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Play your cards right



Art imitates life. That's why these real-life scenarios act as the theme of a brand spanking new role-playing card game, the very latest hit among college students.


Their is always a cat-and-mouse relationship between a naughty student and a strict teacher. The student always wishes to skip class, while the teacher is hot on attendance. The teacher sets a hard examination. Otherwise, the student will look to get by on as small work as feasible.

Opponents adopt the roles of teachers and students respectively, and student union leaders are planted as undercover spies to make the game more intriguing

Xie Muyang, 19, a sophomore majoring in Japanese at Dalian University of Foreign Languages, has designed a card game called College Bang , which consists of over 150 cards which are based on actual incidents taken from campus life.

The game won millions of online followers, who raved about the way it reminded them of their campus life. Also,Also, Xie’s “strategy tips” on each card summarize essential campus survival skills.

They interview upperclassmen and teachers to check if such strategies can direct you toward success in the game of actual life.

Roll call

A mean teacher will call the roll often. However, it may be safe to skip class when there is no roll call.

But according to Yang Min, an English teacher from Shanghai International Studies University, teachers don’t only count on attendance records to decide on a student’s final grade. The changing technique of college graduation increasingly involves in-class participation.

Rule explained – “Some teachers call the roll only a few times throughout the whole semester. But once you miss one, your final mark suffers greatly, even though you have a good overall attendance record,” Xie complained.
Giving hints for exams


All class discussions and group projects need your presence. Even in case you manage to discover a buddy to cheat in the head count for you, he cannot replace you in the class activities,Yang said. So, be there yourself.

Always attend the last lecture of a semester when the lecturer will summarize all of the key points.

Rule explained The last lecture of each work is always well attended. Guys turn up for valuable examination tips.

But Wang Yaxi, 21, finds that his teachers are less than generous in telling students which questions will appear in the final examination. Wang is a sophomore in international journalism at United International College of Beijing Normal University and Hong Kong Baptist University.

However, one of Wangs classmates came up with a crafty plan: He went to ask the teacher for help after each class. Then he pieced together what the teacher had focused on in the work of each study session. Bingo!

Moreover, the reason why fewer and fewer teachers will highlight the key points before exams is, again, related to the changing formats of plenty of courses. Good class participation will lead you to the secrets of the final examination, said Yang.

But Yang poured chilled water on this idea. He pointed out that the assumption that a teacher would favor definite students by giving them examination hints was likely to be wrong. Wangs classmate may subconsciously make progress through such efforts, said Yang.

Friendship

My buddy not only shares cigarettes with me, but also all of those happy memories. This card can help you to solve every issue.

Rule explained My buddies are my most precious gain from my college years, Zhang Jiayang, 22, a computer science grad from Tongji University said with pride in the work of a job interview. If I had not met them, I would have spent my college years alone in the dorm, unhappy and silent.

Xu Han, a counselor at Zhejiang University, agrees that a classmates-based network builds the stable foundation of ones career connections. But he advises students not to confine themselves to a small social circle. Its better to communicate with individuals who have different personalities and majors. This helps you to change to and learn from diverse ways of thinking, said Xu.

Sending postcards back home while traveling abroad is usually merely an afterthought to exploring the sights and runescape gold sounds of your new destination. For Ou Nanxi, however, it`s a living.

Since posting an advertisement on taobao.com, one of China`s major e-commerce platforms, on January 18 pitching the
runescape money chronicles of her travels abroad – in the form of postcards – to interested buyers for 20 yuan ($3) a pop, Ou, a 25-year-old employee of an Internet company in Haikou, Hainan Province, has scored 147 takers. Setting out over this past Spring Festival holiday to Vietnam, she found herself sharing her travel dreams with people from all over China.

Romantic flying dart

Our story began with nothing more complicated than a desire to see the world and a single flying dart – her preferred method for choosing her destination.

"Using a dart to choose where I want to go is such a romantic idea," Ou said. "I like the feeling of spontaneity and runescape accounts possibility from being on the road."

Dedicated

Ou`s touch down in Vietnam on January 26 was the first time she`d stepped foot out of China. She said that in the past while traveling around China, she has maintained a habit of sending postcards to herself, but that she`d quickly lose them while moving residences.

"But I found that my friends always kept the ones I sent to them," she said. "I know they`re more than just pieces of paper – they`re documents of a very special place, time and runescape items relationship in your life."

Making her way through Vietnam, she made sure to seek out a post office in every city she visited and allotted enough quiet time to compose a kind message to every postcard seeker she was in contact with.

"Most people asked me to address the cheap runescape gold postcards to their loved ones," she said.Due to serendipitous timing, most of Ou`s postcards arrived around Valentine`s Day."For girls this was an absolutely priceless present," she said.

One man in Zhuzhou, Hunan Province asked Ou to send a postcard to his son, who is still too young to read.Another contact asked Ou to write a letter of appreciation for his wife, with whom the man had recently been arguing, with the words "Thank you for sticking with me through all the hardships without any complaints" on it. This postcard in particular, Ou said, helped her realize the gravity of her task.

A valuable path

Ou`s travels weren`t without her share of difficulties, though. In 2008 she was diagnosed with Sjgren`s syndrome. Enduring a strong flare-up at one point during the trip, Ou said she was lucky enough to stumble upon a US medical school student, who helped Ou recover through her pain and discomfort and was in turn inspired by Ou`s resolve to seek adventure despite her disability.

Ou said her journey was so exciting that she can`t wait to hit the road again."I`m not done selling dreams – I`m thinking about India for my next destination," she said.

It may just be another expensive car shuttling about the streets of Beijing, but it`s become the talk of the runescape gold town at the Beijing-based Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE).

That`s because the owners of the spanking new Ferrari are He Zhiguan and Shi Chaodong, both recent CUFE business school graduates. Once the Ferrari appeared, however, rumors started proliferating – did they win the money in the lottery? Earn a huge inheritance from a rich aunt? Steal it?

Small start

Both hailing from middle-class families – He from Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Shi from Guangdong Province – their
runescape money business acumen, eventually culminating in their splashy new purchase, has become the stuff of legend in this ultra-competitive business university.

Dating back to the winter of 2006, when both He and Shi were freshmen, their earliest efforts saw them recruit 100 students to join a business team selling rechargeable LED reading lamps to other students at CUFE and runescape accounts more than 20 other universities throughout Beijing, including Tsinghua and Peking University – all of which cut power at night to conserve resources, thus giving rise to an urgent and untapped niche that needed filling.

They soon started seeing the sales to justify their toil. That winter, they sold about 20,000 lamps, earning a net profit of over 80,000 yuan ($12,000). Counting the additional profit from selling other products, including hair dryers and stationery, they earned a profit of more than 300,000 yuan ($45,000) that first semester alone.

Driven to succeed

Though thrilled by their early victories, no one could imagine what might come next.

Over one particularly grueling Spring Festival commuting experience, He and Shi went in together on a second-hand car to cheap runescape gold avoid having to take the train during the holiday crush.

Putting up 90,000 yuan ($13,000) to buy a 10-year-old Toyota, He took a chance and put it back on the market, eventually scoring 120,000 yuan ($18,000) as the resale price.

The two then realized the runescape items economic potential in selling second-hand cars, establishing contacts in the used car markets in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Shenzhen.

Their original team was divided on whether to move in such a daring direction, citing their collective lack of experience in a world as tricky and mercurial as the auto market.

"In the end, most of them stuck with the original business," He said. "Only a few were bold enough to follow us into the deep end."

In May 2007, they made a profit of nearly 100,000 yuan from selling a second-hand Volkswagen Touareg, and cheap runescape gold later that year they opened a store in Beijing to sell higher-end cars.

With their business expanding at a rapid clip, in the summer of 2008 they bought the Ferrari as a reward for their hard work.

Continued efforts

The Ferrari has made them stars on campus and has served as an example of their hard work and business savvy.

Both He and Shi say that they won`t rest on their cheap runescape accounts laurels. According to Shi, if he`s learned nothing else in his business classes, it`s that he must remain motivated and strive for greater successes.

The Goose Town, the central setting for the runescape gold movie, has come to symbolize China for some film buffs with a political leaning. Yet, Jiang repeatedly uses the location as an outing to the murky world of genre-film making.

The most brilliant touches in his movies all seem to traverse the stream of reality, for example, in Bullets opens with a train pulled by white horses.

Jiang Wen is at the top of the world - the runescape money world of Chinese cinema, that is. His year-end release Let the Bullets Fly has just broken the box-office record for a domestic film with some 700 million yuan ($107 million) in gross receipts.He does not need others to tell him how great he is - not any more.

That does not mean he is not proud of Bullets. It`s just that Bullets, for him, is fun. He is aware of all the
runescape accounts political interpretations of his story that have sprung up across the Web and mainstream media.

"No, I did not mean to embed political meanings into the story," he says straightforwardly.I did not invent this set-up. For 30 years in the early 20th century, there was a segment of rail line in Northeast China that was powered by horses," he explains, without getting into the symbolic runescape items significance of such devices. "You may conceive the most unlikely scenes, and you`ll find that fact is stranger than fiction."

Jiang Wen was trained at the Central Drama Academy - as an actor. Yet he is known for his bold visualizations. He prefers scripts read to buy runescape gold] him by someone who can turn the words alive. His storyboards, as drafts for each shot, tend to be cursory. But his verbal description of each scene is so vivid the listener can quickly recreate each frame in his or her mind`s eye.

The only filmmaker whose work Jiang admits as having an impact on him is Martin Scorsese. After watching a string of the American director`s movies, Jiang requested a meeting with him on a trip to the United States arranged by the US Embassy. Scorsese has acted like a mentor, sending him detailed materials from his production.

"When a director sees a story or a script he`s crazy about, he does not have any towering figures in front of him. He must feel he himself is the greatest. It is nonsense when people say they are paying respect to this or that cheap runescape gold predecessor." Jiang says.

What Jiang says

On political analogies

No matter how you shoot it or cut it, you will bring something of yourself into your movies, just as the old saying goes about everything being imprinted with ideology. You do not necessarily intend it. I never meant to make In the Heat of the Sun or Devils at the Doorstep autobiographical. I`m an avid reader of history, but I don`t think history should be approached only in the way we were taught in school. Artists have their own interpretations. So, we make art with our worldviews, but by no means do we create everything in our own self-image.

On film critics

Why should Chinese film critics be obsessed with box-office revenue? That`s the job of the investors and cheap runescape accounts producers. What do you lose when you praise a good movie that does not sell? You should write what you believe in. Critics who are guided by money are pathetic.

The drama revolves around Qingchuan, a young woman from the 21st century, who time travels to the Qing Dynasty. There, she falls into a love triangle with Yinzhen and Yinsi, the fourth and eighth sons of the Kangxi Emperor.And according to the video clip released online, Qingchuan and runescape gold Yinsi find their way back to 21st century in the end.

Pretty faces, imperial conspiracies, a love triangle – The TV drama Palace, which aired on Hunan TV, was just another time-traveling story. But things got interesting when details of the runescape money ending were leaked on the Internet.

That’s how it could happen. But the director Yu Zheng dropped a bombshell, claiming that he had shot three possible endings.

In the other two possible endings, Qingchuan may be forced to get married to Yinzhen, the man she doesn’t love, while her husband Yinsi may end up dying in prison. But most Palace fans did not seem to runescape accounts want such surprises.

A poll on the micro blog of Sina.com showed that 74 percent of respondents were in favor of the ending which had been leaked.

“All I need is a happy ending,” said Zhu Xu, 23, an English major from Beijing Foreign Studies University. “I don’t expect any changes.”

If Yu Zheng did pretend that there were multiple endings, he is not the runescape money first director to play this game.In 1961, American film director William Castle’s horror film Mr Sardonicus allegedly had two endings.Which one was shown depended upon whether the audience gave a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”.But the truth is Castle only ever filmed the “thumbs down” version.Like Castle, Yu Zheng has kept the cheap runescape accounts audience glued to their seats.

The good news is that there was no change at all. The ending shown on TV on Monday night turned out to be exactly the same one people had watched online previously.

Many viewers were relieved that nothing bad happened to the runescape items love birds. But, after all the chaos, people are starting to wonder if there has always been only one ending and whether they have been fooled.


However, it is unlikely that multiple endings or assumed multiple endings will ever work for him again. So, as far as the sequel is concerned, let’s hope the director can avoid a leak.

Many students runescape gold dream of becoming freelancers upon graduation. In their fantasies, a freelancer’s life means waking up just before noon, meeting friends and traveling on a whim, and turning down boring or low-paying work.

But is this really the way they live? We talked with three young freelancers to give readers a more authentic sense of their life and work:

You`ll need a full contact book

Contacts are critical to freelancers, as most of their job opportunities come from friends.

That may require you to maintain a good runescape money] relationship with every client. Wen Yujie, a 23-year-old graduate from Communication University of China, has been a freelance model and animation designer for nearly a year. She has a model contract with VIVI magazine, and so she accepts all job offers from VIVI – even the ones that don’t pay.

“I can make a lot of friends who may later introduce me to other modeling jobs,” Wen said.

Potential employers are increasingly using the Web to learn more about runescape accounts freelancers. To attract more contacts, Wen suggests that would-be freelancers set up a website, or simply a blog or a webpage at social networking sites like renren.com, to highlight their skills and experience.

Social activities in business circles also help freelancers. Connections they make help gain a better grasp of the industry.

Zheng Yuantao, 29, is a freelance translator and writer. “I used to volunteer a lot for an HIV/AIDS organization and thus have some runescape items contacts in the NGO world,” said Zheng. “They would give me assignments, trusting both my language skills and my understanding of specific terms.”

Outstanding skills are a must

It’s hard for a freelancer to compete against corporations. Zhao Tianting, 27, was disqualified for several projects because he was an “individual” freelancer instead of a “corporation” when he freelanced as an art designer for half a year.

“Corporations have more financial and personnel support. So a lower price alone is not that appealing to your potential clients. You need to show that you’re strict with deadlines and have reliable skills,” said Zhao.

Zheng Yuantao agreed: “It’s not that my friends give me work because they favor me, but because they believe they can trust me with cheap runescape gold certain assignments.”

Zheng suggests that would-be freelancers learn more about their industry by joining online communities of industry insiders, like QQ groups and douban groups.

“This will help them to learn about the industry’s ‘mysteries’,” said Zheng.

Prepare to lose a little sleep

Freelancing is not as “free” as you might think. Freelancers, especially those just starting out, don’t have much freedom when choosing assignments. Wen Yujie sometimes has to bite the bullet and undertake jobs she doesn’t like, low pay and cheap runescape accounts picky clients in order to “return a favor”.

“For example, a friend who in the past gave you a well-paying job now is asking you to take one that is not so satisfactory. You have to accept it in order to return the favor,” Wen said.

Also, freelancers seldom have long-term contracts. Failing to meet a deadline once could burn one’s bridges with a client forever.

For this reason, freelancing often means days packed with work. For instance, although Wen receives animation design projects twice-monthly, she often goes three days without sleep to meet the deadline.

“You have to be diligent,” added Zheng. “That is, unless you are a genius who everybody wants to hire no matter how terribly you tend to buy runescape gold procrastinate.”

It may just be another expensive car shuttling about the streets of Beijing, but it`s become the talk of the runescape gold town at the Beijing-based Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE).

That`s because the owners of the spanking new Ferrari are He Zhiguan and Shi Chaodong, both recent CUFE business school graduates. Once the Ferrari appeared, however, rumors started proliferating – did they win the money in the lottery? Earn a huge inheritance from a rich aunt? Steal it?

Small start

Both hailing from middle-class families – He from Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Shi from Guangdong Province – their
runescape money business acumen, eventually culminating in their splashy new purchase, has become the stuff of legend in this ultra-competitive business university.

Dating back to the winter of 2006, when both He and Shi were freshmen, their earliest efforts saw them recruit 100 students to join a business team selling rechargeable LED reading lamps to other students at CUFE and runescape accounts more than 20 other universities throughout Beijing, including Tsinghua and Peking University – all of which cut power at night to conserve resources, thus giving rise to an urgent and untapped niche that needed filling.

They soon started seeing the sales to justify their toil. That winter, they sold about 20,000 lamps, earning a net profit of over 80,000 yuan ($12,000). Counting the additional profit from selling other products, including hair dryers and stationery, they earned a profit of more than 300,000 yuan ($45,000) that first semester alone.

Driven to succeed

Though thrilled by their early victories, no one could imagine what might come next.

Over one particularly grueling Spring Festival commuting experience, He and Shi went in together on a second-hand car to cheap runescape gold avoid having to take the train during the holiday crush.

Putting up 90,000 yuan ($13,000) to buy a 10-year-old Toyota, He took a chance and put it back on the market, eventually scoring 120,000 yuan ($18,000) as the resale price.

The two then realized the runescape items economic potential in selling second-hand cars, establishing contacts in the used car markets in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Shenzhen.

Their original team was divided on whether to move in such a daring direction, citing their collective lack of experience in a world as tricky and mercurial as the auto market.

"In the end, most of them stuck with the original business," He said. "Only a few were bold enough to follow us into the deep end."

In May 2007, they made a profit of nearly 100,000 yuan from selling a second-hand Volkswagen Touareg, and cheap runescape gold later that year they opened a store in Beijing to sell higher-end cars.

With their business expanding at a rapid clip, in the summer of 2008 they bought the Ferrari as a reward for their hard work.

Continued efforts

The Ferrari has made them stars on campus and has served as an example of their hard work and business savvy.

Both He and Shi say that they won`t rest on their cheap runescape accounts laurels. According to Shi, if he`s learned nothing else in his business classes, it`s that he must remain motivated and strive for greater successes.

Get a college degree and you`ll go far? Ye Dong made it to a 10-sq-m room, at 60 yuan ($9) a month, next door to his
runescape gold old college in Shaoguan, Guangdong province.

Now 23, Ye earned his diploma in June 2010. But he has barely left the campus. He still eats in the canteens and runescape money studies in the classrooms. Living close is convenient and familiar, he said.

Around almost every college and university in China are cheap apartments and bungalows for rent, where lots of graduates like Ye live. They live and runescape accounts look like enrolled students, but they aren`t.

Such kind of graduates is called "school-drifters". It became a popular search keyword and triggered wide media coverage and further academic research.

"The number is increasing over the years. A simple reason is that each year the number of graduates rises, while the runescape items employment rate remains basically the same. A large portion of the unemployed become school-drifters. Some previously

employed also come back after a short, unsatisfying, work experience." according to Hu Jiewang, a sociology professor at Jiaying University in Guangdong province.

A hollow feeling

Ye sees himself as a school-drifter. He said the real world is different from his ideal.

He landed a job as a production assistant in a local jewelry company in March last year but quit two months later. "The

2,400-yuan ($360) a month salary was high among my cheap runescape gold classmates, but the job was too tiring. I had only one day off every week and the working hours were too irregular," he said."Entering society made me feel hollow."

Not ready to take a job for now - he has some savings, loans from friends and money from an occasional job - Ye and the two school-drifters he lives with decided to try their luck in this year`s post-graduate exam. Ye`s goal is Jinan

University in Guangzhou, where he failed to get in last year. "I want to be a teacher in the future, so I have to pursue higher degrees."

Hu said most of the school-drifters aim to buy runescape gold
enter grad school. Some hope to find a better job; some want to stay in big cities; and some are simply fearful of the intensely competitive job market.

Living on school resources, Hu said, "is a way of cutting living costs. But they do have some resource conflict with currently enrolled students."

Universities are enrolling more and more students, resulting in crowded campuses, full libraries and self-study classrooms, and dining halls as jammed as farmers markets. School-drifters add to that.

Why don`t drifters return home? "From ancient times the Chinese have had the notion that `going out` and `going to colleges` were good. Anybody coming back home without achievements is a loser," Hu said.

"A too-high expectation from parents could be a burden on students, and could prevent them from returning home after graduation. Many would not tell parents their real situation."

After graduation and entering the cheap runescape accounts society, many graduates felt lost. As a result, the number who stayed in school - for further education, for better opportunities, or for the comfort - increased.