Top 5 Must See Places in Beijing

    Beijing is an old capital city with a lot of tourists attractions. What is the most representative place in Beijing? The answers are various. Here are the Top 5 Must See Places in Beijing.

1）. Forbidden City

    The Forbidden City is the ideal place for you to begin your exploration of Beijing. Make sure to wear comfortable shoes as you have to walk a lot! A multilingual guide recorder is recommended, as it can tell you the stories behind the palace.

Opening Hour: 8:30-17:00

Entrance Fee: RMB 60

2）. Tian'anmen Square

    Lying in the heart of Beijing City, it is the place for massive parades and gathering. It boasts of the largest square of such kind in the world. At sunrise and sunset the raising and lowering ceremony of the Chinese National Flag is well worth seeing.

Ticket fees: Free

Opening Time: Whole Day

3）. Great Wall

    Most of the sections of the Great Wall in Beijing are well-preserved, and the most famous section is Badaling. For the Great Wall hiking, get ready for strong footwear. For hot weather, please also prepare sunblock, sunglasses and water.

Badaling Great Wall:

Ticket Fees: RMB40 (Nov. 01 to Mar. 31); RMB 45 (Apr. 01 to Oct. 31)

Open Hours: 6:40 to 18:30

4）. Summer Palace

    Regarded as the largest imperial garden in China, the Summer Palace is in fact a park-styled royal retreat. With masterly design and artistic architecture integrating the highlight of Chinese garden arts, it has earned a title of "Royal Garden Museum".

Open Time: 6:30-20:30

Ticket Fee: RMB 40 (low season) / RMB 50 (peak season during the holidays)

5）. Temple of Heaven

    The Temple of Heaven worked as sacrificial compound buildings for the Ming and Qing emperors. What's the intriguing by-production of the temple is that if you enter the Temple of Heaven in the early morning, you can find many people doing all types of Kungfu, Taiji, dancing and other morning exercises.

Open Time: 6:00-21:00

Ticket Fee: RMB 35

    Twenty-five years ago, most young Britons wanted a career in law, to be a doctor, or, if they were creative enough, to take up singing. But today, things stand differently.

    According to a survey by Tesco Mobile, a UK company, the “dream job” of young people aged between 16 and 25 in the UK is a video blogger, or “vlogger”. The survey, carried out among 1,002 people, found that as much as 40 percent of them put vlogger as their number one choice on a list of ideal careers.

    This change is undoubtedly as a result of the Internet and social media. They have made it so much easier to reach audience of the world, without having to enter a career in show business in the traditional way.

    In the past, the biggest stars were trained by the Hollywood studios; now, anyone with a computer camera can become a star. Vloggers are the big stars of today because they are normal people interacting with their fans about everyday life.”

    However, what people see is only the bright side of being a vlogger and they fail to notice the fact that only those who are successful earn fame(名声) and fortune. For every success there are hundreds of others who never get off the starting line. There are the dreams that come true and the dreams that remain dreams forever.

    Although being vloggers is popular, some young people choose to follow careers that don't necessarily earn them fame, but allow them to make good use of the Internet to share their hobbies. Young Israeli David Leshaw, for example, runs a business called the Finishers Club. It's an online platform for runners to keep a record of their races. His job allows him to express his enthusiasm, and is always a learning experience. And that's enough for him.

    A university in southwest China's Chongqing City set up a reading room as part of a campaign (活动) that stops students from taking their mobile phones with them in case the device distracts (使分心) them from concentrating on their studies.

    Reportedly a student named Hu Xiaopeng participating in the campaign studied 530 minutes without using his mobile phone. Unlike Hu, another one picked up his mobile phone in less than 20 minutes. "Having seen many students use their mobile phones in the library, a habit that shortens their study time and negatively impacts their learning, we decided to open this reading room," said Zhang Shuran, the person responsible for the project at the university.

    Zhang added that students can keep their phones in appointed bags with numbers on them. The hags are placed on a desk near the door of the reading room. "Staff members at the reading room will check the phones when there's a call," said Zhang, adding that they will inform students when their parents or teachers call them, but will not tell students if an unknown person is calling or when there is a text message. Based on the time students hand in their phones when they come to the reading room and the time they get them back when they leave the room, Hu Xiaopeng from College of Animal Science and Technology of the university set a record of the longest time.Hu spent 530 minutes studying without using his phone. Though feeling somewhat surprised, Hu said, "It's bad to keep mobile phone with you when you are reading or studying."

    The campaign has attracted nearly 200 students since it was launched a week ago. Some Internet users praised the campaign. One user named Liu Jingchang said, "It's good. I don't bring my phone when going to the library in case I get distracted."

    Forty-three years ago, a man took a "small step" on the moon and brought mankind a "giant leap" forward. As the first person to walk on the moon, American astronaut Neil Armstrong is a man whose name will be remembered for generations to come.

    But being the first is never easy. With so many unknowns about space at that time, Armstrong himself was astonished that Apollo 11 actually worked. He thought he and his partners had merely a 50 percent chance of a successful landing back in 1969.

    It was tough indeed. When the module (登月舱) was approaching the moon's surface, the computer wanted to rest them on a steep slope covered with rocks, but Armstrong realized it was an unsafe place to stop.

    As a last minute decision, he safely landed the module by himself. When they finally touched the ground, "there was something like 20 seconds of fuel left," he said in an interview earlier this year.

    Unfortunately, some people doubted his visit to the moon, saying it was faked. But Armstrong responded with a chuckle (轻声笑), saying: "It was never a concern to me because I knew one day, somebody was going to go fly back up there and pick up that camera I left."

    For all his global fame, Neil Armstrong is a remarkably modest man. He rarely gave interviews and didn't like talking about his achievement. He stopped giving his signatures when he found that people sold them for thousands of dollars.

    "I guess we all like to be recognized not for one piece of fireworks but for the ledger (记账簿) of our daily work," Armstrong said in a CBS interview in 2005. When asked how he felt knowing his footprints would be likely to stay on the moon's surface for thousands of years, he said: "I kind of hope that somebody goes up there one of these days and cleans them up."

    Armstrong passed away last month at the age of 82, but he will be memorized. "The next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink (眨眼示意)," his family said to Reuters.

A group of small, waggling (扭动) robots that communicate by flashing lights can make collective decisions. This is similar to the process bees use to reach an agreement on where to build their nest.

"We believe that in the near future there are going to be simple robots that will do jobs that we don't want to do, and it will be very important that they make decisions on their own," says Carmen Miguel at the University of Barcelona in Spain. She and her team tested how copying bees might help with that.

When bees go house-hunting, they communicate their preferred locations through a "waggle dance". The more a bee recommends one location, the longer and harder it waggles. Eventually other bees join them, and they reach an agreement when a majority are waggling together. Researchers previously translated this behavior into a mathematical model, and Miguel and her colleagues used it to program decision-making rules into small robots called kilobots.

Each kilobot with three thin legs had an infrared-light emitter (红外线发射器) and receiver, and a colored LED light. Within a group, kilobots could move around, turn clockwise or anticlockwise and use infrared signals to exchange information.

Ezequiel Ferrero at the University of Barcelona says that across all the experiments, kilobots reached an agreement within about half an hour, even when they didn't have many immediate neighbors to communicate with. He says that getting the right combination of how long they spend transmitting their message and how much they walk around allowed them to make a collective decision in the end.

 Japan is an island country in the Pacific Ocean. As the Japanese students already know, four main islands and more than 3,000 small ones stretch from north to south for about 1,300 miles. As for the climate of the country, well, it's hot and humid(潮湿) in summer, but it is quite cold and wet in Japan during winter. Typhoons, which are violent tropical storms, often threaten Japan during the fall. That's, of course, during the harvest season.

 The population of Japan is about 110,5 million. It may seem hard to believe, but the average population density(密度) of the country is about 678 persons per square mile.

 About two thirds of the entire population lives in Japan's cities. The other one third lives in the suburbs or in the countryside. No other country in southern or eastern Asia has such a large urban, or city population. Tokyo, the capital city of Japan, is the most density-populated city in the world. At last count there were more than 11.5 million people living in Tokyo.