--- title: China: Mei's exaggerations and everyday China — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «China: Mei's exaggerations and everyday China», a lesson of the history course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Mei says China invented everything: paper, football, ice cream. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/) / China: Mei's exaggerations and everyda… # China: Mei's exaggerations and everyday China Lesson 60 of the history course of Mova's primary school: 19 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/0/) — Mei says China invented everything: paper, football, ice cream. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/1/) — Danylo says Ukraine is the oldest and greatest. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/2/) — The history teacher smiles, because every country tells its story with pride, and history class is where the proud stories get checked, kindly. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/3/) — Some of Mei's claims hold: paper, printing, the compass, gunpowder and silk really came from China, FIFA calls the ancient game cuju the earliest known form of football, and wild giant pandas live only in China. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/5/) — Think of a school sports day: each class cheers for its own team, but the stopwatch is the same for everyone. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/6/) — Sources are history's stopwatch. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/7/) — Tu Youyou used one: she tested an old Chinese remedy and found a malaria medicine that won a Nobel Prize. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/9/) — Mei and Danylo learnt to check their sources; the teacher said he learnt a lot from both of them. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/10/) — Pride and truth can live together, and the best history is the one that survives the check. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/11/) — China invented many things, including paper, printing, the compass, gunpowder, porcelain, silk, paper money and the seismoscope; but not everything: the alphabet came from the Middle East, the number zero from India and the working steam engine from Britain. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/12/) — FIFA recognises cuju, a kicking-ball game from ancient China, as the earliest known form of football; the rules of modern football were written in England in 1863. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/13/) — People in Tang China kept ice and made frozen milk desserts; Persians and Arabs also made frozen sweets, so ice cream has several early homes and no clear first. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/15/) — The Chinese zodiac counts years in a 12-year cycle of animals: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig; the idea that your animal decides your character is tradition and fun, not science. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/17/) — Mandarin has the most native speakers in the world; English has the most speakers in total when second-language learners are counted. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/18/) — The Shaolin Temple in Henan province, about 1,500 years old, is famous for kung fu; monks give demonstrations with hard training and some showmanship, but nobody flies, that is film magic. - [19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/19/) — Wild giant pandas live only in the mountains of China; since the 1980s zoos abroad usually rent pandas from China instead of receiving them as gifts, and cubs born abroad are usually sent to China. - [20](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/20/) — In Chinese tradition the dragon, «long», brings rain and good fortune and is a symbol of power, while European dragons are often villains; Chinese legends have some dangerous dragons too. - [21](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/21/) — Traditional Chinese medicine is very old; Tu Youyou won the 2015 Nobel Prize for artemisinin, a malaria drug from sweet wormwood, a plant named in old texts, but many traditional remedies are not proven by tests and some use endangered animals. - [22](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/60-china-mei-s-exaggerations-and-everyday-china/22/) — Both Ukraine and China have long, rich histories; every nation has proud myths, and checking them kindly against sources is what history class is for. - ← previous: [China: modern China, space and contested topics](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/59-china-modern-china-space-and-contested-topics/) - next →: [How we got here: the big steps on one long timeline](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/61-how-we-got-here-the-big-steps-on-one-long-timeline/) - ↑ back to [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/)