With such strong support from the general public, the festival is surely a great event for people of all ages. This free family weekend event brings together people from all over the globe mixing culture, food and music in a great setting at Hampden Park. Time:Sat.24-Mon.26 Aug.

The world's biggest free seafront airshow returns in August with 4 days of perfect flying. The event also includes children's entertainment areas, evening concerts, helicopter rides. A fireworks show marks the end of the event. Ground displays open 10:00 am-6:00 pm daily, with flying from lunchtime until about 5 pm. Time:Thur.15-Sun.18 Aug.

Sovereign Harbour Yacht Club at the Waterfront is, once again, pleased to be able to present their third annual Celebration of Land and Sea event. The event is free for all visitors with plenty of on-site free parking, and no live music performances will need to be canceled due to the summer weather. This year you'll be lucky to enjoy the fireworks display during the celebration.

A Celebration of Land and Sea starts on 23rd August and runs until Monday 26th August. The event opens at 10:00 am daily. Please see website for more information.

Returning for his 26th year Eastboume's Punch and Judy, Ray Sparks will be providing his free Punch and Judy shows on the Wish Tower Slopes every Tuesday and Thursday throughout the school holidays at the usual time of 12:30 and 2:00 pm.

【推荐3】Summer is the most popular season to visit Texas since there is so much to see and to do. While visiting the Lone Star State this summer, don’t miss visiting some of these attractions and taking part in some of Texas’ best summer vacation activities.

Visit SeaWorld

There are sea life shows, adventure camps, thrilling rides and a water park. A great many activities are waiting for you at SeaWorld.

Windsurf (风帆冲浪) at South Padre

With miles of shallow (浅的), calm water in the Lower Laguna Madre and strong winds coming off the Gulf of Mexico, South Padre Island is a windsurfer’s dream.

Swim at Barton Springs

Barton Springs is in the famous Zilker Park. It was formed when Barton Creek was built. Since its opening, Barton Springs has become one of the most popular swimming pools in the state.

Take part in an outdoor adventure

In the scenic Texas Hill Country, Lake Buchanan Adventures offers different kinds of activities, including boating, hiking, camping and more.

Camp and hike in Big Bend Park

Big Bend offers a great number of outdoor activities in an old way. Backpacking, mountain biking, fishing, boating, hiking, nature watching and camping－you name it. If it can be done outdoors, it can be done in Big Bend.

Enjoy saltwater fishing

Saltwater fishing in Texas is as good as anywhere else in the USA. More and more fishermen have been discovering this in recent years and packing their bags and rods (鱼竿) to make good use of Texas’ world-class saltwater fishery.

【推荐2】    1    You probably think you will never be a top student. This is not necessarily so, however. Anyone can become a better student if he or she wants to. Here’s how:

Plan your time carefully. When planning your work, you should make a list of things that you have to do. After making this list you should make a schedule of your time. First your time for eating, sleeping, dressing, etc... Then decide a good, regular time for studying.    2    A weekly schedule(安排) may not solve all your problems, but it will force you to realize what is happening to your time.

Make good use of your time in class.     3    Listening carefully in class means less work later. Taking notes will help you remember what the teacher says.

Study regularly. When you get home from school, go over your notes, preview the important points that your teacher is going to discuss the next day, and read that material.     4    If you do these things regularly, the material will become more meaningful, and you'll remember it longer.

Develop a good attitude towards tests. The purpose of a test is to show what you have learned about a subject. They help you remember your new knowledge. The world won't end if you don’t pass a test, so don’t be over worried.

    5    You will probably discover many others after you have tried these.

【推荐2】In a foreign country, a man visited a local restaurant. He didn’t speak their language. He ordered something indecipherable (无法解释的，难以辨认的) off the menu. When the waiter brought him a plate of delicious looking fried noodles, he smiled and made an OK sign at the waiter with his thumb (大拇指) and forefinger (食指) linked in a circle. Looking angry, the waiter then picked up the dish and threw it to his lap (大腿). What he did wrong, he wondered. Well, nothing is quite as it seems when it comes to using hand gesture in another country.

Gestures have been used to replace words in many countries, and they are often specific to a given culture. Gesture may mean something complimentary in one culture, but is highly impolite in another.

The gesture “thumbup” (竖起大拇指) is commonly misinterpreted (误解). In English, it is popularly known as “thumbsup”, despite the fact that the action is commonly performed with only one hand. English speaking Caucasians (白种人) use it to signal “OK”, which is the same meaning as OK ring gesture. The two can in fact be used almost interchangeably.

Avoid using this gesture in northern Greece unless you want to invite a fight. While American, British and Australian would use the thumbup to signal hitchhiking (搭便车) to the drivers, this message will not encourage a Greek driver or motorist to stop to give them a ride.

There are no right or wrong signals, but only cultural differences. Lack of cultural understanding will lead to disharmony among people from different cultures. When we know what to look for, such encounters with other cultures are actually very interesting, fascinating and fun. It is certainly a great topic to discuss over a cup of coffee and cakes.

【推荐3】A team of engineers at Harvard University has been inspired by Nature to create the first robotic fly. The mechanical fly has become a platform for a series of new high-tech integrated systems. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny machine is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.

“It’s extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just the sum of a bunch of individual components,” said Robert Wood, the Harvard engineering professor who has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. A few years ago, his team got the go-ahead to start piecing together the components. “The added difficulty with a project like this is that actually none of those components are off the shelf and so we have to develop them all on our own,” he said.

They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. “The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of interdependencies on the individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, but then has to be matched well to everything it’s connected to,” said Wood. The flight device was built into a set of power, computation, sensing and control systems. Wood says the success of the project proves that the flying robot with these tiny components can be built and manufactured.

While this first robotic flyer is linked to a small, off-board power source, the goal is eventually to equip it with a built-in power source, so that it might someday perform data-gathering work at rescue sites, in farmers’ fields or on the battlefield. “Basically, it should be able to take off, land and fly around,” he said.

Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications. “You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead,” he said. “So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day to day basis.”