阅读与填词flex · plic · struct

1On Saturday afternoon, Chen Yu was home alone when the doorbell rang. Outside stood a delivery man with a large box. “This is for Mrs Fang across the hall,” he said. “She isn't home. Can you keep it for her?” Chen Yu said yes and put the box in the kitchen.

2Twenty minutes later, he heard a strange noise. Then the box moved!

3Chen Yu opened it. Inside were twelve crabs, and they were alive! Most of them were tied up with string, but one had got free. Before he could catch it, it ran sideways across the floor and under the fridge.

4He took his phone out of his pocket and sent Mrs Fang a message: “Your package is moving!” She replied at once. “They're live crabs for my son's birthday dinner. Please keep them somewhere cool. I'll be back at six.”

5He tried a broom first, but it was too thick to fit under the fridge. In the end, he got the crab out with a clothes hanger. He wrapped it in an old towel, put it back and carried the box out to the cool balcony.

6At six, Mrs Fang knocked on the door. She counted the crabs. “Twelve,” she said, laughing. “You've really saved the dinner.” That evening, she came back with a plate of hot crabs “for the best crab catcher in the building”.

1This autumn, Grade 10 students can spend a weekend at Daoxiang Farm, about two hours from the city by bus, and help with the rice harvest.

Day 1: Saturday, 18 October

28:00 a.m. Meet at the school gate. The bus leaves at 8:15 sharp. 10:30 a.m. Arrive at the farm. A farmer will instruct you in cutting rice safely. 12:00 Lunch with the farm family. 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. Visit the drying yard and learn how rice is dried and packed. 7:00 p.m. Get-together with games and songs.

Day 2: Sunday, 19 October

36:00 a.m. Breakfast. 6:30 to 10:00 a.m. Harvest time in the fields, while it is cool. 11:30 a.m. Lunch. 1:00 p.m. The bus leaves the farm for school.

Accommodation

4You will stay in the farm's guesthouse, eight students to a room. Quilts and pillows are provided.

What to bring

5Bring long trousers, a long-sleeved cotton shirt and a water bottle. Proper clothes really matter: the edges of rice leaves can cut your arms. The farm will give everyone rain boots and a straw hat, so do not bring your own. Leave electronic games at home.

Cost and how to join

6The trip costs 260 yuan, including meals, accommodation and the bus. To join, ask a parent to reply to Ms Gao's email by Wednesday, 8 October. You will then get a confirmation email.

1The bananas in your fruit bowl have probably made a long journey. Bananas need a warm, wet climate all year round, so they grow in tropical places such as Hainan and countries near the equator. Many are shipped across the ocean.

2If you visited a banana farm, you might be surprised to see workers cutting down bunches of hard green fruit. This is not a mistake. Bananas are harvested when they are mature but not yet ripe. A ripe banana would turn soft and brown long before it reached the shops, but a green one can survive a long trip.

3After harvest, the bananas are packed into boxes and loaded onto ships with cooling systems. During the journey they are kept at about 13 to 14°C. Kept cool and away from ethylene, a gas that ripening fruit gives off, green bananas can wait for up to four weeks without ripening. Colder is not better, though. Below about 13°C, the fruit is damaged, and when it ripens later, its skin looks dull instead of bright yellow.

4When the ship arrives, the bananas go into ripening rooms, where workers add a small amount of ethylene to the air for one or two days. Inside each banana, an important change occurs: starch turns into sugar, which is why ripe bananas taste sweeter. How fast this happens depends on the temperature. In a warm room at about 18°C, the bananas can be ready in as little as four days after the gas is first added; in a cooler room at about 14°C, it takes eight to ten days.

5Not every fruit can be treated this way. Bananas, apples and avocados keep ripening after they are picked, but strawberries, grapes and pineapples will not get much sweeter once picked, so they must be left on the plant until they are ripe.

1When Mr Tang asked Lin Xiaoyu to read out the names at the Grade 9 graduation ceremony, she agreed at once. She had a clear voice, and she had announced the results at sports day twice. Then he handed her the list: 316 names, one for every student in the grade.

2Most of the names were easy. The real problem was about twenty names with characters she had never seen before, or characters that can be pronounced in more than one way. She could guess, of course. Nobody would check, and the whole ceremony would be over in an hour. Instead, for a week, she stayed behind after the last lesson each day and walked from classroom to classroom with the list, asking each of those students to confirm the pronunciation of their name.

3In Class 9, a quiet boy was sitting by the window. His name was written 李喆. The second character looks like two copies of 吉 (jí), so Xiaoyu asked, “Is it Li Ji?” He shook his head. “It's Zhé, the same sound as 哲,” he said. “Most people get it wrong, even some teachers. I stopped correcting them in my first year here.”

4Each evening, Xiaoyu wrote the pinyin above the names she had checked, in red ink. Every lunch break, she practised reading the list aloud in the empty music room until she could read it without stopping.

5On the day of the ceremony, the hall was packed with students and parents. When she reached Class 9 and said “Li Zhé” clearly into the microphone, the boy by the window looked up in surprise. He walked to the stage, took his certificate and, on his way back, gave her a small nod.

6Afterwards, his mother found Xiaoyu in the crowd. “Three years,” she said quietly. “You're the first person at this school who has got it right.”

1Every year on 23 or 24 October, Chinese calendars mark the start of Shuangjiang, or Frost's Descent. In Beijing, the name makes sense. After this date, cold air from the north arrives more often, and early mornings may bring the first frost. In Hong Kong, the same date can feel like a joke. Frost is uncommon there, and when it does form, it is usually between December and February, mostly on high ground.

2Frost's Descent is one of the twenty-four solar terms, a system developed in ancient China through long observation of the sun and the seasons. The terms divide the sun's yearly path across the sky into twenty-four equal parts of 15 degrees each, so a new term begins roughly every fifteen days. Their names describe what was happening in the sky and the fields at that time of year: Awakening of Insects, Grain Rain, White Dew, Light Snow.

3Because the terms follow the sun rather than the moon, their dates hardly move in the modern calendar. The date of the Spring Festival can vary by almost a month, from late January to late February, but Qingming, which is both a solar term and a festival, always falls on 4, 5 or 6 April. For farmers, this made the terms a reliable timetable. Old sayings tie them to work in the fields: around Qingming, for example, it is time to plant melons and beans.

4The system does have limits. It took shape in the Yellow River valley, and its names reflect the climate of central China in ancient times. In reality, they fit some places much better than others. Farther south, where winters are mild, Frost's Descent brings no frost and Light Snow brings no snow. A farmer in Guangdong who waited for the names to come true would wait a long time.

5Even so, the terms are far from forgotten. Indeed, they have survived for more than two thousand years, and in 2016 UNESCO added them to its list of the world's intangible cultural heritage. Fewer people plough or sow by them today, but many still use them to talk about the weather, choose seasonal food, or simply notice that another fifteen days have passed.

1Every Monday, the same sound comes through our classroom windows: the roar of the mower. By lunchtime, almost every lawn on campus has been cut to a few centimetres, neat and green and almost empty. I think we should mow less, and not only because the noise drowns out our English lesson.

2A short lawn looks tidy, but in terms of ecology it is close to a desert. Left alone, a lawn becomes a complex mix of grasses and small flowering plants such as clover. Cut every week, those flowers rarely get the chance to open. No flowers means no nectar, and no nectar means few bees or butterflies.

3How much impact would mowing less have? In a survey run by the British wildlife charity Plantlife, members of the public counted the flowers on their lawns. The lawns with the most flowers and nectar were those cut only once every four weeks. By the charity's estimate, such a lawn can feed about ten times as many bees as an ordinary one. Areas left even longer had a wider range of flowers, which kept providing nectar into late summer.

4There is a saving, too. Every cut costs fuel or electricity, as well as the gardener's time. One school will not save a fortune, it is true, but few changes are good for the environment and cut expenses at the same time.

5Some people will reply that long grass looks messy, that it brings insects into classrooms, and that a school needs short grass for sport. They have a point about sport: football needs a proper field, cut short. But nobody plays football beside the bike shed or on the slope behind the science building. Those areas could be cut once a month, with a neat path mown along the edge to show that the long grass is there on purpose, not because someone has forgotten it.

6Last spring, our biology teacher persuaded the school to try this in one corner behind the library. By June it was full of white clover and yellow flowers I could not name, and in the afternoons it was alive with bees. One corner is a modest start. Next spring, I would like the slope behind the science building to get the same chance.