When I was going home to India last year, I called up my mother to ask if she wanted anything from china,
When India had not opened up its markers to the world, I carried suitcase loads of dark glasses and jeans. Thankfully, we can get all these anywhere in India now,
Still ,her answer surprised me:“Green tea,”
As long as I can remember she didn’t even drink Indian tea.
I dutifully bought a big packet of Longjing and headed home to hear the story. My mother and her brother, both regular newspaper readers, believed that Chinese green tea was the wonder drug for all illnesses
At the turn of the century, China was not really familiar to the average Indian, It was a strange country
How things change [And how soon]
Now every town of any size seems to have a “China Market”. And everyone is talking about China
The government of India has planned to send a team to China to see how things are done A minister once said that India must open the doors for more foreign investment（投资）and such a step would “work wonders as it did for China”.
But it’s a two-way street, I just heard about a thousand Shenzhen office workers who have gone to Rangalore to train in software. Meanwhile, all the IT majors are setting up a strong presence in China,
No wonder that trade, which was only in the millions just ten years ago, is expected to his about us$15 billion for last year and us$20 billion by 2008, a goal set by both governments,
No wonder, my colleague wrote some weeks ago about this being the Sino-Indian（中印）century as the two countries started on January I the Sino-Indian Friendship Year,
But what is still a wonder to me is my mother drinking Chinese tea.
What is Bay? The simple answer is that it is a global trading platform where nearly anyone can trade practically anything. People can sell and buy all kinds of products and goods. Including cars, movies and DVDs, sporting goods, travel tickets, musical instruments, clothes and shoes- the list goes on and on
The idea came from Peter Omidyar, who was born in Paris and moved to Washington when he was still a child, At high school, be became very interested in computer programming and after graduating from Tuft University in 1988, He worked for the next few years as a computer engineer. In his free time he started Bay as a kind of hobby, at first offering the service free by word of mouth. By 1996 there was so much traffic on the website that he had to upgrade（升级） and he began charging a fee to members. Joined by a friend, Peter Skill. and in 1998 by his capable CEO, Meg Whitman, he has never looked back. . Even in the great. com crashes of the late 1990s,abay has gone from strength to strength ,. It is now one of the ten most visited online shopping websites on the Internet
eBay sells connections, not goods, putting buyer and seller into contact with each other. All you have to do is lake an e-photo, write a description, fill out a sales form and you are in business: the world is your market place. Of course for each item （商品）sold eBay gets a percentage and that is great deal of money. Every day there are more than sixteen million items listed on eBay and eighty percent of the items are sold
A volcanic eruption in Iceland has sent ash across northern Europe. Airlines have stopped or changed the flights across the Atlantic Ocean, leaving hundreds of passengers stuck in airports.
Grirmsvom is one of the largest and most active volcanoes in Europe. What makes Grimsvom different is that it lies under a huge glacier（冰川） of ice up to 12 maters thick. The hot volcano heats up the ice above it, which then forms a layer（层）of water between the glacier and the volcano This layer of water puts pressure on the volcano, keeping it stable, As the water flows out from under the glacier, the pressure lifts. The lava（岩浆） from the volcano then comes up to the surface. This is exactly what happened today.
Now, airlines have to make changes to their flights so as not to fly through the clouds of volcanic ash. According to KLM. one of Europe’s biggest airlines, airplanes cannot go under the cloud or over it. Going through the cloud can result in ash getting stuck in the airplane’s engines, causing damage to the plane.
The eruption has also caused problems for animals in Iceland. The volcano left ash and sharp. Glass-like rocks all over the countryside. Farmers are keeping their animals inside to stop them from eating ash- covered grass to the sharp object.