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This is NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Yun Feng in Beijing. Here is the news.

China's Education Ministry has taken a critical step in its initiative to reform the college entrance exam system, aiming to reverse the exam-oriented education to help fuel future growth.

According to the ministry, university entrance will no longer be solely determined by students' score in the Gaokao, the national college entrance exam.

In addition to exam results, students will also be evaluated on their morality standards, physical health, art cultivation and social practice. For example, volunteer activities will result in merits.

China resumed the Gaokao system in 1977. Since then, the exam has been called a "single-plank bridge" because of the wide gap between applicants and admissions. But in recent years, Gaokao has attracted criticism for its suffocation of students' innovative spirit.

This is NEWS Plus Special English.

China has approved the construction plan for a new international airport in Beijing that will enable the Chinese capital to handle 72 million more passengers each year.

The project will involve investment of almost 80 billion yuan, roughly 13 billion US dollars, and take about five years to complete.

The new airport will be located 46 kilometers south of Tian'anmen Square in Daxing district, and is expected to become operational in 2018.

The airport is designed to handle 2 million metric tons of cargo and 620,000 passenger flights on an annual basis. It will include 150 parking aprons for passenger jets and a terminal building with a floor space of 700,000 square meters.

Officials say that the new airport will serve the rising demand for air transport in Beijing, boost the balanced development of the capital city's northern and southern areas, and strengthen China's competitiveness in the civil aviation sector.

A 66-kilometer rapid transit line will be built to link the city's northern areas to the new airport. Passengers will spend less than 30 minutes getting to the city center from the airport.

Currently, Beijing has two airports that serve civil aviation flights.

Beijing Capital International Airport, located in northeastern Beijing, served 84 million passengers last year and was one of the busiest airports in the world.

This is NEWS Plus Special English.

China's drug watchdog has ordered a severe crackdown on the illegal sale of cough syrup that contains codeine, a potentially addictive prescription drug.

China's Food and Drug Administration and the Public Security Ministry have released a joint statement saying that pharmaceutical companies and drug retailers must be stripped of their licenses if found to have illegally sold cough syrup containing codeine, and they will be banned from future trading.

In recent years, some pharmaceutical companies and drug retailers have been found to have sold the products in large quantities. The statement says that as a result, abuse of this substance is worsening, and addiction and death from abuse of codeine had caused severe social impact.

The administration has vowed to cooperate with the police in "resolutely putting an end to the abuse issue", and has boosted supervision and control on manufacturing, distribution and purchase of the product.

You are listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Yun Feng in Beijing.

U.S. space agency NASA says that its Mars Curiosity rover has measured a tenfold spike in methane, a potential sign of life, in the atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a rock-powder sample collected by the robotic laboratory's drill.

Researchers say that the temporary increase in methane, sharply up and then back down, shows there must be some relatively localized source; and there are many possible sources, biological or non-biological, such as interaction of water and rock.

The researchers used Curiosity's onboard Sample Analysis at Mars laboratory a dozen times in a 20-month period to sniff methane in the atmosphere.

Curiosity also detected different Martian organic chemicals in powder drilled from a rock dubbed Cumberland, the first definitive detection of organics in surface materials of Mars.

NASA said these Martian organics could either have formed on Mars or been delivered to Mars by meteorites.

The researchers say that Curiosity's new findings are not enough to reveal if Mars has ever harbored living microbes, but the findings do shed light on a chemically active modern Mars and on favorable conditions for life on ancient Mars.