HEARST CASTL, CA

    Hearst Castle is open for tours daily, except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day.

    Tour A -- The Grand Rooms

    View the ground floor rooms of La Casa Grande where Mr. Hearst's guests met their host and were entertained during their stay. See the Assembly Room, where guests met for cocktails, the Refectory, where meals were served, the Morning Room, Billiard Theater. Your knowledgeable guide will bring this big house to life sharing stories about Mr. Hearst, his many guests, and the art collection it contains.

    Prices: Adults: $25.00; Children: $12.00.

    Tour B – The Upstairs Suites (套房)

    This tour features rooms on the upper floors of Casa Grande. Travel through guest suites on your way to the Library where Mr. Hearst housed a collection of 2,000-year-old Greek pots.

    Visit Mr. Hearst's private third floor suite including his bedroom and private study where he held business meetings. Learn about the genius of architect Julia Morgan and the way she put Mr. Hearst's art collection into the design.

    Prices: Adults: $20.00; Children: $10.00.

    Tour C – Evening Tour

    This tour allows visitors to experience the Castle at night as a visitor to the Castle in the 1930s might have. It features highlights from the experience, Upper Floors of Casa Grande, and Garden tours.

    Evening tours are offered on most Fridays and Saturdays during March – May & October – December.

    Prices: Adults: $36.00; Children: $18.00.

    Tour D – Accessible Holiday Twilight

    This tour is wheelchair accessible. Visitors who have difficulty climbing stairs, or who cannot stand or walk for extended period, may also benefit from this tour. Accessible transportation is provided from the Visitor Center to all areas of the Holiday at Hearst Castle tour. Call 866-712-2286 for additional information.

    Prices: Adults: $30.00; Children: $18.00.

    83-year-old Antonio Vicente has spent the last four decades of his life fighting against the trend. As Brazilian landowners cut down rainforests to make room for profitable plantations(种植园) and cattle grounds, he struggled to bring the jungles of his childhood back to life.

    "When I was a child, the peasants cut down the trees to make grasslands and charcoal, and the water dried up and did not come back," he told the reporters, "I thought: 'Water is valuable, no one makes water and the population will not stop growing. What is going to happen? We are going to run out of water.'"

    With only some donkeys and a small team of hired workers, Antonio Vicente set about bringing back the forest to his land. What started out as a weekend hobby soon became a permanent way of life, and Antonio recalls often spending whole days and nights in his young jungle, surrounded by rats and foxes, and eating banana sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Over the last 40 years, he has planted an estimated 50,000 trees on his 31-hectare land, which now make up a small but unique area of rainforest, and a haven for wildlife.

    As the forest grew, the water returned, and Antonio says that there are now over 20 water, sources on his land that were no longer there when he bought it. Then the animals started making a home there. Today, the forest is alive with the sounds of birds and insects living there, and more species are settling in every year.

    "There are toucans(巨嘴鸟), all kinds of birds, squirrels, lizards, and even the boars are returning," 83-year-old Vicente says, "If you ask me who my family are, I would say all this right here, each one of these that I planted from a seed."

    Time flies, but the tracks of time remain in books and museums. This is what made a recent tragedy in Brazil even more terrible.

    On Sept.2, a big fire ripped through the National Museum of Brazil.“ Two hundred years of work, research and knowledge were lost,” Brazilian President Michel Temer wrote on Twitter after the fire. “It's a sad day for all Brazilians.”

    Most of the 20 million pieces of history are believed to have been destroyed. Only as little as 10 percent of the collection may have survived, Time reported. Among all the items, there were Egyptian mummies, the bones of uniquely Brazilian creatures such as the long－necked dinosaur Maxakalisaurus, and an 11,500－year－old skull called Luzia, which was considered one of South America's oldest human fossils.

    Besides these, Brazil's indigenous(本土的，土著的) knowledge also suffered. The museum housed world－famous collections of indigenous objects, as well as many audio recordings of local languages from all over Brazil. Some of these recordings, now lost, were of languages that are no longer spoken.

    “The tragedy this Sunday is a sort of national suicide, a crime against our past and future generations,” Bernard Mello Franco, one of Brazil's best－known columnists, wrote on the O Globo newspaper site.

    The cause of the fire is still unknown, as BBC News reported on Sept. 3. After the fire burned out, crowds protested outside the museum to show their anger at the loss of the irreplaceable items of historical value.

    According to Emilio Bruna, an ecologist at the University of Florida, museums are living, breathing stores of who we are and where we've come from, and the world around us.

    Just as underwater grass floats on the surface if it loses its roots, a nation is lost without its memories. The fire at the National Museum of Brazil teaches the world an important lesson: We should never neglect history.

    If you also have a friend like Francia Raisa, you are really lucky. On Thursday, singer and actress Selena Gomez, 25, used Instagram(照片墙,一款社交软件) to explain why she was "laying low" this summer. She posted a photo of herself in a hospital bed with her friend Francia Raisa holding hands. She said she recently received a kidney transplant(肾脏移植) from her best friend because of complications(并发症) from lupus(狼疮), an autoimmune disease, which means it is the result of the immune system attacking normal tissue, including the kidneys, brain, heart and lungs.

    People with lupus may first experience tiredness, joint pain or a little bit of rash(皮疹) on their bodies and can go for a long time before their doctors realize it is more serious. Many people see two or four doctors before the real problem is picked up. According to Dr. Kyriakos Kirou, roughly a third to one­half of people with lupus develop kidney disease, and up to one in five of them will eventually need a transplant, sometimes because they weren't treated with effective drugs to prevent the immune system from attacking the kidneys. Though Gomez said that she was "very well now," she warned about the dangers of not taking medical diagnoses(医学诊断) seriously, like she did before.

    Her Instagram post also called attention to two major health topics: the need for living organ donators and the fact that Gomez represents three groups more likely to be diagnosed with lupus and lupus­related kidney disease. Nine out of 10 people diagnosed with lupus are women, and most develop the disease between the ages of 15 to 44. And lupus is two to three times more common among women of color, including Hispanic (西班牙裔)women, according to the Lupus Foundation.

    Raisa is Latin(拉丁人), and Gomez's father is of Mexican origin. While it's not essential that the organ donator and receiver be of the same race, people who share a similar racial background sometimes are better matched, according to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing.

Harvard Pre-College Program

    Our summer program for high school students is designed to pave the way for a successful college experience.

    HERE YOU CAN:

    Learn without limits

    Pursue your interests in courses focusing on physics, law, writing, philosophy, and a dozen other subjects.

    Live at Harvard

    You will live in a historic undergraduate house near Harvard Square.

    Your plan covers three meals a day, seven days a week.

    Have fun outside the classroom

    You might enjoy a Cirque du Sileil performance, a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, or a trip to the Museum of Science.

    ELIGIBILITY (申请资格)

    Students are academically motivated and will graduate in 2020 or 2021.

    TO APPLY

    Complete an online application and provide the following materials: the $50 nonrefundable application fee; transcripts (成绩单) with fall 2018 grades; signed rules and regulations.

    INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS

    Participants should apply for the B-2 tourist visa. If English is not your native language, submit scores from the TOEFLor IELTS language proficiency exam.

    APPLICATION TIPS

    No fee is required to start your application. You will be asked to pay the application fee only upon submitting the application.

    The scores of successful applicants are typically above 103 on the TOEFL with 25 on the written section or at least 7.5 on the IELTS with 7 on the written section.

    Use a desktop or laptop. You will be asked to write short essays as part of your application. This may be challenging to do on a mobile phone.

    You will receive an email informing you of the application status approximately three weeks after you have completed your application.