When girls play with cars, they're serious. It was at primary school that Gu Huijing first became interested in cars after watching some car-themed movies. Born in 2004 in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, Gu decided to major in automobiles (汽车) when she was in junior high.

She's driven by interest, but she is also a realist. “I think the future of the automobile industry is bright because we cannot live without food, clothes, houses and cars,” she said.

In April, she won first prize at a competition for vehicle maintenance (车辆维修) in Dongguan city, which drew 33 teams from different cities across the province.

“I thought it couldn't be that hard to repair cars when I started to take courses, but I was totally wrong,” Gu said. When she started learning in 2019, she was frequently confused by various problems. “And competition within our school is intense, so I had to work extra hard,” she said.

Her teacher once tried to persuade her to give up as she was a sophomore (大二学生), and wasn't as knowledgeable as the seniors, and no women had ever been selected for the competition before. “But I insisted that I would carry on,” she said. Finally, her training and hard work won her the only place to stand for her school at the competition.

A woman winning first prize in a vehicle maintenance competition became a hot topic on-line, causing heated discussions over gender (性别) and career choices. “Women should not be influenced by old-fashioned thinking, and should do whatever it takes to discover their interests and strengths. There are more possibilities out there,” one netizen wrote.

Gu said, “Many people think vehicle maintenance is a job for men. That's wrong. I don't think gender has anything to do with choice of jobs.” “I have a goal and I will work harder to make it happen,” she added. “I will be responsible for my choices.”

We human like to conquer. For the same reason that soccer players want to hold the World Cup trophy(奖杯) and tennis players crave a Grand Slam win, mountaineers dream of reaching the highest peak on the planet - Mount

“Everybody wants to stand on top of the world,” Mirza Ali from Pakistan who had just “conquered” Mount Qomolangma, told the Los Angeles times.

However, this desire to conquer has become so strong that we have begun to travel in the wrong direction.

During the climbing season in 2019- from March to May at least 11 climbers died in the Himalayas, making it one of the worst seasons on record And the fact that/many of the climbers were inexperienced is one of the major factors (因素) contributing to the tragedy/according to USA Today.

“They don't train very hard. They underestimate(低估) [Qomolangma],” Jangbu Sherpa, who has been working as a guide on Mount Qomolangma since 2006,told NBC News. “There are lots of climbers who just want to check the box so that they can say they've been to the top of the world.”

This ignorant attitude of climbers- also leads to other problems - apart from putting their own lives at risk, of course. According to HuffPost, the mountain's cleaning group collected 12 tons of trash - including food wrappers(包装袋), and oxygen tanks - left behind this climbing season.

Perhaps what we should do now is restore meaning to the activity itself - real meaning.

“When I did make it to the summit, what I realized is that standing on top of a mountain doesn't change you and doesn't change the world,” Alison Levine, who reached the peak of Mount Qomolangma in 2010, told the NPR. “It's really about the journey. The journey is the most important thing on any mountain."