[Photo/Xinhua]

The sixth edition of the popular children's encyclopaedia "One Hundred Thousand Whys" has been published. The exhaustive collection of texts has delighted readers for years, inspiring them and answering all those niggling questions. More than half of the questions answered in the new books are collected directly from children across the country.

Why do people grieve? Why are girls smarter than boys? These are the types of questions included in the latest version of the children's encyclopaedia, which has been around for more than 50 years.

The publisher says children proposed more than half of the 4,000 questions in the books.

"Starting from May, 2011, we started collecting questions all over the country. More than 10,000 children have put forward over 30,000 questions. Those questions became the foundation for the new books," said Hong Xingfan from Juvenile & Children's Book Publishing House.

Hong says more than 80 percent of the questions included in the latest version are new, while new answers have been provided for the 20 percent of questions that have been used before. Hong adds that they have used more than 8,000 illustrations to better explain the answers.

Some parents say publishers could do more to get kids to pick up the books. "Nowadays, children like to watch cartoons. If they can make the book more comic or something, that would be even better for young kids. Children love motion pictures and bright colors," a parent named Diao Hongwen said.

One middle school student in the city says if he has a question he can't answer, he would prefer to look online instead of spending hours reading an encyclopaedia. "Because we have so much homework to do. We don't have much time for reading books unrelated to academic study," said the student, Wang Mengyu.

The publisher says they have more than 50,000 questions in their database and are working on digitizing the books, so they can build an online children's encyclopaedia in the future.

The new set of the encyclopaedias includes 18 books, and costs 980 yuan.

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