. When offered the option to descend from the plane without being photographed, she again insisted, “We’ll go out the regular way. I want them to see what they have done.”

The former first lady had always understood the power of imagery to convey messages. By showing up in her bloody outfit, she reminded everyone there, and everyone who would later see photos from the ceremony of the murdered president.

Some of the most quoted quotes by experts in IT history have turned out to be ironic (讽刺的).

1899

“Everything that can be invented has already been invented.” Charles H. Duell, director of the U.S. Patent Office believed it     1     (would be, will be) a future with no more inventions. A century later, the world is telling us that there     2     (are, were) still many things to be invented, and many things that were once thought impossible are becoming true.

1943

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,” said Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM. Thomas Watson, referring to a time when the world needed only five mainframe computers to satisfy all computing requirements,     3     (had, would have) no idea that the demands on data processing (数据处理)     4     (became, would become) so great. Time has changed, and now is the age of the PC. For the world market capacity (容量) for PCs, we now have to use “billion” after numbers.

1949

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” This was from Popular Mechanics, talking about the future of science.

The technology has completely been beyond people’s imagination, and the computer     5     (had long said, has long said) goodbye to its huge weight. Today’s microprocessor chips (微处理器芯片) are used in mobile phones, digital cameras and other hand-held electronic devices. Some experts predicted that one day nanotechnology     6     (would make, will make) chips as thin as a hair.

The surprising history of computing over the past years has taught us not to take experts’ comments too seriously. Anyone can make mistakes, and our lives will eventually become a history of limitations. When humans predicted confidently that something     7     (would happen, was happening) in the future, they tended to forget they     8     (would fail, have failed) to learn the lessons of history.

8 . On June 6, World War II veterans (老兵) and other visitors gathered in Normandy for the 78th D-Day anniversary (周年纪念日) in memory of soldiers who gave up their lives to bring peace and freedom to French people. Several thousand people joined a ceremony at the American Cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach in the French town of Colleville-sur-Mer.

US Air Force planes flew over the American Cemetery during the ceremony, in the presence of Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is the final resting place of 9,386 soldiers who died fighting on D-Day and in the operations that followed.

Ray Wallace, then 97, a former paratrooper, was among the World War II veterans attending the ceremony in the French town of Colleville-sur-Mer. According to him, on D-Day, his plane was hit and caught fire forcing him to jump earlier than expected. He landed 20 miles away from the town of Sainte-Mère-Église, the first French village to be liberated from Nazi occupation. Less than a month later, he was caught by the Germans. He was finally liberated after 10 months and returned to the U. S. Still, Wallace thought he was “lucky”. “I remember the good friends that I lost there. So, it’s a little emotional,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “I guess you can say I’m proud of what I did but I didn’t do that much.”

On D-Day, a large number of soldiers landed on the beaches, carried by 7,000 boats. On that single day, 4,414 soldiers lost their lives, 2,501 of whom were Americans. More than 5,000 were wounded. On the German side, several thousand were killed or wounded.

Wallace, who was using a wheelchair, was among about 20 World War II veterans who opened the parade (游行) of military vehicles on the eve of the D-Day anniversary in Sainte-Mère-Église with cheers from thousands of people, in a joyful atmosphere. He did not hide his pleasure, happily waving to the crowd as parents explained the stories of World War II heroes to their children. Many history lovers, wearing military clothes from the period, also came to the stage and celebrated the event.

10 . About 12,000 years ago — long before the famous Roswell UFO crash made headlines in America — an alien (外星人的) spaceship crashed in China. And their descendants are still living in a faraway Chinese village today! That is the mind-bending claim made in the new book Out of Time and Place, a collection of reports from the files of Fate, a magazine edited by Terry O’Neill.

The story first came to light in 1937 when an expedition led by Chi Pu-Tei came across a group of caves deep in the Bayan-Kara-Ula Mountains. In the caves were found strange-looking skeletons with big heads and small, slender bodies —closely matching typical descriptions of space aliens. The explorers also uncovered 716 mysterious stone discs with strange hieroglyphics (象形文字) on them.

In Qinghai province, where the mountains lie, ancient stories tell of small, skinny beings with oversize heads who came from the sky long long ago. And to this day, locals live in fear of attack from strange-looking creatures from above.

And there’s more. In 1947, British scientist Karyl Robin-Evans led an expedition into the mountains and discovered a group of dwarfs (侏儒) who called themselves the Droza. “They told him that their ancestors came from a planet in the Sirius (天狼星) system and crashed in this mountain area a long time ago,” writes Hausdorf, “Many of them were killed, but survivors adapted themselves to living on this rough planet far from home.”

For decades, Robin-Evans’ claims were dismissed as nonsense. But in 1995, the Associated Press reported that in the region a village named Huilong had been recently discovered — populated by 120 dwarfs ranging from 3-foot-10 to 2-foot-1 tall. Hausdorf asks, “Could these people be the last living descendants of the survivors of the legendary UFO crash — the Chinese Roswell?”