【推荐1】Here are some Gap Year events for you to choose.

Visitoz

It’s the only organization in Australia that guarantees jobs for young people coming to our country on a Work and Holiday Visa. For young Americans this is a huge chance to get away from home and stand on their own two feet to make their own decisions. And it could also be a very pivotal chance for those kids who itch to own their new lifestyle.

Phone: 4168-6106

Email: info@Dvisitoz.org

The Experiment in International Living

It provides summer abroad programs for high school students who are always aiming to be a “genteel” learner engaging in many foreign countries with “fecund” programs that are designed to equip participants not only with essential cultural skills and, in many cases, language skills, but also with a deeper awareness of and sensitivity to critical global issues shaping the diverse communities and regions we visit.

Phone: 800-345-2929

Email: experiment@worldlearning.org

The International School for Earth Studies

A private and sagacious institution! We are always devoting ourselves to explore and delve students’ dowry and instinct of keeping a kind of sense to touch the earth by making them grow a seed and witness a sprout stretching from the soil. Meanwhile, we will also appeal them to be a forerunner on the marching towards protecting the earth’s environment.

Phone: 819-647-3226

Email: info@earthstudies.ca

Expedition Education Institute

Are you affectionate about intriguing and venerable nature world? Will you burst into a smile with rapture when seeing the nature world become better and better? Do you have a habit of stint and recycling? Expedition Education Institute can provide every ecologist dreamer(students in gap year limited)with this opportunity to be erudite in environment and create a wonderful world!

Phone: 207-322-2973

Email: Info@expeditioneducation.org

【推荐2】The Victorians’ Way of Having Fun

Whether it was visiting a human zoo, taking a bull on a hot-air balloon ride, or singing beautiful songs, Victorian Londoners loved to have fun. As performance managers came up with increasingly well-designed ways to make money from the capital’s huge potential audience, Victorians effectively invented the modern leisure industry – including theme parks, pubs and professional football. As a new book by historian Lee Jackson explains, the hunt for profit involves surrounding morality, class and empire. So where did Victorians go for fun? And what still exists today?

Dancing Rooms: Argyll Rooms, Piccadilly

It’s now a building site near Leicester Square, but when the Argyll Rooms lost its licence in 1878, there was a riot (暴乱). Drunken students were so angry at the closure of their favourite place that they took to the streets. The Argyll closed as the dance craze came to an end, and Bignell turned the space into the Trocadero music hall. It kept that name through the 20th century when it was transformed into one of London’s most tasteless tourist attractions. The site currently awaits development into a hotel.

Pleasure gardens: Gremorne Gardens, Chelsea

Gremorne was run by three West End pub owners, popular among the young people then. It closed in 1877 after losing its licence. Pleasure gardens more generally lost their meaning of existence with the establishment of public parks. London’s rapid growth meant the valuable land was usually sold to big companies for other purposes, which is why so little of London’s great pleasure gardens remain.

Pleasure gardens were also overshadowed by larger exhibition grounds such as the Crystal Palace, which tried to find a way of balancing entertainment with cultural education. Little physically remains of the Crystal Palace itself, which moved to Sydenham from Hyde Park in 1854, but the grand 200-acre grounds still exist as a public park.

On the site of the Methodist Central Hall was a short-lived attraction that attempted to transport the seaside to central London. It was railways that made Margate and Southend accessible to Londoners, and some of the leisure activities peculiar to the seaside soon made it back to the capital.

Football grounds: Craven Cottage, Stevenage Road, Fulham

Fulham FC, London’s oldest professional football club, still works at their first ground, built by the Victorians in 1896. Versions of the sport had been around for centuries, but it was the Victorians who created the game and then professionalized it. This led to enclosed grounds where spectators paid for admittance, with the income spent on acquiring new players. The modern game was born.

【推荐3】Every year, thousands of teenagers participate in programs at their local art museums. But do any of them remember their time at museum events later in life? A new report suggests that the answer is yes— and finds that alumni (毕业生) of arts-based museum programs credit them with changing the course of their lives, even years after the fact.

The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles recently asked researchers to conduct a study to find out how effective their long-standing teen art programs really are. They involved over 300 former participants of four programs for teens that have been in existence since the 1990s. Alumni, whose current ages range from 18 to 36, were invited to find out how they viewed their participation years after the fact.

Among the alumni surveyed, 75 percent of alumni rated the teen program experience as the most favorable impact on their own lives, beating family, school and their neighborhoods. Nearly 55 percent thought that it was one of the most important experiences they’d ever had, regardless of age. And two-thirds said that they were often in situations where their experience in museums affected their actions or thoughts.

It turns out that participating in art programs also helps keep teens enthusiastic about arts even after they reach adulthood: 96 percent of participants had visited an art museum within the last two years, and 68 percent had visited an art museum five or more times within the last two years. Thirty-two percent of program alumni work in the arts as adults.

Though the study is the first of its kind to explore the impact of teen-specific art programs in museums, it reflects other research on the important benefits of engaging with the arts. A decade of surveys by the National Endowment for the Arts found that childhood experience with the arts is significantly associated with their income and educational attainment as adults. Other studies have linked arts education to everything from lower drop-out rates to improvement in critical thinking skills.

【推荐3】Plants are living things. So can they feel pain? Plants don't feel pain the same way animals and people do, says Anke Steppuhn. She is a scientist at the Free University of Berlin in Germany. “What we define as pain usually has to do with a nervous system，” Steppuhn explains. When you put your hand too close to a hot stove, nerve cells send a signal to your brain. Your brain decodes(解码) that signal as pain. This causes you to pull your hand away before any serious damage is done.

Plants don't have nerves or brains, so they can't feel pain like we do. “But plants do recognize when something is hurting them，” Steppuhn says. Because they are rooted to the ground, they can't escape a dangerous situation. So they need other ways of fighting back.

The biggest threat to a plant's life is getting eaten. Some plants grow sharp little hairs. Other plants produce bad－tasting or even harmful chemicals. These force an attacker to abandon its meal. A plant called bittersweet nightshade does something even smarter, Steppuhn found. When a slug(蛞蝓) chews holes in a nightshade' s leaf, liquid begins dripping(滴) around the wound. It is almost as if the plant were bleeding. The liquid is sugary nectar(花蜜), and it happens to be a favorite food of ants. In their effort to collect the nectar, the ants swarm(蜂拥而至) all over the injured plant. They will attack anything that stands in their way. That includes the slug that damaged the plant in the first place. It's a very clever trick. Whenever a slug attacks a plant, the plant calls an army of ants to kill the slug.

Nectar isn't the only way plants attract bodyguards. They also release certain chemicals into the air when they are being eaten. People usually can't detect these smells. But wasps(黄蜂) can. When a wasp detects this cry for help, it races to the scene of the crime. If it finds the right kind of insect chewing down on the plant, the wasp will interrupt the attacker's meal. It will do this by laying eggs inside the insect’s body!

【推荐2】New Jersey Botanical Garden Membership

It’s easy to apply for New Jersey Botanical Garden (NJBG) Membership or renew your membership online, by phone or by mail. And it’s so important to the Botanical Garden! Your membership dollars help to improve the Garden, and provide educational and recreational (娱乐的) activities for the general public. Thank you for your support! To apply for or renew it, please click on the appropriate section and membership category below for safe and convenient online payment processing by PayPal.

If you prefer to apply by phone or mail, call the NJBG office at (973) 962-9534 or download and send in our membership brochure (Adobe Acrobat PDF file).

★Apply NJBG Today

★Renew Your Membership

The Botanical Garden started life as Skylands, a large area in the grand manner. It is famous for a 44-room Tudor Revival granite mansion (公馆) designed by John Russell Pope. Skylands has 96 acres of formal and naturalized gardens and is surrounded by over 1,000 acres of meadows (草坪) and woodlands. Purchased by the State in 1966 and officially named as the New Jersey Botanical Garden in 1984, the gardens contain approximately 5,000 species and varieties of trees and flowers.

For you, the NJBG is an exciting and beautiful place to visit, where you may enjoy each season’s best. Members enjoy special events, festivals, lectures, and rewarding educational opportunities for both city and country gardeners.

Your NJBG membership offers you discounts at participating nurseries (苗圃), garden centers and other fine businesses. Simply present your NJBG membership card when beginning your purchase:

*Goffle Brook Farm and Garden Center, (201) 652-7540

10% off your purchase

*Metropolitan Plant Exchange, (973) 638-7613

12% off your purchase

*Rohsler’s Allendale Nursery &Florist, (201) 327-3156

15% off your purchase