阅读与填词bio · graph · east

1Xiaoyu's Chinese teacher had set the class a challenge. Everyone had to learn twenty Tang poems by heart before the end of the month. So every morning at seven, Xiaoyu stood on the balcony and recited a poem out loud. She never looked at her book.

2In March, a new neighbour moved in next door. Mr Feng was a retired bus driver, and he had a grey parrot called Bobo. Bobo was very cute, but he was also very quiet. His cage stood on the balcony, just two metres from Xiaoyu's.

3One Saturday, Xiaoyu was reciting one of Li Bai's longer poems about the moon. Halfway through, she stopped. Her mind was empty. Then a voice from next door said the missing line, loud and clear.

4Xiaoyu's mouth fell open. It was Bobo! The parrot went on and finished the whole poem. Then he started again from the beginning.

5Mr Feng came out onto his balcony, laughing. “I've tried to teach him ‘good morning’ for a whole year,” he said. “He has never learned it. But he has been listening to you every single day.”

6Now Bobo knows at least six of Xiaoyu's poems. However, he still can't say “good morning”.

1Come and meet the animals that live between the land and the sea! Our guides lead rock pool walks on the south beach of Shell Bay. You will look for crabs, starfish and many kinds of seaweed.

When

2Walks take place every Saturday and Sunday in July and August. Each walk lasts one hour and starts one hour before low tide. Low tide comes at a different time each day, so check the times on the board at the east car park.

Tickets

3Adults: 30 yuan. Junior tickets (ages 6–14): 15 yuan. Children under 6 cannot join, and children under 12 must come with an adult. Each walk takes 20 people at most. Book online, or buy tickets from the guide on the beach.

Rules

4Please obey your guide at all times. You may touch the animals gently, but it is illegal to take any animals, shells or stones away from the beach. Do not feed the seagulls, and keep away from the rocks at the north end.

Night walk

5During July and August, we also hold a monthly night walk with torches, on the night of the full moon. It is open to people aged 12 and over only. Places must be booked online. No tickets are sold on the beach for this walk.

What to bring

6Wear shoes that can get wet. Bring water and a hat: the sun can be strong on the shore.

1Walk past a field of young sunflowers early in the morning, and you will find them all facing east, toward the rising sun. Come back in the late afternoon, and they will be facing west. During the night, they slowly turn back to the east, ready for sunrise. For a long time, nobody knew how they did this, or why.

2In 2016, a team of biologists at the University of California, Davis, published some answers. They marked the stems with small ink dots and filmed the plants day and night. The films showed that the movement comes from growth. During the day, the east side of a young plant's stem grows faster than the west side, so the stem bends and the head points west. At night, the west side grows faster, and the head swings back.

3The plants are not simply reacting to sunlight, however. When the researchers moved young sunflowers indoors, under a light that stayed in one place, the plants kept swinging east and west for several days. Like people, sunflowers seem to have an inner clock that tells them when morning is coming.

4Following the sun works a bit like turning a solar panel to catch more light. In one test, plants that were tied so they could not turn grew less leaf area than plants that were free to move.

5As sunflowers grow older and their flowers open, they stop moving, and most of them end up facing east. The team found that east-facing flowers warm up quickly in the morning sunshine, and bees and other insects prefer warm flowers. In the study, east-facing flowers received five times as many insect visits as flowers turned to face west. Moreover, when the scientists used a heater to warm west-facing flowers in the morning, more insects came to them.

1Tang Jun has delivered letters in Qingshi, a small town in the hills, for twenty-two years. He knows almost every house and every dog on his route. So when a postcard arrived with no street and no house number, the other workers handed it to him.

2The address said only: “To Xiao Mei, the girl at the noodle shop by the old bridge, Qingshi.” On the front was a photograph of the town's stone bridge. On the back, a man from Harbin had written: “Twelve years ago, I got lost here in the rain. You gave me a bowl of noodles with chilli oil and drew me a map to the bus station on a paper napkin. I teach geography now, and I still show your map to my students as an example of a perfect map. Thank you.”

3Tang saw the problem at once. The noodle shop had closed five years earlier, when the Li family moved away, and nobody had kept in contact with them. A phone shop stood there now.

4Tang could have sent the card back. Instead, he kept it in his pocket and asked about the Lis at every stop on his route. The phone shop owner had never met them. The woman at the tea stall remembered Xiao Mei as “the girl who was always drawing”, but nothing more. On Friday, an old man feeding his birds said that Mrs Li's sister lived somewhere near the east school.

5The sister was surprised to see a postman at her door. Xiao Mei, she said, was in Shanghai now, working as a junior architect. She drew buildings instead of maps.

6Tang put the postcard in a new envelope with a short note: “Found you. — The postman of Qingshi.” A month later, a postcard arrived at the post office. This time, it was addressed to him.

1At three in the morning, the surgical ward was quiet except for the hum of machines. Xu Ning had been a junior doctor for exactly six weeks, and this was her first night on duty without anyone checking her work. The senior doctor, Dr Gao, was asleep in a small room at the end of the corridor. Everyone knew two things about him: he was a leading authority on emergency surgery, and he never used two words when one would do.

2The nurse called Xu to Bed 17. Mr Chen, a 35-year-old taxi driver, had come in late that afternoon with a stomachache. He had eaten at a roadside stall at lunchtime, and the doctor on the day shift had put the pain down to bad food. He was being kept overnight mostly because his wife was worried.

3Now he was awake and holding his side. Xu examined him carefully. In the evening, the ache had been around his belly button; now it had moved low down on his right side. His temperature was higher than at midnight. When she pressed gently on the spot and then let go, he cried out.

4Xu was almost convinced she knew what this meant, but not completely. The blood test results would not be back for another hour. Should she seek help now, or wait? She walked down the corridor and stopped outside Dr Gao's door. She hated to wake a man who had spent eleven hours in the operating room that day and had gone to bed only at one. For nearly a minute she stood there with her hand raised. Then she took a deep breath and knocked.

5Dr Gao listened without a word, pulled on his white coat and followed her to Bed 17. Five minutes later, he ordered a scan. It showed exactly what Xu had feared: appendicitis. By five o'clock, Mr Chen was in the operating room.

6At seven, as the sun came up over the car park, Mr Chen was asking for breakfast. Dr Gao found Xu at the nurses' desk and put a cup of hot tea in front of her. “The young doctors who frighten me,” he said, “are the ones who never knock.” Then he went off on his morning rounds.

1Last summer, I stood on a mountain top in Huangshan, waiting for the sunrise. As the sky turned pink and gold, I looked around. I was standing in a sea of raised phones. Almost everyone was watching the sun come up on a screen the size of their hand, and so was I. Today I have forty photographs of that morning, and I can hardly remember how it felt to be there.

2There may be a reason for that. In one study at Fairfield University in the US, psychologist Linda Henkel sent students on a guided tour of the university's art museum. They were asked to photograph some objects and simply to look at others. The next day, they remembered fewer of the objects they had photographed, and fewer details about them. Henkel calls this the “photo-taking impairment effect”. When we count on the camera to remember for us, it seems, we stop paying attention ourselves.

3Before you throw your phone away, however, consider the second part of her study. This time, some students were asked to zoom in and photograph just one section of an object, such as the head of a statue. They remembered those objects well, and not only the section in the photo but also the parts outside it. Zooming in, it seems, made them look closely.

4Some readers will say this hardly matters. Photos let us share our travels with friends anywhere in the world and keep moments we would otherwise lose. They have a point. But a photo that is never looked at keeps very little. Most of my forty sunrise pictures have not been opened since the day I took them.

5So I am not asking anyone to leave the camera at home. My suggestion is simpler: look first, then shoot. Give a scene a full minute of your attention before you raise your phone, and then take one picture of the part that moved you most. The next time I stand on a mountain at dawn, the crowd around me may be watching the sky through their screens. I plan to watch it with my own eyes.