阅读与填词mate · develop · employ

1Every winter, Mr Gao sells roasted sweet potatoes outside the gate of Xinhua Middle School. Between customers, he plays Chinese chess on a wooden box beside his cart. Any student can play against him, but in three winters, no student has won a single match.

2Lu Fan lost to him eleven times in November. Mr Gao never told her where she had gone wrong. Instead, after each game, he asked her to find the bad move herself. If she found it, her sweet potato was free. She wrote every bad move in a small notebook.

3One cold Friday in December, a crowd gathered around the box. Lu Fan played slowly and carefully. One by one, Mr Gao's pieces left the board. The students behind her began to whisper.

4Just then, a woman stopped at the cart. “Two sweet potatoes, please,” she said. Mr Gao stood up to serve her, and he took his time. He chatted with her about the weather and counted her change twice.

5When he finally sat down again, he studied the board for a long time. Then he burst out laughing and clapped his hands. “Well played,” he said. “I was hoping that customer would stay a bit longer.”

6The next day, a new sign hung on his cart: “Beat me at chess and get a free sweet potato. (Not you, Lu Fan.)”

1Welcome to Lantern Lane Youth Hostel, inside the old city walls of Pingyao! We are your hosts, Mr and Mrs Qiao.

Beds and prices

2A bed in a six-bed room costs 60 yuan a night. A bed in a four-bed room costs 80 yuan. Top bunks are 10 yuan cheaper. Students with a student card get 10% off any bed.

3This year is our tenth anniversary! Stay four nights in a six-bed room and only pay for three. You cannot use this offer and the student discount together.

Paying

4You can pay for beds and bikes by WeChat Pay or Alipay. Bikes cost 20 yuan a day. The key card deposit is 50 yuan, and we only take it in cash. We return it when you leave. If you lose your key card, there is a 30-yuan fine.

House rules

5Check-out time is 12 noon. Leaving later? Leave your suitcase at the front desk. It is free until 6 p.m. and 5 yuan an hour after that. Quiet time is from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., so please whisper in the rooms. There are two bathrooms on each floor, with hot water all day.

Tips from your hosts

6Walk on the city wall before 9 a.m. to avoid the tour groups. For dinner, try the noodle shops on West Street. Enjoy your stay!

1Last Saturday, my cousin and I were playing basketball in the park when we saw a flash of lightning over the hills. My cousin counted the seconds until we heard the boom of thunder. He got to fifteen. “Divide by five,” he said. “It's three kilometres away. We've got time to finish the game.” We played for another twenty minutes, until rain began to fall. Was he right? — Wang Jie, 15, Hangzhou

2Dear Wang Jie, your cousin got the maths wrong, and the decision too.

3Lightning and thunder happen at the same moment. Lightning heats the air so suddenly that the air expands with a loud boom. You see the flash first because light travels through the air almost instantly, while sound needs about three seconds to cover one kilometre. Dividing by five works for miles, not kilometres. So fifteen seconds means the lightning was about five kilometres away.

4The sound itself is a clue as well. A sharp crack or click usually means the lightning struck close by, while a long, low rumble means it was several kilometres away.

5But that is not the real problem. Three kilometres or five, you were close enough to be hit. Thunder can usually be heard only about 16 kilometres from the lightning, and lightning can strike that far from a storm, sometimes before any rain has fallen. In other words, if you can hear thunder at all, you are in danger.

6So the rule is simple: when thunder roars, go indoors. A proper building or a car with a hard metal top will keep you safe; a tree, a tent or a bus shelter will not. Then wait 30 minutes after the last thunder before you go back out. The next flash could be closer than the last one. — The Weather Desk

1Every Spring Festival, Lin Xue collected red envelopes from her aunts, uncles and grandparents, and every year her mother said the same thing: “Give them to me. I'll keep the money for you.” Lin Xue never saw the money again. In her family, “I'll keep it for you” had become a joke.

2The winter she turned sixteen, Lin Xue decided she was old enough to look after her own money. At dinner one evening, she put down her chopsticks. “Mum, how much have you kept for me over the years? I'd like a full account, please.”

3Her father laughed. Her mother said nothing. She went into the bedroom and came back with an old shoebox.

4Inside were thirteen red envelopes, one for every Spring Festival since Lin Xue was three. All of them were empty, but on the back of each one her mother had written the amount and where the money had gone. Age 7: 1,500 yuan, new glasses and a desk lamp. Age 10: 2,000 yuan, a laptop for online lessons. Age 13: 800 yuan, summer art classes. Lin Xue read them one by one. She had never once asked where those things came from.

5At the bottom of the box was a bank card. “The rest is in here,” her mother said. “It's in your name, and you don't have to wait until you're eighteen. You can use it whenever you like.”

6Lin Xue sat with the box on her knees for a long time. Then she took this year's red envelopes out of her bag, counted the cash inside and wrote on the back of one: Age 16: 2,400 yuan. She handed them to her mother. “Could you keep these for me?” she said. “But this time, I'd like to help with the records.”

1In the hills of Qingtian County in Zhejiang, farmers do something that might surprise rice growers elsewhere: they keep fish in their rice fields. After the young rice plants are set in the flooded fields, young fish are let into the water. For the next few months the fish swim freely throughout the field, and when the rice is ready, the farmers harvest both.

2The practice is more than 1,200 years old, and it works because the rice and the fish help each other. The fish take on two tasks that farmers would otherwise handle with chemicals: they eat weeds, and they eat insects that attack the rice, such as planthoppers. As they swim about, they loosen the soil and add oxygen to the water, and their waste feeds the rice. In return, the rice plants shade the water and keep it cool in summer, and the insects drawn to the plants become extra food for the fish.

3Scientists wanted to know whether this old system could compete with modern farming. A team led by Chen Xin of Zhejiang University conducted a six-year study, comparing rice-fish fields with fields that grew rice alone. Their results, published in 2011, were striking. The rice-fish fields needed 68% less pesticide and 24% less chemical fertilizer, yet they produced about the same amount of rice. On top of that, the farmers had fish to eat or sell.

4In 2005, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations named the Qingtian system a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System, the first in China. The title has drawn visitors to the area. In one village, fish from the rice fields once sold for 20 yuan a kilogram; a few years later they were selling for 120.

5Chen believes the method is most useful where land and water are too limited to grow rice and raise fish separately. A scientist at the International Rice Research Institute has gone further, calling it an extremely useful way to fight hunger and poverty across tropical regions.

1At ten o'clock every night, my mother checks her phone. If it says 9,400 steps, she puts her shoes back on and walks laps around the living room until the number reaches 10,000. Then she opens WeChat to check her place on her friends' step leaderboard.

2I understand the appeal. A clear target is easy to follow, and walking is good for almost everyone. But where does 10,000 come from? Not from medical research. In 1965, a Japanese company began selling a step counter called manpo-kei, meaning “10,000-step meter”. The number was chosen mainly because it was easy to remember; the Japanese character for 10,000 even looks a little like a person walking. In other words, it is an artificial target.

3In a 2019 study of about 16,700 older women, Harvard researcher I-Min Lee found that those who took around 4,400 steps a day were much less likely to die over the following four years than those who took around 2,700. The benefit grew with more steps, but it levelled off at about 7,500. For these women, 10,000 was no magic line.

4My bigger worry is what counting does to walking itself. In experiments by Jordan Etkin of Duke University, students who could check their step counts walked farther than those whose counters had their displays covered. But they enjoyed the walking less, and it felt more like work. Counting, it seems, can turn physical activity we do for pleasure into a task to finish.

5Supporters of step-counting will say that for people who hardly move at all, having a number to attain is a useful push, and that competing with friends keeps them going. They have a point. Anything that gets someone off the sofa is worth something.

6But a target should serve us, not the other way round. My mother used to walk home from the market along the river because she liked the old trees there. These days she walks with her eyes on her screen. Last Sunday we left our phones at home and walked by the river for over an hour. When we got back, she asked how many steps we had done. Nobody knew. She thought for a moment, then laughed. “Let's call it ten thousand,” she said.