Welcome to Orlando! It has a host of attractions and activities. Ready to join the party and plan a visit to O-Town? Just print out our list that suits your style.

    Universal Orlando's Islands of Adventure

    The addition of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter was among the list of must-visits for theme park enthusiasts. Each of the park's “islands” — Toon Lagoon, Jurassic Park, and The Lost Continent — has unique appeal in the form of rides and interactive attractions. (407-363-8000)

    Gatorland

    It bills itself as “Orlando's best half-day attraction”, for in a city people are limited by their time and money. Catch Gatorland's animals and handler(驯化) shows in the afternoon. There's a nighttime run as well, including the Gator Night Shine and various activities. Gatorland ranks as a comparative theme-park bargain. (407-855-5496)

    Aquatica

    One of the city's most unique water parks, Aquatica is a fantastical world of twisting, turning rides and sparkling white sand beaches. And if you enjoy a side of terror with your water-park fun, be sure to check out Ihu's Breakaway Falls. This towering slide is an eight-story mind-bender of a plummet(垂直落下) that is not for the weak heart. The less exciting will still find plenty of fun splashing from one giant wave pool to another or drifting down the lazy river through a world of unusual fish. You can also watch the black-and-white Commerson's dolphins underwater. (407-351-3600)

    Warbird Adventures

    Few attractions are more hands-on historic than Warbird Adventures, which offers thrill-seekers the opportunity to fly like the hero aces of World War II in the North American T-6 Texan. Flights range from 15 minutes to an hour. A visit to the nearby Kissimmee Air Museum is a wonderful way to round out the experience. (407-870-7366)

    Do you know that November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)? You can find the NaNoWriMo Young Writer's program at ywp.nanowrima.org. It is a challenge（挑战）to write a 50,000-word novel in one month.

    The program began in 1999 in San Francisco with only 21 members. Later year, more than 400,000 took up the challenge. The writers can choose what they want to write about. On November 1st, writers visit the website and start to update（更新）their word count. They can communicate with other writers there as well. All the writers have to stop writing on November 30th.

    It is okay if you have never written a book before. The website provides lesson plans and workbooks for beginners. You can use them to improve writing skills in your novel. Then you can start planning what your novel will be about.

    Are there any books published（出版）from the NaNoWriMo program? Here are a few:

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Water for Elephants by SaraGruen

Entrychats by Cecile Duquenne

    Are there any young readers who want to join in this program? If you want, we hope you can write the best novel. If you have not heard of NaNoWriMo, but you have a good story in mind, join us!

    Writing it down

    Unlike some other European languages, English is a little tricky when it comes to writing. How a word is pronounced and how it is actually spelt can be very different things.

    Same spelling, different meanings

Imagine, then, a situation where two words are spelt and pronounced exactly the same way, but have completely different meanings. Welcome to the world of homonyms（同形同音异义词）. Take, for example, the word "fair"—it can be a kind of festival, an adjective to describe the colour of your hair or how you should play a game. Or "leg", which can be attached to a person, or a table and can also be a distance you travel, or a part of a competition.

Don't take it literally（字面意思）

So how do you know which meaning someone is referring to? You don't, except by the context. Obviously, if someone asks you to "give them a hand", they don't want you to remove what is at the end of your arm.

What's in a name?

    Sometimes even the context doesn't help much—the result can be amusing. These sentences play with the double meaning of a noun:

    Sentence 1: I used to be a banker, but I lost interest.

Sentence 2: A small boy swallowed some coins and had to go to hospital. When his grandmother phoned to ask how he was, the nurse said: "No change yet".

    More ambiguity（歧义）

    Sentence 3 plays with the different meanings of a verb:

    Sentence 3: I wondered why the ball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.

Double trouble

    And sometimes a word can be a noun and a verb, but have different meanings. Can you work this one out?

    Sentence 4: Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

    If you like these homonyms, you will be pleased to know that English has plenty more!

    I have a pair of pants. Tell me: How many different ways can I put a pair of pants to use?

    Now imagine you're Lady Gaga. Bill Gates. A scuba diver. An architect. You still have the pants. What other uses come to mind?

    What you just practiced—the conscious act of "wearing" another self—is an exercise that, according to psychiatrist Srini Pillay, MD, is essential to being creative.

    One problem about our understanding of creativity is that we tend to connect it to our concept of self: Either we're "creative" or we aren't, without much of a middle ground. "I'm just not a creative person!" a frustrated student might say in art class.

    Dr. Pillay, an assistant professor at Harvard University, has spent a good part of his career challenging these ideas. He believes that the key to unlocking your creative potential is to reject the old advice that urges you to "believe in yourself." In fact, you should do the opposite: Believe you are someone else.

    Dr. Pillay points to a 2016 study where the authors – educational psychologists Denis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar-divided their college-student subjects into three groups, instructing one group to think of themselves as "poets" and another to imagine they were "librarians" (the third group was the control). The researchers then presented all the participants with ten ordinary objects, including a fork, a carrot, and a pair of pants, and asked them to come up with as many different uses as possible for each one.

    Those who were asked to imagine themselves as poets came up with the widest range of ideas, whereas those in the librarian group had the fewest. Meanwhile, the researchers found only small differences in students' creativity levels across academic majors. In fact, the physics majors pretending to be poets came up with more ideas than the art majors did.

    These results, write Dumas and Dunbar, suggest that creativity is not an individual trait but a "product of context and perspective." Everyone can be creative, as long as he or she feels like a creative person.

    Family sizes are shrinking around the world. In many countries, families are having fewer than two children. Smaller families mean many children now grow up with fewer cousins. This is hard to imagine, as I come from a large extended family with 23 first cousins on one side and 25 on the other.

    Sometimes when I can't sleep, I try to name all my relatives. Of course, almost all of those cousins have married and had children and now their children are having children. With extended families growing so large and spreading so far, get-togethers have nearly become a thing of the past.

    One of the last gatherings on my father's side was at the home of a cousin who has a place in the country on top of a hill. A tent was set up, holding long tables creaking(嘎吱作响) under the weight of fried chicken, potato salad and chocolate cake. A fishing hole waited nearby for the kids. Vehicles poured in from every direction, parking on the drive, the grass, wherever they could find a spot. There was talking and laughing and joking and food.

    While such gatherings had grown infrequent, we were all happy to be together. Although some of us had not seen one another since so-and-so's wedding or somebody's father's funeral, most people were still easy to recognize. Three sisters who sat together all had the same beautiful skin their mother had. The cousin with bright blue eyes who raced her horse as a teenager still had bright blue eyes. An older cousin who gave me piano lessons when I was young and naughty seemed to have forgiven me. We share a gene pool of people who work hard and laugh often.

    It was very dark when the last set of taillights disappeared into the night. As we gathered our things, said our goodbyes and prepared to leave, a cousin called to me saying, "Don't forget where you come from." I never could. And I'd never try.

    If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story to go? That's the question that changed my life forever.

    At the age of 19, I became a massage therapist(治疗师). For the first time in my life, I felt free, independent and completely in control of my life. That is, until my life took a detour. I was diagnosed with bacterial meningitis. Over the course of two months, I lost my spleen(脾), my kidneys, and both of my legs below the knees.

    One day, I went home. I crawled into bed and this is what my life looked like for the next few months me passed out, escaping from reality, with my legs resting by my side. I was completely physically and emotionally broken. But I knew that in order to move forward, I had to let go of the old Amy and learn to embrace the new Amy. And that is when I began to realize that I didn't have to be small any more. I could be as tall as I wanted or as short as I wanted depending on whom I was dating. And if I snowboard again, my feet aren't going to get cold. And the best of all, I thought, I can make my feet the size of all the shoes that are on the sales shelf. And I did!

    I started snowboarding. Then I went back to work. And then I co-founded a non-profit organization for physical disabilities so that they could get involved in action sports. And just this past February, I won two World Cup gold medals, making me the highest-ranked adaptive female snowboarder in the world.

    Eleven years ago, when I lost my legs, I had no idea what to expect. But if you ask me today, if I would ever want to change my situation, I would have to say no, because my legs haven't disabled me. They've forced me to rely on my imagination and to believe in possibilities, and that's why I believe that our imaginations can be used as tools for breaking through borders, because in our minds, we can do anything and we can be anything. It's belief in those dreams and facing our fears directly that allow us to live our lives beyond our limits.