Hello 大家好，经过两周的修养，我们回归了。因为主播在生病期间喝了很多茶，茶也对他恢复健康起到了很多的作用，所以我们这一期决定来讲一下茶叶。

Hello everyone and welcome to episode 28 of Weekend English Club. Last week I was sick and had a cold, so I was not able to work on an episode but I got better and want to talk about tea today. I like drinking tea when I am sick, but also when I am healthy. But what is tea actually, and where did it come from?

Tea is a drink made by pouring boiling water over the leaves of a plant called Camellia Sinensis, but you do not have to remember that name. Most people just call it the tea plant. This plant originally came from an area around Yunnan in China. Aside from water, tea is the most popular drink in the whole world. Chinese people started using tea as a medicine thousands of years ago, and later it also became popular as an everyday drink. Before the Tang dynasty tea was mainly drunk in southern China, but later it also became popular in the rest of the country and also spread to Korea, Japan and Vietnam. These countries still drink a lot of tea as well, but it also became popular in the rest of the world.

Westerners learned about tea around 500 years ago when they started trading with China. Dutch traders bought tea in China and Japan and brought it back to Europe, where it then became a popular drink in places like the Netherlands, Germany and France. Eventually tea also spread to the United Kingdom, where it became super popular as well. English people started adding milk and sugar to their tea, which they still do today. In Europe tea used to be very expensive and only for rich people, but around 200 years ago it became much cheaper and everyone could drink tea.

There are many types of tea, such as white tea, yellow tea, green tea, oolong tea, black tea which is known as red tea in china, and pu'er tea. They are all very different and some of them are stronger than the others, but they can all have very interesting flavors. Of course now you also have many other drinks like ice tea and bubble tea, but in the past people only had normal tea. China still produces half of all the tea in the world and tea is still a very important part of many cultures around the world. It is good for your health, so do not forget to drink some tea regularly.

• Pouring：倾泻；倒
• Boiling：沸腾的
• Originally：最初，原来
• Aside from：除了...之外
• Spread：传播；流传
• Vietnam：越南
• Eventually：最终；终于
• Bubble tea：珍珠奶茶
• Produce：生产，制造
• Half of：一半；...的一半
• Regularly：定期地，有规律地

主播：Daniel

校对：nan_nan