An article about my country in the English speaking press

In the early afternoon on 12th May a huge earthquake struck Sichuan Province in south west China. The earthquake was so strong it shook about 1,500 kilometres away. Many people in these regions died due to this serious disaster. I, like all Chinese people and even the whole world, have been concerned about this event all through. I selected this article Nation of 1.3bn falls silent to honour victims from NZ Herald because this is a significant event for China. The Chinese government ordered a three-day mourning period for the whole country to let all Chinese people, the grief of families, those hard-working rescuers and aids from the whole China and international community remember those victims in this destroyed earthquake.

This article mainly described how Chinese people mourned the victims of the huge earthquake in Wenchuan in diverse ways. In the three days of mourning, the national flag flew at half mast in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and the Olympic torch relay stopped. During the first three minutes from 14.28 19th May throughout the whole of China air raid sirens and car, train and ship horns wailed, people everywhere all observed a 3 minute silence and all public entertainment as well as stock and futures exchanges stopped trading.

The Effect of Globalization on Food in China

In the latest decades with the high-speed development of information technology and continual improvement of transport the process of globalization in many aspects has got a great acceleration. Food and diet culture also have merged each other. China has been significantly affected by food and diet culture.

In the first place, the effact is reflected sufficiently in supermarkets of cities. While walking around the food supermarkets, many food on the shelves from different counties can be seen, such as, wine from some counties of Europe, Australia and New Zealand, chocolate, coffee, candy, drinks, fruit, chips, some dry nuts and turkeys from the main counties of North America, seasoning from Korea and Japan and rice from Thailand and so on.

Next, many known international fast food chains, such as, Mcdonald's, KFC, Dicos, Starbucks, SUBWAY and Pizzahut, have been distributing in many cities of China, and from reports only KFC in China has reached 700. In addition, there are many bakeries and ethnic restaurants in cities. So people are able to experience foreign food without necessarily travelling anywhere.

Furthermore, some Chinese people have been changing their diet styles, particularly those young people and children, who eat out for these western food in fast food chains and even take them to schools as lunch. On the weekends or holidays these shops are always crowded with young people and children with parents' companions, which is so called 'westernise' in diet by some Chinese people. Meanwhile, many middle-age people are also willing to receive western food. Sometimes they buy foreign foods from supermarkets to cook and taste.

To sum up, globalization of food has been offering much richer choice of food to Chinese people known as epicures, and has been changing the diet culture of some Chinese people. However, some of the fast food was judged as junk food. It is hoped that more healthy food could be imported to China.