Idema, a Dutch Sinologist（汉学家）, has served as the director of the Chinese Languages and Cultures Department at Leiden University of the Netherlands and was also director of Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.He has studied ancient Chinese plays, novels and literature, and has authored or translated a number of influential books published in English and other languages.

    The 70-year-old Dutch Sinologist recalled his half-century-long romance with Chinese culture during a recent visit to Beijing.As a child,the vivid descriptions of China in Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winner Pearl S.Buck's books sparked Idema's interest in the country.He later read classic Chinese literature and spent whole days pouring through works at the National Library of China.

    While many other experts on China focused on the country's economic transformation, Idema continued to study traditional Chinese literature."There were scholars studying law, religion and society, but not traditional Chinese literature,which was my personal interest," Idema explains.

    Finding reference books for his research,especially regional publications,used to be a huge challenge,and Idema used to spend a lot of time collecting books and other materials during visits to China.Now it is much more convenient with the Internet.

    Idema usually chooses less-known subjects for his research and tries to get firsthand materials.In recent years, he has devoted himself to translating Chinese folk tales and writing about Chinese folk society and folk culture.

    "Traditional Chinese culture is a passion.I have been studying it for 50 years and will continue to do so,"says the retired professor.

根据短文内容，选择最佳答案，并将选定答案的字母标号填在题前括号内。

    Tulou, the special residential architecture of Fujian Province was included on the UNESCO's World Heritage List during the 32nd session of the World Heritage Committee in Quebec, Canada.

    In the fourth century, Han Chinese living in the Central Plains area began to migrate south, gradually gathering in Fujian and forming the Hakka communities. As a defence against enemies, the Hakkas chose to live in compact (紧凑的) communities, and the tulou was their preferred houses. Tens of thousands of such earthen structures were constructed in Fujian Province.

    Most tulous are to be found in the valleys, surrounded by high mountains, and some are in the depths of the great mountains. Most are three to four storeys high, and look like circular blockhouses (堡垒). Rooms on the first floor are used as kitchens, rooms on the second floor are used as barns (谷仓), and rooms on the third and fourth floors are for bedrooms and living rooms. For defensive purposes, the rooms on the first floor have no windows.

    Raw materials for the tulou were obtained locally. Their main building material was a mixture of clay, sand, lime and water, and egg whites, brown sugar and rice water were added as adhesive agents (粘合剂). It was then mixed to form the walls. Once they dried, the walls were so hard that driving a nail into them would have been difficult. Fir branches, which are extremely strong and do not rot, were used to strengthen them, and many centuries later they have remained their original look.

    Tulous are located in a region where earthquakes happen frequently, and their circular construction helps them resist the regular shocks.

    The proven design even inspired one famous Peruvian architect, who paid several visits to Yongding, to build a tulou back home. Not long after, an earthquake struck only 10 kilometers away, and while all the houses around the earthen building fell down, his tulou remained.

    A cat is recovering in California after surviving a 6,500-mile journey across the Pacific stowed inside a Chinese shipping container without food or water. Staff and volunteers have named it “Ni Hao”, which is Chinese for “hello”.

    It was discovered breathing shallowly after a two-week trip across the Pacific Ocean. The cat was seriously suffering from loss of water and starvation when the container was opened in California last week, but was said to be doing well after being sent to the Carson Animal Care Centre in Los Angeles. At first it was too weak to stand, but finally took its first steps. Then it ate a good meal and slept soundly. The cat woke up on Thursday morning, physically in a better condition than 24 hours ago.

     “Ni Hao greeted the medical team with its first meow this morning and is attempting to stand,” said Marcia Mayeda, head of the Los Angeles Department of Animal Care and Control. Aaron Reyes, director of the Department, added, “We finally got to hear its voice. It sounds like a single-engine plane.”

    Ni Hao is expected to be observed for 60 days but afterwards animal workers will look forward to providing it with a good shelter. “It's much better for it to recover in a home environment,” Mr. Reyes said. “It's just like a human being in a hospital so we're hoping to move it.” He added, “Little by little we're getting there. We're hoping that under the treatment and with rest, it'll be able to recover quickly.”

    It was not immediately clear how the cat got into the container.

    In a win for literary fiction amid declining sales, Sally Rooney's novel Normal People has been named Waterstones book of the year in 2018.

    Rooney's second novel, which follows two young people falling in love in Ireland, has sold 41, 000 copies in hardback in the UK since it was released in August-five times the hardback sales of her 2017 debut, Conversations With Friends. At 27, Rooney is now the youngest winner of the award, which is given by the UK's biggest bookshop chain, Waterstones.

    Normal People received almost universal applause upon its release. Longlisted for the Man Booker prize, the book won novel of the year at the An Post Irish book awards in November of 2018 and has also been shortlisted for the Costa novel of the year, announced in January of 2019.

    The reader response to Normal People had been astonishing. As well as the universal praise, it has been a huge word- of-mouth (口头的) hit. There're customers returning to buy multiple copies as gifts. Normal People strengthened Sally Rooney's reputation as the voice of her generation and one of the most exciting novelists around today. Its success is a testament to the health of literary fiction and indicates that there is still significant appetite for excellent storytelling.

    The award, established in 2012, tends to go to books that are already bestsellers near Christmas. It has previously been won by the late American author John Williams's Stoner, the cookbook Polpo by Russell Norman, and last year's choice, Philip Pullman's La Belle Sauvage.

    James Daunt, Waterstones' managing director, said Rooney's win was a sign of the healthy state of literary fiction, which has seen sales decrease over the last decade. "We are delighted to name it our book of the year," he said.

    Families around the country are finding new options for their children's midday meal thanks to a growing number of delivery options catering to students. Kiddos Catering in Chicago adopts a method of providing restaurant meals to schools that contract with it. Owner Michelle Moses and her staff work with area restaurants to create a variety of kid-friendly choices and deliver the meals to the schools five days a week. Parents select the lunches from an online order form that lists the day's featured restaurant and its menu choices.

    "Each day is a different restaurant with six to 10 menu options," she said. "It offers so much choice to kids." The service appeals to parents because they think their children are less likely to toss out restaurant food than a packed lunch, Ms. Moses said. The schools appreciate that Moses handles the ordering, payment, pickup, and food distribution in the cafeteria. "Schools really want to be in the business of educating kids," she said. "They don't want to be in the food and beverage(餐饮) business."

    That doesn't mean that schools always like it when teens (or parents) take it upon themselves to order food through phone apps. Many schools have banned that practice, citing safety concerns about delivery drivers showing up at school unannounced and the burden of tracking down students to alarm them that their meals have arrived.

    "These types of deliveries pose an unnecessary security risk for students and staff," said Bernard Watson, director of community relations for Gwinnett County Public Schools in Suwanee, Ga. "In addition, our award-winning school nutrition program provides students with a wide variety of tasty, nutritious meals on-site, so there is no need to order food from outside."

    Jacob Levin, a recent graduate of Bexley High School in Bexley, Ohio, relied on a sub shop to deliver a sandwich to him during lunchtime meetings or other appointments that conflicted with his lunch period. "It was a convenient option. In most cases, I would not have been able to eat at school if it weren't for the delivery option," he said. "Having a restaurant-quality sub also was much more enjoyable than cafeteria food."

D

With the completion of the Human Genome（基因组）Project more than 20 years ago, and the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA enjoying its 70th birthday last year, you might assume that we know how life works. Think again!

Evolution has a 4bn-year head start on us. However, several aspects of the standard picture of how life works-the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular（分子）machines and more-have wildly reduced the complexity of life. 

In the excellent book How Life Works, Philip Ball explorers the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more delicate affair than we have understood. Ball explains that life is a system of many levels-genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules-each with its own rules and principles, so there is no unique place to look for an answer to it. 

Also, How Life Works is a much more appealing title than the overused question of "What is life?". We should be less concerned with what a thing is, and rather more focused on what a thing does. Defining a living thing implies an unchangeable ideal type, but this will run counter to the Darwinian principle that living things are four-dimensional, ever changing in time as well as space.

But it's an idea that is deeply rooted within our culture. Ball points out that we rely on metaphors（比喻）to explain and explore the complexities of life, but none suffice. We are taught that cells are machines, though no machine we have invented behaves like the simplest cell; that DNA is a code or a blueprint, though it is neither; that the brain is a computer, though no computer behaves like a brain at all.

Ball is a terrific writer, pumping out books on incredibly diverse subjects. There's a wealth of well-researched information in here, and some details that are a bit chewy for the lay reader. But the book serves as an essential introduction on our never-ending quest to understand life.