阅读与填词spect · quest · care

1At the start of Grade 10, Li Tao's English teacher, Mr Zhou, gave the class a new task. Every evening, they had to write five lines in an English diary. Mr Zhou, a former newspaper reporter, collected the diaries each morning and returned them before lunch.

2Li Tao hated the task. Nothing interesting ever happened to him, he thought. On the third evening, he wrote nothing at all and handed in a blank page.

3The next day, his diary came back with one line in red ink: “What was the first thing you saw this morning?”

4Li Tao could not remember, and that bothered him. On his way home, he looked around more carefully. By the river, an old man was feeding ducks at dusk. One small duck was always too slow to get any bread. Li Tao watched it for ten minutes.

5That night he wrote eight lines about the ducks. Mr Zhou's next question was: “Did the small duck get any bread in the end?” Li Tao didn't know. So the next evening, he went back to find out.

6The change was gradual. Mr Zhou's questions got shorter, and Li Tao's diary got longer. By the end of the term, the book was full. Li Tao bought a new one himself. On its first page, he wrote a question of his own: “What will I notice tomorrow?”

1This term, every Grade 10 student will take one elective course on Friday afternoons from 2:30 to 4:00. Please read the list below carefully before you choose.

The courses

2Animal World (Room 301): A first look at zoology. The course includes a trip to the city zoo in May. 30 places.

3People and Society (Room 204): An introduction to sociology. Students will design a questionnaire and interview people in our community. 25 places.

4School Radio (Central Building, Room 2): Learn to plan and present programmes for our school radio station. Students must pass a short interview first. 12 places.

5Five-a-side Soccer (Sports Field): Practise skills and teamwork. The course ends with a class tournament in June. 40 places.

How to choose

6Fill in the form on the back of this page. Write down a first choice and a second choice. Forms with blanks will be returned to you. Hand the form to your class teacher before 5 p.m. on March 6.

7If your first choice is already full, you will get your second choice. If both of your choices are already full, you will be given a place on Five-a-side Soccer. Places are given out in the order in which forms arrive, so don't wait until the last day!

1Imagine you are walking across a field when you notice a small box lying in the grass, tied to a parachute. A label on the side says: “If found, please return.” What you have found is a radiosonde, a weather instrument that has just fallen from about 30 kilometres above the ground.

2Every day, at the same two times, more than 800 weather stations around the world send up balloons carrying these instruments. At launch, a balloon is about 1.5 metres wide. As it rises, the air around it becomes thinner and pushes on it less, so the balloon gradually grows. Within about two hours it may be six to eight metres across. Then it bursts.

3All the way up, the radiosonde measures the temperature, the air pressure and how damp the air is, and sends these readings back to the ground by radio every second. Its position is also tracked by GPS. From the way it moves, forecasters can work out how fast the wind is blowing, and in which direction, at each height.

4Why go to all this trouble? Instruments on the ground only describe the air near the surface, but our weather is made in the whole sky above us. The computers that produce forecasts need accurate information about the air at every level, and a balloon collects it directly, layer by layer.

5When the balloon bursts, a small parachute opens and carries the radiosonde back down. It often lands more than 160 kilometres from where it started. In the United States, about 75,000 radiosondes are sent up every year, but only about one in five is ever found and returned. Each one carries a prepaid envelope, so that it can be repaired and used again.

1Every summer, I work part-time in Mrs Lu's shop in Jingdezhen, where she repairs old bowls and vases. Most customers bring in cheap teapots with broken handles. So I was curious when a stout man in a smart suit walked in one July morning, carrying something wrapped in a thick blanket.

2It was a blue-and-white vase with a long crack down one side. “It belonged to my ancestors,” he said proudly. “It's a real antique, at least 150 years old. A collector is coming to see it on Friday, and he says it could be worth a fortune once the crack is repaired. Can you fix it before then?”

3Mrs Lu inspected the vase for a long time without a word. She ran her fingers over its smooth surface. Then she studied the blue flowers through a magnifying glass. Finally, she measured several of the flowers with a ruler.

4“It's a lovely vase,” she said. “But it's not as old as you think. Look, these flowers are all exactly the same, down to the millimetre. A vase this old would have been painted by hand, and no two flowers would be quite alike. This pattern was printed by a machine, perhaps forty years ago.”

5The man's face turned red. “So it's worth nothing?”

6“Not much to a collector,” Mrs Lu said. “But I can still repair the crack, and I'll only charge you for the materials.”

7The man was silent. Then he stepped forward and touched the neck of the vase. “My grandmother used to put plum blossoms in it every Spring Festival,” he said quietly. “Fix it. I'll call the collector and tell him not to come.”

8On Friday he came back for it. When he left, he carried the vase out in the same blanket, far more carefully than he had carried it in.

1In the national library in Paris, some of the most important papers in the history of science are kept in boxes lined with lead. Anyone who wants to read them must first sign a form and put on protective clothing. The papers are the laboratory notebooks of Marie Curie, and more than a century after she wrote in them, they are still radioactive.

2The story begins in 1896, when the French scientist Henri Becquerel found that uranium gave off invisible rays that could pass through black paper. Most researchers were far more excited about X-rays, discovered only a few months earlier. Curie, a young Polish-born scientist working in Paris, chose to study the weaker uranium rays instead. She could not see them, but she could measure them. The rays let the air around them carry a tiny electric current, and a sensitive instrument built by her husband, Pierre, and his brother could detect it. Her storeroom was damp, and the damp air affected her readings.

3Her measurements showed that the more uranium a material contained, the stronger its rays were. Yet one mineral, pitchblende, gave off far more rays than its uranium could explain. Curie suspected that it held an unknown element. In 1898 she and Pierre announced not one new element but two: polonium, named after her home country, and radium. Proving that radium was real required years of hard work in an old shed. By 1902, after working through several tonnes of pitchblende, they had produced just a tenth of a gram, an amount almost too small to see. A radium industry soon grew up, but the Curies chose not to patent their method and never made a fortune from it.

4Few people yet understood how dangerous radium was. Curie carried tubes of radium in her pocket and kept them in her desk drawer. At night, she later wrote, the glowing tubes in the workroom “looked like faint, fairy lights.” In 1934 she died of a blood disease that was very likely caused by years of exposure to radiation.

5Some of that radium is still on the pages. Radium loses half of its radioactivity only after about 1,600 years, so the boxes in Paris will be handled with great care for a very long time.

1A tourist stops you outside the school gate and asks the way to the train station. You know every word you need. Yet your mind goes blank, your face turns red, and all you can do is apologize: “Sorry, my English is poor.” Many students have had this experience. They do well in exams, but they are far from fluent when they actually need to speak. I believe the problem is not a lack of knowledge. It is that we have been trained to concentrate on accuracy at the cost of fluency.

2Think about how English is usually marked in school. Every missing “-s” and every wrong tense is circled in red. Students soon learn that the safest answer is a short one, and that the safest choice in a conversation is to say nothing at all. Our expectations of ourselves rise until nothing less than perfection will do, and since perfection is impossible, we stay silent.

3Compare this with the way a small child acquires her first language. When a three-year-old says “I goed to the park”, nobody stops her and makes her say “went” instead. Her parents respond to what she means: “Oh, did you see any dogs there?” The conversation goes on. Over thousands of such conversations, her grammar gradually becomes accurate. Fluency comes first; accuracy follows.

4Some teachers worry that mistakes left uncorrected will turn into habits that are hard to break. That is a fair concern, but correcting everything on the spot is not the answer. A student who is stopped every time she opens her mouth learns only one lesson: keep it closed. Mistakes can be noted quietly and discussed after the speaker has finished.

5So here is my suggestion. In every English class, set aside ten minutes in which students talk in pairs about anything they like, and nobody corrects anybody. Save the red pen for written work. And next time a tourist asks you for directions, skip the apology. Just smile, point and say, “Go straight on, then turn left at the second traffic lights.”