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 Windsor 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.

Finding Your Hidden Talents

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    What sorts of things do you like to read about, watch or do? What are your favorite shows on television? Which column of the newspaper and magazines do you like to read? To know what you are interested in is the first step towards finding your hidden talents.

 ● Try out different things.

    If y ou want to find out your dexterity (灵巧) in each of the things that interest you, then try them out.{#blank#}2{#/blank#} Locate a safe environment, where you can try out different things without anybody's interference (干扰).

 ●Find your passion（激情）

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#}. However, there will be only a thing or two, which you are passionate about. What is the one thing that you love to do the most, with most enthusiasm (热情)? Get the answer to the question and you will come to know what exactly you are passionate about.

 ●Improve yourself

    After you come to know about the areas of your interest, it is the time to improve yourself. Read lots of books and learn from people. One of the best ways to learn something is to teach.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}. This will help increase your depth of knowledge. In this process, you will be able to discover all your hidden talents.

 ●Know your limits

    In the process of finding your strengths or talents, you should not ignore your weaknesses as well. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}. Know what makes you struggle. You will then come to know about your talents as well as the areas that you need to work on.

A. Find your interests.

B. Know your strengths.

C. Therefore, teach what you have learnt.

D. You may be a person of various interests.

E. Carry out experiments and explore things.

F. It needs observation and analysis （分析）of one's own self.

G. Find out the things which you are not good at.

    Most people agree that honesty is a good thing. But does Mother Nature agree? Animals can't talk, but can they lie in other ways? Can they lie with their bodies and behavior? Animal experts may not call it lying, but they do agree that many animals, from birds to chimpanzees, behave dishonestly to fool other animals. Why? Dishonesty often helps them survive.

    Many kinds of birds are very successful at fooling other animals. For example, a bird called the plover sometimes pretends to be hurt in order to protect its young. When a predator（猎食动物）gets close to its nest, the plover leads the predator away from the nest. How? It pretends to have a broken wing. The predator follows the "hurt" adult, leaving the baby birds safe in the nest.

    Another kind of bird, the scrub jay, buries its food so it always has something to eat. Scrub jays are also thieves. They watch where others bury their food and steal it. But clever scrub jays seem to know when a thief is watching them. So they go back later, unbury the food, and bury it again somewhere else.

    Birds called cuckoos have found a way to have babies without doing much work. How? They don't make nests. Instead, they get into other birds' nests secretly. Then they lay their eggs and fly away. When the baby birds come out, their adoptive parents feed them.

    Chimpanzees, or chimps, can also be sneaky. After a fight, the losing chimp will give its hand to the other. When the winning chimp puts out its hand, too, the chimps are friendly again. But an animal expert once saw a losing chimp take the winner's hand and start fighting again.

    Chimps are sneaky in other ways, too. When chimps find food that they love, such as bananas, it is natural for them to cry out. Then other chimps come running. But some clever chimps learn to cry very softly when they find food. That way, other chimps don't hear them,  and they don't need to share their food.

    As children, many of us learn the saying "You can't fool Mother Nature." But maybe you can't trust her, either.

    A new study says electronic toys are not helping babies learn.

    "Even if companies are marketing them as educational, they're not teaching the babies anything at this time," said Anna Sosa the study's author.

    Researchers listened to audio(声音的) recordings of parents playing with their babies aged 10 months to 16 months. The researchers compared the experiences when the children played with electronic toys, traditional toys such as blocks, or when the children looked at books. What they found is that parents talked less with their babies when the babies played with electronic toys.

    Why is this important? Research shows that how quickly children develop language is often based on what they hear from parents. When the infants played with electronic toys, parents said little to their children. But with traditional toys, such as blocks, parents shared the names and descriptions of the animals, colors and shapes as their children played. There was even more information given by parents as their babies looked at the pictures in books.

    Of course, there is no need for parents to throw out electronic toys, but they should look at their infants' play with such toys as entertainment, not a learning experience.

    Toy Industry Association spokeswoman Adrienne Appell responded to the study. She said it is important that parents make time to play with their children. "Playing is a way that kids can learn so much, not only cognitive(认知的) skills, but social and developmental skills," she said. She added that play should be balanced, including time for just "make believe" activities, as well as traditional and electronic toys.

    Living and dealing with kids can be a tough job these days, but living and dealing with parents can be even tougher.

    If I have learned anything in my 16 years, it is that communication is very important, both when you disagree and when you get along. With any relationship, you need to let other person know how you are feeling. If you are not able to communicate, you drift apart()疏远). When you are mad at your parents, or anyone else, not talking to them doesn't solve anything.

Communication begins with the concerns of another. It means that you can't just come home from school, go up to your room and ignore everyone. Even if you just say "Hi", and see how their day was for five minutes, it is better than nothing.

If you looked up the word "communication" in a dictionary, it would say "the exchange of ideas, the conveyance（表达）of information, correspondence （通信）, means of communication: a letter or a message". To maintain (保持) a good relationship, you must keep communication strong. Let people know how you feel, even if it's just by writing a note.

    When dealing with parents, you always have to make them feel good about how they are doing as a parent. If you are trying to make them see something as you see it, tell them that you'll listen to what they have to say, but ask them politely to listen to you. Yelling or walking away only makes the situation worse.

    This is an example: one night, Sophie went to a street party with her friends. She knew she had to be home by midnight after the fireworks, but she didn't feel she could just ask to go home. That would be rude. After all, they had been nice enough to take her along with them. Needless to say, she was late getting home. Her parents were mad at first, but when Sophie explained why she was late, they weren't as mad and let the incident go. Communication is the key factor here. If Sophie's parents had not been willing to listen, Sophie would have been in a lot of trouble.

    Communication isn't a one-way deal: it goes both ways. Just remember: if you get into a situation like Sophie's, telling the other person how you feel and listening is the key factor to communication.

Are we alone in the universe? A team of scientists announced on January 6, 2015 that they had identified eight planets beyond our solar system, three or four of which orbit in their stars' "Goldilocks Zone" — the region where temperatures are not too hot or too cold for water, which is a necessary ingredient for life as we know it, to exist liquid form. This may be good news for people hoping that Earth is not the only inhabited world in the universe.

    The scientists, led by Dr. Guilermo Torres of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, made the discoveries using data collected by the planet-seeking Kepler telescope.

    NASA launched Kepler in 2009. Since then, the telescope has identified more than 1,000 planets outside of our solar system. Torres and his team analyzed the data about the eight newly discovered world to determine which ones are most likely to be similar to our Earth.

    Among the new discoveries, the scientists say the planets called Kepler438b and 442b are the closest to Earth. Kepler 438b is just about 10% larger than our planet, and gets 40% more of its energy from its star than Earth receives from the Sun. Temperatures there would be about 140 degrees. Kepler 442b is about 33% larger than Earth, but receives 30% less energy from its star. That would make it a potentially chillier world than our own. Torres says it is possible for life to exist and survive in either of those temperatures, but for that to happen, these planets would need to have another key ingredient for life: a heat-trapping atmosphere like Earth's.

    While these findings add to the possibility that life exists beyond Earth, Torres cautions against drawing conclusions, “We are not claiming they are inhabited,” he says. In fact, these planets are so far away that the scientists cannot observe them directly, which can be explanation for why for now it remains unknown whether these planets contain life. But the discovery of planets in their stars' habitable zones suggests that somewhere out there, some form of alien life may have taken hold.