Best Travel Guides by Continent

     We've broken down(分类)the best travel guides, by continent, to help you find student discounts and travel like a local on your next adventure.

Europe—Let's Go Europe 2017: The Student Travel Guide

     Let's Go was founded about 55 years ago when a Harvard student had an idea to provide accessible, budget travel lips for young people. Students lave its amusing pages. Let's Go Europe 2017 has everything you need for your trip—from the best beer in Brussels to how to avoid the lines at the Louvre.

Africa—The Rough Guide to Cape Toxin, the Winelands, and the Garden Route

     With its colorful photos and detailed tips on how to make the most of South Africa, The Rough Guide is the book to gel when visiting Africa. You may not have access to Google Maps when you1 re out exploring but that's OK. The Rough Guide also comes with easy use to maps.

     It can be purchased as an eBook, or as a paperback(平装本).

Asia—Lonely Planet: South-East Asia on a Shoestring

     This guide is perfect for those backpacking through the hidden treasures of South-Ea.sl Asia. With detailed recommendations from experts in the area, this guide helps first-timers as well as experienced backpackers. This book can lie purchased as a paperback travel guide. A download for an eBook or separate chapters can be purchased to serve as a guide to specific cities.

North America—Planet USA Travel Guide

     With detailed reviews of the best places to eat, sleep, and explore, Lonely Planet is linked with budget-friendly attractions and that's why it makes our best travel guides list. This travel guide is available in paperback.

    Navajo was the perfect choice for a secret language. It is very complex. One vowel (元音）can have up to ten different pronunciations, changing the meaning of any word. In the 1940s, Navajo was unwritten language. No one outside of the reservation could speak it or understand it.

    The Navajo Code team had to invent new words to describe military equipment. For example, they named ships after fish: lotso-whale (battleship), calo-shark (destroyer), beshloiron-fish (submarine). When a Code Talker received a message via radio, he heard a series of unrelated Navajo words. He would then translate the words into English and use the first letter of each English word to spell the message. The Navajo words tsah (needle), wol-la-chee (ant), ah-kh-di-glini (victor), and tsah-ah-dzoh (yucca) spelled NAVY.

    The Code Talker kept the code a secret. They memorized everything. There were no code books. As a result, no ordinary Navajo soldiers, if captured by the enemy, could understand the code. More than 3,600 Navajos served in World War II, but only 420 were Code Talkers with the US Marines. They coded and decoded battlefield messages better and faster than any machine. They could encode, transmit, and decode a three-line English message in 20 seconds. Machines of the time required 30 minutes to perform the same job.

    Even after the war the code remained top secret. When they were asked about their role, Code Talkers just said: “I was a radioman.” War movies and histories came out without mentioning them. The code was never used again and was finally declassified in 1968. Only then did the secret came out.

    It's carnival season in Europe, a crazy time for parades, mask, music and dance. No one is sure where the tradition exactly comes from. But while its origin remains a mystery, this does not keep people from joining it.

    The Carnival of Binche, the most famous one that is staged in Belgium, has been announced as a masterpiece (杰作) of the Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. The event usually takes place during a Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, with performers known as "Gilles" dressed in clown-like costumes, dancing and marching along the streets. During parade, the Gilles throw oranges to the crowd as an act of well-washing and it is considered rude to throw them back.

    Venice is said to be the birthplace of carnivals. In the city, the annual carnival starts 58 days before Easter. It features various brightly-colored and well-made masks. Every year, thousands of visitors go to the city to be part of the festive event.

    The Germans, always considered serious-minded, also have their carnivals. The Cologne Carnival is one of the largest, with Rose Monday as the best part. On Rose Monday Parade, lots of gifts are prepared for the people who join it. For this year, 300 tons of candies and more than 300,000 souvenirs were thrown out of the various nicely-decorated floats (花车) to the crowd.

    The Nice Carnival in the southern French city of Nice lasts two or three weeks from February to march every year. It features floats, music, dance, performances and entertainment activities. The parade of lights and the final day carnival parade are the most exciting parts of the entire event. Compared to the Rio Carnival in Brazil and the Winter Carnival in Quebec, Canada, the Nice Carnival has a special artistic touch, and it is one of the three major carnivals around the world.

    Carnivals were first organized in the Middle Ages. They were supposed to be a time of eating and drinking before the Easter fast (斋戒). Nowadays, they have turned into winter tourism attractions of many European cities.

    Scientists Diego Kersting and Cristina Linares have found that some coral species are able to recover from harmful warming events through a unique survival strategy (策略)—known as "rejuvenescence" (新生)—among corals in the Mediterranean Sea. The findings represent some rare good news for corals around the world, which are facing numerous severe threats—most notably, climate change.

    "The main threats are climate change, overfishing, pollution and coastal urbanization," Kersting said. "But currently, climate change is probably the one causing the most coral cover declines. Warming stresses corals up to a point that may cause death. Some corals bleach (白化) before dying. Other corals do not bleach but die directly." He went on, "Our findings are significant because this survival strategy was only known from fossil corals that existed hundreds of millions of years ago. It is the first time that it has been found in a living coral. Thanks to our findings, we know now that some corals are able to recover, but unfortunately this is not enough in the current climate change context."

    For their research, Kersting and Linares monitored 243 colonies of the endangered reef-building coral Cladocoracaespitosa in Spain's Columbretes Islands Marine Reserve over 16 years, starting in 2002. The monitoring revealed that Cladocoracaespitosa in the Mediterranean uses rejuvenescence to cope with warming events. This process involves the polyps — or the individual coral animals in a colony—shrinking inward and abandoning their skeletons (骨骼) during warm periods, before rejuvenating at a later point. "What happens is that some polyps in a coral colony—sometimes just one— reduces completely its dimensions and partially retreats from its skeleton," Kersting said. "Once the stressful event is over, the shrunken or rejuvenated polyp recovers its size and builds up a new skeleton. Eventually, it begins to reproduce itself through budding and begins to cover the dead colony surfaces."

    He continued, "The results were very surprising because I started to observe colonies that were dead years ago, that were showing living parts many years after their death."

    There is a very long list of rules for the New York City subway. Don't put your feet on a seat, don't carry open cups of coffee or soda, don't take more than one seat... Those are just a few of the rules. There are hundreds more.

    With so many rules, why is it still unpleasant to ride the subway?

    Some people think that the problem is that no one enforces the rules. Other passengers sometimes try to enforce rules. But you can't rely on them because New Yorkers have unwritten rules against talking to strangers and making eye contact with strangers. How can you tell someone to take her shopping bags off the seat and throw away her Coke without talking to her or looking at her? It is difficult.

    There are other New Yorkers who think that the subway is unpleasant because there are not enough rules. One rider wrote a letter to The New York Times a couple of weeks ago suggesting a few more subway rules. Here are some of the rules that she would like to see:

    —Don't lean on the poles. You prevent other people from holding on. They can fall down.

    —Talk quietly. The trains are already too noisy.

    —Give your seat to elderly passengers or to parents with small children.

    If those unwritten rules of etiquette are written down, will the rude people be more likely to follow them? It doesn't make sense to make more rules that no one will enforce.

    The real problem is that we are forgetting how to be nice to each other. It is embarrassing that we need a rule to tell us to give our seat to elderly passengers. Nobody should need to be reminded to do that.

    I say we stop talking about the rules and try to remember our manners. Let's be nice to each other not because a police officer might tell us to get off the train, but because it is the right thing to do. Then New York City would be more civilized —both above ground and below.

When learning a new language, speakers often have non-native accents. Linguistic research suggests such accent is shaped by the speaker's first language that they learned when growing up. Schepens' team's research puts new light on just how strong these effects can be.

There're similar researches from other scientists, but Schepens' team analyzed a data set of more than 50,000 adults, who learned Dutch as their second or third languages. Besides, these adults came from more than 60 different first language backgrounds. These data were collected through a state exam administered by the Dutch government for foreigners that enter Holland. The exam rated each test taker's Dutch speaking proficiency(熟练，水平)

The team found that about half of the individual difference in the proficiency of learners could be accounted for by a handful of reasons: the learner's education and sex (women had higher scores than men), the learner's age when they arrived in Holland, the time they spent in Holland, and the learner's first language. This last reason was the most prominent one since it accounts for 50 percent of the explained difference in learners' proficiency.

What leads to this? Working with professor Hout, Schepens's team studied the linguistic similarity between Dutch and the 62 first languages spoken by different learners in the database. The huge majority—about 80 percent—of the effect of the language background was explained by linguistic similarity. Of the test takers who grew up speaking Arabic, only about 5 percent scored higher in Dutch speaking proficiency than the worst 50 percent of the test takers that grew up speaking German.

"Our results suggest this is largely due to the fact that German shares many linguistic characteristics with Dutch, but Arabic does not," says Schepens.

"This suggests a large part of the non-nativeness of a learner is simply due to the language they grew up with, and this reason is entirely out of their control," says Florian Jaeger." The result can play a part in language teaching."