休闲阅读 第7期

A

Frequently Used Chinese Characters Are Decreasing

Though 1.65 million words are found in use in the files(文件), only 110,000, or seven percent, are frequently used. The rest are mainly names of people, places and organizations, according to the survey made by the Ministry of Education and the State Language Commission on the present situation of Chinese language.

The survey is based on 900 million characters in more than 8.9 million text files chosen from newspapers, magazines, TV stations and the Internet.

“That means Chinese is not that difficult to learn,” said Li Yuming, director of the language information administration department of the Ministry of Education.

The survey report, the first of its kind issued in China, also shows that a large number of characters, which were rarely used in the past, now appear more often in publications.

Among the first 7,000 characters ranked according to frequency of usage in the research, about 615 are not in the existing 7,000-character table of the standard Chinese that were made nearly 20 years ago.

Among the words used on Internet, more than 55 percent are symbols or letters, more than Chinese characters, according to the survey.

Because of rapid social development and the appearance of new media, such as the Internet, the Chinese language is witnessing a fast development, maybe faster than it has ever had, Li said.

Obviously, the present character table has fallen behind the development, and the ministry is drafting(起草) a new one, Li said, adding that the research may serve as an important reference to the revision(修证).

B

Biggest Rail Station in Europe Opens

Europe’s largest train station in Berlin opened on Friday two weeks before the World Cup.

German official Angela Merkel said at the opening ceremony that the five-storey steel and glass central railway station located in the center of Berlin “stands for a modern, liberal (自由的) country that opens to the world.”

Guenter Verheugen, Vice President of EU Commision, described the new Berlin Hauptbahnhof as “a milestone for the city, the region and Europe”. The station will hopefully see a more stable(稳定的), peaceful and secure Europe, he added.

As the world’s eyes turn to Berlin for the World Cup, Hartmut Mehdorn, the chief of Germany’s state-owned rail company, Deutsche Bahn AG, said he hopes the new station will show Germany’s best in technology, engineering, base, efficiency(效率) and architecture, and send the fans to the matches on time.

The station, built over ten years at an estimated cost of 700 million euros (about 890 million US dollars), expects some 1,100 trains and 30,000 passengers everyday.

Dozens of round glass-elevators, escalators(自动电梯) and staircases take travelers down to a three-level shopping square, where 82 stores and restaurants will be providing service around the clock seven days a week.

Twelve meters above street level, six east-west bound tracks will connect destinations such as Paris and Moscow. And 15 meters underground, eight north-south lines cross, linking Copenhagen to Athens through a new 3.6 kilometer tunnel which runs under Berlin’s city center.