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Earth Hour
The Chinese term literally means ¡°an hour on the earth¡± and corresponds to the original English term "Earth Hour." This international event is held on the last Saturday of March each year, encouraging households, governments and businesses to turn off non-essential lights for one hour to save energy.

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flexible retirement
Most Chinese state employees must retire at fixed ages by law ¡ª men at 60 and women at 55. But many people are calling for flexible arrangements whereby employees and employers can negotiate to postpone the retirement ages, say to 68.

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DINS
The expression is used mainly in Taiwan where it means families that enjoy a double income but without sex because the husband and wife are too preoccupied with their work to have the mood or time for sex.

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home page
This term, meaning literally ¡°baked chicken¡± in Chinese, is a comical transliteration used by Netizens for the English words ¡°home page.¡± The pronunciation of the Chinese term is quite similar to the English phrase.

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toxic assets
It refers to various asset categories hard hit by the financial crisis, such as subprime mortgages. Use of ¡°toxic¡± became widespread as any person, bank or organization holding subprime mortgages or related assets became financially debilitated.

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zombie bank
The term refers to a bank that cannot lend money because its liabilities are greater than its assets, but it stays in business thanks to government support.

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Web store builders
It refers to Web technology veterans who help design Web pages for online shop owners to attract more customers. Their responsibilities are compared to apartment decoration workers, but Web store builders use pictures, flash and music clips instead of construction materials.

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love tests
A professor at Nankai University in China recently invented a test to determine if two people should start a relationship. It aims to analyze the values, personalities and behaviors of each in line with the principles of a Couple-Centered Approach.

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re-education
The Chinese translates literally as ¡°back to the furnace,¡± meaning ¡°recycling,¡± and is now used figuratively to mean returning to college for re-education after a few years of work.