Society

A woman hangs mugwort on the gate of her house in Yangzhou, Jiangsu province, June 6, 2011, as believed by ancient people to keep away disease.

Onlookers can be forgiven for thinking that the whiskered middle-aged man walking into the exam room is a father of one of the test takers there.

Liang Shi, 44, attends a class for pre-exam training in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, last week to prepare for the national college entrance examination.

But rather than coming to support a child, he will be taking an exam himself. Tuesday will bring his 15th sitting for the gaokao, the national college entrance exam, in the past 28 years. This time he will take the exam together with his teenage son.

"I only want to realize a dream," Liang Shi, a 44-year-old native of Chengdu, capital of Southwest China's Sichuan province, told China Daily on Monday.

Continuous downpours have triggered severe floods in a county in southwest China's Guizhou province, leaving 14 dead and 35 missing by 8 am on Tuesday.

The flooding also forced the relocation of 45,000 residents in Wangmo County of Qianxinan Prefecture, the provincial flood control and drought relief headquarters said in a statement.

The Ministry of Railways will publish a new national train schedule on July 1, which will add 195 routes and implement floating ticket prices for the China Railway High-Speed (CRH), the Beijing Youth Daily reported on Thursday.

The new schedule will allow high speed trains running at different speeds to operate on the same CRH lines, and ticket prices will be lower for passengers who choose lower-speed trains on those lines.