阅读与填词memor · dict · strict

1Every student in our city knows the voice. It is calm and clear, and a little slow. “Now you have five seconds to read Question 1.” We still hear it in every English listening test.

2Last Saturday, I went into a small flower shop in our district to buy a plant for our biology project. A grey-haired woman stood behind the counter. “Good morning,” she said. “Can I help you?”

3I nearly dropped my bag. I knew that voice! I just stood there with my mouth open, and she looked at me, a little confused.

4“Are you the listening test lady?” I asked at last. She laughed. The voice belonged to Mrs Lin, a retired English teacher. For twenty years, she recorded the instructions for our city's tests. “You're the third student who has recognised me this month,” she said.

5We had a long conversation. I told her I had got full marks for listening last term. “Congratulations!” she said. Then I told her that the last question was always the hardest. “I know,” she said. “The man in that one speaks far too fast. I only read the instructions!”

6When I left, she gave me an extra flower for free. Then she smiled and said in that famous voice, “Now you have five seconds to say thank you.”

1Thank you for buying the S2 desk lamp. Please read this guide before you use it. The box includes the lamp, a USB cable and this guide.

Turning it on and changing colour

2Touch the round button on the base once to turn the light on, and once more to turn it off. To change the colour (warm yellow, natural white or cool white), touch the button twice quickly.

Brightness

3Slide your finger along the touch control next to the button to adjust the brightness. There are five levels. Press the small AUTO button for Auto mode, and the lamp will change its brightness to match the sunlight in your room.

Focus mode

4Press the F button to start Focus mode. After 25 minutes, the light becomes a little darker to tell you to take a five-minute break.

Battery

5A full charge takes about three hours. It lasts up to 40 hours at the lowest level, but only 6 hours at the highest. The small light on the back indicates how much power is left. It is white when more than half is left and orange when less than half is left. When it starts to flash, charge the lamp soon.

Safety

6Do not look straight into the light, and keep the lamp away from water. For the health of your eyes, keep the room lights on when you study at night.

1In 2006, John Marzluff, a scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, set out to test whether wild crows could recognise individual human faces. Wearing a rubber caveman mask, he caught seven crows on the university campus, put a ring on each bird's leg and let them go.

2Then the real test began. Marzluff and his team walked around the campus, sometimes in the caveman mask and sometimes in a second mask with an ordinary-looking face. When they wore the caveman mask, crows flew close, called loudly and refused to leave them alone. Scientists call this behaviour “scolding”. The second mask, by contrast, was largely ignored.

3What surprised the team was what happened over the following years. The scolding did not die down; it spread. Crows that had never been caught joined in, including birds more than a kilometre away. Young crows seemed to become aware of the danger by watching their parents. On one walk, 47 of the 53 crows Marzluff met scolded him. The number of angry birds reached its highest level in 2013.

4The team concluded that crows not only remember a dangerous face but also pass the warning on to others. For a bird that lives close to people, this makes sense. A city crow needs to know which humans feed it and which might harm it, and it gains a great deal from what the rest of its group has learned.

5Even so, the memory did not last forever. In September 2023, seventeen years after the experiment began, Marzluff walked across the campus in the caveman mask once again. This time, not a single crow scolded him.

1For ten months I saved every yuan I could. By March I had 4,000 yuan, just enough for the new Kestrel 12. The phone was advertised everywhere: on buses, in the metro, even on the back of my maths book, where a friend had stuck an advertisement as a joke. “Faster. Brighter. Smarter,” it said.

2The salesman at the phone shop was a grey-haired man called Mr Hu. Before showing me anything, he asked to see my old phone. He looked through it for a minute: no games, and hundreds of photos of school events. “School newspaper?” he asked. I nodded. My mum had made sure there were no games on it. Mr Hu nodded with satisfaction.

3He walked past the shiny new phones and took a box from a lower shelf. “Last year's version,” he said. “Same camera, same battery. It's on sale this week for 2,600.”

4I was confused. Why would a salesman push the cheaper phone? Was something wrong with it? “What's the catch?” I asked. “Its only real shortcoming is speed,” he said. “It gets a bit slow with big games. And there isn't a single game on your old phone.”

5Behind the counter, a young colleague of his raised her eyebrows. After I had paid, I heard her whisper, “You could have sold him the new one.” Mr Hu just shrugged. “He didn't need the new one.”

6That phone lasted me four years. When it finally died, I went straight back to the same shop. Mr Hu was still there, a little greyer than before. Before showing me anything, he asked to see my old phone.

1Almost every Chinese child meets the Xinhua Dictionary in primary school. First published in 1953, when a large part of the population could not read, the small book was meant to help ordinary people learn characters and to set a standard for Mandarin. It has since sold more than 567 million copies, and in 2016 Guinness World Records named it the world's most popular dictionary.

2A book like this could easily stand still. Instead, it has been revised every five to seven years. The dictionary of the 1950s had about 8,000 entries; by the 11th edition there were 13,000. Words that no longer described daily life have been taken out, and new ones have been added as society has changed.

3What makes the dictionary unusual is how seriously its editors take small details. In 1998, when the character ju, used for a kind of hair treatment, was added, the editors found they could not describe the process properly. So one editor, Jia Caizhu, went to a hairdresser and tried the treatment herself, twice, before the entry was written.

4Readers help too. The 1998 edition included a picture illustrating the lotus root, with three stems growing from one joint. Peng Yun, a reader from Jiangxi who had watched lotus farming for years, wrote to say he had never seen such a thing. Instead of ignoring his letter, an editor went to a pond to see whether the picture was in accord with the real plant. It was not, and the picture was changed in the next edition.

5Not every story about the dictionary is true, however. Many people believe its price was once set to match the cost of half a kilogram of pork, so that any family could afford it. Yu Guilin of the Commercial Press, founded in 1897, says he cannot confirm this. In 2015 the 11th edition cost 19.9 yuan, while half a kilogram of pork cost about 18 yuan online, but he suggests this may be nothing more than a coincidence.

6Since 2017 the dictionary has also had an app version, which lets users look up a character by writing it on the screen, taking a photo of it or simply saying it aloud.

1When did you last see the Milky Way? If you live in a city, the honest answer may be “never”. In 2016, an international team of scientists reported that more than 80 percent of the world's population lives under skies polluted by artificial light, and that about one third of humanity can no longer see the Milky Way at all. For most of human history, a sky full of stars was a universal experience. Now people travel hundreds of kilometres to find one.

2The problem is growing fast. A study published in 2023 used more than 50,000 observations by ordinary people, who simply compared the stars above them with a set of star charts. Its conclusion was alarming: the night sky had been getting brighter by almost 10 percent a year. At that rate, a child born where 250 stars are visible would see only about 100 by the age of 18.

3Contrary to what you might expect, satellites had largely missed this change. They mainly record light that shines straight up, while much of the glow in our skies comes from light that spreads sideways, from street lamps, shop windows and advertising screens. Many cities have also replaced orange street lamps with white LEDs, whose blue light spreads more widely in the air and is harder for those satellites to detect.

4Some readers will object that bright streets feel lively and welcoming, and that shops need light to attract customers. I am not suggesting that we switch off every light. My point is that much of our lighting is simply wasted: lamps that shine into the sky instead of onto the ground, empty offices lit all night, advertising screens glowing at three in the morning.

5The fixes are small adjustments, not sacrifices. Public lights can be fitted with covers so that they shine only downwards, changed to warmer colours and dimmed late at night. None of this means giving up the light we need.

6Next time you are outside on a clear night, count the stars you can see and remember the number. If the scientists are right, it will be smaller next year.