Summer Holiday Fun 2014!

The summer holidays are upon us again. Here is our guide to summer holiday fun in Peterborough!

Peterborough Museum

    The Age of the Dinosaurs' is the museum's main attraction this summer. Get up close to prehistoric creatures via some great hands—on exhibits! Watch out for monsters lurking around every ember! The museum is open from 10:00am to 5:00pm Monday to Saturday, and from 12:00pm to 4:00pm on Sundays in August.

Call 01733 864663 for details

Saxon Youth Club

    School holiday fun：Young people aged 13—19 will be able to produce their own music, compete in spots activities, or try their hand at cooking at Saxon Youth Club, Saxon Community Centre, Norman Road. Peterborough every Monday and Wednesday from 3:00pm．PLUS an aero ball tournament will take place on Thursday 12th August between 3:30pm and 6:30pm.

Call 01 353 720274 for details

Houghton Mill

    The new play Alice through the Looking Class — a new production of the family favorite on Monday 30th August. Bring rugs or chairs to sit on and a picnic if you wish to eat during the play. Gates open 5:30pm, performance 6:30pm—8:30pm. Tea room will be open until end of the interval. Adult ￡10．Child ￡7．Family ￡20．

Booking advisable on 0845 4505157.

Farmland Museum and Denny Abbey

    Farmland Gaines：From Wellie Wanging to Pretend Ploughing matches, come and join the Farmland Team．Collect your sporting stickers and create a colorful rosette that is fit for a winner！No need to book, just turn up between 12:00pm and 4:00pm on Thursday 19th August Suitable for children aged four and above, each child should be accompanied by an adult and all activities are included in the normal admission price Tickets Cost￡7 per child.

For further information, call 01223 810080.

    Street art is a very popular form of art that is spreading quickly all over the world. You can find it on building, sidewalks, street sings and trash cans from Tokyo to Paris, and from Moscow to Cape Town. Street art has become a global culture and even art museums and galleries are collecting the works of street artists. Even advertising companies also use street art in their ads due to its popularity.

    Street art started out very secretly because it's illegal to paint on public and private property without permission. People often have different opinions about street art. Some people think it is a crime with others think it's a new form of culture.

    Art experts claim that the movement began in New York in the 1960s. Young adults sprayed words and images on walls and trains. This colorful and energetic style of writing became known as graffiti(涂鸦). Graffiti art showed that young people wanted to rebel against society. They didn't want to accept rules, and they travelled around cities to create paintings that everyone could see. In many cases, they had trouble with the police and the local government.

    Many street corners in Paris show the works of Space Invader. A French artist uses small pieces of glass to make images of space creatures. He has been doing this for some years and the police have arrested him a few times. On his website, you can see many other places where he has created this form of art.

    Street artists do their work for some reasons. Some of them do not like the artists who make so much money in galleries and museums. They choose street art because it is closer to common people. Some artists try to express their political opinion in their works. They often want to protest against big firms and corporations. Others like to do things that are forbidden and hope they don't get caught.

    In today's world, the Internet has a big influence on street art. Artists can show their pictures to people all over the world. Many city residents, however, say that seeing a picture on the Internet is never as good as seeing it alive. The street art movement lives with the energy and life of a big city. There it will continue to change and grow.

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    Languages have been coming and going for thousands of years, but in recent times there has been less coming and a lot more going. When the world was still populated by hunter-gatherers, small, tightly knit(联系) groups developed their own patterns of speech independent of each other. Some language experts believe that 10,000 years ago, when the world had just five to ten million people, they spoke perhaps 12,000 languages between them.   

    Soon afterwards, many of those people started settling down to become farmers, and their languages too became more settled and fewer in number. In recent centuries, trade, industrialisation, the development of the nation-state and the spread of universal compulsory education, especially globalisation and better communications in the past few decades, all have caused many languages to disappear, and dominant languages such as English, Spanish and Chinese are increasingly taking over.

    At present, the world has about 6,800 languages. The distribution of these languages is hugely uneven. The general rule is that mild zones have relatively few languages, often spoken by many people, while hot, wet zones have lots, often spoken by small numbers. Europe has only around 200 languages; the Americas about 1,000; Africa 2,400; and Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3,200, of which Papua New Guinea alone accounts for well over 800. The median number （中位数）of speakers is a mere 6,000, which means that half the world's languages are spoken by fewer people than that.

   Already well over 400 of the total of 6,800 languages are close to extinction (消亡), with only a few elderly speakers left. Pick, at random, Busuu in Cameroon (eight remaining speakers), Chiapaneco in Mexico (150), Lipan Apache in the United States (two or three) or Wadjigu in Australia (one, with a question-mark): none of these seems to have much chance of survival.

    Some people dream about becoming engineers. Luckily, the new IMAX film Dream Big shows how engineering can improve people's lives. It teaches viewers how engineers use high-tech to help the world. The film hits IMAX theaters nationwide on February 17 to celebrate Engineers Week.

    The film, taking place in locations like China, Dubai and Africa, tells the stories of engineers who try to come up with creative ideas to save energy and help people.

    Dream Big was directed by Greg MacGillivray who has 38 films under his belt, including some of the most successful films ever shown in IMAX theaters.

    How did MacGillivray get into the moviemaking business? “I grew up at the beach. My first movies were about surfing and the ocean. As time went on, I saw the changes in the ocean including polluting and overfishing. So I started making films about conservation of nature.” He told TFK. Now, his films cover a variety of topics, from the natural world to human creation.

    One of the engineers in Dream Big is Angelica Hernandez. In high school, she was on a team that best MIT, a university, in an underwater robotics competition. Today, the engineering work she does focuses on helping people use less energy and save money and resources. “I work with companies to promote energy efficiency with their commercial customers, so it's really trying to push forward all the measures that customers and high-energy users can apply, she explains.

    Engineering is such a good job-you make good money, travel around the world, solve amazing problems and help people.” She says.

    The mission of Dream Big is to show people the good that engineers can do to the world. “That was the impulse of making this movie”, MacGillivray explains, “We want to explain engineering in a way that will get the kids very excited about it.” “Whoever and wherever you are, you can become an engineer,” he adds, “All you need is the creative spirit.”

    There is an old saying that America and Britain are "two nations divided by a common language." No one knows exactly who said this, but it reflects the way many Brits feel about American English. But are American and British English really so different?

    Vocabulary

    The most obvious difference between American and British English is vocabulary. There are hundreds of everyday words that are different. For example, Americans go on vacation while Brits go on holidays; New Yorkers live in apartments while Londoners live in flats. There are far more examples than we can talk about here. Fortunately, most Americans and Brits can usually guess the meaning through the context of a sentence.

    Past Tense Verbs

    You'll also find some differences with past forms of irregular verbs. The past tense of "learn" in American English is "learned". British English has the option of "learned" or "learnt". The same rule applies to "dreamed" and "dreamt", "burned" and "burnt", and "leaned" and "leant". Americans tend to use the -ed ending; Brits tend to use the-t ending.

    Spelling

    There are hundreds of slight spelling differences between British and American English. Noah Webster, an author, politician and teacher, made an effort to reform English spelling in the late 1700s.

    Webster wanted to spell words the way they sounded. You can see Webster's legacy(遗产) in the American spelling of words like color (from colour), honor (from honour), and labor(from labour).

    Not So Different After All

    British and American English have far more similarities than differences. With the exception of some regional dialects, most Brits and Americans can understand each other without too much difficulty. They watch each other's TV shows, sing each other's songs and read each other's books. They even make fun of each others' accents.

    From quiet paths by a stream in a forest to busy roads running through a city, people have created various forms of routes in different places. These now exist all around us, and their use is imperative for societies. These routes have enabled people to move, transport things, and send information from one place to another quickly and safely. Throughout history, they have been important in our daily lives.

    Early routes were often formed naturally on land. They gradually developed over long periods of time while people traveled them on foot or horseback. A significant turning point in their history arrived when the first wheeled carts appeared in ancient times. Once this happened, people recognized the importance of well-maintained routes. Therefore, towns, cities, and entire countries improved them. As a result, life became more convenient, communities grew, economies evolved, and cultures expanded.

    People have established routes on water, too. Rivers and canals have served as effective routes for people to move around and carry things. For instance, in the old, Japanese city of Edo, water routes were used for the transportation of agricultural products, seafood, and wood. People have also opened routes across the sea. The seaways were critical for the navigation of ships, particularly in the days when they moved mainly by wind power. Using these sea routes, people could travel great distances, and go to places they had not previously been able to reach.

    People have gone on to open routes in the sky as well. Since the invention of the airplane, they have made it possible to travel long distances easily. Eventually, people became able to travel safely and comfortably high in the sky, and going vast distances only took a small amount of time.

    Today, we have a new type of route, the Internet. By using this worldwide route, people can easily obtain information that once was available mainly from books and face-to-face communication. They can also instantly send messages to large numbers of people all at once.

    As long as there have been people, there have been routes to connect them. Currently unknown routes will surely take us even further in the future.