The Parthenon(帕特农神庙) in Athens is a building with a long and complex(复杂的) history. Built nearly 2,500 years ago as a temple celebrating the Greek goddess Athena, it was for thousands of years the church of the Virgin Mary of the Athenians, then a mosque (清真寺), and finally a ruin. The building was changed and the sculptures(塑像) much damaged over the centuries. By 1800 only about half of the original sculptural decoration remained.

    Between 1801 and 1805, Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire(奥斯曼帝国), which controlled Athens, acting with the full knowledge and permission of the Ottoman authorities，removed about half of the remaining sculptures from the fallen ruins and from the building itself. Lord Elgin loved Greek history and transported the sculptures back to Britain. The arrival of the sculptures in London had a huge effect on the European public, greatly increasing interest in ancient Greek culture and influencing contemporary artistic trends. These sculptures were gained from Lord Elgin by the British Museum in 1816 and since then they have all been on show to the public, free of charge.

    Since the early 1980s, however, the Greek government has argued for the return of all the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum. They have also challenged the British Museum Board of Trustees' legal title to the sculptures.

    The British Museum, however, insists that it exists to tell the story of cultural achievement throughout the world, from the dawn of human history over two million years ago until the present day. The museum considers itself an important resource for the world: the breadth and depth of its collection allows the world public to re-examine cultural identities and explore the complex network of interconnected world cultures.

    It also says that, within the context of this unparalleled collection, the Parthenon sculptures are an important representation of ancient Athenian civilization. Each year millions of visitors admire the artistry of the sculptures and gain insights on how ancient Greece influenced — and was influenced by — the other civilizations that it came across.

Auckland International Airport (AKL) Services

    We are open for all international flights and provide high standards of for visitors to New Zealand. We offer information on a range of attractions, and we also offer a booking service for activities, accommodation and transport. Buses into the city centre are provided at a competitive price.

    The second floor of the international terminal offers a view of the airfield and all incoming and outgoing flights. There is a café situated here as well as a restaurant, which is available for all airport visitors to use.

    Passengers who require immediate medical attention should dial 9877 on any public telephone in the terminal. The chemist's is located on the ground floor near the departure lounge, and sells a complete range of products.

    Departing passengers can put their luggage or packages into recyclable plastic bags to protect them from damage. Luggage storage, charged at $10 per hour, is available on the first floor. Transit（过境）passengers have free access to storage service.

    Every international passenger, with the exception of children under 12 years of age, is required to make a payment of $25 when leaving New Zealand. This can be arranged at the National Bank on the ground floor.

    As Auckland International Airport has adopted the “quiet airport” concept, there are usually no announcements made over the public address system. Details of all arrivals and departures are displayed on the monitors located in the terminal halls and lounge areas.

    The airport meets the needs of business travelers and has several rooms available for meetings or business gatherings. These are located next to the airport medical center on the first floor. For information and bookings please contact the Airport Business Manager on extension 5294.

    Graph can be a very useful tool for conveying information especially numbers， percentages, and other data . A graph gives the reader a picture to interpret. That can be a lot more pages and pages and pages explaining the data .

    Graphs can seem frightening, but reading a graph is a lot like reading a story. The graph has a title ,a main idea ,and supporting details.You can use your active reading skills to analyze and understand graphs just like any other text .

    Most graphs have a few basic parts: a caption or introduction paragraph, a title , a legend or key, and labeled axes. An active reader looks at each part of the graph before trying to interpret the data. Captions will usually tell you where the data came from (for example, a scientific study of 400 African elephants from 1980 to 2005). Captions usually summarize the author's main point as well. The title is very important. It tells you the main idea of the graph by stating what kind of information is being shown. A legend, also called a key ,is a guide to the symbols and colors used in the graph. Many graphs, including bar graphs and line graphs, have two axes that form a corner, Usually these axes are the left side and the bottom of the graph .Each axis will always have a label. The label tells you what each axis measures.

Bar Graphs

    A bar graph has two axes and uses bars to show amounts. In Graph 1 ,we see that the x-axis shows grades that students earned, and the y-axis shows bow many students earned each grade .You can see that 6 students earned an A because the bar for A stretches up to 6 on the vertical measurement. There is a lot of information we can get from a simple graph like this(See Graph 1).

Line Graphs

    A line graph looks similar to a bar graph ,but instead of Bars, it plots points and connects them with a line .It has the same parts as a bar graph – two labeled axes –and can be read the same way .To read a line graph, it's important to focus on the points of intersection rather than the line segments between the points, This type of graph is most commonly used to show how something changes over time.

    Here is a graph that charts how far a bird flies during the first Five days of its spring migration (See Graph 2).

    The unit of measurement for the x-axis is days. The unit of measurement for the y-axis is kilometers. Thus we can see that ,on the first day, the pipit flew 20 kilometers. The line segment goes up between Day 1 and Day 2,which means that the bird flew farther on Day 2.If the line segment angled dawn, as between Day 4 and Day 5,it would mean that the bird flew fewer  kilometers than the day before. This line graph is a quick, visual way to tell the reader about the bird's migration.

    Pie Graphs

    A typical pie graph looks like a circular pie. The circle is divided into sections, and each section represents a fraction of the data. The graph is commonly used to show percentages; the whole pie represents l00 percent, so each piece is a fraction of the whole.

    A pie graph might include a legend，or it might use icons or labels within each slice. This pie graph shows on month's expense, (See Graph 3 ).

    Food $ 25

    Movies $ 12

    Clothing $ 36

    Savings $ 20

    Books $ 7

    Parents who help their children with homework may actually be bringing down their school grades. Other forms of parental involvement, including volunteering at school and observing a child's class, also fail to help, according to the most recent study on the topic.

    The findings challenge a key principle of modern parenting(养育子女) where schools except them to act as partners in their children's education. Previous generations concentrated on getting children to school on time, fed, dressed and ready to learn.

    Kaith Robinson, the author of the study, said, "I really don't know if the public is ready for this but there are some ways parents can be involved in their kids' education that leads to declines in their academic performance. One of the things that was consistently negative was parents' help with homework." Robinson suggested that may be because parents themselves struggle to understand the task." They may either not remember the material their kids are studying now, or in some cases never learnt it themselves, but they're still offering advice."

    Robinson assessed parental involvement performance and found one of the most damaging things a parent could do was to punish their children for poor marks. In general, about 20% of parental involvement was positive, about 45% negative and the rest statistically insignificant.

    Common sense suggests it was a good thing for parents to get involved because "children with good academic success do have involved parents ", admitted Robinson. But he argued that this did not prove parental involvement was the root cause of that success." A big surprise was that Asian-American parents whose kids are doing so well in school hardly involved. They took a more reasonable approach, conveying to their children how success at school could improve their lives."

    As any plane passenger will confirm, a crying baby is almost impossible to ignore, no matter how hard you try. Now scientists believe they may have worked out why. A baby's cry pulls at the heartstrings(扣人心弦) in a way while other cries don't, researchers found.

    Researchers found that a baby's cry can trigger unique emotional responses in the brain, making it impossible for us to ignore them—whether we are parents or not. Other types of cries, including calls of animals in great pain, fail to get the same response—suggesting the brain is programmed to respond specifically to a baby' cry.

    A team of Oxford University scientists scanned the brains of 28 men and women as they listened to a variety of calls and cries. After 100 milliseconds—roughly the time to blink(眨眼)—two parts of the brain that respond to emotion lit up. Their response to a baby's cry was particularly strong. The response was seen in both men and women—even if they had no children.

    Researcher Dr Christine Parsons said, “You might read that men should just notice a baby and step over it and not see it, but it's not true. There is a special processing in men and women, which makes sense from an evolutionary view that both men and women would be responding to these cries.” The study was in people who were not parents, yet they are all responding at 100ms to these particular cries, so this might be a fundamental response present in all of us regardless of parental status.

    Fellow researcher Katie Young said it may take a bit longer for someone to recognize their own child's cries because they need to do more “fine-grained analysis”. The team had previously found that our reactions speed up when we hear a baby crying. Adults performed better on computer games when they heard the sound of a baby crying than after they heard recordings of adults crying.

    The best-known example of external( 外部的)influence causing language change is the "Americanization" of world culture, which has caused English words to appear in city streets all over the world. The effect is most noticeable in pop music. Foreign groups often record in English, and the words are picked up and repeated in the same language everywhere, even by children who otherwise have little or no command of the language. I once met a Brazilian child of about ten who could count 'one, two, three', but only by adding the words 'o'clock, four o'clock rock 'at the end.

Some people are often strongly critical of the influence of English on their language — especially when an English word replaces a traditional word. In 1977, France passed a law banning the use of English words in official situations if an equivalent( 意义相同的)French expression existed — but the law seemed to be honored more in the breaking than in the observing. Some other countries have considered introducing a similar law despite the evidence that such laws have very little effect, and that the arrival of loan words( 外来词) can greatly enrich a language (as indeed in the case of English itself, which has a long history of welcoming foreign words).

    However, not everyone is critical. In particular, commercial firms and advertisers are well aware of the potential selling power that the use of English vocabulary can bring. In Japan, English is even used in television commercials, despite the fact that the majority of viewers would not understand exactly what was being said: the excellence implied by the mere use of English is apparently enough to command the strategy to the advertisers.

    Most of the influence of English is upon the vocabulary of foreign languages, but surveys are slowly bringing to light several cases where word order or word structure has been affected. Sentences of the type “The book sells well”, using an active construction for a passive meaning, have begun to appear in Danish (Bogen soelger godt). Several languages keep the English plural ending when they make use of a loan word, and do not translate it into the native form, e.g. drinks. There are many other such cases.