Teachers' Day is, interestingly, not celebrated on the same day all over the world. In some countries it is marked by a holiday, in others it is a working day.

    International Teachers' Day is celebrated on October 5. Being held ever since 1994, it is in honor of teachers' organizations worldwide. Its aim is to encourage supports for teachers and to meet the needs of students.

    China    In 1939, Teachers' Day was set for August 27, Confucius' birthday. In1951, the celebration was stopped. However, it was founded again in 1985, and the day was changed to September 10.

    India     Teachers' Day is celebrated on September 5 in honour of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the second president of India, whose birthday falls on that day.

    Russia    In Russia, Teachers' Day was celebrated on the first Sunday of October between 1965 and 1994. Since 1994, the day is observed on the October 5, just the same day as World Teachers Day.

    The US    In the US, Teachers' Day is non-official holiday. It is celebrated on the Tuesday of the first full week of May. A number of activities are organized in schools to honor teachers. The celebrations can continue for the whole week of May.

    Thailand     In Thailand, National Teachers' Day is celebrated every year on January 16. The first Teachers' Day was held in 1957. The day is a holiday in schools.

    Whether you're up for a Crocodile Dundee's adventure or you'd just like a taste of the Australian sun, the beaches in and around Sydney can offer you all that and more.

Sydney Beach

    Sydney Beach is located at Sydney's northernmost tip on an extension(延伸) of land ending at Palm Beach. Before checking out the golden sand, take a quick tour of the houses of millionaires from the art and film industries.

Palm Beach

    Only about an hour from downtown Sydney, Palm Beach offers a long stretch(延伸) of clean sand and water. With parking near the center of the beach, that leaves the rest of it as a peaceful location with a sparse population, from which you can go surfing but take care — without the huge crowds of other Sydney's beaches, Palm Beach doesn't afford quite the safety level to be found elsewhere. Volunteer lifesavers are on duty only on weekends and holidays.

Bondi Beach

    For the famous beach, Bondi Beach has to be your choice. Parking is difficult to find even on slow days, so consider taking public transport to this world—known beach in the eastern Sydney suburbs. Easily reachable by taxi, bus, and rail, Bondi Beach offers sun bathing, swimming, snorkeling, and all sorts of water sports fun. If you're in the mood for a bit of exercise, two scenic coastal walks will afford you great views and sights along the shore. Take in views from Mackenzie's Point. It starts at Bondi and heads south to Bronte Beach. But don't try to swim in Mackenzie's Bay — it holds dangers such as hidden rocks.

Bronte Beach

    Your second choice for a scenic coastal walk covers a few miles and takes you from Bronte Beach to Waverly Cemetery, where many famous Australians are buried, including the poet Henry Lawson.

    READY or not, the college application season has begun. There are two main kinds of early admissions programs: Early Action and Early Decision.

    Early Action is a great choice for the well-prepared student. Students apply early, and are allowed to apply under an Early Action program to as many colleges as they choose. The biggest advantage for students is that colleges let them know early – in most cases, before Jan 1. Roughly 15 percent of colleges and universities offer an Early Action option(选择). Oct 15 is now the first deadline for many colleges and universities. This movement toward earlier deadlines is especially popular in the Southeast, with many of the large public universities leading the way. North Carolina State University, the University of South Carolina and the University of Georgia all have an Oct 15 Early Action deadline.

    Early Decision is a promise that cannot be reversed. Students who are accepted must take back their other applications and should attend that school. Students are allowed to apply to just one school under an Early Decision program. Early Decision deadlines are in early November, with colleges letting students know by mid-December. Many students believe that they are more likely to be accepted if they apply for Early Decision, but it actually depends.

       In some cases there is big increase in students being accepted, and at other colleges it is not that big at all. Generally, the strongest students are applying early. Athletes and students with focused interests are encouraged to apply for Early Decision.

    A. High tech with traditional life at Green Bank.

    Over millions of years, penguins（企鹅）have developed a keen sense of where to find food. Once they're old enough, they set off from the shores on which they were hatched for the first time and swim long distances in search of tasty fish like anchovies and sardines. But they don't search directly for the fish themselves.

    For example, when young African penguins head out to sea, they look for areas with low surface temperatures and high chlorophyll(叶绿素) because those conditions signal the presence of phytoplankton（浮游植物）. And lots of phytoplankton means lots of plankton（浮游动物）, which in turn means lots of their favorite fish. Well, that's what it used to mean.

    Climate change plus overfishing have made the penguin feeding grounds a mirage(海市蜃楼). The habitat is indeed plankton-rich—but now it's fish-poor. Researchers call this an “ecological trap.”

    “It's a situation where you have a signal that previously pointed an animal towards good quality habitat. That habitat's been changed, usually by human pressures. The signal stays, but the quality in the environment deteriorates.”

    Richard Sherley, a zoologist at the University of Exeter and his team used satellite imaging to track the African penguins from eight sites along southern Africa. Historically, the birds benefited from tons of fish off the coasts of Angola, Namibia and western South Africa, but now they're going hungry.

    “I was really hoping we'd see them going east, and finding areas where the fish had moved to but it ends up being quite a sad story for the penguins.” said Richard.

    The researchers calculate that by falling into this ecological trap, African penguin populations on South Africa's Western Cape have declined by around 80 percent.

    Some research groups are exploring the idea of moving chicks to a place where they can't get trapped, like the Eastern Cape. But Sherley thinks that a longer-term solution means making and carrying out rules to create more sustainable(可持续的) fishing industry, something that he says needs public support.

    Age has its privileges in America, and one of the most important of them is the senior citizen discount. Eligibility(资格) is determined not by one's need but by the date on one's birth certificate. The discounts have become a routine part of many businesses—as common as color televisions in motel rooms and free coffee on airliners.

    People with gray hair often are given the discounts without even asking for them; yet, millions of Americans above age 60 are healthy and solvent (有支付能力的). Businesses that would never dare offer discounts to college students or anyone under 30 freely offer them to older Americans. The practice is acceptable because of the widespread belief that ＂elderly＂ means ＂needy＂. Perhaps that once was true, but today elderly Americans as a group have a lower poverty rate than the rest of the population. To be sure, there is economic diversity within the elderly, and many older Americans are poor. But most of them aren't.

    It is impossible to determine the impact of the discounts on individual companies. For many firms, they are a stimulus to revenue. But in other cases, the discounts are given at the expense, directly or indirectly, of younger Americans. Moreover, they are a direct irritant(刺激物) in what some politicians and scholars see as a coming conflict between the generations.

    Generational tensions are being fueled by continuing debate over Social Security benefits, which mostly involve a transfer of resources from the young to the old. Employment is another sore point. Supported by laws and court decisions, more and more older Americans are declining the retirement dinner in favor of staying on the job—thereby lessening employment and promotion opportunities for younger workers.

    Far from a kind of charity they once were, senior citizen discounts have become a privilege to a group with millions of members who don't need them.

It no longer makes sense to treat the elderly as a single group whose economic needs deserve priority over those of others. Senior citizen discounts only enhance the myth that older people can't take care of themselves and need special treatment; and they threaten the creation of a new myth, that the elderly are ungrateful and taking for themselves at the expense of children and other age groups. Senior citizen discounts are the essence of the very thing older Americans are fighting against—discrimination by age.

    Hadi Partovi, founder of Code.org believes every student should learn the basics of computer science just like they do math, physics, or biology, regardless of what they want to do in the future. The expert says knowledge about the subject is important to understand how the world around us works and compares it to learning about photosynthesis(光合作用), even though not every student is going to be a botanist. To spark students' interest, he created the “Hour of Code,” which introduces the world of computing to anyone, from ages 14 to 104, in a fun, interactive manner. Observed annually during Computer Science Week, the event now draws tens of millions of kids from over 180 countries.

    The “Hour of Code”, which can be scheduled anytime during Computer Science Week, begins with an introductory video on computer science. Participants can then select from hundreds of fun assignments that are sorted by both grade level and coding experience. Though each project is designed to last just sixty minutes, beginners can deal with as many challenges as they desire.

    To help introduce computer science in classrooms on a more regular basis, Code.org has also developed a catalog of online courses that can be incorporated(纳入)in a school's regular curriculum. Since the nonprofit began offering the courses in 2013, over 704, 000 teachers have signed up to teach introductory computer science to over 22 million students worldwide.

    Thanks to the efforts of the pioneer, about 40 percent of US schools now offer computer science as a subject. The numbers are even higher—an impressive 70 percent—if after-school offerings such as robotics clubs are included. Even more encouraging, eight years ago, just 19, 390 students took an Advanced Placement Computer Science exam. By the spring of 2017, the number had jumped 415 percent to 99, 868.