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http://english.cri.cn/7146/2014/07/04/2582s834474.htm

This is NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.​

Train trips on the Beijing to Shanghai high-speed railway have surpassed 220 million since its debut three years ago.​

China's railway authorities say that daily average trips on the railway reached 230,000 last year; and the number climbed to 272,000 in the first half of this year.​

The more than 1,300-kilometer-long railway links the country's most prosperous economic zones, cutting travel time between Beijing and Shanghai to less than five hours.​

The railway is designed to handle maximum train speeds of 350 kilometers per hour. High-speed trains on this railway made their debut on June 30, 2011.​

This is NEWS Plus Special English.​

China's Tianhe-2, the world's fastest supercomputer, is boosting science and technological development at home and abroad.​

"Tianhe-2" retained its top spot for the third consecutive time on the biannual Top 500 list of supercomputers.​

An official with the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou in southern China says that the event represents a significant change from "Made in China" to "made with China's wisdom".​

"Tianhe-2" was developed by the National University of Defense Technology, and runs at almost 34 petaflops per second.​

Its computing capacity in one hour equals that of the 1.3 billion people in China calculating on calculators for 1,000 years.​

The supercomputer has been in commercial operation since April this year.​

Capable of handling high levels of analytical, computing and processing, the supercomputer is driving multiple industries and SciTech projects with secure high-speed development.​

It completed high-precision calculations of the external flow field around China's first home-made large passenger jet in only six days. It would have taken about two years without the supercomputer.​

In the medical field, the supercomputer enables doctors to gain a comprehensive understanding of certain diseases before surgery; and helps evaluate and reduce medical risks.​

The supercomputer has been used in the country's priority projects, covering energy, bioscience, pollution control and high-speed rail design.​

This is NEWS Plus Special English.​

Beijing saw an outbreak of hand-foot and mouth disease with more than 2,600 cases reported per week in the past few weeks.

Beijing's disease prevention center says during the period between the last week of May and June 22nd, the number of weekly reported hand-foot and mouth cases increased from 2,600 to 3,000 in Beijing.​

The Beijing Disease Prevention and Control Center says although the number of cases increased compared with the same period last year, the number of critical or death cases were almost the same.​

The municipal health authorities say that hand-foot and mouth disease is a viral illness that usually affects infants and children younger than five. The disease starts with a slight fever followed by blisters and ulcers in the mouth and rashes on the hands and feet.​

The virus is usually transmitted through digestive and respiratory systems or through intimate contact.​

You are listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.​

The World Heritage Committee has added an extension of the South China Karst, a natural World Heritage Site since 2007, to the World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO.​

The extension covers a total area of over 1,000 square kilometers, and includes four sections all located in southwest China.​

Karst topography is a distinctive landscape formed by the dissolution of layers of soluble bedrock, such as limestone, dolomite and gypsum.​

It is characterized by underground systems such as sinkholes and caves. It may also result in a variety of large-or small-limestone pavements, karst valleys, flutes, and vertical shafts on the exposed surface.​

The World Heritage Committee, which was convening its 38th annual session in Doha, Qatar, added China's 2,400-year-old Grand Canal and a section of the ancient trade route Silk Road to the World Heritage List.​