阅读与填词time · act · port

1Hao Ran was always late. Sometimes he missed the school bus. Once he even arrived at a maths exam ten minutes after it started.

2His grandpa was different. He drove big, powerful trains for thirty-five years and was never late, not even once. “A train can't wait for its driver,” he liked to say.

3On Hao Ran's fourteenth birthday, Grandpa gave him a present: his old silver watch. That night Hao Ran noticed that it was exactly five minutes fast. He started to change it, but Grandpa stopped him. “Leave it,” he said. “Trust me.”

4The next morning, Hao Ran looked at the watch during breakfast. It said 7:25, and the bus came at 7:30! He grabbed his bag and ran, and he reached the bus stop with time to spare. He knew the watch was fast, of course. But every time he looked at it, he hurried anyway. By the end of the month, he had become punctual.

5One evening, Hao Ran asked Grandpa why the watch had to stay fast. Grandpa laughed. “When I started work on the railway, I was always late too,” he said. “So the old driver who trained me set my watch five minutes fast. I never changed it back.”

6Hao Ran looked at the watch on his wrist. He wasn't going to change it back either.

1Read this before you put up your tent.

Arriving

2Check-in is from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the front gate. If you are not able to arrive before 7 p.m., please call us in advance. Each group must complete a short form when they check in. The timetable for the free bus to the town is also at the gate.

Tents

3Bring your own tent or rent one from us for ¥60 a night. Each of our tents is for three people at most. All tents must go up at the numbered tent sites, not by the lake or among the trees.

Food and water

4Cooking supplies and firewood are available at the shop next to the gate. There is plenty of free drinking water at the water points. Fires are allowed only in the metal fire rings.

Rules and safety

5Quiet hours are from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. Dogs must be kept on a lead. There is no electricity at the tent sites, but you can charge phones and portable chargers at the shop for ¥5.

6There are many bees near the lake in summer. If you are allergic to bee stings, tell us when you check in, and we will give you a tent site far from the water. In an emergency, go to the first-aid room by the gate, which is open 24 hours.

1It is a January night in Harbin, where the temperature often drops below -20°C. You take out your phone to photograph the ice sculptures. The battery shows 40%. You take two pictures, and the screen suddenly goes black. Back in your warm hotel room, you turn the phone on again, and it shows 35%. What happened?

2The answer lies inside the battery. A phone battery does not hold electricity the way a bottle holds water. Instead, it stores energy in chemicals. When you use the phone, chemical reactions inside the battery send tiny charged particles, called lithium ions, from one side of the battery to the other. This movement creates the electric current that powers the phone.

3Like most chemicals, the ones in a battery react more slowly when they are cold. The ions move more slowly too, and the battery can no longer supply power as fast as the phone needs it. When that happens, the phone reads the battery as almost empty and shuts itself down, even though plenty of energy is still stored inside.

4The good news is that this loss is only temporary. Apple, for example, says its phones are intended for use between 0°C and 35°C, and that battery life will return to normal once the phone is warm again. The ions have not gone anywhere. They just could not move properly in the cold.

5There is one mistake to avoid, though. Charging a battery below 0°C can do real damage. A thin layer of lithium metal can build up inside it, and the battery may never completely recover. So if your phone dies on a winter walk, keep it in an inside pocket, close to your body, and let it warm up before you plug it in.

1Chen Mei has worked in the lost property office at a busy metro station for nine years. Her job is to reunite people with the things they leave behind. Most days it is umbrellas, phones and keys, and most owners come back for them within a day. Once, someone even handed in a goldfish in a plastic bag.

2One Monday morning, a cleaner brought in a brown wallet. Inside was 200 yuan, but there was no ID card and no bank card. There were only three other things: a train ticket from Xi'an dated the Friday before, with the name torn off, a receipt from a noodle shop, and a child's drawing of a cat with the words “For Uncle Wei” at the bottom.

3“No name, no phone number,” said her young colleague. “Just put it on the shelf.” But something on the receipt caught Chen Mei's attention. It came from a shop two streets away, and it had been printed at 7:10 that morning: one bowl of beef noodles, to take away.

4At five to seven the next morning, Chen Mei was sitting in that noodle shop. At 7:08, a tired-looking young man came in and ordered beef noodles to take away. “Mr Wei?” she asked, and put the wallet on the counter.

5He did not count the money. He took out the drawing and held it for a long moment. “My niece drew this,” he said. “I moved here from Xi'an for work last week. The city is so big, and some nights I feel really lonely. This cat is the only piece of home I brought with me.”

6A week later, another drawing arrived at the lost property office. It showed a cat in a metro uniform, holding a brown wallet.

1If you visit a panda base in Sichuan, you may find China's national treasure doing little more than eating and sleeping. It is easy to call pandas lazy. Scientists would choose a different word: efficient.

2The panda's problem is its diet. Bamboo makes up almost everything a wild panda eats, but the plant has very little food value, and the panda's digestive system is still built like a meat-eater's. So a wild panda spends 10 to 14 hours a day eating and can get through as much as 40 kilograms of bamboo in a single day.

3Scientists had long wondered how such a large animal could live on such a poor diet. In 2015, an international team led by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported a large part of the answer. They measured the daily energy use of five pandas in captivity and three in the wild. The result was striking: on average, the pandas used only about 38 percent of the energy expected for a land mammal of their size. As one researcher pointed out, a 90-kilogram panda uses less than half the energy of a 90-kilogram human.

4How do pandas manage it? Part of the answer is behaviour: they are much less active than other bears. GPS trackers showed that the wild pandas stayed in one place for more than half of the day and, on average, travelled only about 20 metres an hour. But slow movement is not the panda's only energy-saving characteristic. Some of its organs, such as the brain and liver, are small compared with those of other bears. Its levels of thyroid hormones, which control how fast the body burns energy, are as low as those of a black bear in its winter sleep, and the team found a gene change, unique to pandas, that may help explain why.

5In other words, the panda has not failed to adapt to bamboo. It has adapted in its own way: not by getting more out of its food, but by spending as little energy as possible. A panda lying on its back for hours is not being lazy. It is living exactly the way its body is built to live.

1Every teacher knows the moment. After explaining a difficult idea, she asks, “Does everyone understand?” Forty heads nod. A few students look down at their books. Nobody says a word, and the lesson moves on. For years I was one of the nodders, and I suspect that many of the others were as lost as I was.

2Why do we pretend? Partly, of course, because we fear that others will doubt our ability. But we also tend to believe we understand things better than we actually do. In a well-known study at Yale University, people rated how well they understood everyday objects such as zips and locks. Then they were asked to explain, step by step, exactly how those objects work. After trying, nearly all of them lowered their ratings. The feeling of knowing, it turned out, was not the same as knowledge.

3In a classroom, this tendency can be costly. A small gap in understanding rarely stays small. Gaps accumulate: the idea you did not follow in September becomes the foundation for three new ideas in October. And when everyone nods, the teacher has no way to evaluate what the class has really learned. She moves on with the best of intentions, and the gap grows.

4Some will argue that encouraging constant questions slows the whole class down, and that it is better to look things up later on your own. To some extent, that is fair. Not every question needs to be asked in front of forty classmates. But I have noticed that when one student finally raises a hand and says, “Sorry, could you go over that again?”, a wave of quiet relief passes through the room. The question was rarely hers alone.

5It takes some courage to acknowledge that you are lost when everyone else seems to be following. One thing makes it easier: be exact. Instead of saying “I don't get it,” point to the step where you got lost: “I don't see why this number becomes negative.” A specific question is easier to ask and easier to answer. Often, it is the very question half the class was hoping someone else would ask.