1 . Out of London Tours

Stratford, Oxford, Christ Church and the Cotswolds with Lunch

Length of time

About 10 hours

Days of operation

April 2009 to March 2010 — Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday

This tour starts at 8:45 am and finishes at around 6:30 pm

Description

*Oxford

Enjoy the magnificence of Oxford! Well-known for over 900 years as a centre of academic excellence. Follow in the footsteps of its famous students, from Bill Clinton to Lewis Carroll. Uncover the university town of Oxford at a leisurely and relaxing pace.

*Chirlst Church

Lights, camera, action! A treat for all Harry Potter fans — see where many scenes from the films have been shot! Wonder at the magnificence of Christ Church, including the Great Hall which Hogwarts Hall is based upon.

*Cotswolds

Discover the fascinating Cotswolds! Full of history and heritage (历史遗留物), the Cotswolds is a charming combination of breathtaking natural beauty, busy market towns and sleepy villages.

Lunch in the Cotswolds

Treat yourself in a traditional English pub (酒吧) and admire the charrn of this old wool town. The lunch will bc taken in the Cotswolds village of Burford.

*Stratford

Shakespcare's birthplace

A market town with a difference! Visit Shakespeare's Birthplace, the half-wooded house, where the world's greatest writer was born, to gain a fascinating insight into his childhood.

Anne Hathaway's Cottage

Satisfy yourself with an eye-opening experience at the childhood home of William Shakespeare's wife! Wander around the half-wooded house and its eye-catching surroundings.

Price guide

Adult: £74.00

Child (3 — 18):£64.00

Senior citizen/ College student:£69.00

3 . Every Saturday morning, as the clock strikes 9 am, over 50,000 eager runners set off on a 5km journey around their local park. The Parkrun phenomenon, which originally began as a small gathering among a group of friends, has now boosted 400 events across the UK and numerous others globally. These events, fueled   by the dedication of thousands of volunteers, offer a free and inclusive opportunity for individuals of all ages   and abilities to participate. Runners range from four-year-olds to grandparents whose finishing times vary greatly, spanning from Andrew Baddeley’s world record of 13 minutes and 48 seconds to leisurely strolls lasting over an hour.

Parkru n is succeeding where London’s Olympic “legacy” has failed. Ten years ago on Monday, it was announced that the Games of the 30th Olympics would be held in London. Planning documents promised that the lasting legacy of the Games would be to move a nation of sport lovers away from their couches. The population would be fitter, healthier and produce more winners. This obviously has not happened. The number of adults doing weekly sport did rise, by nearly 2 million in the run-up to 2012, but the general population had already been growing faster than this number. Worse yet, the numbers are now falling at an accelerating rate. The opposition claims primary school pupils doing at least two hours of sport a week have been nearly halved. Obesity has risen among adults and children alike. Official retrospections (回顾) continue to speculate as to why London 2012 failed to “inspire a generation”. The success of Parkrun can offer us some answers.

Parkrun is not a race but a time trial: Your only competitor is the clock. Its concept welcomes everybody. There is as much joy for a puffed-out (上气不接下气) first-timer being clapped over the line as there is for the sport’s top talent. The Olympic bidders, by contrast, wanted to get more people doing sports and to produce more elite athletes. The dual aim was mixed up: The stress on success over taking part was off-putting to newcomers.

Indeed, there is something a little weird in the state getting involved in the planning of such a fundamentally “grassroots” concept as community sports associations. If there is a role for government, it should really be in getting involved in providing common public goods — making sure that there is space for playing fields and the money to pave tennis and netball courts, and encouraging the provision of all these activities in schools. But successive governments are to blame for selling green spaces, squeezing money from local authorities and declining attention on sport in education. Instead of wordy, worthy strategies, future governments need to do more to provide the conditions for sport to thrive. Or at least not make them worse.

6 . Tiredness May Lead to Snacking

Staying up late doing homework is always tiring. Perhaps when we are tired, we feel the need to eat unhealthy snack food. Recently scientists have been investigating tiredness and snack food.

According to a study in the Journal of Neuroscience, people are more likely to crave snacks when they don’t get enough sleep.

For the study, researchers from University of Cologne in Germany gave the same dinner to 32 healthy men aged between 19 and 33. Half of the men were then sent home to bed, and the other half were kept aware in the laboratory all night.

The next morning, the participants were asked to consider how much they would be willing to pay for snack food items shown to them in pictures.

According to the researchers, all were similarly hungry in the morning, and had similar levels of most hormones and blood sugar.

However, brain scans showed that when the sleep-deprived participants looked at the pictures of junk food, they released more of the “hunger hormone”. This is the hormone responsible for increasing the appetite, and making us consume more.

Asked about how much they would pay for snacks, “participants with sleep deprivation were more willing to overspend on food items than those with a good night’s sleep,” researchers said.

Researchers also observed that among the people who hadn’t slept, there was greater activity in the part of the brain where food rewards are processed.

Scientists think that sleep-deprived people experience changes to the hunger hormone and the brain’s reward system that leads to a stronger desire to eat snacks with high fat and calories.

“This brings us a little closer to understanding the mechanism behind how sleep deprivation changes food valuation,” Professor Jan Peters, a co-author of the study from the University of Cologne, told The Independent.

Listen to some soft music to relieve your tiredness.

Do some slight exercise for a short time when you’re tired.

Eat yogurt or fruits to replace snacks with high fat and calories.

Distance yourself from the craving.

8 . Now let us look at how we read. When we read a printed text, our eyes move across a page in short, jerky movement. We recognize words usually when our eyes are still when they fixate (固定). Each time we fixate, we see a group of words, this is known as the recognition span or the visual span. The length of time for which the eyes stop — the duration of the fixation — varies considerably from person to person. It also varies within one person according to his purpose in reading and his familiarity with the text. Furthermore, it can be affected by such factors as lighting and tiredness.

Unfortunately, in the past, many reading improvement courses have concentrated too much on how our eyes move across the printed page. As a result of this misleading emphasis on the purely visual aspects of reading, numerous exercises have been devised to train the eyes to see more words at one fixation. For instance, in some exercises, words are flashed on to a screen for, say, a tenth or a twentieth of a second. One of the exercises has required students to fix their eyes on some central point, taking in the words on either side. Such word patterns are often constructed in the shape of rather steep pyramids so the reader takes in more and more words at a successive fixation. All these exercises are very clever, but it is one thing to improve a person’s ability to see words and quite another thing to improve his ability to read a text efficiently. Reading requires the ability to understand the relationship between words. Consequently, for these reasons, many experts have now begun to question the usefulness of eye training, especially since any approach which trains a person to read isolated words and phrases would seem unlikely to help him in reading a continuous text.