阅读与填词form · vis · hand

1Lily was born left-handed. At home, this was never a problem. But every Spring Festival, the whole family had dinner at Grandma's long table, and Lily's left elbow kept knocking against her cousin Haoran's right arm.

2This year, her aunt had an idea. “Why don't you switch hands?” she said. “It's easy. Just try.” Lily tried. The chopsticks felt strange in her right hand, and a piece of fish slipped and dropped into her soup. Everyone laughed, and Lily's face turned red.

3After the holiday, she decided to practise. For a whole week, she ate and wrote with her right hand. Her handwriting became terrible. Her maths teacher could not even read her homework.

4On Sunday, Grandpa came to visit. He watched her for a while without a word. Then he took the pen in his left hand and wrote her name. The characters were beautiful.

5“I was born left-handed, too,” he said. “At school, my teacher made me use my right hand, so I have written with it for sixty years. But at home, I always practised with my left hand. It still remembers.”

6At the next Spring Festival dinner, Grandpa gave Lily the seat at the end of the table. Nobody sat on her left, and nobody asked her to use her right hand again.

1Have you ever wanted to build a robot hand or make your own compass? Then come to Hands-On Saturday at Oakwood Science Museum on May 18! Students aged 10 to 16 are welcome.

Activities

2Robot Hands (9:30–11:00 a.m., ages 12–16): Build a hand out of paper and string, and then see if it can grab a paper cup.

3Make a Compass (9:30–11:00 a.m. or 2:00–3:30 p.m., ages 10–16): Turn a sewing needle into a compass and use it to find your way around the museum garden.

4Fingerprint Lab (2:00–3:30 p.m., ages 10–16): Take your own fingerprints and find out why even twins do not have the same ones. Be careful: the ink gets everywhere!

How to join

5Entry is free, but places are limited. To register, fill in the form on our website by May 15. Each student can choose up to two activities. Students under 12 must come with an adult.

Good to know

6We provide all the materials, so there is no need to bring anything. Please wear old clothes. The museum is fully accessible to wheelchair users. For more information, call 6688 5120.

1Have you ever walked out of a dark cinema into bright sunshine and sneezed? If so, you are not alone. Informal surveys suggest that somewhere between one in ten and one in three people sneeze when they suddenly meet strong light. It is common enough to have a scientific name: the photic sneeze reflex.

2People have wondered about it for a very long time. More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek thinker Aristotle asked why the heat of the sun makes us sneeze. He believed that the sun warmed the nose and caused the sneeze. In the early 1600s, the English thinker Francis Bacon tested this idea. He stood in the sun with his eyes closed. He could feel the heat on his face, but he did not sneeze. The sneeze came only when his eyes were open. It was evident that light, not heat, was the key.

3But why would light cause a sneeze? Nobody knows for sure. One popular idea involves two nerves that lie close together in the head. One carries visual information from the eyes to the brain. The other carries signals from the face and nose. When strong light suddenly hits the eyes, the signal may be so powerful that some of it spills over into the nearby nerve. The brain then mistakes it for something in the nose and responds with a sneeze.

4Whatever the cause, the reflex runs in families. If one of your parents has it, there is about a 50 percent chance that you were born with it too.

5For most people, a sunny sneeze is harmless, even a little funny. For pilots, however, even a second with their eyes closed could be dangerous. Luckily, a small study found a simple answer: wearing sunglasses stopped the sneezes.

1Chen Xi had practised the piece for two months. At the school New Year concert, she would perform it on the violin, with her best friend Zhou Yan on the piano. As they walked on stage, Chen Xi saw their music teacher, Mr Liu, in the front row. He gave her a thumbs-up. Her hands were cold, but she managed a smile.

2The performance began well. Halfway through, however, there was a sharp sound. The thinnest string on her violin had broken, and it hung loose in the air. Chen Xi stopped playing, and three hundred faces looked up at her.

3For a moment, she could not move. But Zhou Yan did not stop. She played the same few lines again and again, as if nothing had happened, giving her friend time. In the front row, Mr Liu made a small gesture. He held up his left hand as if it were on an invisible violin and slowly moved it closer to his chin.

4Chen Xi understood at once. A month earlier, Mr Liu had made her play a whole song on just one string. “Just for fun,” he had said. Now she slid her hand higher up the neck of the violin and found the missing notes on the next string. They sounded a little darker than usual, but they were all there.

5When the last note ended, the hall remained quiet for a second. Then the applause came, loud and long. Chen Xi's knees were still shaking as she walked off the stage.

6Backstage, she thanked Mr Liu. He only smiled. “Next month,” he said, “we'll practise with two strings missing.”

1In 1812, a three-year-old boy was playing in his father's workshop in Coupvray, a small town east of Paris. His father made things out of leather, and the boy picked up an awl, a sharp tool for making holes, to copy him. The tool slipped and struck him in the eye. An infection soon spread to his other eye, and by the age of five, Louis Braille was completely blind.

2When he was ten, Louis won a place at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, one of the first schools for blind children in the world. The school's books were printed in large raised letters that readers traced with their fingers. It was a slow process. A reader had to feel each letter separately and hold it in mind until a word was complete. The books were also heavy and expensive to make, and writing in this way was almost impossible.

3In 1821, Louis learned about a system devised by Charles Barbier, a captain in the French army. Barbier had wanted soldiers to pass messages in the dark without speaking or lighting a candle, so he used patterns of raised dots pressed into thick paper. Each sign could have up to twelve dots. The army found it too difficult to use, but Barbier believed it might help blind people.

4Louis saw its value at once, and also its problems. A sign of twelve dots was too tall to feel with a single fingertip, so readers had to move their fingers up and down. By 1824, when he was only fifteen, he had made a breakthrough. He reduced the twelve dots to six, arranged in two columns of three. A six-dot cell was small enough to fit under one fingertip, so a reader could feel a whole letter in a single touch. With these six dots, Louis found 63 different patterns.

5Louis published his system in 1829 and later became a teacher at the school. Yet in his lifetime it remained unofficial there. The school only adopted it in 1854, two years after his death. From there it spread across France and around the world. Today braille gives blind readers access to books, maps and even the buttons in lifts.

1When I was eight, the playground near my home had a metal slide so tall that I was terrified the first time I climbed it. It took me a whole summer to go down it without holding on to the sides. Last month I went back. The tall slide was gone. In its place stood a plastic one no higher than my shoulder, above a floor of soft rubber. Even the swings had been changed: their chains were shorter, so they could not go very high.

2I understand why. No parent wants to see a child with a broken arm, and nobody wants to be responsible for an accident. But in trying to remove every danger, we may be taking away something children need: the chance to learn to manage fear for themselves.

3Ellen Sandseter, a psychologist in Norway who has watched children at play in several countries, points out that children approach risk step by step. Very few of them, she says, try to climb to the highest point the first time they climb. They go a little higher each time, and each small success shows them what they can do. There is even evidence that this kind of play may protect children from fear. A long-term study in New Zealand found that children who had been hurt in falls between the ages of five and nine were less likely, not more likely, to be afraid of heights at eighteen.

4Critics will say that injuries are real, and they are right. A broken bone is no joke, and some dangers have no place on a playground at all: a loose board, a broken step, a nail sticking out of a post. Children cannot see these dangers coming, so adults must remove them. A tall slide is different. A child can see exactly how high it is and decide whether to try it today or next week.

5So the next time your little brother wants to climb to the top of the climbing frame, try not to grab his arm straight away. Stand close, keep your hands ready, and let him find out how high he can go.