The provincial normal university in east China's Fujian Province has offered an elective sex education course to students for the first time.

The 32-hour course introduces basic sex information to students including physiology, psychology, ethics and health care.

Students are still shy about choosing the course, because for a thousand years talking about sex has been a national taboo and they have had little information about sex.

According to a survey conducted by the university, 10 percent of male students and 16 percent of female students do not know how a baby is conceived.

In addition, university students nowadays get 80 percent of their sex information from newspapers, magazines, TV programs and the Internet, some of which is pornographic and gives the wrong impression to students.

Some students who have taken the course said in an interview that it increased their knowledge, but it seemed a little late to not receive sex education until university.

(People?s Daily December 13, 2001 )