Beijing Today (November 21, 2003)

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Local people in cliff-hugging Guoliang village did not dare to raise pigs any larger than 50 kilograms. Page 16

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 21 2003

Even vegetarian monks could not resist the captivating smell of the soup and leapt over a wall to get a taste. Page 14

NO. 130

CN11-0120

“I don’t want to wake up one morning to find I’m 50 and still just relegated to rehearsals, earning 30 yuan a day.” Page 11

HTTP://BJTODAY.YNET.COM

Volleyball Glory Again By Hou Mingxin hina beat its last rival and hosts, Japan, to take the title of the 2003 women’s volleyball World Cup last Saturday, with a perfect record of 11 straight victories. The road to the crown took China 17 years, but the victory of the women’s volleyball team means much for the country. In the past week, domestic media has heaped praise on the team, with

C

headlines like “China goes through wind and rain to see sunlight.” “We are so excited. We know the win means so much for the country. Every player had a burning desire to win the title. They have been working so hard for so many years,” said head coach Chen Zhonghe after the win. In 1981, also in Japan, the Chinese team took the World Cup after beating their hosts in the final, the first time China had ever won a

world title in a team sport. The women became household names and national heroines overnight and volleyball became one of the nation’s most popular sports. For the next five years, the Chinese women dominated world volleyball, winning five consecutive world champions, the gold medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games and the 1985 World Cup. “It was a miracle and the wins were so important to China, which

had just opened its doors to the outside world,” said Gao Shenyang, vice president of the Chinese Volleyball Association, in an interview with Xinhua last Saturday. “It was like rain in the desert. Everybody felt encouraged by the victories to work harder to build a prosperous country!” However after winning the 1986 world championships, the Chinese team suffered a 17-year title drought, finishing in seventh and eighth plac-

es respectively in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and 1994 world championships, both of which results were widely regarded as “national disasters.” Unlike in the 1980s, the domestic media has been relatively restrained in its coverage of this event, pointing out that the absence of Russia, the most formidable rival, made the victory an incomplete one. Next year’s Olympics, it is widely agreed, will be the true test.

Xinhua Photo

Donor Discovery Could Save Life of Little Girl

The question: “If the image of function y=ax2+ bx+a has two intersection with axis X, then the area of the point (a,b) on the aOb plane (not including the boundary) should be......”

According to Zhu, the full solution of the question is: a≠0 and│b│>2│a│, but the “correct” answer C, which does not exclude axis b by drawing it as a broken line or by drawing the shadow areas on the left and right of axis b with lines of different directions, only represents │b│>2│a│

Murky Math

The letter to the Ministry of Education signed by the 12 academicians. Photo by Aily

Top scientists question college entrance problem

By Xiao Rong questionable math problem in Jiangsu Province’s 2003 College Entrance Examination has 12 academicians in arms. After receiving a letter signed by the 12 academicians declaring that none of the four provided answers to multiple choice question No. 1 of the math test provide the correct solution to the problem, the Ministry of Education is reportedly now considering a fourth review of the contentious question. Zhu Ruzeng, a researcher at the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has been urging the Ministry of Education to work out a fair solution to the issue of the math question since it first came to his attention in June. The jointly signed letter is the latest step in the 62-year-old professor campaign. “It’s simply a wrong question. This is obvious even to a high school student, whereas the three reviews organized by the education departments deny the fact.

A

The correct solution of the question, or the revised answer C, according to Zhu Ruzeng.

It is really a question of scientific spirit,” Zhu told Beijing Today in a telephone interview last Thursday. Argumentation Zhu’s curiosity was first aroused by a report in the Yangzi Evening News on June 18, concluding that solution C did in fact correctly answer question No. 1 of the Jiangsu College Entrance Examination, after a review by experts invited by Jiangsu College Recruitment Office. Before that, Zhu had read on the internet that some math teachers from Yuhuatai Middle School in Nanjing had raised questions about the multiple choice question. Wondering how a simple math question regarded as eroneous by many local math teachers, could turn out to be correct again after a review, Zhu found the question on the internet and performed the calculations himself, only to find that the question was self-contradictory and that none of the four choices was the correct answer. (Continued on Page 2)

By Sun Ming Against all odds, good news has come in for American Linda Wells and her adopted daughter Kailee. Last weekend, a suitable donor for the bone marrow transplant the six-year-old girl desperately needs to counter her aplastic anemia was found in Tianjin. As Beijing Today reported last week, Wells arrived in Beijing on November 5 for her second trip to China to find a donor. She considered it her last chance to save her daughter’s life following disappointment in her first trip, made in February this year. “I just can’t believe it. It’s too good to be true,” the 51-yearold lawyer publicly announced in Tianjin on Sunday, “The odds were rated at several million to one.” Earlier that day, doctors in Tianjin discovered stem cell samples from a one-year-old Chinese girl are a perfect match for Kailee.

The cells have been frozen at Tianjin’s Union Stem Cell and Gene Engineering Ltd for one year. A representative of that facility told Beijing Today yesterday that there are enough cells in storage to conduct a transplant. Wells adopted Kailee from Changde, Hunan Province in 1997 and five years later the little girl was diagnosed with aplastic anemia. Her doctors in the US reviewed eight million possible donors from global bone marrow databases without finding a match. The China Marrow Bank has issued a statement that the stem cells from the Tianjin girl need further appraisal and once they confirm there is enough usable blood in the umbilical cord sample to perform the transplant, they will make arrangements for it to be transported to the US. Wells left China to return home on Tuesday.

Linda Wells holds a T-shirt with a photo of her adopted daughter, Kailee, at a press conference in Beijing last Monday. EXECUTIVE EDITOR: ZHANG XIAOXIA EDITOR: XIAO RONG DESIGNER: LI SHI

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