Astronaut spacecraft bound for Earth orbit or beyond. NASA also uses the term as a title for those selected to join its Astronaut Corps. The European Space Agency similarly uses the term astronaut for members of its Astronaut Corps. By convention, an astronaut employed by the Russian Federal Space Agency (or its Soviet predecessor) is called a "cosmonaut" in English texts. The word is an anglicisation of the Russian word "kosmonavt" (, ), one who works in space outside the Earth's atmosphere, a space traveler, which derives from the Greek words "kosmos" (κόσμος), meaning "universe", and "nautes" (ναύτης), meaning "sailor". Other
Chinese as a foreign language China. After this period, only Cantonese and Mandarin remained as the most influential variants of Chinese, the former due to the importance of maritime trade in Guangzhou and the emergence of Hong Kong as a key economy in East Asia. Chinese departments in the West were largely centered on Cantonese due to British colonial rule over Hong Kong until the opening of communist-ruled China starting in the 1970s. The teaching of Chinese as a foreign language in the People's Republic of China started in 1950 at Tsinghua University, initially serving students from Eastern Europe. Starting with Bulgaria in 1952, China