A Chinese university has built the world’s longest 3D-printed bridge. The creation has a 【小题1】(long) of 26.3 meters and a width of 2.6 meters. Its design came from the historical Zhaozhou Bridge 【小题2】(build) in AD 605.

【小题3】 the ancient Zhaozhou Bridge required a decade to build, the team spent only 450 hours【小题4】(complete) all of their new bridges concrete parts. Besides, the bridge’s cost came in at just two thirds of that of 【小题5】 ordinary bridge.

The bridge consisted 【小题6】 44 individual 3D-printed concrete units, each of them approxi-mately 3 by 3 by 5 feet. The sides, influenced by the Zhaozhou Bridge, 【小题7】(make) with 68 single concrete plates moved into place by robot arms.

The leader of the team noted that “the demand for labor in construction projects will be in short supply increasingly” in the future. If China cannot find people to build bridges, “intelligent construction will become an 【小题8】(importance) channel to solve this problem”.

There 【小题9】(be) other 3D-printed architectural projects over the last few years, as the technology has become【小题10】(popular) than before. A team at MIT built a sample house in 14 hours. If there are ever houses on Mars NASA suspects the houses also will be built by robots using 3D printing.

The 17-year-old making films fun for deaf children

For eight-year-old Toby, who is deaf, watching films or TV can sometimes be a bit pointless, because so many of them don’t have sign language versions. “We have subtitles (字幕) but it goes too fast,” his dad Jarod Mills said. But now, Toby has some help thanks to an app 【小题1】 (develop) by a 17-year-old student, Mariella Satow, who created a signing app called SignUp.

She got the idea when she 【小题2】 (teach) herself American Sign Language (ASL) — one of hundreds of sign languages used across the world. Manella wanted to watch TV shows to help her learn, and she was disappointed 【小题3】 (discover) how few had signed versions. It’s taken a year for Mariella to develop the technology, with lots of help from ASL teachers and the deaf community.

The app is available in the US as a browser extension—with an interpreter appearing in a box 【小题4】 the film starts playing. It only works on Disney Plus films at the moment, because that’s 【小题5】 Mariella thought she could help the most children. Jarod, 【小题6】 works at a school for deaf children, says it was “exciting” watching Toby use Mariella’s invention. He says, “Kids are getting information like any hearing child does.”

Deaf people in the UK face many of the same barriers when it comes to cinema and TV. “A hearing person 【小题7】 go to the cinema any time whereas deaf people have to make sure there’s a suitable viewing a time we’re free,” says 27-year-old Stacey Worboys from Cardiff. She has learned British Sign Language(BSL), and is comfortable using subtitles when watching TV shows and films. But she feels having an interpreter would make things 【小题8】 (inclusive), especially for someone who might struggle with subtitles.

Stacey and Toby aren’t the only people to be welcoming Mariella’s app. It’s now got thousands of users, and she’s working long days to balance it with her A-level studies. The time difference from New York to her school in Rugby, Warwickshire, means she sets her alarm for 5am.

She admits it’s “a bit tough” – but the silver lining is it gives her time to work on SignUp once lessons are over. The positive reaction from teachers and parents has kept Mariella 【小题9】 (motivate) to face the early starts.” The most meaningful comments are when it’s the first time a child 【小题10】 (have) full access to a movie. The numbers don’t really matter. Instead, it’s the messages,” she says.

It’s common to see a barista (咖啡) create coffee art, 【小题1】 it’s a whole different ballgame doing same thing with tea. Han Zheming has managed to perfect the skill, 【小题2】 (create) tea art in cups, or dian cha in Chinese, which used to be a routine during the Song Dynasty.

Over the past six years, the 40-year-old Shanghai resident 【小题3】 (use) tea and spoons to create nearly 200 patterns based on ancient paintings.

Chinese tea culture started to enjoy【小题4】 (popular) during the Tang Dynasty and flourished throughout the Song Dynasty, when tea had become a necessity for almost everyone, from nobles and scholars 【小题5】 common people, just like other essential items, such as rice, oil and salt, as 【小题6】 (suggest) by Song politician Wang Anshi.

In the Song Dynasty, the common way of having tea was through dian cha. The process begins with hot water being poured over fine powdered tea creating a paste, then more hot water 【小题7】 (add) slowly as the tea is constantly stirred by hand with a bamboo stick. This method later spread to other parts of East Asia, including Japan, 【小题8】 similarities can be seen in the way matcha is prepared today.

This action of pouring hot water is called dian, which was listed as 【小题9】 intangible cultural heritage in 2019. About tea—stirring, Han said that it usually requires stirring the mixture between 180 and 200 times before the water and the tea are 【小题10】 (full) blended.