In 1947 a group of famous people from the art world headed by an Austrian conductor decided to hold an international festival of music, dance and theatre in Edinburgh. The idea was to reunite Europe after the Second World War.

It quickly attracted famous names such as Alec Guinness, Richard Burton, Dame Margot Fonteyn and Marlene Dietrich as well as the big symphony orchestras(交响乐团). It became a fixed event every August and now attracts 400, 000 people yearly.

At the same time, the "Fringe" appeared as a challenge(挑战) to the official festival. Eight theatre groups turned up uninvited in 1947, in the belief that everyone should have the right to perform, and they did so in a public house disused for years.

Soon, groups of students firstly from Edinburgh University, and later from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham were making the journey to the Scottish capital each summer to perform theatre by little-known writers of plays in small church halls to the people of Edinburgh.

Today the "Fringe", once less recognized, has far outgrown the festival with around 1, 500 performances of theatre, music and dance on every one of the 21 days it lasts. And yet as early as 1959, with only 19 theatre groups performing, some said it was getting too big.

A paid administrator(行政人员) was first employed only in 1971, and today there are eight administrators working all year round and the number rises to 150 during August itself. In 2004 there were 200 places housing 1, 695 shows by over 600 different groups from 50 different countries. More than 1. 25 million tickets were sold.

1）出国旅游很有意义；

2）开阔眼界, 了解国外的风俗和历史；

3）和来自不同文化背景的人交朋友, 学习外语；

4）放松身心, 欣赏美景。

注意：

1）词数80左右(信的开头和结尾已给出, 不计入总词数)；

2）可以适当增加细节, 以使行文连贯。

Dear Michael,

How are you? These days, I am planning to travel abroad during the vacation.

Yours truly,

Li Hua

People from East Asia tend to have more difficulty than those from Europe in distinguishing facial expressions, and a new report published online in CurrentBiology explains why.

Rachael Jack, University of Glasgow researcher, said that rather than scanning evenly (均匀的) across a face as Westerners do, Easterners fix their attention on the eyes.

"We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions," Jack said. "Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, whereas Easterners favor the eyes and neglect (忽略) the mouth. "

According to Jack and her colleagues, the discovery shows that human communication of emotion is more complex than previously believed. As a result, facial expressions that had been considered universally recognizable cannot be used to reliably convey emotion in cross-cultural situations.

The researchers studied cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions by recording the eye movements of 13 Western Caucasian and 13 East Asian people while they observed pictures of expressive faces and put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry, or neutral. They compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using their particular eye movement strategies.

It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes and made significantly more errors than Westerners did. "The cultural difference in eye movements that they show is probably a reflection of cultural difference in facial expressions, " Jack said. "Our data suggest that whereas Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion, Easterners use the eyes more and mouth less. "

In short, the data show that facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotion. From here on, examining how cultural factors have diversified these basic social skills will help our understanding of human emotion. Otherwise, when it comes to communicating emotions across cultures, Easterners and Westerners will find themselves lost in translation.