阅读理解

    A Sydney Pass gives you unlimited and flexible travel on the Explorer Buses: the 'red' Sydney Explorer shows you around our exciting city sights while the 'blue' Bondi Explorer visits Sydney Harbor bays and famous beaches. Take to the water on one of three magnificent daily harbor cruises(游船). You can also travel free on regular Sydney Buses, Sydney Ferries or City Rail services (limited area), so you can go to every corner of this beautiful city.

    Imagine browsing at Darling Harbor, sampling the famous seafood at Watsons Bay or enjoying the city lights on an evening ferry cruise. The possibilities and plans are endless with a Sydney Pass. Wherever you decide to go, remember that bookings are not required on any of our services so tickets are treated on a first in, first seated basis.

    Sydney Passes are available for 3, 5 or 7 days for use over a 7 calendar day period. With a 3 or 5 day pass you choose on which days out of the 7 you want to use it. All Sydney Passes include a free Airport Express inward trip before starting your 3, 5 or 7 days, and the return trip is valid (有效的) for 2 months from the first day your ticket was used.

Sydney Pass Fares

*A child is defined as anyone from the ages of 4 years to under 16 years. Children under 4 years travel free.

**A family is defined as 2 adults and any number of children from 4 to under 16 years of age from the same family.

    During his first week as a new Atlanta police officer, Officer Che Milton answered a call for shoplift at the nearby Family Dollar store. When he arrived, Milton found a 12-year-old girl in tears over trying to steal a $2 pair of shoes. Crying, she told Milton that the shoes were supposed to surprise her 5-year-old sister.

    Milton, instead of arresting the girl, asked her to take him to her home instead. When he arrived, Milton's heart sank. He found a house nearly empty, with only a sofa and sheets on the floor instead of beds. There was no food in the kitchen and the kids were there. The girl's mother told the officer that her husband worked but didn't make much money and that she couldn't afford to do the same with several children to take care of and no daycare money to spare.

    Moved, the officer drove to a restaurant and bought four pizzas for them and he called the Division of Family and Children Services and asked if there was a social worker who could help.

    When the police department found out about Milton's trips, instead of punishing him, the department decided to share his story on Facebook and added that “not only is he here to enforce(实施) the law but also to go the extra mile and be a bigger part of the community he is policing.”

    Hundreds of citizens liked the post, asking how they could help. The department followed with posts including the six children's sizes and mother's clothing sizes. It also called for blanket and furniture donations. Visit the posts to learn how you can help and find more useful ways to donate your old things.

    In 2016, three viruses made news, and they present difficult problems for health officials in the New Year. One virus threatens babies in many parts of the world. Another has reappeared in an African nation. And a third is one of the deadliest viruses of modern times. The three viruses are Zika, polio and HIV. However, in 2016 scientists and researchers from all over the world worked to make progress against those viruses and to develop better ways to control them.

    The spread of the Zika virus caused public health officials in many nations to put in place strong measures to control its spread.

    Brazil, which hosted the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, was hit hard by the virus. Health officials warned pregnant women against traveling to the sporting event. Zika is usually a mild illness. It is so mild that most people who are infected do not know they have it. However, in the past two years in the Western Hemisphere, Zika has been linked to babies being born with extremely small heads. This condition is called microcephaly. The international medical community found that this link to birth defects makes Zika a very dangerous virus.

    Zika first appeared in Uganda more than 60 years ago. It is spread by mosquitos and by sex. The virus recently appeared in Brazil. Then cases appeared in other countries to the North. Cases were reported in the United States in the southern state of Florida. Health officials in Texas are also concerned the virus might be spreading there.

    Doctors can only advise women to be careful. They advise women not to travel to areas where the virus is spreading, to avoid mosquito bites or to delay pregnancy. Currently there is no vaccine against Zika. However, one could be available by 2018.

    The TED speaker series features "ideas worth spreading". With over 1,400 to choose from, we've selected a few that are perfect for students.

    ⒈Larry Smith: Why you will fail to have a great career

We humans may have an unfavorable habit of making excuses for ourselves or being too confident about ourselves. Accordingly, Larry Smith, a professor of economics at the University of Waterloo in Canada, tells us why most of us will fail to have a great career. Luckily, as he puts it, there is a way out—follow your heart, as long as it is good for your career.

    ⒉Andy Puddicombe: All it takes is 10 mindful minutes

Between dance team, volunteering and –oh, right—lectures, your life's crazy factor(因素)is about to go way up. In this entertaining and informative talk, Mindfulness, expert Andy Puddicombe teaches us how to be "more healthy, more mindful and less distracted" by taking just 10 minutes out of the day to be "more present".

    ⒊Shane Koyczan: To this day…for the bullied(欺凌)and beautiful

    This talk is sure to stay with you. Shane Koyczan's "To This Day" is an affecting spoken-word poem about bullying and being different that gained over 10 million views on YouTube. In this talk, Koyczan gives a live reading of the poem, along with some stories about his background.

    ⒋Susan Cain: The power of introverts(性格内向者)

    Does a cup of tea and a good book sound like a perfect Friday night? In this personal talk, Susan Cain argues that introverts have talents and abilities. Our culture may value being outgoing, but the world needs all kinds.

Gottfried Wilhelm von Liebniz was a philosopher and mathematician in search of a model. In the late 1600s Leibniz decided there was a need for a new, purer arithmetic than our common decimal (十进制) system. He got his inspiration from the 5000-year-old book that is at the heart of Chinese philosophy: the I-Ching, or Book of Changes.

This ancient text was such an influence on Liebniz that he titled his article on the new arithmetic "Explanation of a new arithmetic and the ancient Chinese figure of Fu X". Fu Xi was the legendary first author of the I-Ching. The arithmetic that Liebniz described was binary (二进制) code, which is used in almost every modern computer, from iPhones to China's own Tihane-2 supercomputer.

To figure out what Liebniz learned in the I-Ching, we need to understand something that most of us have taken for granted. When we listen to an MP3, look at a digital photo or watch the latest TV drama, we are experiencing a digital representation of reality. That representation is basically just a string of binary signals that are commonly known as 1s and 0s. What Liebniz's gained from the book was that even the most complex reality could be represented in the binary form as 1s and 0s.

In the philosophy of the I-Ching, reality is not entirely real. It is something more like a dream. This dream of reality arises from the binaries of Yin and Yang, as they play out countless combinations, practically everything in the universe. It's not surprising then, from the l-Ching's perspective, that anything in the dream of reality can be represented in a string of 1s and 0s, processed by a computer.

The I-Ching was far more ambitious than the current practical applications of binary code. It is claimed that the I-Ching represents nothing less than the basic situation of human life itself. As a system for predicting the future, the I-Ching might disappoint, but as a way of questioning your own unconscious mind, it can be remarkably useful.

The I-Ching's teachings also contain warnings about our digital revolution. Binary code, powered by modern computers, has an amazing capacity to represent reality. However, the ancient authors of the I-Ching might have understood its potential-and its dangers-even better than we now do.

So when scientific thinkers ask whether computers can create "virtual realities" or "artificial intelligence", they are missing the point. Of course, we can create ever deeper and more complex layers of the dream of reality. The real question is, can we wake up from the dream we're in already?

Fans of art believe that its main purpose is to make us look at life from many different angles. When it comes to Cubism(立体主义), however, the artists of this era wanted us to look at life from every angle. 

The father of Cubism, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, is among the art world's most famous names. Like many other great names before him, he felt restrained by the rules of his teachers and decided to do something: break them. 

Early in his painting career, Picasso realized something important about how people view and remember scenes of beauty. When we look at a subject, we don't just see it from one angle, as many paintings appear. Instead, we study the subject from a number of different angles, heights and viewpoints. This is the aim of Cubism: It portrays(描绘) subjects from a wide range of angles; it doesn't force us to see things as the artist viewed them at the time he or she painted them. To bring his visions to life, Picasso and other Cubists took the most basic components of a subject and rearranged them in a way which let us see it in full detail. 

"By breaking objects and figures down into distinct areas, Picasso aimed to show different viewpoints at the same time and within the same space," in the words of the Tate Institution. Or as Lithuanian—born Cubist Jacques Lipchitz once put it: "Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different."

Cubism stood out as it was an art movement which didn't just rely on the artist to share their vision by painting what they saw. As cubist paintings mainly show their subjects in a deconstructed form, this means that viewers must use their imaginations to find the missing pieces for themselves. As Guardian art critic Johnathan Jones noted, this is part of the beauty of enjoying Picasso's works. "If you can relax your gaze(凝视)enough and just enjoy the painting long enough, something really amazing happens. Your mind produces a solid feeling of the things Picasso was looking at. the world is revealed in its majesty(壮观)," he wrote.