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2017-03-27 Special English
This is Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing. Here is the news.
A Long March-7 carrier rocket has arrived at a launch center in south China in preparation for the launch of China&`&s first cargo spacecraft in April.
After around a week of ocean and rail transport, the carrier rocket arrived in Hainan Province. It will undergo assembly and testing prior to the April launch of China&`&s first cargo spacecraft Tianzhou-1.
The Tianzhou-1 is expected to dock with the orbiting Tiangong-2 space lab three times and conduct propellant refueling in orbit. It will also conduct other space experiments before getting back to earth. Tiangong-2 will remain in orbit and continue its experiments.
The Long March-7 is a medium-sized carrier rocket that can carry up to 14 tonnes of cargo to low-Earth orbit. It is able to carry cargo spacecraft and man-made satellites. It made its maiden flight in June last year.
The launch of Tianzhou-1 will complete the second phase of China&`&s manned space program. It is a crucial step for China in building a space station by 2020.
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China and the United States have the greatest potential to lead advances in disruptive technology. That&`&s according to a recent report by an international accounting firm KPMG.
The annual report is called "The Changing Landscape of Disruptive Technologies". It is based on a survey of over 800 global technology leaders including start-up entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 executives.
This year&`&s poll reflected a slight uptick for China. Twenty-five percent of respondents said they believe China can be a leader in disruptive technology, compared with 23 percent last year.
Those endorsing the United States declined slightly from 29 percent a year ago to 26 percent now.
China continues to make rapid gains as it moves from a reliance on manufacturing to an innovation powerhouse.
Through the use of disruptive technology, including cloud computing and the Internet of Things, Chinese companies are jumping on the new business opportunities.
Visionary entrepreneurial leaders including Jack Ma of Alibaba are known and greatly respected globally.
Shanghai was identified as the top leading technology innovation hub in addition to Silicon Valley over the next four years, followed by New York, Tokyo and Beijing. The city&`&s ranking was based on its strong regional position in financial markets and numerous hi-tech parks.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing.
China&`&s top health authority has urged tightened supervision over the clinical use of antibiotic drugs to contain drug-resistance strains.
A warning has been issued by the National Health and Family Planning Commission, China&`&s health watchdog.
The commission said health departments and medical institutions at all levels should reinforce supervision on antibiotic use and carry out inspections at least twice a year.
It encouraged medical institutions to join the efforts to monitor the clinical use of antibiotic drugs and drug-resistant strains to improve the early warning mechanism.
Abuse of antibiotics can give rise to new strains of hardy bacteria that can live and even thrive despite the use of the medication.
At present, drug-resistant infections have become a major challenge to global public health, causing the death of 700,000 people and 230,000 newborns worldwide every year.
In August last year, the commission issued a national action plan to tighten supervision over antibiotic production, sale and use.
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China&`&s first big data research center for children&`&s health was founded in central China&`&s Hubei Province in a bid to improve children&`&s medical care system.
The center was set up by Wuhan University and a Beijing-based pediatric technology firm. It aims to develop a more complete medical care system for children in disease prevention, diagnosis and personalized treatment.
The center has collected information on more than 200,000 children in 70 hospitals across seven provinces. The collection will expand to 300 hospitals by the end of this year, and 1,000 by 2020.
The research center said it will develop into a national cloud platform for children&`&s health information, offering standards on personalized medical care and clinical treatment.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing.
The forest coverage of Beijing has more than tripled from 13 percent to 42 percent since China launched a national tree-planting campaign three decades ago.
The proportion of green land in urban Beijing increased from 20 percent in 1980 to 48 percent last year.
A total of 200 million saplings have been planted since the campaign began in the early 1980s.
Last year, the city planted trees on 13,000 hectares of land. This year, the city will plant one million more trees.
The tree-planting campaign has led to fewer barren mountains, and authorities have encouraged residents to register to take care of the trees.
In 1979, China designated March 12 as National Tree Planting Day.
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Ceremonies have been held to commemorate the 92nd anniversary of the death of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Sun was a renowned statesman who led the revolution that ended imperial rule in China in 1911.
Representatives from all walks of life attended a ceremony in a park named after him in Beijing.
Officials and residents of east China&`&s Jiangsu Province marked the day at Sun&`&s mausoleum in Nanjing, the province&`&s capital city, honoring his achievements and role in the revolution.
Sun was born in 1866 and is known to the Chinese people as a "great revolutionary and statesman" for his leading role during the 1911 Revolution, which ended more than 2,000 years of feudal rule in China.
Sun died in Beijing in 1925.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
China will publish the Analects of Confucius in foreign languages this year. The book is a collection of ideas and sayings from the Chinese philosopher.
The China Confucius Foundation and a publishing group in east China&`&s Shandong Province will jointly complete the translation and publication of the collection. The five foreign languages are Arabic, Mongolian, Czech, Portuguese and Spanish.
The translations will be distributed to the countries through the foundation and global Confucius institutes.
The thoughts of Confucius constitute the root of Chinese traditional culture and have profoundly influenced Chinese society over the past 2,500 years.
Confucius was born in Shandong in 551. He founded a school of thought that influenced later generations and became known as Confucianism. He is believed to be the first person to set up private schools in China and enroll students including the poor.
The Analects is a collection of his famous sayings, reflecting his political views, moral principles and educational ideas. Among his classic sayings are "How happy we are to have friends from afar" and "Do not do to others what you don&`&t want to be done to you".
The Analects has already been translated into English, Japanese, Russian, Korean, French and German.
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Two special exhibitions are underway at the National Gallery Singapore to showcase the evolution of Chinese ink painting and its impact on Singapore art history.
The exhibition is entitled "Rediscovering Treasures". It is the first comprehensive survey by a national museum to focus on collections from Xiu Hai Lou, one of the most important ink collections in Singapore.
The exhibition offers important insights into how art collecting and patronage developed in Singapore during the early 20th century. It provides visitors with the chance to see rare masterpieces by prominent artists in China.
Chen Chong Swee was one of the first artists in Singapore to use Chinese ink painting techniques to depict local landscapes. The exhibition "Strokes of Life: The Art of Chen Chong Swee" is a major retrospective survey of Chen&`&s artistic career spanning six decades, and it focuses on his key contributions to artistic developments in Singapore from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Many of the masterpieces are rarely seen in public.
The exhibitions will run till the end of this year. The National Gallery Singapore will organize a series of complementary programs to encourage greater appreciation of ink art, including lectures by respected academics and practitioners, and hands-on activities for visitors of all ages.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing.
A survey shows that Hong Kong&`&s customer service industry is in need of young talents. It also notes that only around a third of local young job seekers consider working in the industry as full-time.
The survey was conducted by the Hong Kong Association for Customer Service Excellence. It interviewed 1,300 local customers, customer service employers and graduate job seekers in December last year.
Only 32 percent of the young job seekers considered working in customer service industry as full-time. The long working hours and high pressure are the key problems of their concern.
At the same time, 74 percent of customer service employees shared the same perception.
Given the tight supply of young joiners in the market, employers must put considerable resources on recruiting and retaining job talents, including offering competitive salary and providing better career path and a happier workplace.
Helping young people understand the positive sides of the customer service industry and focusing on work-life balance are also two effective ways to attract more talents.
The survey also showed that 80 percent of local customers have experienced good customer service in the past 12 months, and the data has been at a high level since 2013.
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Local authorities in Southwest China&`&s Guizhou province began a search for possible siblings of a girl who was abandoned around 10 years ago and was later adopted by a Canadian couple.
If they succeed, the girl will have a good chance of curing her disease through a bone-marrow transplant.
The girl, named Hosanna, was left alone on the doorsteps of a county police station in 2007. When they failed to find her parents, the police sent her to a local welfare house.
Greg and Cathy Crowell, a couple who already had four children, adopted her later that month, knowing that she had a disease. They called her &`&Hosanna&`&, which is Hebrew for "savior".
Hosanna suffers from a severe hereditary blood disorder resulting from the poor ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen.
Following doctors&`& advice, Hosanna spent her life receiving blood transfusions every two to three weeks, as well as daily injections to remove excessive iron from the transfusions.
Hosanna can survive with blood transfusions, but she will need them for her entire life.
In the past decade, Hosanna, who will celebrate her 11th birthday this spring, has been living in Alberta, Canada, with the couple. They have returned to the welfare house during that time, but have had no luck in finding her biological parents.
Doctors in China and Canada have told the couple that the only way to cure Hosanna is through a bone-marrow transplant, which requires a match that is most likely to be found in siblings.
The couple recently posted an open letter online, announcing a search for relatives of the girl. They offered to cover the cost of the blood tests to find a match.
The letter caught the attention of the authorities in the county where Hosanna was originally found. The authorities have pledged to assist the couple in their search.
While there have been no leads so far, the couple said they remain hopeful.
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