WELCOME

    Welcome to Windsor Castle, the oldest and largest occupied castle in the world .Windsor is one the official residences (住所)of the Queen, who sometimes stays here.

Audio tours

    Free audio tours are available on leaving the Admission Centre at the start of your visit .There is a descriptive audio tour for blind and poor-sighted visitors.

Guided tours

    Visitors can explore the history of the Castle through a tour of the Precincts with an expert guide. Tours depart at regular intervals throughout the day from the Courtyard and finish at the entrance to the State Apartments.

Visitors with children

    For those visiting with children, a special family tour and various activities are offered during school holidays and at weekends .Please note that, for safety reasons, pushchairs are not permitted in the State Apartments. However, baby carriers are available to borrow.

St George's Chapel

    Visitors arriving at the Castle after 15:00 from March to October are advised to visit St George's Chapel first before it closes.

Shopping

    Shops offer a wide range of souvenirs designed for the Royal Collection, including books, postcards, china, jewellery, and children's toys. Please ask at the Middle Ward shop about our home delivery service.

Refreshments

    Bottled water can be purchased from the Courtyard and Middle Ward shops. From April to September ice cream is also available. Visitors wishing to leave the Castle for refreshments in the town may obtain re-entry permits from the castle shops. Eating and drinking are not permitted in the State Apartments or St George's Chapel.

Photography and mobile phones

    Non-commercial photography and filming are welcomed in the Castle. Photography, video recording and filming are not permitted inside the State Apartments or St George's Chapel. Mobile phone must be switched off inside the State Apartments and St George's Chapel in consideration of other visitors.

Security

    As Winter Castle is a working royal palace, visitors and their belongings should get through airport style security checks. For safety and security reasons a one-way system operates along the visitor route.

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    After a confirmed rabies(狂犬病) case in Parke County, Indiana, experts are urging caution if you find a bat(蝙蝠) in your home or office.

    “If you try to kill a bat, you are more likely to get bitten,” said Joy O'Keefe, assistant professor of biology and director of Indiana State University's Centre for Bat Research, Outreach and Conservation. “Most bats people find in their houses are healthy and are not going to bite them and give them rabies.” But they could be a federally endangered species, such as the Indiana Bat, which is found in this area.

    So if you spot a bat in your home or office, don't kill it or touch it with bare hands, O'Keefe said. Instead, put on a pair of heavy gloves and gently move it into a box or bucket. Once contained, the bat can be removed outside.

    “If it's a healthy bat, it'll fly away eventually,” O'Keefe said. “If it doesn't move or seem to be healthy, you can take it to the health department to be tested.”

    This is the time of year when bats move from their summer resting sites to their winter resting sites, O'Keefe said.

    “We get calls every year during the first month of school year from people finding bats in the university's buildings,” said O'Keefe.

    Bats are a great help to people, as every night they can eat up to their entire body weight of insects. Bats, however, are facing great threats from epidemics(流行性疾病), habitat destruction and other things.

    “The best way the average person can help bats is by understanding them and by telling other people how awesome bats are and what bats do for us,” O' Keefe said. “Hopefully, it will make people think that if there's a bat in their house, they should try to get it out but not kill it. That would be really positive for bats—to not have people be one of their major threats.”

Three Feet From Gold

    Darby's uncle was caught by the “gold fever” in the gold-rush days, and went west to dig and grow rich. After months of labor, he was rewarded by the discovery of the shining ore (矿石). He needed machinery to bring the ore to the surface. So, with the “strike”, he returned home. And with the help of Darby, he borrowed a lot of money. After buying the machinery and having it shipped, Uncle and Darby went back to work the mine.

    The first car of ore was mined. And the returns proved they had one of the richest mines in Colorado! Down went the drills! Up went the hopes of Uncle and Darby!

    Then something happened! The vein (矿脉) of gold ore disappeared! They drilled on, but all in vain. Finally, they decided to quit and sold the machinery to a junk man for a few hundred dollars. The junk man called in a mining engineer to look at the mine and do a little calculating. The engineer's calculations showed that the vein would be found just three feet from where the Darbys had stopped drilling! The junk man took millions of dollars in the vein, because he knew enough to seek expert's advice before giving up.

    Most of the money which went into the machinery was borrowed through the efforts of Darby, who was then a very young man. The money came from his relatives because of their faith in him. He paid back every dollar of it, although he was years in doing so.

    Long afterward, Mr. Darby made another discovery that desire can be changed into gold. This discovery came after he went into the business of selling life insurance. Remembering that he lost a huge fortune, for he stopped three feet from gold, Darby profited by the experience in his chosen work, saying to himself, “I stopped three feet from gold, but I will never stop because men say 'no' when I ask them to buy insurance.”

    Darby sold more than a million dollars in life insurance annually. He owes his “stickability” to the lesson he learned from his “quitability” in the gold mining business.

    It's a real case of fish out of water. Blennies (鲇鱼) in the South Pacific Ocean are gradually relocating to land to escape their predators (捕食者), in an example of evolution in action.

    Fish first began crawling onto dry land about 400 million years ago, kicking off an evolutionary chain of events that led to humans. But their reasons for exiting the sea have been uncertain.

    To look for clues, Terry Ord at the University of New South Wales in Australia has been studying several species of blennies at Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands.

    At low tide, blennies are commonly found swimming in rock pools around the edges of the island. But when high tide moves in, they climb up to dry land and move around the rocks until the tide retreats.

    The researchers found that this is most likely to avoid predators that swim in with the rising tide – mainly bigger fish like lionfish.

    To test what would happen if blennies did not have an escape plan, they made blenny models and sank them in the sea. The mimics ended up with wounds, bite marks and chunks-missing.

    Of course, there are still dangers for blennies on land, like the occasional bird attack, but the predation risk on land is a third that of underwater.

    What's more, moving onto land has additional benefits for blennies. Holes in the rocks provide sheltered nests for laying eggs, and they can maintain their diet of bacteria.

    In fact, several species of blenny fish at Rarotonga have already made the full transition to land-dwelling (陆生的) species. They continue to breathe with their gills, but have developed stronger tail fins and jump from rock to rock.

    Ord believes that many evolutionary processes have been driven by the need to escape predators. “It is often assumed that animals move homes to find new sources of food, but in many cases, escaping predators is a stronger motivation.” he says.

    I'll never forget the day when Mary came into my office and said, I am too old to learn how to use a computer. I shook my head. Here was a woman who had raised 6 children and who had made great progress in her career telling me that she was too old to learn something new. I told her that I always believed people were never too old to learn.

    Mary followed my advice and did learn how to use the computer. Now, she is retired and leading a very active life volunteering in her community(社区), using her computer skills and helping anyone that needs help.

    When she was in her sixties, one day she called me and said she had played the piano for others all her life, and now she was going to plan to make a CD of her own. My mind flashed back to the day when she told me she was too old to learn. You can imagine my surprise and delight.

    To produce the CD, she had a lot of things to learn. It was not just sitting at the piano and playing. She had to research the songs, learn about copyright(版权), and learn about marketing. It was pretty amazing for someone who once said she was too old to learn. And finally she made it. Now she has her own CD-Mixed Blessings.

    Most of you probably have heard about some people who have gone back to university in their seventies and have also graduated. They are on their way again to charging themselves with a new skill and a new attitude towards life. The point is you are unable to learn anything at any age if you believe you are too old. On the contrary, you can achieve anything at any age if you believe you can.

    Rich countries are racing to dematerialise payments. They need to do more to prepare for the side-effects.

    For the past 3,000 years, when people thought of money they thought of cash. Over the past decade, however, digital payments have taken off— tapping your plastic on a terminal or swiping a smartphone has become normal. Now this revolution is about to turn cash into an endangered species in some rich economies. That will make the economy more efficient—but it also causes new problems that could hold back the transition(转型).

    Countries are removing cash at varying speeds. In Sweden the number of retail cash transaction per person has fallen by 80% in the past ten years. America is perhaps a decade behind. Outside the rich world, cash is still king. But even there its leading role is being challenged. In China digital payments rose from 4% of all payments in 2012 to 34% in 2017.

    Cash is dying out because of two forces. One is demand— younger consumers want payment systems that plug easily into their digital lives. But equally important is that suppliers such as banks and tech firms (in developed markets) and telecoms companies (in emerging ones) are developing fast, easy-to-use payment technologies from which they can pull data and pocket fees. There is a high cost to running the infrastructure behind the cash economy—ATMs, vans carrying notes, tellers who accept coins. Most financial firms are keen to abandon it, or discourage old-fashioned customers with heavy fees.

    In the main, the prospect of a cashless economy is excellent news. Cash is inefficient. When payments dematerialise, people and shops are less open to theft. It also creates a credit history, helping consumers borrow.

    Yet set against these benefits are a couple of worries. Electronic payment systems may risk technical failures, power failure and cyber-attacks. In a cashless economy the poor, the elderly and country folk may be left behind. And a digital system could let governments watch over people's shopping habits and private multinationals exploit their personal data.