阅读与填词way · work · guard

1My cousin Lili got married last May, and I had an important job at her wedding. During the tea ceremony, the bride and bridegroom would pour tea for the elders of the family. I had to stand next to them and carry the cups on a tray.

2I was nervous. Everyone in my family knows that I am clumsy. At Grandpa's birthday party last year, I dropped the whole cake on the floor.

3The ceremony began. Lili poured the first cup and handed it to Grandma with both hands. Then I stepped forward with the next cup. My foot caught on the edge of the carpet, and the cup slid off the tray. It broke into pieces on the floor.

4The room went quiet. My face turned red, and I felt so embarrassed that I wanted to run away. I glanced at Lili. Was she angry?

5Then Grandma laughed and clapped her hands. “Sui sui ping an!” she said loudly. Soon all the guests were laughing and saying the same words.

6Later, Grandma explained it to me. In Chinese, the word for “broken” sounds just like the “sui” in “sui sui ping an”. So when something breaks on a happy day, people turn it into a wish: “Peace every year!”

7That evening, Lili gave me a red envelope. Inside was a note: “Thanks for the best wish of the day.”

1Do you enjoy solving problems with your hands? Then join the Egg Drop Challenge, the main event of this year's Science Week at Hongxing High School (November 9–13).

The challenge

2Your aim is simple: keep a raw egg safe. Each team will build a small package for its egg. On Friday afternoon, November 13, all the packages will be dropped from the third floor of the Science Building. If the egg does not break, the team passes. You may only use paper, drinking straws and rubber bands. The package, with the egg inside, must not weigh more than 100 grams.

Who can join

3Students in Grades 10 and 11. Each team must have two or three members, and each student may join only one team.

How to sign up

4Fill in the form on the school website before 5 p.m. on November 6. Every team will get two eggs for practice.

Awards

5Every team that passes will get a certificate. The three passing teams with the lightest packages will also win awards. Prizes range from science books to tickets for the City Science Museum.

Please note

6The event will not be cancelled because of rain. If it rains on Friday, the drop will take place on the following Monday at the same time. For more information, visit Mr Zhao in the Science Office (Room 204).

1After an evening of online classes and homework on a computer, many students notice the same problems: their eyes feel dry and tired, their heads ache, and the words on the screen seem to blur. Eye doctors call this digital eye strain.

2Because its symptoms are similar to those of ordinary tiredness, many people do not connect them with screens at first. According to the American Optometric Association, the most common ones are tired eyes, headaches, blurred vision, dry eyes, and pain in the neck and shoulders.

3Why do screens cause so much trouble? Part of the explanation lies in blinking. Each time we blink, a thin layer of tears spreads across the eye and keeps it wet. Normally we blink about 15 times a minute, but when we stare at a screen, we blink only about half as often, so our eyes dry out. Glare is another cause. Light from a window or a lamp bounces off the glass of the screen, and our eyes have to work harder to see the words behind it.

4Fortunately, most of these problems are easy to avoid. Eye doctors suggest the 20-20-20 rule: every 20 minutes, look at something about 20 feet (six metres) away for at least 20 seconds. They also advise placing the screen slightly below eye level, at an angle that lets you look a little downward, and turning it so that light from windows does not fall directly on it.

5For most people, the symptoms fade soon after they stop using a screen. If yours do not, it may be time to visit an eye doctor. Sometimes the real cause is a vision problem that has never been corrected, and a new pair of glasses is all you need.

1For two weeks, Zhou Yi had thought of nothing but the class barbecue. As class monitor, she had arranged everything herself. She had booked a spot in Lakeview Park, collected thirty yuan from each classmate and made a shopping list so long that her mum laughed at it. “It's a barbecue,” Mum said, “not a wedding.”

2On Saturday morning, Zhou Yi woke up to the sound of pouring rain. At eight o'clock, a message arrived from the park: all barbecue bookings for the day had been cancelled. The meat and vegetables were already in the fridge, and the class money had been spent.

3She sat on her bed and stared at her phone. Thirty-eight classmates were waiting to hear from her, and she had no idea what to say.

4Then a message popped up from Ma Tao, the quietest boy in the class. “My parents' dumpling shop is closed on Saturday mornings,” he wrote. “The kitchen is big. Bring the food, and let's make dumplings instead.”

5By ten o'clock, the little shop was full of wet, noisy teenagers. Ma Tao's mother showed them how to chop the meat, mix it with the vegetables and fold each dumpling into a neat half-moon. Most of them were hopeless at first. Their dumplings were too fat or too flat, and some fell open in the boiling water. Mrs Ma just laughed and showed them again.

6At noon they pushed three tables together and ate whatever came out of the pot: pretty dumplings, ugly ones and a few that were mostly soup.

7That evening, Zhou Yi posted a photo in the class group with a message: “Sorry about the barbecue, everyone.” The first reply came from Ma Tao: “What barbecue?” Next term, when the class voted on where to hold the end-of-term party, nobody suggested the park.

1Every school year, some parents make a deal with their children: an A in maths earns a new phone, and every book finished earns ten yuan. It seems an obvious way to get results. After all, adults are paid for their work, so why not children? I used to think the same way. I no longer do.

2My doubts began with a well-known study published in 1973. American psychologists chose a group of children aged three to five who already loved drawing with coloured markers. Some of the children were promised a “Good Player Award”, a card with a gold star and a red ribbon, if they drew pictures. Others received the same award as a surprise after they had finished, and a third group got nothing. One to two weeks later, the markers were put out again during free play, with no award on offer. The children who had drawn for the promised award now spent about half as much time drawing as the children in the other two groups.

3The researchers' explanation was that once drawing had become a way to earn a prize, the children began to regard it as work rather than play. When the prize disappeared, so did much of their reason to draw. Interestingly, the surprise award did no harm. It was the promise of a reward, made before the activity, that changed how the children saw it.

4I am not saying that all rewards are harmful. For a dull job that nobody would do for fun, such as cleaning out the garage, paying a child a little may be perfectly reasonable: there is no love of the activity to lose. And children clearly benefit from sincere praise for real effort, which can inspire them to keep going.

5But reading is not cleaning a garage. If our aim is to raise children who read for the rest of their lives, paying them by the book sends exactly the wrong message: that reading is a job you do only when someone makes it worth your while. So keep the money in your wallet. Fill the house with books, talk about the stories at dinner, and let children discover for themselves why people stay up late to finish a chapter.

1In January 1915, the ship Endurance became trapped in the sea ice of the Weddell Sea, off the coast of Antarctica. On board were Ernest Shackleton and his crew of 27 men. Shackleton had planned to land on the coast and lead a small team across the whole continent. Instead, they could only wait as the ice carried the ship slowly north. Through the long polar winter they lived on board, playing football on the ice and hoping that spring would set them free.

2It never did. As the ice pressed against the ship, her wooden sides began to crack, and on 27 October 1915 Shackleton gave the order to abandon ship. The men dragged their tents, food and three lifeboats onto the ice. To save weight, Shackleton told them they could each keep only two pounds — less than a kilogram — of personal belongings.

3There was one surprising exception. Leonard Hussey's banjo weighed about twelve pounds, yet Shackleton insisted that it come along, calling it “vital mental medicine”. He understood that cold and hunger were not the only dangers. Men who lost hope would stop fighting to stay alive. Over the months that followed, Hussey's music helped keep everyone's spirits up.

4On 21 November the crushed ship finally sank. The men drifted on the ice for more than four months before they took to the lifeboats and reached Elephant Island, a rocky place far from the routes that ships usually took. There was little hope that anyone would find them there. So, in a desperate attempt to get help, Shackleton and five others set out in a small lifeboat for South Georgia, an island where they knew they would find people. Their voyage of about 1,300 kilometres across some of the roughest seas on Earth took more than two weeks.

5On 30 August 1916, a rescue ship finally reached the 22 men still waiting on Elephant Island. All 28 men had survived. In March 2022, researchers found the wreck of the Endurance about 3,000 metres below the surface of the Weddell Sea, still in remarkably good condition.