Female Grandmaster—Hou Yifan

Even by the standard of chess geniuses, Hou Yifan stood out. It wasn’t so much the way she played the game 【小题1】 with an aggressive but flexible style. It was that she was a girl. Thirteen years after she became a Grandmaster, at the age of fourteen, people still mentioned two big hairpins that used to pin back her bobbed hair. “I never felt 【小题2】 or limitations,” she told me recently from her home in Shenzhen, China, where she is a professor at Shenzhen university’s Faculty of Physical Education.

“My parents never told me that as a girl you should do this or that,” she said. “Teachers never shaped my views in that way.” These days her hair falls to her shoulders and black cat’s-eye glasses frame her face. She speaks English quickly and 【小题3】. She is the only woman among the hundred best chess players in the world.

Chess is not like basketball or soccer. Men and women face one another on equal terms, and no one can tell the 【小题4】 of a player from the moves on a scorecard. Still, of the seventeen hundred and thirty-two Grandmasters in the world, just thirty-eight are women. Much of this gap stems from how many women compete versus the number of men who do: around sixteen percent of tournament players are 【小题5】 as female and most of them are children. As a purely 【小题6】 matter, you would expect few, if any, women at the extreme of the rankings. Still, this appears to be an incomplete explanation of the inequality at the top of the game, about which Hou is 【小题7】. “You cannot deny it, you cannot pretend it doesn’t happen,” she told me, of the absence of women from chess highest echelon(梯队). For years, she has been the only one who stood a chance.

Hou was born in 1994 in Xinghua, a small city near China’s coast. As a child she 【小题8】 a chess set in a shop window and liked the shapes of the pieces. When she was five, she started playing the game with other kids at the home of a chess teacher and showed enough talent that her parents 【小题9】 her a year early in the local school which had a chess program. She and her classmates would consult a large chess dictionary and write out the first few moves of famous openings on a sheet of paper. Then they would set up their boards, dutifully 【小题10】 their copied instructions and launch their wild attacks.

She moved to Shandong with her mother and attended chess classes. Two years later, she joined the national team and won the girls under ten championship in 2003. In the next year, she finished boys under ten tournament tied for first.

This a public service 【小题1】. Audiences are 【小题2】 to turn off the phones or put them on silence. When the ball is in play or if a player is 【小题3】 please do not cheer or talk loudly. Wait for the point or game to 【小题4】 before standing up or leaving your seat. When taking photos during the match, please turn off your 【小题5】. Please do not throw anything onto the court.

The Great Wall Marathon

The Great Wall of China is one of the new wonders of the world, with breathtaking views. In 1998 Soren Rasmussen 【小题1】 the idea of organizing a Great Wall marathon. Rasmussen and two running experts chose a route along part of the Great Wall. The marathon has taken place annually in May since 1999. In the initial event, just 292 runners participated but numbers have gone up 【小题2】—in 2015 there were 2,500 runners from over 160 countries.

The Great Wall marathon is considered to be one of the toughest in the world. The part of the route that is actually on the Great Wall includes two exhausting up-and-down sections about 8 km long with 5,146 steps. It’s such a steep climb in parts 【小题3】 it’s hard to walk up—never mind run! The weather is hot and humid, with temperatures of around 30℃, but it can be hotter. Part of the route passes through a dry river bed with huge boulders (巨石). Runners who arrive there later in the day find it challenging because the boulders have become so hot that it’s like 【小题4】 a sauna.

So who does the marathon? Surprisingly, the marathon attracts both professional 【小题5】 and people who want to run for fun or simply do something different. Some runners stop every 10-15 minutes to take photos, chat to the locals and enjoy the scenery! If the thought of doing such a marathon horrifies you, then you can do a half marathon or an 8-km fun run instead.