Born and raised in Dunhuang, Northwest China’s Gansu Province, YaoYanbei _________ to Dunhuang as a promising _________ after graduating from a college in Xiamen.

In 2016, inspired by patterns in Dunhuang murals (壁画), Yao _________ a toy camel. “Through the toy camel, I intended to _________ the spirit of the locals who are usually tough-minded and hard-working,” Yao said.

In August 2017, Yao spent nearly a month inside grottoes (石窟) drawing the murals. “Staying in the grottoes from dawn to dusk, I felt _________ connected with the ancient artists who _________ the murals. It was an amazing _________,” she said. Inspired by the sculptures and murals, Yao later designed some innovative products, including T-shirts, bookmarks, pocket mirrors and key rings.

Thanks to the efforts of designers like Yao, the _________ and creative industry began to take root in Dunhuang. Starting from 2018, every year the city has _________ an international design week to help __________ the industry. “By pooling the wisdom of designers from home and abroad, we want to make Dunhuang’s creative __________ more fashionable,” said Liu Mengxing, a vice general manager of a local company.

Looking ahead at her __________ in design, Yao plans to __________ Dunhuang’s ancient art further and apply the wisdom of ancient artists to products of modern life. “I want to design more creative products that __________ to more international customers,” said Yao. “I hope my design can bring people __________ to Dunhuang.”

We’re told that writing is dying. Typing on keyboards and screens _______ written communication today. Learning cursive (草书的), joined-up handwriting was once _______ in schools. But now, not so much. Countries such as Finland have dropped joined-up handwriting lessons in school _______ typing courses. And in the US, the requirement to learn cursive has been left out of core standards since 2013. A few US states still place value on formative cursive education, such as Arizona, but they’re not the _______.

Some experts point out that writing lessons can have indirect benefits. Anne Trubek author of The history and Uncertain Future of Handwriting, argues that such lessons can _______ a skill called auto-maticity. That’s when you’ve perfected a task, and can do it almost without thinking, granting you _______ mental bandwidth to think about or do other things while you’re doing the task. In this sense, Trubek compares handwriting to driving.

“Once you have driven for a while, you don’t _______ think ‘Step on gas now’ or ‘Turn the steering wheel a bit,’” he explains. “You just do it. That’s what we want children to _______ when learning to write. You and I don’t think ‘now make a loop going up for the ‘I”-or “now look for the letter ‘r’ on the keyboard’. Trubek has written many essays and books on handwriting, and she doesn’t believe it will die out for a very long time. _______, she believes students are learning auto-maticity faster with keyboards than with handwriting: students are learning how to type without looking at the keys at earlier ages, and to type faster than they could write, granting them extra time to think about word choice or sentence __________. In an essay for the New York Times last year, Trubek argued that due to the __________ automaticity of keyboards, today’s children may well become better communicators in text as handwriting takes up less of their education. This is a view that has attracted both criticism and support.

She explains that two of the most common arguments she hears from __________ regarding the decline of handwriting is that not protecting it will result in a “loss of history” and a “loss of __________ touch.”

On the former she __________ that 95% of handwritten manuscripts can’t be read by the average person anyway-“that’s why we have paleographers (古文字学家),” she explains, paleography being the study of ancient styles of writing-while the __________ refers to the warm associations we give to handwritten personal notes, such as thank-you cards. Some educators seem to agree, at least to an extent.

Nguyen Thi Thu is one of the few remaining artists practicing and constantly enhancing the traditional Vietnamese art of sculpting realistic-looking flowers out of papaya (番木瓜树) fruits.

Thu became ________ in carving various flowers from papaya fruits at the age of 15, when she ________ a class on the art of sculpting fruit. She was fascinated by the ________ art form, but then she had to ________ to Russia and stayed there for 15 years. Thu couldn’t ________ her favorite art form because she was too busy working and had no ________ to green papayas. She ________ it with all sorts of other fruits and vegetables, but nothing was quite like the papaya she ________. When she returned to Hanoi in 2009, she ________ got back into papaya sculpting, and she has been practicing the art ever since.

Over the years, Thu has ________ herself to carve various types of flowers, but her favourite by far is also one of the most ________, the chrysanthemum (菊花). Creating a single flower takes between 45 minutes and over an hour,________ the complexity of the design. “I often fall asleep thinking of how to ________ a certain flower, and then I get out of bed to practice,” Thu said.

Apart from ________ her art form during various public events and creating delicate papaya flowers, Thu also holds classes in Hanoi, as a way of ________ the traditional art form.