CENTENARIAN LINGUIST PASSES AWAY.docVIP

CENTENARIAN LINGUIST PASSES AWAY 　　Renowned linguist Zhou Youguang， the creator of pinyin， a system that represents the pronunciations of Chinese characters using the Roman alphabet， passed away on January 14， one day after his 111th birthday. 　　Born in Changzhou， east China’s Jiangsu Province， on January 13， 1906， Zhou studied economics at St. John’s University in Shanghai in the 1920s. He worked for a bank in China and 　　was sent abroad to work in New York and London in the 1930s and 1940s. He returned to Shanghai in 1949 and became a professor of economics at Fudan University and Shanghai University of Finance and Economics before becoming a linguist. 　　In the 1950s， he joined a Beijing-based national committee to develop an alphabetic system for reading Chinese characters， which came up with pinyin. Pinyin has since become a key tool for learners of modern standard Chinese. 　　 Media Convergence 　　People’s Daily January 12 　　It has become imperative for traditional media to converge with new media in order to survive. From January 2017， two newspapers in China―Beijing Times and Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post―have stopped putting out print editions and published solely online. The embrace of new media by the two newspapers reflects the urgency of media convergence. 　　Several leading media organizations are dabbling in new media by establishing editorial departments for media convergence and creating accounts on social media platforms including Weibo and WeChat. However， it should be noted that media convergence doesn’t simply mean meshing traditional and new media together. Rather， traditional and new media should be deeply merged in order to create new possibilities. 　　Now， the Internet has become the most important information transmission medium. For instance， during the 2016 Rio Olympics， TV audience viewing figures were much lower than those during the London Olympics four years previously， while the number of people watching the Games online i