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This is NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Yun Feng in Beijing. Here is the news.
Wenzhou City in east China has broken up a gang that was providing illegal sex-determination tests, largely for gender selection.
The gang tested more than 2,000 women in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, and some of the women had abortion on the basis of the results.
14 people have been detained so far.
One of the main suspects, sir named Chen, worked at a private clinic in Wenzhou. He started offering the illegal tests last year. He collected blood samples of pregnant women who wanted to know the gender of their child.
Two female suspects from a neighboring city claimed they were from Hong Kong and the tests were conducted in medical institutions in Hong Kong.
Each customer paid 800 yuan, or 130 U.S. dollars, for the test. 35-year-old Chen, his wife and his compliances tested around 300 women, making illegal profits of over 200,000 yuan.
In China, sex determination testing, gender-selective procedures and abortions for non-medical purposes are prohibited. A traditional preference for boys over girls results in a largely skewed sex ratio, which stands at 115 boys born for every 100 girls.
Worldwide, a normal range should be between 103 and 107. Sex-selective abortions after sex determinations have further fuelled an imbalance.
Family planning officials in Wenzhou say the relaxation of birth control rules did not help reverse the skewed sex ratio, as some families qualified for a second child want to know the gender of their second child.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
For the second time, Beijing resident Jiang Hai took her 4-year-old son to the annual Beijing Foreign Language Festival, hoping the environment get her son interested in the language.
Jiang says that when her son grows up, he will definitely have to communicate with foreigners. So Jiang wants the child learns English as early as possible.
The Beijing Foreign Language Festival started in 2002. It emphasizes communication, interactivity and the practical use of foreign languages.
For many years, English has been considered one of the three most important subjects in Chinese schools, along with Chinese and Math. Most provinces and cities offer English classes from elementary school, but the tradition of emphasizing English appears to be on the wane.
In Beijing, the value of English will be reduced to 100 points from the current 150 in the college entrance exam in 2016. Despite this, more parents like Jiang want their children to start learning English at an early age.
Wang Xue is director of an English school for learners as young as 4 years old. The company has been expanding due to the strong demand from parents, as some parents believed English should be taught as early as possible.
The cost for learning English is high. A survey late last year by Beijing Foreign Language University showed that in 2012, Chinese parents spent 14 billion yuan, or around 2 billion U.S. dollars, on their children' early English education.
According to Wang, the fee for one hour of native speaker's class is around 130 yuan, adding up to about 20,000 yuan for a one-year program. Some schools even offer program worth 40,000 yuan, in which students are taught one to one by a native speaker.
You're listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Yun Feng in Beijing.
Three Chinese volunteers have finished an experiment, living in an enclosed capsule for three months, eating only laboratory-grown plants and insects.
That was China's first human test of the "Moon Palace 1", a 500-cubic meter module that is China's first bio-regenerative life support base.
The lab set on the campus of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. It is a virtual biosphere, where people can provide food for themselves by cultivating grain, vegetable, fruit and insects. The system can also produce water and fertilizers, process waste and revitalize the air.
The system features a cabin and two plant cultivation labs, which is a miniature version of the Earth's biosphere. It can help make it possible for astronauts to live safely in space stations without any deliveries of supplies for long periods.
The research team selected five kinds of grain, 15 varieties of vegetable, one kind of fruit, as well as a yellow mealworm which provided protein for the volunteers during the experiment.
It is hoped that the life support system can further facilitate China's manned space program.
Last June, three Chinese astronauts spent 12 days in Tiangong-1, or Heavenly Palace 1, in the country's longest manned space mission.
China's manned space program has entered its second decade with ambitious plans of building a permanent space station and manned lunar probe.
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