Two food companies (公司) in the UK have been asking people what they usually have for lunch. Their 【小题1】 show that the British are not very exciting when it comes to lunch—most of them eat the same things every day! Most people have their lunch every day at 12:30, 【小题2】 they start thinking about lunch two hours before that.

So 【小题3】 do British people have for lunch? At the top of the list are cheese sandwiches, with chicken sandwiches next. We like baked potatoes with tuna (金枪鱼), too, but 【小题4】 third most popular lunch is salad and then soup, preferably tomato not cabbage! Food from other countries—such as curry (咖喱)—【小题5】 not very popular at lunchtime, and we don’t like garlic (大蒜). But we do eat a 【小题6】 of pasta (意大利面食).

People in Britain have been having lunch for hundreds 【小题7】 years, but they have never spent very long time eating their meal.

Lunch time is getting shorter—half of Britain’s workers have their lunch in the office and it 【小题8】 them only 30 minutes to have their midday meal. Doctors say it isn’t a very healthy way 【小题9】 eat and can make us feel stressed. Perhaps we should all spend longer 【小题10】 our lunch!

Our grandparents seem to have magic powers sometimes. Give them a Chinese lunar calendar 【小题1】 they will know what the weather will be like days or even months later.

What’s the 【小题2】? They are following the 24 Solar Terms (节气), which are an important part of Chinese culture. Last year the United Nations 【小题3】 it to the list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (人类非物质文化遗产).

The 24 Solar Terms began during the ancient periods. At that time, most Chinese people made 【小题4】 living on farms. So weather changes were important for them. But of course, they had 【小题5】 weather report or Internet to help them.

But people found a way. They studied the sun’s movement and also 【小题6】 attention to other natural changes 【小题7】 air temperature, water and plant growth. 【小题8】, they worked out the 24 Solar Terms to mark the changes.

The terms became their guide to farming work. For example, the solar term jingzhe (惊蛰) is when insects wake up 【小题9】 a long sleep in the cold winter. Farmers take it as a sign of warm weather and get busy working.

The 24 Solar Terms is regarded as China’s 【小题10】 great invention, after paper-making, printing, the compass and gunpowder. Now, it is still widely used in daily life even in the age of technology-based modern farming.

Do you know something about rings（年轮）? Do you know they can tell us what the weather was like, sometimes 【小题1】 hundreds of years ago?

A tree will grow well in a climate with lots of sunshine and rainfall. And little sunshine or rainfall will limit the growth of a tree. We can see the 【小题2】 of climate by studying the tree rings. For example, to find out the 【小题3】 of ten years ago, we can count the rings of a tree from the 【小题4】 to the inside. If the tenth ring is far from the eleventh ring, then we’re sure that it was sunny and rainy 【小题5】 of that year. If it is near to the eleventh ring, then the climate that year was bad.

Tree rings are important not only for studying the history of weather but also for studying the history of 【小题6】 . Many centuries ago there 【小题7】 a lot of people at a place in New Mexico. But now you can find only sand there-no trees and no people. What happened?

A scientist studied the rings of dead trees there. He found that the people had to leave because they had cut down all the trees to 【小题8】 fires and buildings. As all the trees had gone, the people there had to move.