Think you have a good grasp of English? Good. Read the six sentences below, then.

Sentence 1: The old man the boat.

Sentence 2: The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.

Sentence 3: Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

Sentence 4: Fat people eat collects.

Sentence 5: The man who hunts ducks out on weekends.

Sentence 6: The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.

Linguists (语言学家) call these “garden path sentences”, which take you by the hand and lead you down a winding path to a dead end. Despite this, they’re all grammatically correct. Let’s see why.

Sentence 1: The old man the boat.

Besides sounding like a rejected Hemingway title, this sentence is indeed grammatically correct thanks to some well-placed homonyms—words that share the same spellings but have different meanings. Homonym 1 here is “old”, used as a noun, meaning “old people”; homonym 2 is “man”, used as a verb, meaning “to serve in/on”. With that in mind, the sentence means “The old people serve on the boat”.

Sentence 2: The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.

At first read, you’d think “is made of” is the main verb of this sentence. But it’s not. The simplest form of this sentence is “The cotton grows in Mississippi”; confusingly, “clothing is made of” is used to tell us what cotton we’re talking about. This sentence would make way more sense if written “The cotton that clothing is made of grows in Mississippi”, but English allows us to remove certain conjunctions like “that”, with its meaning maintained.

Sentence 3: Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

The first half of this sentence is easy to catch. So when dealing with the other half, people usually follow the structure of the first half, and it’d be understood as “fruits fly like bananas”. This is obviously unreasonable. Only when people rethink can they recognize the true meaning of the sentence. Therefore, such sentences manage to make people ignore the structure of the sentence itself, thus departing from its original meaning.

Come on! Take a walk down the garden path with the rest of the sentences.

Warming seas across the globe are endangering coral reefs(珊瑚礁), a key ecosystem that supports sea life to live .

As a possible way to save them from extinction, scientists have recently frozen and revived groups of adult corals for the first time, according to a recent study.

Freezing biological materials, or “cryopreserving” them, refers to keeping them in a deep freeze for long periods without affecting the cell’s viability(活性), according to the Science Times website.

Researchers in the US experimented with freezing pea-sized pieces of a common coral in Hawaii. After removing the microbes on the corals, they closed the corals in metal containers filled with a chemical solution that helped control ice growth.

When the corals reached a temperature of around-200℃, the remaining water in the corals solidified into a glassy form. The corals were still alive, with their life-driving functions becoming extremely slow. After being cryopreserved for a few minutes, the researchers pulled the corals out and placed them in warm water. In two minutes, they started consuming oxygen -a sign of them staying alive.

Previously, researchers had already successfully cryopreserved coral larvae(幼虫), according to a study in 2018. However, the larvae can only be collected when corals spaw(产卵), which happens just a few nights each year. “That’s putting a lot of eggs in one basket,” US marine scientist Liza Roger told Science News.

This breakthrough offers more hope to the world’s corals, said Roger. However, there’s more work to be done. A few days after thawing, the corals became “stressed out” from the process and were killed by the bacteria they normally live in harmony with. The researchers are working on using medicine to help them survive for a longer period of time.

Humans have been battling viruses since before we had even evolved into our modern form, but we’re a long way from winning the fight against them. Here are a few of the worst killers.

Scientists identified Marburg virus in 1967, when small outbreaks occurred among lab workers in Germany who were exposed to infected monkeys. The infected people develop high fevers and bleeding throughout the body. Marburg can be passed on from human to human via direct contact. The death rate is 80%in the 1998-2000 outbreak in Congo and in the 2005 outbreak in Angola.

The first known Ebola outbreaks in humans struck Africa in Sudan and Congo in 1976. The natural host of Ebola is bats. The virus is spread through contact with infected people or animals.   Symptoms include fever, bleeding and organ failure. The death rate is 50%to 70%.

Hantavirus was first recognized as an infectious disease in the 1950s in Korea. But it first gained wide attention in the U. S. in 1993, when a healthy young man and his fiancee died within days of developing shortness of breath. Hantavirus was isolated from a deer mouse. More than 600 people in the U. S. are now infected and 36%have died. The virus doesn’t spread from human to human.

Mers-CoV virus had an outbreak in Asia, Saudi Arabia in 2012 and South Korea in 2015. The virus likely originated in bats. The disease infected camels before passing into humans and causes fever and shortness of breath. It has a death rate between 30%and 40%, making it the most deadly of the known coronavirus (冠状病毒) family. Mers-CoV spreads from one person to another.