When people today talk about a tiny house, they probably mean the trendy living space that's about the size of a shed (棚). But you would have to be five inches tall to live in the original tiny houses. Dollhouse(小房子)，which have been around for several centuries, don't offer shelter to real people, but they provide a vivid（生动的） experience of life in times and places both real and imaginary.

    The National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., lets visitors time travel in this tiny world through ―Small Stories: At Home in a Dollhouse,” an exhibit that opened Saturday. Visitors can see twelve dollhouses from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, which contain amazing tiny furnishings. But those people who put together the exhibit also wanted visitors to know the characters inside.

    “It's 300 years of British homes told through their inhabitants (居民),” said Alice Sage, who is in charge of the London museum.

    So as visitors look inside the Tate Baby House, a fancy townhouse from 1760, they can push a button to hear a young woman get a lecture from her mother on the proper way to run a home. In the Killer Cabinet house, a servant named Betsy complains about the problems of city life in the 1830s. “We've got the cat to keep the rats away,” she says.

    That dollhouse was John Killer's gift to his wife and five daughters. The girls were allowed to play with the house, but they probably also learned a few lessons, Sage said.

    “The kitchen of the house would have been the perfect way to teach the girls about the management of a home,” she said, noting the tiny dishes and pots.

    Those who prefer a more modern look won't be disappointed. There are two rooms displaying a white dollhouse from 1935, an apartment house from the 1960s and a brightly colored 21st-century design.

    The end of the exhibit shows how imaginative design sometimes works best in small spaces.

    The Building Museum asked twenty-four artists, designers and architects from across the United States to each create a “dream room” from the past, present or future. Some of these unique small rooms were made using traditional furnishings, others from materials such as clay, insects, 3D-printing, and even peeps marshmallow candies!

    Shakespeare's Birthplace and Exhibition

    Henley Street, Strafford-Upon-Auon   Tel: 01789 204016

    Shakespeare's Birthplace Was the childhood home of William Shakespeare. Take a step back in time and see what life was like for the young Shakespeare growing up in Stratford-Upon-Avon. The house has been exactly furnished, and includes both original and copy items similar to those which would have been there in the house when Shakespeare was a boy. Beautiful painted cloths hang on the walls, brightly colored fabrics fill the rooms and his father's glove workshop has been recreated. At the back of the house is a beautiful garden containing many plants，herbs and flowers mentioned in Shakespeare's plays.

    The neighboring exhibition shows Shakespeare's life and focuses on many rare local items connected with him, as well as a copy of the first edition of his collected plays published in 1623.

    Limited disabled access

    Many restaurants close to Shakespeare's Birthplace

    Town center parking

    Gift shop

    Allow at least 45 minutes to visit the house and the exhibition

    I was a very lucky girl.Many girls didn't know they could take part in or even be good at sports,but I never needed to be told that because I grew up with my grandmother who was a great Olympian.Even today,many girls need that extra nod in sports,but where can they get it?

    Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Gwendolyn Brooks wrote hundreds of poems during her lifetime. She was known around the world for using poetry to increase understanding about black culture in America.

    Her poems described conditions among the poor, racial inequality and drug use in the black community. She also wrote poems about the struggles of black women. But her skill was more than her ability to write about struggling black people. She was an expert at the language of poetry. She combined traditional European poetry styles with the African American experience.

    In her early poetry, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about the South Side of Chicago. The South Side of Chicago is where many back people live. In her poems, the South Side is called Bronzeville. It was A Street in Bronzeville that gained the attention of literary experts in 1945. Critics praised her poetic skill and her powerful descriptions of the black experience during the time. The Bronzeville poems were her first published collection.

    In 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She won the prize for her second book of poems called Annie Allen. Annie Allen is a collection of poetry about the life of a Bronzeville girl as a daughter, a wife and mother. She experiences loneliness, loss, death and being poor. Ms. Brooks said that winning the prize changed her life.

    Her next work was a novel written in 1953 called Maud Martha, Maud Martha received little notice when it was first published. But now it is considered an important work by some critics. Its main ideas about the difficult life of many women are popular among female writers today.

    In some of her poems, Gwendolyn Brooks described how what people see in life is affected by who they are. One example is this poem, Corners on the Curing Sky.

    By the end of the 1960s, Gwendolyn Brooks' poetry expanded from the everyday experiences of people in Bronzeville. She wrote about a wider world and dealt with important political issues.

    Do you suppose Darwin, one of the greatest scientists of all time, really did foolish experiments? Or did he do experiments that were so simple and basic that other people just thought they were foolish?

    Sometimes, people think they already know the answer to a question or the solution to a problem. Sometimes, they really do know an answer or a solution, but without thinking they are important.

    Charles Darwin didn't settle for(满足于) just thinking he knew something. And, he believed all things could be important however simple they seemed to be.

    Suppose you drop sheets of paper that are of exactly the same size and shape. If you drop them at the same time in the same place, they will fall in the same way. Now make one of the sheets of paper into a tight little ball and let it drop along with the other sheets. What happens? You have done an experiment that is so simple that you might think it couldn't be worth anything.

    But this simple experiment is important. It explains part of our present-day understandings of physics, ideas that were worked out long ago by Galileo and Newton. And these understandings set aside some of ancient Greek physics.

    Scientists sometimes stop to look at very simple things and to think very hard about them. Even the simplest idea, which we might think is foolish, can shake the foundations of science.

    China's popular "Singles' Day", better known as "Double Eleven", started out as a day to celebrate singles symbolized by the four number ones on the date of November 11.

    With time that meaning has changed. In 2009, China's e-commerce leader Alibaba set the day as a lucky shopping day for online sales as the date was both easy to remember and perfectly timed as it hit between the consumer spending lull (间歇) between National Day and Chinese New Year. It soon became a hit, and Double Eleven became a buying frenzy (疯狂) spread across the world's second largest economy.

    In 2019, the Double Eleven Shopping Festival entered its eleventh year. During this decade, Alibaba, Chinese e-commerce giant, and other e-commerce platforms, together with consumers, have co-created a very big shopping event whose heat has swept the world. Foreign readers share their ideas on Singles' Day in China:

    GhostBuster (UK) I think Double Eleven is unbelievable. It is not a religious festival that people of the same religion but living in different countries share. As an e-commerce faithful fan, I really love the shopping festival.

    Emanreus (Australia) I work in Shanghai. Many of my young female colleagues are still single. They simply haven't time to date, as they tend to work long hours then travel two hours by subway to get to and from work. Single's Day is a day when they give themselves a treat with online shopping.

    BlondeAmber (Ireland) There is not hing to be proud of to be in a country that spends so much online on a particular day. It does nothing more than show the superficiality (肤浅) of the temporary pleasure of shopping, and produces nothing more than a mountain of environmental waste. I bet there is plenty of buyers' deep regret after this day.

    Ionstar (US) Singles Day became a big deal for Valentine's Day not for the singles! Well, Alibaba's 11. 11 has become more famous and important than that of Black Friday and Cyber Monday!