You will celebrate Spring Festival with your family in just one month. While preparing for the most (重要的) holiday of the year, you may come across an animal sign from the Chinese zodiac on the paper cut decorations that hang on your home's doors or windows.
According to the Chinese lunar calendar,(二月) the sixteenth is the beginning of the Year of the Dog. Although they(看作) as friends and part of the family today, China and Western countries have different cultural beliefs about dogs.
In Chinese, some words concerning dogs have bad meanings. In English, however, the (情况;形式) is different. People use "every dog has his day" to describe a period of good luck and "work like a dog" to describe a hard worker.
The dog-human relationship goes right back to the beginnings of Western civilization. Perhaps the most moving evidence is from the (第八) century BC, in Greek poet Homer's The Odyssey. In next centuries, the friendship between humans and dogs was a common subject for artists.
In (事实；实际), people were close to dogs in a way they weren't close to cows, pigs or even (马). Farmers worked closely with dogs. But even after science came to agriculture and dogs (失去) their traditional roles, the relationship between man and dogs remained.
Nowadays in the West, (百万) of people keep dogs as pets. They are at the heart of family life. People feed them, take them on holidays and look after them. In return, dogs are loyal in a way that friends sometimes aren't. We (知道) an English saying, "A dog is man's best friend."
