Homestay provides English language students with the opportunity to speak English outside the classroom and the experience of being part of a British home.

What to Expect

    The host will provide accommodation and meals. Rooms will be cleaned and bedcovers changed at least Once a week. You will be given the house key and the host is there to offer help and advice as well as to take an interest in your physical and mental health.

Accommodation Zones

    Homestays are located in London mainly in Zones 2.3 and 4of the transport system. Most hosts do not live in the town center as much of central London is commercial and not residential. Zones 3 and 4 often offer larger accommodation in a less crowed area. It is very convenient to travel in London by Underground.

Meal Plans Available

·Continental Breakfast

·Breakfast and Dinner

·Breakfast, Packed Dinner

    It's important to note that few English families still provide a traditional cooked breakfast. Your accommodation includes Continental Breakfast which normally consists of fruit juice, cereal, bread and tea or coffee. Cheese, fruit and cold meat are not normally part of a Continental Breakfast in England. Dinners usually consist of meat or fish with vegetables followed by desert, fruit and coffee.

Friends

    If you wish to invite a friend over to visit,you must first ask your host's permission. You have no right to entertain friends in a family home as some families feel it is an invasion of their privacy.

Self-Catering Accommodation in Private Homes

    Accommodation on a room-only basis includes shared kitchen and bathroom facilities and often a main living room. This kind of accommodation offers an independent lifestyle and is more suitable for the long -stay student . However, it does not provide the same family atmosphere as an ordinary homestay and may not benefit those who need to practice English at home quite as much.

根据短文内容，选择最佳答案，并将选定答案的字母标号填在题前括号内。

    Below is a selection from a popular science book.

    If blood is red, why are veins（静脉） blue?

    Actually, veins are not blue at all. They are more of a clear, yellowish color. Although blood looks red when it's outside the body, when it's sitting in the vein near the surface of the skin, it's more of a dark reddish purple color. At the right depth, these blood-filled veins reflect less red light than the surrounding skin, making them look blue by comparison.

    Which works harder, you heart or your brain?

    That kind of depends on whether you're busy thinking or busy exercising. Your heart works up to three times harder during exercise, and shifts enough blood over a lifetime to fill a supertanker. But in the long run, your brain probably tips it, because even when you're sitting still your brain is using twice as much energy as your heart, and it takes four to five times as much blood to feed it.

    Why do teeth fall out, and why don't they grow back in grown-ups?

    Baby (or “milk”) teeth do not last long; they fall out to make bigger room for bigger, stronger adult teeth later on. Adult teeth fall our when they become damaged, decayed and infected by bacteria. Once this second set of teeth has grown in, you're done. When they're gone, they are gone. This is because nature figures you're set for life, and what controls regrowth of your teeth switches off.

    Do old people shrink as they age?

Yes and no. Many people do get shorter as they age. But, when they do, it isn't because they're shrinking all over. They lose height as their spine（脊柱） becomes shorter and more curved due to disuse and the effect of gravity(重力). Many (but not all) men and women do lose height as they get older. Men lose and average of 3-4 cm in height as they age, while women may lose 5 cm or more. If you live to be 200 years old, would you keep shrinking till you were, like 60 cm tall, like a little boy again? No, because old people don't really shrink! It is not that they are growing backwards —- their legs, arms and backbones getting shorter. When they do get shorter, it's because the spine has shortened a little. Or, more often, become more bent and curved.

    Why does spinning make you dizzy（眩晕的）?

    Because your brain gets confused between what you're seeing and what you're feeling. The brain senses that you're spinning using special gravity-and-motion-sensing organs in your inner ear, which work together with your eyes to keep your vision balance stable. But when you suddenly stop spinning the system goes out of control, and your brain thinks you'removing while you're not.

    Where do feelings and emotions come from?

Mostly from an ancient part of the brain called the limbic system. All mammals have this brain area —- from mice to dogs, cats, and humans. So all mammals feel basic emotions like fear, pain and pleasure. But since human feelings also involve other, newer bits of the brain, we feel more complex emotions than any other animal on this planet.

    If exercise wears you out, how can it be good for you?

    Because our bodies adapt to everything we do to them. And as far as your body is concerned, it's “use it, or lose it”! It's not that exercise makes you healthy, it's more that a lack of exercise leaves your body weak and easily affected by disease

    Nikola Tesla

    Long overshadowed in public memory by his one-time employer, Thomas Edison, Tesla (1856—1943) was a brilliant scientist and engineer who earned more than 700 patents. He is most famous for developing alternating current (交流电), but his work also led to advances in wireless communications, lasers, X-rays, radar, lighting, robotics, and much more.

    Tesla was born to Serbian parents in what is now Croatia, but he emigrated(移民) to the U.S. as a young man, where he eventually became a naturalized citizen. Besides Edison, who later became his bitter rival, Tesla often worked with inventor George Westinghouse. In 1893, the pair demonstrated their advances in lighting and motors in the "White City" at the Chicago World's Fair. In 1895, Tesla and Westinghouse developed the world's first hydroelectric power plant, at Niagara Falls.

    At the turn of the century, Tesla set up a laboratory called Wardenclyffe in the small community of Shoreham, Long Island, where he conducted some of his most ambitious experiments. The building was financed by J. P. Morgan and designed by acclaimed architect Stanford White.

    The most prominent feature was Wardenclyffe Tower, also called Tesla Tower, a 187-foot-tall metal lattice tower topped with a big antenna that was intended to beam communications and even energy across the Atlantic.Tesla ran out of money while building the tower and was foreclosed(取消赎回权) on twice. As with his previous Colorado Springs lab, assets were sold to pay up his debts. In 1917, the U.S. government blew up the tower, fearing that German spies were using it in World War I. The metal was sold for scrap. For decades, the building was used for photo processing.

    "The tower is long gone, but the three-quarter-length statue of Tesla unveiled last week is a fitting memorial," said Alcorn, a retired teacher. "This is the last remaining Tesla laboratory anywhere in the world," she said. "He inspires those who work hard but don't get recognition, and people are starting to recognize how important his contributions are."

    As a sign of that growing appreciation, Elon Musk's start-up electric car company Tesla Motors was named after the visionary inventor in 2003.

    Last year DeepMind's AlphaGo programme took on and beat two of the world's best players of the Chinese game of Go（围棋）-an unbelievable achievement seen as a milestone in the development of artificial intelligence (A). That programme was trained by first giving it vast amounts of data from amateur and professional games.

    The new AlphaGo Zero began with a blank board and nothing but the rules of Go and set about playing against itself. Within three days it was so advanced that it took on the previous version, which had taken months to develop, and defeated it by a hundred games to zero.

    DeepMind says that creating knowledge from first principles without learning from human expertise（专门技能）is an important step in developing artificial intelligence. The company's founder Demis Hassabis said this breakthrough could help in real world problems such as designing new drugs or discovering new materials.

    In 1997, Garry Kasparov was defeated by Deep Blue, a computer program written by IBM, running on a supercomputer. This was the first time that a ruling world chess champion was defeated by a computer program in tournament conditions. Superficially, AlphaGo's win against Lee Sedol can be compared to Deep Blue's win against Gary Kasparov, which happened almost 20 years ago. So: what's the big deal? We have to understand the differences between chess and Go.

    In chess, each player begins with 16 pieces of six different types. Each piece of type moves differently. The goal of the game is to seize the other player's king. Go starts with an empty board. The goal of the game is to gain as much territory（领地）as possible.

    Although the rules of Go might appear simpler than those of chess, the complexity of Go is higher. Also, games usually last longer for lots of moves. A typical game in Go might last for 150 moves vs.80 in chess.

    With the development of our society, cell phones have become a common part in our lives. Have you ever run into a careless cell phone user on the street? Maybe they were busy talking, texting or checking updates on WeChat without looking at what was going on around them. As the number of this new "species" of human has kept rising, they have been given a new name—phubbers (低头族).

    Recently a cartoon created by students from China Central Academy of Fine Arts put this group of people under the spotlight. In the short film, phubbers with various social identities bury themselves in their phones. A doctor plays with his cell phone while letting his patient die, a pretty woman takes a selfie (自拍) in front of a car accident site, and a father loses his child without knowing about it while using his mobile phone. A chain of similar events finally leads to the destruction(毁灭) of the world.

    Although the ending of the film sounds unrealistic, the damage phubbing can bring is real. Your health is the first to bear the effect and result of it. "Always bending your head to check your cell phone could damage your neck," Guangming Daily quoted doctors' words. "The neck is like a rope that breaks after long-term stretching." Also, staring at cell phones for a long time will damage your eyesight gradually, according to the report.

    But that's not all. Being a phubber could also damage your social skills and drive you away from your friends and family. When getting together with family or friends, many people prefer to play their cell phones while others are chatting happily with each other and this creates a strange atmosphere, Qilu Evening News reported.

    It can also cost your life. There have been lots of reports on phubbers who fell to their death, suffered accidents, and were robbed of their cell phones in broad daylight.

    The first newspapers were written by hand and put up on walls in public places. The earliest daily newspaper was started in Rome in 59 BC. In the 700's the world's first printed newspaper was published. Europe didn't have a regularly published newspaper until 1609, when one was started in Germany.

    The first regularly published newspaper in the English language was printed in Amsterdam in 1620. In 1621, an English newspaper was started in London and was published once a week. The first daily English newspaper was The Daily Courant (《每日新闻》). It came out in March, 1702.

    In 1690, Benjamin Harris printed the first American newspaper in Boston. But not long after it was first published, the government stopped the paper. In 1704, John Campbell started The Boston Newsletter (《波士顿新闻通讯》), the first newspaper published in the American colonies. By 1760, the colonies had more than thirty daily newspapers. There are now about 1,800 daily papers in the United States.

    Today, as a group, English language newspapers have the largest circulation (发行量) in the world. But the largest circulation for a newspaper is that of the Japanese newspaper Asahi Dhimbun (《朝日新闻》). It sells more than 11 million copies every day.