介绍:
This is Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing. Here is the news.
China is studying how to retrieve and reuse manned spacecraft in its future missions.
The chief engineer of the nation's manned space program said China's next goal is to reuse manned spacecraft to make its space exploration cost-effective.
Reusable manned spacecraft are a Holy Grail of space exploration. The United States developed partially reusable manned spacecraft capable of reaching low Earth orbit. But they were all retired in 2011 due to high costs and risks, including an accident in 2003 that killed seven astronauts.
The chief engineer did not go into any more details on the project, but stressed his team's focus on saving costs, giving an example from the Tiangong space lab series.
Chinese scientists have managed to incorporate all tasks planned for the third generation of the lab into the second generation. There has been no need to develop the third generation.
He said China's space station will be completed around 2022. It will be a green model, with highly advanced and budget-saving facilities in flight control, power supply and waste recycling.
Earlier this month, US rocket developer SpaceX achieved a world first by landing one Falcon rocket on a carrier at sea. China was paying close attention to such innovation and was testing its own reusable rockets, promising a breakthrough before the end of 2020.
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The Ministry of Education has told parents its efforts to ensure more children from poor backgrounds getting a college education will not hurt the chances of students from more affluent parts of China.
The ministry said its changes to the enrollment policies of this year's gaokao, the national higher education entrance exam, will not mean children from developed parts of China will lose out.
The event follows a heated discussion in China about the changes to the gaokao enrollment policies. A recent directive from the ministry means there will be a redistribution of cross-provincial quotas for some provinces.
According to the directive, universities in some more developed provinces with rich tertiary education resources will have to take a large number of students this year from less developed regions.
The more developed provinces include east China's Jiangsu Province and central China's Hubei Province. The two provinces will take in more students, who pass the gaokao, from areas including Tibet and Xinjiang in western China.
The quotas for larger enrollment are understood to be significantly increased from previous years, but there are no hard numbers available.
The directive created a public outcry from parents in two provinces. Some parents protested in front of local education bureaus, claiming the redistribution will mean fewer local students being enrolled to colleges and universities.
The ministry has said that the move is aimed at further boosting equal access to higher education and narrows the gap between developed regions and their poor counterparts.
The university entrance exam is seen by students and parents in China as one of the most important milestones in life.
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Chinese police have launched a mobile app to encourage witnesses to report the whereabouts of missing or trafficked children.
More than 5,000 anti-trafficking police will provide updates to the app on receiving new reports of missing children.
Users near the location where a child disappeared will receive push notifications, including photos and descriptions of the missing child. The scope of these push notifications will be expanded over time.
Information will be available to the public at the platform's official Sina Weibo account. Police will cooperate with new media outlets and mobile apps to encourage the public to help in anti-human trafficking work.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
The first Chinese-Russian university plans to enroll its first group of students this year. Located in Shenzhen in Guangdong province, the MSU-BIT University marks a milestone in educational cooperation between China and Russia.
Postgraduate students in Nano science and ecology will be enrolled in the new Shenzhen MSU-BIT University in September after it gets official approval from the Ministry of Education. The university is going to enroll undergraduates from next year.
MSU-BIT is run by Lomonosov Moscow State University, the Beijing Institute of Technology and the Shenzhen government. It is the first such cooperation between Chinese and Russian universities.
The university plans to enroll a total of 5,000 students from home and overseas in the near future. Thirty to 50 percent of them are expected to come from countries along the ancient Silk Road.
Students will be equipped with multilingual capabilities, and the classes will be taught in Chinese, English and Russian.
The number of students studying in each other's countries has been growing. More than 16,000 students from Russia studied in China last year, while more than 25,000 Chinese students studied in Russia.
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China's first Confucius classroom in a prison has opened in East China's Shandong Province.
The classroom opened in Luzhong Prison in central Shandong as part of a charity program funded by the China Confucius Foundation.
The provincial prison management bureau said the prison will pilot a series of changes, including classroom and library design, as well as training prison instructors in Confucian teachings. The activities aim to improve the prison's cultural atmosphere.
The classroom will feature Chinese calligraphy, literary classics and moral education.
Named after the ancient Chinese philosopher, Confucius schools and classrooms are generally run as non-profit public institutions to help foreigners understand China through language and culture classes at overseas universities. The first such institute was established in 2004.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
Almost 1,200 water-saving projects have been built in Beijing, saving up to 100 million cubic meters of water every year.
Beijing's water authorities said water permeable bricks, sunken green fields and rainwater recycling facilities have been widely adopted in the city.
Beijing recycled and utilized 160 million cubic meters of rainwater last year.
Beijing has been listed as one of the pilot "sponge cities" in China. The city's urban planning authorities said more wetlands, filtration pools and permeable public spaces will be added to make the city "spongier".
Beijing once relied heavily on groundwater. Excessive exploitation has led to decline of groundwater levels and subsequent subsidence.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to newsplusradio.cn. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know by e-mailing us at mansuyingyu@cri.com.cn. That's mansuyingyu@cri.com.cn. Now the news continues.
A doctor from Shanghai has saved a woman who passed out on an international flight from Shanghai to Los Angeles in the United States. After receiving treatment from the doctor, the woman finally regained consciousness.
Zhao Yingchun is the chief doctor at Shanghai Songjiang District central hospital. He took the flight to attend his daughter's graduation ceremony on May 12.
During the flight, Zhao heard a public announcement seeking help for a fainted passenger. He rushed to the passenger trying to give her immediate emergency treatment.
The middle-aged woman had suddenly fainted and had been in a coma after returning to her seat from the lavatory.
The medical devices provided by crew members were only a stethoscope and a blood pressure monitor. He could not hear her blood pressure due to the noise made by the plane engine.
But Zhao still managed to treat the passenger. Fifteen minutes later, the woman mildly reacted, and after 40 minutes, was able to talk.
He stayed with her for one hour, checking her breath and her heart beat every 5 minutes, until she was completely recovered.
As the plane landed at Los Angeles airport, the crew members thanked Zhao for his timely aid and tried to give him 150 US dollars as a reward. Zhao did not take the money, saying it was what a doctor should do.
The airline staff offered him free air miles and a souvenir to show their appreciation.
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Double-amputee climber Xia Boyu is around 1,500 meters away from reaching the summit of the world's highest mountain.
Xia has reached a height of 7,280 meters on the 8,848-meter-high Mount Everest.
According to a live broadcast on news portal sina.com, by the end of the day, the 65-year-old climber was expected to have reached camp C4, where he failed in his first attempt to reach the summit 41 years ago.
Xia was born in Chongqing in southwest China. A violent storm in 1975 kept him at the camp at an altitude of 8,600 meters. He was then a new member of China's national mountaineering team.
The attempt cost him both his legs. He suffered severe frostbite on his feet, after he gave his only sleeping bag to an ailing teammate. He became disabled.
Xia says his confidence comes from years of hard physical training, which was only interrupted for a short period of time when he was diagnosed with cancer 10 years ago.
Equipped with artificial limbs, Xia has climbed many mountains, with four of them being higher than 6,000 meters above sea level.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
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