중앙데일리

What people are talking about

The conversation was the same over lunch a few days ago. Our country is in serious trouble, someone started. Whether we voted for him or not, we urgently need President Roh Moo-hyun to find stability and show more ability, another person said. Someone else voiced the opinion that the Roh administration’s biggest crisis was the lack of public trust because of the president’s frequent verbal mistakes. Get Mr. Roh to get his words straight, he…

June 25,2003
Change on the diamond trail

Since ancient times, diamonds have been a symbol of wealth and high standing. Today, diamonds are so popular that anyone with money can buy one, but during the Roman era, only the nobility owned the gem. There is no accurate record on when humans first used diamonds. But historians report that India’s Dravidian tribe began using them around the seventh or eighth century B.C. Before the 18th century, India exercised enormous power as the wo…

June 24,2003
Screen quotas make little sense

Should the system of quotas requiring Korean-made films to be shown a certain number of days be scrapped? Yes, some officials have said recently, because the quotas are interfering with negotiations for a bilateral investment treaty with the United States. Under the screen quota system, movie theaters in Korea are currently required to run Korean movies at least 146 days per screen. Under strict supervision, any theater that fails to follo…

June 23,2003
Proud past, troubled present

Chohung Bank has more titles starting with “the nation’s first,” or “No.1” than any other local bank. The bank was established in 1897 as Hansung Bank, and is in the Korean Guinness Book of Records as Korea’s oldest. Also, it is the first corporation to have been formed here in Korea. The name “Chohung” was adopted on October 1, 1943, when the bank was merged and taken over by other banks during the Japanese occupation. In 1918, the …

June 22,2003
Tiny bubbles

Tulips, a flower of the lily family, have a traditional significance of a “confession of love.” But in the mid-17th century, Dutch painters used tulip as symbols of vanity and greed. The price of tulip bulbs had become so expensive as to approach the price of a house ― in other words, a bubble developed. Soap bubbles, glittering with multiple colors, can mesmerize people, but they disappear in the blink of an eye. In economics, a bubble…

June 20,2003
Revolutions and upheavals

Lao She was one of the representative writers of early 20th-century Chinese literature. In October 1950, the left-leaning novelist ended his exile to the United States, receiving a letter that said, “Return to the revolutionary motherland,” from Zhou Enlai. Mao Tsetung and Mr. Zhou appointed him chairman of the Beijing Federation of Literature and Art. In Beijing Mr. Lao bought a house with the money he earned from his famous novel, “Luotuo …

June 19,2003
10, 20, 30: marking an ascent

By 1987, six years after reaching a per capita income of $10,000, Japan had doubled that income measure. Five years later, Japan’s per capita income was $30,000. The United States’ per capita income hit $10,000 in 1978, but it took 10 more years to reach $20,000, and an additional nine years for it to climb to $30,000. Singapore attained $10,000 per capita income in 1989, and five years later broke through $20,000. Not all nations co…

June 18,2003
The story of tea

“Chajing,” written by Lu Yu of China’s Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907), is regarded as the Bible of tea. According to this book, the Chinese ground boiled tea leaves and lumped them into a cake. Then the cakes were left for years underground. The best were fermented for more than a hundred years. This technique is still used for the puerh tea of the Winnan region. But in modern times the Chinese are drinking more urong tea or paojong tea, which…

June 17,2003
Out of Africa

“The human race originated in Africa.” Charles Darwin, an evolutionist in the 19th century, advocated that theory, and asserted that the primitive ancestors of the human race had lived in the southern jungles of Africa. The primitive human being, similar to the ape, went through dramatic evolution, while walking out of woods and traveling to Asia and Europe via the savannahs, or tropical plains. He believed that human beings began to stand e…

June 16,2003
Shuttling hither and yon

The word “shuttle” is on Koreans’ tongues again because the leaders of Japan and Korea agreed to open air transportation links between Haneda Airport near Tokyo and Seoul’s Gimpo Airport. The word initially referred to a part of a weaving loom that travels back and forth from left to right to insert threads between the longitudinally-spaced threads. That back-and-forth movement gave rise to the word’s usage as a verb meaning to move back a…

June 15,2003

1 ... 984 985 986 987 988 989 990 991 992 ... 1083