The International School for Earth Studies

    It's a private，interdisciplinary institution specializing in earth-based studies．The Programs encourage students to explore the seeds of greatness，with a view to developing tomorrow's environmentally sensitive spokespersons and leaders. The principle goal is to help students develop responsibility inspired through appreciation and love for natural places and the greater environment．

    Program Location（s）：Newfoundland，Canada

    Phone：819—647—3226

    Email：info＠earthstudies.ca

    Expedition Education Institute

    Do you want to be an ecological leader，to become deeply rooted in the natural world and in your own power to make change and create a better，more resilient world？

Organized as the equivalent （等价物）to a semester abroad，Expedition Education Institute offers a unique opportunity for gap year participants to be personally transformed and academically challenged and supported to become better and more self-directed life-long learners．

    Program Location（s）：USA

    Phone：207—322—2973

    Email：Info＠expedition educatlon.org

    The Experiment in International Living

    It provides summer abroad programs for high school students who want to connect deeply and engage meaningfully with the richness and complexities of another country. Programs are designed to equip participants not only with essential cultural skills and，in many cases，language skills，but also with a deeper awareness of and sensitivity to critical global issues shaping the diverse communities and regions we visit.

Program Location（s）：Europe，the Americas，Africa，south of the Sahara

Phone：800—345—2929

Email：experiment＠worldlearning.org

Visitoz

    It's the Only organization in Australia that guarantees jobs for young people coming to our country on a Work and Holiday Visa. For young Americans this is a huge chance to get away from home and stand on their own two feet to make their own decisions．

Program Location（s）：Australia

Phone：4168—6106

Email：info＠visitoz.org

    Perhaps you think you could easily add to your happiness with more money. Strange as it may seem, if you're unsatisfied, the issue is not a lack of means to meet your desires but a lack of desires—not that you cannot satisfy your tastes but that you don't have enough tastes.

    Real riches consist of well-developed and hearty capacities (能力) to enjoy life. Most people are already swamped(淹没) with things. They eat, wear, go and talk too much.They live in too big a house with too many rooms, yet their house of life is a deserted hut.

    Your house of life ought to be a mansion (豪宅) , a royal palace.  Every new taste, every additional interest, every fresh enthusiasm adds a room.  Here are several rooms your house of life should have.

    Art should be a desire for you to develop simply because the world is full of beautiful things. If you only understood how to enjoy them and feed your spirit on them, they would make you as happy as to find plenty of ham and eggs when you're hungry.

    Literature, classic literature, is a beautiful, richly furnished room where you might find many an hour of rest and refreshment. To gain that love would go toward making you a rich person, for a rich person is not someone who has a library but who likes a library.

    Music like Mozart's and Bach's shouldn't be absent. Real riches are of the spirit. And when you've brought that spirit up to where classical music feeds it and makes you a little drunk, you have increased your thrills and bettered them. And life is a matter of thrills.

    Sports, without which you remain poor, mean a lot in life. No matter who you are, you would be more human, and your house of life would be better supported against the had days, if you could, and did, play a bit.

    Whatever rooms you might add to your house of life, the secret of enjoying life is to keep adding.

    Soaping up your hands may do more than just get rid of germs. It may wash away the inner confusion you feel right after being forced to make a choice between two appealing choices, according to a new study. The study builds on past research into a phenomenon known as “the Macbeth effect”.

    It turns out that Shakespeare was really onto something when he imagined lady Macbeth trying to clean her conscience（良心）by rubbing invisible bloodstains from her hands. A few years ago, scientists asked people to describe a past wrong act. If people were then given a chance to clean their hands, they later expressed less guilt than people who hadn't cleaned.

    This finding fascinated W. S. Lee, a researcher. “Anything from the past, any kind of negative emotional experiences, might be washed away,” says Lee.

He decided to test hand washing's effect on one kind of bad feeling: the tension we feel after being forced to choose between two attractive choices, because picking one choice makes us feel that we've lose the other. People usually try to calm this inner conflict by later exaggerating（夸大）the positive aspects of their choice.

    He had students rank 10 different music CDs. Then be offered students one CD as a gift. Some students then use liquid soap. Others only looked at the soap or sniffed（噢）it. “Actually, you do not need water and soap,” says Lee.

    Later, the students again had to rank all the music. People who didn't wash their hands had the normal response — they scored their take-home CD higher. Suggesting that they now saw it as even more attractive than before. But this wasn't true for the hand washers. They ranked the music about the same. “they feel no need at all to justify the choice,” say Lee.

    But the implications of it just aren't clear. Schwarz says it's too soon to know whether people should head for a sink after making a tough choice. He says washing may help decision-makers by cleaning away mental disorder, but perhaps if they don't go through the usual post-decision process of justifying their choice, they might feel more sorrow in the long run.

    Scientists in Britain have managed to teach bumblebees(大黄蜂) to pull strings to get to food and then pass on what they have learned to others in their colony(群体)—showing a high level of intelligence despite their tiny brains.

    Researchers at Queen Mary University of London said the experiments, often used to test the intelligence of apes (猿) and birds, showed for the first time that some insects are up to the task, and can also pass skills on through several generations.

    The findings add to the evidence suggesting the ability for “culture spread” — the ability to learn and pass on knowledge and skills — may not be exclusive to humans.

    In the research, published in the journal PLOS Biology on Tuesday, the scientists were able to train 23 out of a group of 40 bees to pull strings with their legs and feet.

    The strings were attached to discs — or artificial “flowers” — containing food at their center but placed under a transparent screen. The bees, spotting the food beneath the screen, learned to pull the “flowers” out by pulling the string with their legs and feet to be able to get to it.

    From another group of bees given the chance to solve the task without any training, only two of 110 were successful.

    Another group of bees was then allowed to observe the trained bees pulling the strings, and 60 percent of them successfully learned the skill. Finally, trained bees were put in colonies, and the scientists found the technique spread successfully to a majority of the colony's worker bees.

    Lars Chittka, a Queen Mary University professor who guided the project, said the team is interested in figuring out the brain processes behind the bees' learning and teaching skills.

    British Writer John Donne once said: "No man is an island; every book is a world." As an enthusiastic reader, I can't agree with the latter part of the sentence more. Every summer, I endeavor to find some peaceful places where I can attack some classics without being disturbed. Thomas Hardy wants to live far from the madding crowd. I am no friend to chaos, either.

    I read George Orwell's 1984 in a New England beachside cottage with no locks on the doors, no telephones or televisions in the rooms. 1984 is a good book that needs deep reflection. Attempting Sound and Fury lying on the bed of a poorly-occupied motel, however, was less fruitful: I made it through one and a quarter volumes, but then my eyelids were so heavy that I couldn't keep them open.

    But this summer I find myself at a loss. I'm not quite interested in J. D. Salinger, say, or Frankenstein. There's always War and Peace which I've covered some distance several times, only to get bogged down in the "War" part, set it aside for a while, and realize that I have to start over from the beginning again, having forgotten everyone's name and social rank. How appealing to simply fall back on a favorite—once more into The Call of the Wild or Alice in the Wonderland, which feels almost like cheating, too exciting and too much fun to belong to serious literature.

    And then there's John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. This title do not amaze but confuse. We're never short of sour grapes, but we've never heard of angry grapes. Anyway grapes are my favorite fruit of summer. These stone fruits can always make me feel cheerful and peaceful all at once.

    It is important to know another language and how to communicate without words when you are in another country. Before saying anything, people communicate with each other by using gestures(手势). However, many gestures have different meanings, or no meaning at all, in different parts of the world.

    In the United States, nodding your head up and down means "yes", while in some parts of Greece and Turkey, it means "no". In the southeast of Asia, it is a polite way of saying "I heard you".

    Today in the USA, when someone puts his thumb up, it means "Everything is all right." However, in Greece it is bad. Also putting your clasped(紧握的)hands up above your head means "I am the winner." It is the sign which players often make. In Russia it is the sign of friendship.

    In the USA, holding your hand up with the thumb and index finger(食指), and the other three straight means "Everything is OK." In France, it means "You are worth nothing."

    It is also important to make eye communication. If you look down when talking to an American, he or she may feel that you are shy, or you are trying to hide something.

Besides these, you should also know there are some topics that cannot be talked about, such as age, weight and marriage. You can talk about the weather, work, sports, food, where one lives and news of the day.