The Chinese character ‘或’ (Romanized as ‘huo’; English meaning ‘or’) can be used in many ways, including as a noun, verb, pronoun, and logical connective. As it functions as a logical connective, at least five different semantic meanings (inclusive-, exclusive-, identical-, whole-, and both-or) have been distinguished. This paper explores the deployment and meaning variations of ‘huo’ in elementary science texts. The findings indicate that the five types of ‘huo’ are prevailingly deployed in elementary science text. Crucially, the texts consistently lack linguistic cues for teachers and readers to understand the exact meaning. Understanding the meaning of ‘huo’ depends a great deal on domain knowledge. Strategies for teaching logical connectives and topics for further investigations are proposed.

　　This study explores textbooks used by Finnish elementary schools, employing connections and document analysis on research on Finnish textbooks in Taiwan. Study is carried out on the English version of Laskutaito, a set of elementary school math textbooks published by WSOY, consisting of 12 volumes for grades 1-6, thirteen master’s theses, and five studies from journals on Finnish textbooks. The study indicates that mathematical tasks are mostly non-contextual when categorized by problem representations, cognitions and knowledge of problem solving. Besides, mathematical representations mainly require procedural knowledge and meaningless connections. In addition, when investigated from the perspective of connections, it is found that Finnish textbooks contain five features: diversity of mathematical intra-connections, hidden layout of mathematical concepts, presentation of real-world mathematics, knowing the world through textbook and reinforcing logic reasoning and mathematical perception. As a whole, the mathematics textbooks used in Finnish elementary schools contain seventy to eighty percent non-contextual tasks, while emphasizing the development of mathematical thinking and reasoning. As only thirty percent of tasks are contextual, they are rich in international views and authentic world information.

　　This study employs content analysis to compare illustrations in Chinese textbooks published by People’s Education Press with those published by Kang Hsuan Education Press. It uses quantitative and qualitative to analyze il-lustrations of both versions to explore gender ideology. The following conclu-sions were reached as result: 1. More males are used in illustrations than fe-males in both textbook versions. 2. The professions of males are emphasized while females tend to be shown in supporting roles. 3. The Chinese textbook published by People’s Education focuses more on shaping roles like national leaders and war heroes. 4. When gender is unspecified in the text, the charac-ters shown in illustrations are generally male. 5. Both versions try to promote the equality of sexes, but social stereotypes still persist. 6. While gender ideol-ogy in illustrations is influenced by text, it takes on obvious ideological signifi-cance itself. Lastly, there is more elaboration on male roles in the Chinese textbook published by People’s Education than that published by Kang Hsuan Education. And female roles are more boring than those of males in both ver-sions.