Imagine a mass of floating waste is two times the size of the state of Texas. Texas has a land area of more than 678,000 square kilometers. So it might be difficult to imagine anything twice as big. All together, this mass of waste flowing in the North Pacific Ocean is known as the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch（太平洋垃圾带）. It weighs about 3,500,000 tons. The waste includes bags, bottles and containers-plastic products of all kinds.

    The eastern part of the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch is about 1,600 kilometers west of California. The western part is west of the Hawaiian Islands and east of Japan. The area has been described as a kind of oceanic desert, with light winds and slow moving water currents（流，流动）. The water moves so slow that garbage from all over the world collects there.

    In recent years, there have been growing concerns about the floating garbage and its effect on sea creatures and human health. Scientists say thousands of animals get trapped in the floating waste, resulting in death or injury. Even more die from a lack of food or water after swallowing pieces of plastic. The trash can also make animals feel full, diminishing their desire to eat or drink.

    The floating garbage also can have harmful effects on people. There is an increased threat of infection（感染）of disease from polluted waste, and from eating fish that swallowed waste. Divers can also get trapped in the plastic.

    Its existence first gained public attention in 1997. That was when racing boat captain and oceanographer Charles Moore and his crew sailed into the garbage while returning from a racing event. Five years earlier, another oceanographer learnt of the trash after a shipment of rubber duckies got lost at sea. Many of those toys are now part of the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.

    In August,2017, a team from the University of California, San Diego became the latest group to travel to it. They were shocked by the amount of waste they saw. They gathered hundreds of sea creatures and water samples to measure the garbage patch's effect on ocean environment.

China' Forbidden City—-traditionally off-limit at night for anyone except emperors and visiting dignitaries (显要人物)—- was decorated with lanterns as China celebrated the end of the Chinese New Year holiday. The complex, home to Chinese emperors for five centuries, was opened at night for the first time since it was reopened as the Palace Museum 94 years ago.

    The complex and palace walls were illuminated with red lanterns and a light show, designed to recreate the feelings of the royal court, while the China National Traditional Orchestra and the Peking Opera performed. An image of a treasured scroll called A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains was cast onto the palace roof.

    Most of China's 1.3 billion people, however, had to watch the show on television. Only 3,000 people were allowed in: 2,500 invited guests and 500 people who booked their tickets online. "The 3,000 visitors can show off for the whole year," one person said on Weibo. When booking for the second day opened at midnight, the booking system crashed for more than an hour due to great demand. The free tickets were quickly taken when it reopened. A lively secondary market soon appeared. Scalpers were selling tickets for as much as 9,999 yuan on online trading sites.

    The Palace Museum is now on a campaign to attract more visitors, with its former curator Shan Jixiang saying he wants to make traditional Chinese culture more accessible to the general public. More than 80 percent of the palace is now accessible to visitors, up from 30 percent in 2012. Shan has set a target of 85 percent by 2020 to mark the palace's 600^th anniversary. Creativity today has made the Palace Museum younger and drawn traditional culture closer to the public.

    The most popular martial arts (武术)today came from Asia, especially China. Some Chinese fighting styles were invented more than 3, 000 years ago. Many martial arts were invented because people needed to defend themselves or protect others. Nowadays, people learn martial arts as a way of keeping fit or as a competitive sport, but they are still very useful for selfdefence (防卫).

     Martial arts are often referred to as either soft or hard. These terms imply a way of dealing with your opponent's (对手的)force. Soft martial arts, such as tai chi, teach you to use your opponent's own force to defend yourself. Soft styles use movements and timing to avoid, deflect and redirect their opponent's attacks (攻击). These martial arts are soft for the defender but not for the attacker! On the other hand, hard styles, such as kung fu, teach you to defend yourself using force. Techniques involve blocking, posturing and powerful punching and kicking. Hard martial arts techniques are more effective(有效的)if you are more skillful, more powerful and faster than your opponent.

    Perhaps one of the best known Japanese martial arts today is karate. But did you know that it came from Fujian Province? in the century, a community of Chinese migrants(移民)from Fujian settled (定居)in what was then the kingdom of Okinawa. The Chinese migrants used to gather in a park to .enjoy cultural activities — one of which was kung fu. This soon caught the attention of local youths, who started learning kung fu from their Chinese neighbours.

    In fact, Chinese influence in martial arts was not only kung fu. The very first Korean military (军事)training manual was based on a Chinese version. During the Japanese invasion (侵略)of Korea in the 16th century, the Korean army needed an effective way to train a large number of soldiers. They used a training methodology from a Chinese military manual called ji xiao xin shu, written by the famous Chinese general, Qi Jiguang, who had himself defeated Japanese army.

    In the first few years of their lives, children brought up in English-speaking homes successfully master the use of hundreds of words, including those for objects, actions, emotions, and many other aspects of the physical world. However, when it comes to learning colour words, the same children perform very badly. If shown a blue cup and asked about its colour, typical two-year-olds seem as likely to come up with "red" as "blue".

    Cognitive (认知) scientists at Stanford University in California supposed that children's incompetence at colour-word learning may be directly linked to the way these words are used in English. They are used mostly in pre-nominal position (e.g. "blue cup"), in contrast to post-nominal position (e.g. "The cup is blue."). The difficulty children have may simply come down to the challenge of having to make predictions from colour words to the objects they refer to, rather than from the objects to the colour words.

    To explore this idea further, the research team recruited 40 English children aged between 23 and 29 months and carried out a three-phase experiment. It considered of a pre-test, followed by training in the use of colour words, and finally a post-test that was identical to the pre-test. The pre- and post- test materials comprised six objects that were unfamiliar to the children. There were three examples of each object in each of three colours — red, yellow and blue. The objects were presented on trays (托盘), and in both tests, the children were asked to pick out objects in response to requests in which the colour word was either a pre-nominal ("Which is the red one?") or a post-nominal ("Which one is red?").

    In the training, the children were introduced to five sets of familiar items (balls, cups, crayons, glasses, and toy bears) in each of the three colours. Half the children were presented with the items one by one and heard them labeled with colour words used pre-nominally, while the other half were introduced to the same items described with a post-nominal colour word. After the training, the children repeated the selection task on the novel items in the post-test. Correct choices on items that were consistent across the pre- and post-tests were used to measure children's colour knowledge.

    According to the assessment, children's performance was consistent when they were both trained and tested on post-nominal adjectives, and worst when trained on pre-nominal adjectives and tested on post-nominal adjectives. Comparing the pre- and post-test scores across each condition revealed a significant decline in performance when children were both pre- and post-tested with questions that placed the colour words pre-nominally.

    Not many years ago, a wealthy and rather strange old man named Johnson lived alone in a village in the south of England. He had made a lot of money in trading with foreign countries. When he was seventy – five, he gave $ 60,000 to the village school to buy land and equipment for a children's ground.

    As a result of his kindness, he became famous. Many people came to visit him. Among them was a newspaperman. During their talk, Johnson remarked that he was seventy-five and expected to live to be hundred. The newspaperman asked him how he managed to be healthy at seventy-five. Johnson had a sense of humor. He liked whisky and drank some each day. "I have an injection (注射) in my neck each evening," he told the newspaperman, thinking of his evening glass of whisky.

    The newspaperman did not understand what Johnson meant. In his newspaper he reported that Johnson was seventy-five and had daily injection in his neck. Within a week Johnson received thousands of letters from all over Britain, asking him for the secret of his daily injection.

When I was about twelve, I headed to a restaurant for dinner with my family. It was winter, and on that night the wind was really blowing hard. 

As my mum and I headed to the restaurant from our car, a girl about my age and her mother came up to us. They asked if we had any spare change(零钱). My mum right away asked where they lived. They pointed to an old car in a parking lot across the street. The girl said there were six of them living in that car. 

My mum said she had something to do after handing the people a few dollars. She sent me inside the restaurant with my dad and my three siblings(兄弟姐妹). But she didn't come. Later, I found out she had gone home and put all the food in our cupboards into a few bags. Then, she brought that food over to the car and handed the bags to the family. I wasn't there when that happened, but I can only imagine the joy it brought to those people. A few days later, when I actually found out about what she had done, I asked her why she helped those people. She told me that they were not lucky. I remembered the face of that girl who had asked us for change. She was the same age as me, yet we looked so different. 

Here I stood, dressed in almost new clothes, headed to eat in a restaurant and then went back home to the bedroom I shared with my younger sister. I remembered thinking the other girl didn't have any food to eat and that she was heading back to a cold car shared with five other people. 

After painting this picture in my mind, I understood why my mum had done what she did. I will never forget what she did that night, and how she taught me one of the best lessons I have ever learned.