Astronaut-politician Astronaut-politician Astronaut-politicians are those individuals who have entered politics after traveling to space as an astronaut. Even with the increasing number of individuals who have flown in space, astronauts still maintain a wide degree of public recognition, and those interested in pursuing a career in politics have been able to take advantage of their renown to enter politics at higher levels of elected office. American John Glenn, one of the Mercury Seven selected in 1959 by NASA became the first American astronaut to orbit the earth when he flew the Mercury-Atlas 6 named "Friendship 7" for three earth orbits on
Chinese as a foreign language using intonation whilst retaining the correct tones. Chinese courses have been blooming internationally since 2000 at every level of education. Still, in most of the Western universities, the study of the Chinese language is only a part of Chinese Studies or sinology, instead of an independent discipline. The teaching of Chinese as a foreign language is known as "duiwai hanyu jiaoxue" (). The Confucius Institute, supervised by Hanban (the National Office For Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language), promotes the Chinese language in the West and other parts of the world. The People's Republic of China began to accept foreign