#1 Choice for 3rd-year and 4th-year College Chinese. Written by professors from top Universities in the U.S. In simplified and traditional characters. In this new edition, we kept the topics of the first eleven lessons from the previous version but made small modifications to the dialogues and texts so they are more up to date and relevant. Three new topics are added: Ordinary People and Children of the Elite (Lesson 4), Democracy and the Modern Life (Lesson 6) and Influence of Contemporary Arts (Lesson14). This made both Part 1 and Part 2 of this new edition contain seven topics. Adding these three new lessons allows students to discuss more current topics. It also better distributes the amount of new vocabulary across each lesson and creates new contexts for the students to review and practice them. In Part 1, the 7 topics are: Heroes Through Chinese Eyes; Women's Social Status; Education and School Life; Ordinary People vs. Children of the Elite; Social Organizations and Social Activities in China; Democracy and Modern Life; Life of the Elderly. Notes of reviewed vocabulary from pervious lessons are added to the listening dialogues, reading texts, sample sentences and workbook exercises. This will make it easier for students to preview and review each lesson. At the same time, it will give instructors flexibility to select or shuffle the lessons to best fit their needs. We also included the transcripts of the dialogues at the end of the listening section and added more speaking activities related to the students' daily life. We also filmed a skit for each lesson to teach action verbs and narrative abilities and added warm-up activities, culture notes and authentic materials to each topic. In the workbook, vocabulary exercises are given in chunks to help students review vocabulary in corresponding stages. Exercises in Chinese characters are also given to help student memorize them more systematically and to strengthen their concept of character-based lexicon learning.