Anhui back on track after nature's wrath

The route of the newly opened Hefei-Fuzhou high-speed railway.

With a top speed of 300 kilometers per hour, the Hefei-Fuzhou railway links many renowned scenic spots in East China, including the Yellow Mountains in Anhui, Sanqing Mountain in Jiangxi and Wuyi Mountain in Fujian.

With the new railway, Hefei now sends 33 bullet trains to Huangshan (the Yellow Mountains) each day, cutting the travel time from up to five hours to 90 minutes, helping to expand tourism in Anhui’s southern regions.

Guo Huaijun, a native of Hunan province working in Hefei, took advantage of the reduced travel times as he accompanied his father and other relatives on the bullet train to Huangshan for a three-day stay.

Director Li Zhong of Huangshan Municipal Tourism Administrative Commission said he expects the number of visitors to Huangshan - currently 46 million a year - to rise to about 53 million annually.

Summer is also a time, as many parents and students know only too well, when thoughts turn to high-school or college entrance exams.

Some test scores have been released and on June 28 students taking part in the college entrance examination in Anhui - which hit 572,511 this year, a drop of 5.94 percent over 2014 - were given results by the provincial education department.

Meanwhile, students taking exams to enter senior high school got results in 16 prefecture-level cities across Anhui since the start of July. Some 566,500 candidates took the exam this year, a slight decrease of 0.2 percent over last year.

Students and their parents await test announcements by the local education authorities.