First opened to the public in 1976,the California State Railroad Museum is one of Sacramento's largest and most popular visitor destinations.Over 500,000 people visit the museum every year,with guests traveling from throughout the world to experience this world-famous place.

    The museum consists of six original buildings.The main exhibit building,the Railroad History Museum,totals 100,000 square feet.Completed at a cost of US $16.1 million,it opened in May 1981.

    Hours: The museum is open daily (except on Thanksgiving,Christmas and New Year's Day) from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. From May 28 to September 3,the museum will be open until eight o'clock in the evening.

    Admission: US $10 for adults,US $5 for youths aged six to seventeen;Children aged five and under are free; Cash,personal checks,traveler's checks and credit cards are accepted for payment.

    Location: The California State Railroad Museum is located at the corner of Second and “I” street in Old Sacramento.

    Parking: A limited number of spaces are available for parking on the streets near the museum.However,these spaces are not suitable for guests visiting longer than 90 minutes.All-day parking is available in the large public garage at the “I” Street entrance to Old Sacramento,for a small fee.

    Food Service: Many restaurants are located near the museum.These range from reasonably priced, family-friendly places to some of the finest dining restaurants in the city.

    Accessibility: The museum is fully accessible to people with disabilities.Certain exhibits and programs have limited accessibility,due to factors such as narrow and historic stairways.

    Photography: We welcome photography for personal use.Hand-held cameras are allowed;however,tripods are not permitted for safety reasons.A Morning for Photographers at the museum is a special event.Tripods are allowed during this event.

    Started by the British Council, the UK's international organization for cultural relations and educational opportunities, this year-long activity sets out to improve fluency in spoken English in particular.

    Prize-winning online competition

    The activity also marked the start of an online competition, “My Favorite English Word”. You can join by simply posting your word of choice on China Daily.com. The most popular words will be included in a draw to win a variety of prizes, including Kindle, Polaroid camera and Bluetooth speaker. To participate, click here.

    English Teacher Award.

    The activity establishes an English Teacher Award to recognize excellence in teaching among Chinese non-native teachers of English. Nominations(提名) will be made by students and English teachers.

    In order to recognize more inspiring teachers, monthly prizes will be presented and the winner of the grand final award will be announced later in the year. The winner will have the opportunity to study in the UK for 4 weeks—supported by the International House London.

    Throughout the activity, the “English is GREAT” website will provide access to free online resources and all kinds of materials for English learners of all levels.

UK-Mandarin (Standard Chinese) Excellence Program

    The “English is GREAT” activity will reply to the UK-Mandarin Excellence Program, started in 2016, which aims to have 5,000 secondary school pupils in the UK fluent in Mandarin by 2020.

    Poet William Stafford once said that we are defined more by the detours in life than by the narrow road toward goals. I like this image. But it was quite by accident that I discovered the deep meaning of his words.

    For years we made the long drive from our home in Seattle to my parents' home in Boise in nine hours. We traveled the way most people do: the fastest, shortest, easiest road, especially when I was alone with four noisy, restless kids who hate confinement and have strong opinions about everything.

    Road trips felt risky, so I would drive fast, stopping only when I had to. We would stick to the freeways and arrive tired.

    But then Banner, our lamb was born. He was rejected by his mama days before our planned trip to Boise. I had two choices: leave Banner with my husband, or take him with me. My husband made the decision for me.

    That is how I found myself on the road with four kids, a baby lamb and nothing but my everlasting optimism to see me through. We took the country roads out of necessity. We had to stop every hour, let Banner shake out his legs and feed him. The kids chased him and one another. They'dget back in the car breathless and energized, smelling fresh from the cold air.

    We explored side roads, catching grasshoppers in waist-high grass. Even if we simply looked out of the car windows at baby pigs following their mother, or fish leaping out of the water, it was better than the best ride down the freeway. Here was life and new horizons.

    We eventually arrived at my parents' doorstep astonishingly fresh and full of stories.

    I grew brave with the trip back home and creative with my disciplining technique. On an empty section of road, everyone started quarreling. I stopped the car, ordered all kids out and told them to meet me up ahead. I parked my car half a mile away and read my book in sweet silence.

    Some road trips are by necessity fast and straight. But that trip with Banner opened our eyes to a world available to anyone adventurous enough to wander around and made me realize that a detour may uncover the best part of journey—and the best part of yourself.

    The human face is a remarkable piece of work. The astonishing variety of facial features helps people recognize each other and is vital to the formation of complex societies. So is the face's ability to send emotional signals, whether through an unconscious red face or the artifice of a false smile. People spend much of their waking lives reading faces, for signs of attraction, hatred, trust and fraud. They also spend plenty of time trying to hide true feelings or intentions.

    Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces. In America facial recognition is used by churches to track worshippers' attendance; in Britain, by retailers to spot past shoplifters. In China, it confirms the identities of ride-hailing drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple's new iPhone is expected to use it to unlock the home screen.

    Set against human skills, such applications might seem incremental(增值的). Some breakthroughs, such as flight or the Internet, obviously transform human abilities; facial recognition seems merely to encode(编码)them. Although faces are unique to individuals, they are also public, so technology does not, at first sight, interfere with something that is private. And yet the ability to record, store and analyze images of faces cheaply, quickly and on a vast scale promises one day to bring about fundamental changes to opinions of privacy, fairness and trust.

    Start with privacy. One big difference between faces and other biometric data, such as fingerprints, is that they work at a distance. Anyone with a phone can take a picture for facial-recognition programs to use. Facebook's bank of facial images cannot be used by others, but the Silicon Valley giant could obtain pictures of visitors to a car showroom, say, and later use facial recognition to serve them ads for cars. Law-enforcement agencies now have a powerful weapon in their ability to track criminals, but at enormous potential cost to citizens' privacy.

    The face is not just a name-tag. It displays a lot of other information—and machines can read that, too. Again, that promises benefits. Some firms are analyzing faces to provide automated diagnoses of rare genetic conditions, far earlier than would otherwise be possible. Systems that measure emotion may give autistic(孤独症的)people a grasp of social signals they find difficult.

    Many doors close for those who have ever been in prison for a crime. It can be difficult for former prisoners to reenter society. A number of training programs are aimed at reopening doors for these men and women.

    "Together We Bake" teaches cooking and marketing skills to women who have spent time in prison so they can start new lives. It is a 10-week program which teaches women how to bake and sell cookies. Two friends, Tricia Sabatini and Stephanie Wright, created the program.

    "I have a background in social work and she is an amazing baker," Ms. Wright explains. "We discovered that for this population of women, returning from prison into the community, there aren't a lot of resources for them. So we thought we could combine our passions (激情) and develop this job as a training program. "Stephanie Wright says they started the program earlier this year." We had two classes so far that have graduated. This is our third class. We have eight women currently in this class. We've 16 women graduated in the first two classes."

    Terry Garred is one of the graduates. She says the program helped her turn her life around. Next she hopes to complete her high school studies. She is also working for "Together We Bake" to help other women follow the path she took.

    The program includes classes in which the women talk about their experiences and learn communication and job skills. Thirty-six-year-old Jamie White had spent three years in jail, which made her a little puzzled about her future life back into society. But she found those meeting were very helpful. She learned how to open up, and was just trying to better herself. She gained new skills. She sells baked goods at local markets every weekend now.

    Some kinds of mental skills naturally decrease as people get older. Yet research seems to show that some training can improve such skills. A recently published study also appears to attest that the good effects of training can last for many years after that training has ended.

    Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland wanted to learn how long memory and thinking skills would last in older people who were trained to keep them. The people were part of the ten-year research project. They were taught methods meant to improve their memory, thinking and ability to perform everyday tasks.

    More than 2,800 volunteered for the study called ACTIVE ­ short for Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly. Most were studied when they were more than 70 years old.

    The volunteers took one of several short training classes meant to help them keep their mental abilities. One class trained participants in skills including how to remember word lists. Another group trained in reasoning. A third group received help with speed-of-processing ­ speed of receiving and understanding information. A fourth group ­ the control group did not get any training.

    Earlier results had established that the training helped the participants for up to five years. Now, leading study writer George Rebok says, the research showed most of the training remained effective a full ten years later.

    Professor Rebok and his team found that the people trained in reasoning and speed-of- processing did better on tests than the control group.

    "We are wondering whether those effects which endured over time would still be there ten years following the training, and in fact, that's exactly what we found.

    The effect on memory, however, seemed not to last as long. Still, the old people in any of the three classes generally reported less difficulty in performing daily activities than the control group. The total training time for the older people was between 10 and 15 hours.