China Merchants Bank Co Ltd has teamed up with ride-hailing major Didi Kuaidi to provide automobile financing and expand its reach in China's booming mobile payment industry.

    The two have inked a comprehensive partnership, which includes a strategic investment by the former in the latter. Under the partnership, CMB will become the first bricks-and-mortar bank that can offer in-app credit card payments to Didi users. At present, users of Didi can only choose third-party payment solutions like WeChat Payment and Alipay to pay cab fares.

    Zhao Ju, vice-president of CMB, said the cooperation with Didi was an important step in its mobile Internet finance strategy. “CMB's mobile payment is going to enter a new chapter by leveraging Didi Kuaidi's vast user base," he said.

    According to a report by China Internet Network Information Center earlier this month, Didi holds 87.2 percent of China's private car hailing market. The company said it has received 1.43 billion car-hailing requests on its platforms in 2015, which means 1.43 billion payments were made via smartphones.

    CMB is expected to use Didi to reach the core users of China's mobile payment market. Jean Liu, president of Didi, said many of the expats prefer payment by credit card rather than Alipay or WeChat. "The new partnership will help improve service quality and customer loyalty," she said. The investment makes CMB part of Didi's existing investors, including Tencent Holdings Ltd, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and China Investment Corporation. Both of the companies declined to reveal the actual amount of the investment.

    Liu, who showed up on Tuesday for the first time in public after her treatment for breast cancer, said the cooperation with CMB is for the long run and "the capital investment is only part of it".

    Under the partnership, CMB and Didi will cooperate on a wide range of initiatives on financial services and online-to-offline cooperation. Apart from the in-app credit card payments, the two companies are going to launch joint credit cards in late February and automobile financing services for Didi's car owners. CMB's branches across China are expected to help Didi recruit more drivers.

    "There is a lot of room for imagination in our partnership," Li said, adding in future people may use their CMB credit card reward points to pay for the ride on Didi.

    Li Chao, an analyst with iResearch Consulting Group, said the partnership may not significantly boost CMB's mobile payment business. "Didi has educated the market for three years and its customers have formed the habit of paying by WeChat or Alipay. So I think CMB can only turn a very smart proportion of Didi users into its payment customer," he said. "But the move shows that China's traditional banking industry is finally thinking out of the box and looking for outside partners in Internet finance competition," he said.

    Statistics from Big-Data Research showed that more than 90 percent of China's 9.3 trillion yuan ($1.41 trillion) worth of third party mobile payment market is donated by Alibaba and Tencent.

    In one of the world's most forbidding environments, Polar bears spend !heir summers roaming (漫步) the Arctic on large pieces of floating ice. They drift(漂移) for hundreds of miles, finding mates, hunting for seals , and fatting themselves up for the winter. Without the floating ice , the world's largest bears could not survive Yet at this moment , the polar bears' Arctic habitat (栖息地) is melting away under it because of global warming.

    Over the past three decades, more than a million square miles of floating ice has disappeared Scientists predict that, if the current rate of global warming continues, most, if not all, of the bears' floating ice will be gone by 2100. As a result, the world's polar bears could face global dying out by the end of this century.

    Already, the ice on the southern edge of the polar bears' habitat is melting about three weeks earlier than in the past. The loss of those key weeks leaves the bears less time to hunt, eat and store up fat. Once the ice melts, the bears must fast for up to eight months on land until the floating ice returns. As a result of early melting, there has been a 14 percent decline in the Hudson Bay polar bear population over the past ten years- a fall clearly caused by global warming.

    Besides, a growing number of polar bears may be drowning (溺水) as they are forced to swim more often, and for longer distances, looking for ice sheets(冰原). According to a report by the US Mincrals Management Service, researchers observed four dead polar bears floating 60miles off Alaska in September of2006 and said it was likely that many other bears swimming far off shore also drowned. Scientists have concluded that the worldwide population of about 20,000polar bears is likely to become smaller by more than 30 percent in the next 35 to 50 years alone.

    Justin Bieber is only fifteen years old and has become very popular already. He was raised (抚养) by his mother in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. When he was twelve he won second place in a local singing contest. He started posting (贴) videos of his contest performances on the Internet for his friends and family. Soon these videos had been seen more than ten million times.

    A music manager saw those videos and asked Justin to fly to Atlanta, Georgia, to meet the singer and songwriter Usher. A year later Justin released (发行) his first albumMy World. It sold over a million copies in the first two months. Four singles were released before the album. All became popular. This made Justin Bieber the only singer in the history of the Billboard magazine to have four singles from his first album among the most popular songs before the album's release.

    Justin Bieber performed for President Obama at the White House last December. He was part of a musical show that raised money for the National Children's Medical Center. He was also among the many singers who recorded the song We Are the World. The song was produced to raise money for Haiti. The video has been seen more than seven million times on the Internet. And it was shown during the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

    Justin Bieber's family did not have much money when he was young. He did not have as much so other children did. Justin says he wants to influence young people in a good way. He believes that you can do anything if you put your mind to it.

    Dr Dian Fossey, one of the world's leading women scientists, had a remarkable career. The work she devoted her life to protecting and studying the mountain gorillas (大猩猩) of Africa—has proved highly effective and has resulted in the steady (平稳的) increase of this most endangered great apes.

    Fossey made her first trip to Africa in 1963. Three years later, she returned to Africa to begin a long term study of the mountain gorillas. She set up camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo but moved to Rwanda because of political reasons in 1967. She established her "Karisoke" Research Centre camp on September 24, 1967.

    Fossey's aims were to study gorilla ecology (生态学) and social organization. She found that in order to achieve this, she needed to recognize individual gorillas, which required that the gorillas get used to her presence (出现). By copying gorillas' behaviour and sounds, Fossey began to gain their trust, and in 1970 an adult male gorilla she had named "Peanuts" reached out to touch her hand.

    Close observations over thousands of hours enabled Fossey to gain the gorillas' trust and bring forth new knowledge about their behaviour. Stories and photographs of her work were published in National Geographic Magazine and elsewhere.

    In 1977, one of Fossey's favorite gorillas, Digit, was killed by poachers and she established the Digit Fund to help raise money for gorilla protection efforts in the same year.

    On December 26, 1985, Fossey was murdered while going back to her house in Karisoke. Her body was discovered near the research centre. Most probably? Dian Fossey had been killed by the poachers she'd fought against. On her tombstone (墓碑): "No one loved gorillas more..."

    In 1988, the life and the work of Fossey were made into a movie based on her book.

    Discover Nature Schools programs

    Becoming Bears (Kindergarten-2 grade)

    By becoming baby bears children learn from their "parent" to survive the seasons. Kids will find safety in the spring and learn kinds of food bears eat during the summer, and then create a cave for winter hibernation(冬眠). After learning the skills needed to survive, students will go out of the cave as an independent black bear able to care for themselves. (1.5-2 hours)

    Whose Clues? (3-5 grade)

    Kids will discover how plants and animals use their special structures to survive. Through outdoor study of plants and animals, kids will recognize their special structures and learn how they enable species to eat, avoid their enemies and survive. Using what they have learned, kids will choose one species and tell how they survive in their living places. (3-4 hours)

    Winged Wonders (3-5 grade)

Birds add color and sound to our world and play an important ecological (生态的) role. Students will learn the basics of birds, understand the role birds play in food chains and go bird watching using field guides and telescopes. Students will do hands-on activities. Students will use tools to build bird feeders, allowing them to attract birds at home.(3-4 hours)

Exploring Your Watershed (6-8 grade)

    We all depend on clean water. Examining how our actions shape the waterways around us. Go on a hike to see first-hand some of the challenging water quality problems in a city. Students will test the water quality to determine the health of an ecosystem.

    Each program is taught for a class with at least 10 students.

    All programs include plenty of time outdoors. So please prepare proper clothing, sunscreen and insect killers for children.

    To take part in a program, please email dcprograms@mdc.mo.gov.

    Are you interested in country music? I like it very much! It will take me away for a while after I am tired. The guitars and songs will take me to mountains and fields. Country music usually talks of everyday life and feelings. It's the spirit of America, easy to understand, slow and simple. Country music developed in the Southern United States. It was the folk music of American countryside. Many of songs tell about the lives of farmers. They talk about love, crops or death.

    The life of the countryside can be hard, so the words in country music are often sad. At first, people played the music only at family parties. But it became more popular later. In the 1920s, people played country songs on the radio, and they made them into records. When people in the countryside moved to towns and cities to look for work, they took their music with them. Country music continued to change and became popular across America. John Denver was one of America's most famous country singers in the 1970s. His song "Take Me home, Country Roads" is well-known and people still play it today.