1 . The Eden Project, an educational charity in Cornwall, England, is committed to connecting people with each other and their environment. Here is the basic information about the Project.

Outside Gardens

Exploring miles of paths in the Outside Gardens, you’ll discover landscapes featuring beautiful sculptures and plants used for medicine, fuels, materials and food. These gardens are particularly child-friendly places for children to learn and play.

Follow the path deep into the Rainforest Biome to feel the heat of the largest indoor rainforest environments in the world: Tropical Islands, Southeast Asia, West Africa and Tropical South America.

Walk across the Rope Bridge that stretches across the forest between two of the tallest trees in the 50-metre-high Biome to learn how the rainforests help regulate the climate. Travel through floating clouds on the Cloud Bridge to get a sense of how rainforests reflect sunlight and help cool the planet. Stop by the Carbon Platform to see how the growing rainforest takes in CO₂ and stores it in wood, leaves, roots and soil. Visit the Biodiversity Platform to explore how plants eat, drink, reproduce and protect themselves from danger without moving.

Mediterranean Biome

Take an unforgettable journey through the landscapes of the Mediterranean Europe, South Africa and California and discover the amazing variety of plants growing in these regions.

Explore the diverse and fantastical plants in the Western Australia Garden in this biome. This garden, created in cooperation with Kings Park and Botanic Garden in Perth, Western Australia, features the wonderful plants native to the Mediterranean region of Australia.

Annual Pass

Our Annual Pass gives you unlimited-entry for a whole year!

Thundering drums, yelling crowds and energetic, boatmen, such scenes of excitement     1    (be) not rare across China on Duanwu, or Dragon Boat Festival,     2     falls on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month each year.

Although tales of its origin differ, the two-thousand-year-old festival is widely celebrated     3     memory of Qu Yuan, a great poet during the Warring States Period (475—221 BC).

When Qu realized his country’s decline was beyond recovery, he became so unhappy that he killed     4    (he) on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. Legend has it that the     5     (local) rowed boats to save the poet and threw zongzi, or sticky rice dumplings, into the river to keep fish from eating his body.     6     tradition was passed down in China and even traveled across borders.

A host of other practices are also associated with Duanwu. The fifth day of the fifth month is considered unlucky and     7     (poison). To drive away the bad luck, many people,     8     (especial) those in South China, take herbal baths and hang special plants over their doors. Some people even wear little bags     9     (stuff) with Chinese herbs, all with nice smells,     10     (scare) away the bad spirits.

5 . When Karl Goldstein was a kid, he took piano lessons every Saturday morning with a family friend. But when Goldstein was 12, his teacher told his ________ that he needed better instruction. So his mother took him to a music school, and ________ for classes taught by Alice Shapiro who was known for being ________. On the first day, she told Goldstein that he had to memorize the ________ of the Beethoven Sonata within a week.

“Well, I don’t think I can do that,” Goldstein hesitated.

“But you must do it,” the teacher said ________.

This was nothing like his ________ Saturday mornings with his former teacher, and it wasn’t ________ before Goldstein decided that he didn’t want to take piano lessons anymore. He ________ he’d pick up another instrument, or maybe just ________ himself the piano after the semester.

But a few words of encouragement from the music teacher changed Goldstein’s ________. One day, Shapiro turned to him and said something ________, “I am really happy that you have made remarkable progress within such a short time! I am sure you’re not going to ________.”

The encouragement transformed their relationship ________ and it was the beginning of a long and ________ relationship.

“Years later, I became a piano teacher and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 50 years. I ________ it all to the precious moment with my seemingly tough teacher, Alice Shapiro.”

6 . According to a survey, nearly a third of all adults reported that they sometimes struggle to make basic decisions.     1    , try these strategies from decision-making experts.

Let go of the idea of making perfect decisions

Much of the pressure you feel comes from how much you associate your choices with your identity. For example, you are always worried about sending the wrong message about who you are and what you stand for.     2     In fact, it can keep you from making any good decision at all.

Just allow yourself three to five options

The grocery store is as good a place as any to get struck by indecision. If you walk in without a shopping list, you might spend twenty minutes picking up boxes and putting them down. Sometimes, there are just too many options to process any of them meaningfully, because we can handle about three to five choices on average.     3    .

Practice trusting yourself

It is normal to rely on friends for fit checks or for movie recommendations.     4     try to resist the urge and make more of those choices on your own. And then look at what is the outcome of the decision, so that you can build up trust in your ability to know what’s right for you in any given moment.

    5    

Whether it’s about choosing how often you’re going to hit the gym, or deciding when you’ll go grocery shopping for the week, sticking to your old habits or starting new ones is a great way to reduce stress.

7 . As home gardeners in the US page through seed catalogs (目录册) and pick out their favorite plants this week, there’s a new seed that has never been available to them before: a purple tomato. It is the first genetically engineered food crop to be directly marketed to home gardeners and the seeds went on sale Saturday.

The lending scientist behind the tomato is Cathie Martin. About 20 years ago, she set out to create a transgenic (转基因的) tomato, using DNA from a purple snapdragon, which is an unrelated eatable flower. Her goal was to develop a tomato with high levels of anthocyanins, chemicals that give blueberries, blackberries, eggplant and purple cabbage their color. Research has shown that anthocyanins also have anti-cancer and anti-aging effects.

“It’s normal for tomatoes to make these healthy chemicals. But they typically don’t make them very much in the fruit,” Martin told reporters in an interview. “They normally appear in the leaves and stems.”

So she started with, separating the DNA in the snapdragon flower that turns on and off the purple color. Next, she used a basic technique that was figured out by scientists in the 1980s to introduce it into a certain bacteria so that the tomato could then take in the foreign genetic material and express this new gene.

The result? In a paper published in Nature, Martin found that the purple tomato had, per weight, as much anthocyanin as a blueberry or eggplant, and that the mice who ate a diet mixed with purple tomatoes lived 30% longer than those who didn’t.

“Americans eat more tomatoes annually, so it makes the nutritional benefits more accessible,” Martin said.

Of course, some people have raised health concerns about eating genetically engineered foods. But these foods were introduced three decades ago and studies have not shown any harm.

“The purple potato is another great example of how the outcomes and applications of such biotechnologies can improve our life,” Martin said.

8 . On Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement calling on school districts to move start times to 08:30 or later for middle and high schools, so that students can get at least 8.5 hours of sleep a night. It notes that making middle and high schoolers start classes before 08:30 threatens their health, safety and academic performance.

“It’s a very powerful statement about the importance of sleep. But it’s horrifically challenging to move the start schedules up and back.” Dr. Judith Owens tells NPR. “Letting teenagers sleep later sets off a series of adjustments. Teachers have to change their schedules, and older children who sit younger ones might no longer get home first.”

But this is one area where the evidence is unequivocal, the statement stresses. As children become teenagers, their sleep-wake cycle shifts two hours later. So it’s difficult, if not impossible, for them to go to sleep before 22:30. As a result, the Academy has found that 59% of middle schoolers and 87% of high schoolers are getting less than the recommended 8.5 to 9.5 hours of sleep a night.

“There’s a price to pay for that,” the statement warns. “Studies have found that lack of sleep in teenagers increases the risk of traffic accidents, and makes them easier to get depressed and overweight. Instead, teens who get more sleep do better academically, with better standardized test scores and better quality of life.”

Drinking coffee to get through the day or sleeping more on weekends doesn’t make up for the sleep shortage, the statement notes. “It’s not simply about getting teenagers to go to bed early or removing electronics from the bedroom. Those are important things, but the biology plays a more decisive role.”

As someone who has to wake up a sleepy-eyed middle schooler at 06:20 every morning, I’m praying that our school district will adopt a later start time. I know that science doesn’t necessarily determine policy. But how about a nice increase in standardized test scores?

9 . With her first song on social media in 2019 and her first Grammy win in the best African Music Performance category four years later, Tyla has become the new face of African pop.

For many listeners, Tyla’s 2023 hit song “Water” was their first taste of the sound of amapiano, which is a new musical movement that started in the towns of South Africa in the 2010s. Roughly translated from Zulu to mean “the pianos” or “piano people,” amapiano is a mix-up of a few different types of music: jazz, deep house, kwaito and log drum percussives. “Amapiano is the mainstream music of South Africa’s party scene,” says Moma, a Sudanese-American DJ. “And it has become a lifestyle there.”

Moma first heard amapiano in 2016 when he hopped in a taxi in South Africa. He tipped his driver $50 to let him download the music and took the sounds back to the US. As the music started to move around America, Tyla was perfecting her own version of it back home in South Africa.

She started singing on TikTok and dropped her first song, “Getting Late” in 2019, to show her parents that she was serious about pursuing a career in music after high school. Based on the track, they agreed to give her one year to make it happen.

It took a few months for Tyla and her team to shoot the video for “Getting Late”, with no backing, no budget. But when they finally uploaded it to TikTok in early 2021, labels noticed.

In the video, Tyla’s taken the building blocks of amapiano and added elements of pop made by stars like Rihanna (to whom critics and fans are now comparing her) and Justin Bieber. Her signature sound has been called “pop-iano”.

After publishing “Water” in July 2023 and noticing it had become a piece of trending audio on the app, Tyla and her team created a dance challenge in August. Tyla’s performance during the competition really made a splash. “It introduced me to a wider audience than I had ever imagined,” Tyla says. “It has positively changed my life.”

10 . Digital reading appears to be destroying habits of “deep reading”. Amazing numbers of people with year of schooling are in effect illiterate (不识字的). Admittedly, some people have been complaining about new media since 1492, but today’s complaints have an evidential basis, Ljubljana Reading Manifesto says, “The digital area may lead to more reading than ever in history, but it also offers many attractions to read in a shallow and scattered (碎片化的) manner — or even not to read at all. This increasingly endangers higher-level reading.”

Digital literacy has changed reading. When you read a book on paper, you can be entirely inside the experience, absorbing hundreds of pages to capture the world’s complexity. Online, says Maryanne Wolf of UCLA, we are “skimming, scanning, scrolling”. The medium is the message: doing deep reading on your phone is as hard as playing tennis with your phone. Recently, a bright 11-year-old told me I was wasting time on books: he absorbed more information faster from Wikipedia. He had a point. But digital readers also absorb more misinformation. And they seldom, absorb nuanced (微妙的) ideas.

In the white paper that underlies the Ljubljana Reading Manifesto, experts catalogue the passive parts of digital reading: “Recent studies of various kinds indicate a decline of... critical and conscious reading, slow reading, non-strategic reading and long-form reading.” In the 2021 international PISA survey, 49 percent of students agreed that “I read only if I have to”, 13 percentage points higher than in 2000.

As professors from Northwestern University foresaw in 2005, we are returning to the days when only an elite (精英的) “reading class” consumes long texts — despite more people spending longer in education and book sales remaining robust.

People who lose higher-level reading skills also lose thinking skills. That’s horrible, because “higher-level reading” has been essential to civilization. It enabled the Enlightenment, and an international rise in sympathy for people who aren’t like us.