Now, monster traffic jams hit Beijing

Beijing: The monster traffic jams which become a norm outside Beijing stretching up 100 km and lasting for days have now started paralysing the Chinese Capital as the city is chocked with 4.5 million vehicles.



Beijing was choked by 88 traffic jams yesterday morning in addition to a record 140 traffic jams that paralysed the city's roads on Friday last with the number of vehicles on road exceeding 4.5 million, City's traffic management bureau said.

As of September 12, there were 6.1 million drivers and 4.5 million registered motor vehicles on the streets of the capital, according to figures from the bureau. As a result China's famed infrastructure including its sprawling multi-lane highways as well as urban road infrastructure is increasingly coming under strain in the recent months leaving the government nonplussed.



Outside city, the Beijing- Tibet highway is increasingly getting blocked for days together with heavy trucks bringing coal to the energy hungry metropolis while growing number of vehicles jammed the city roads.

To minimise bottlenecks, Beijing now limits the number of cars that may be on the road during the week, according to the last number of vehicle license plates. Traffic was moving slower than 20 km per hour on 88 trunk roads and expressways in Beijing at 9 am on Sunday, official media reported. The morning rush extended an extra hour, China Daily reported.



Last Wednesday, the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau warned that the city's roads were exhibiting pre-festival symptoms, as "residents made more trips during off-peak hours and at night". "Shopping, visiting friends and relatives, and party going will contribute to major traffic flows on the city's ring roads before the national holidays," it said.



The three-day holiday for the Mid-Autumn Festival, when families traditionally gather and exchange gifts, starts on Wednesday and the seven-day holiday for National Day begins on Oct 1.

The traffic bureau said Beijing will be further tested on Sept 25, 26 and Oct 9, which will once again be considered work days without traffic restrictions.



With Sunday considered a work day, the subway system responded to the challenge by keeping train capacities as high as on regular work days, a move it plans to repeat on the days before and after the two holiday periods.

Source: PTI

Indian kids miles ahead of white counterparts

London: Indian and Chinese students, who lag behind at age five, outshine white British children in exams when they reach age 16, a study has revealed.



The research suggested that peer pressure may influence how well different groups work at their studies.

The researchers from University College London said the ethnic minority pupils' achievement was an "amazing success story", Daily Mail reported on Wednesday.



Pupils who belong to ethnic minorities struggle to grasp English when they start schooling but they catch up with their white British counterparts and even outperform them as their language skills improve.

"School systems are more efficient if they are more competitive," Harvard University's Martin West, who co-wrote the study, was quoted as saying.

Black and Asian pupils may benefit from greater attention, says the study that was published in the Economic Journal. Researchers poured over exam results for nearly 500,000 pupils to carry out the study.



The researchers observed that in vocabulary and making patterns tests, at the ages of three and five, white British children outshone their ethnic minority counterparts.

When the pupils were seven-years-old, all ethnic minority groups with the exception of Chinese pupils were behind white British youngsters in English and maths tests.

However, by the time compulsory schooling ended, Bangladeshi, Pakistani and black pupils from outside the Caribbean had caught up with their white British classmates, while Indian and Chinese pupils had overtaken them, the media report said.

The improvements in language skills as ethnic minority pupils was a huge reason for closing the gap.



The study said that among Indians, the share of native English speakers was just one in five.

It also came out that ethnic minority parents chose better secondary than primary schools, perhaps because they become more adept at negotiating the school admissions system.

Christian Dustmann, one of the study's authors and director of the Centre for Research and Analysis on Migration, said: "We don't really understand the dynamics of peer groups within a school, and how within a school individuals sort into different groups."

Source: IANS