Put your car keys away and forget about your travel pass — it's time to do a bit of walking.

    National Walking Month is organized every May by Living Streets, an organization that campaigns for the rights and the needs of pedestrians — indeed, the organization was previously known as the Pedestrians' Association. The association's aim is to make streets safe, attractive and enjoyable spaces for people to live, work, shop and play. By putting people (rather than vehicles) first, Living Streets wants to create streets and spaces where people feel happier, healthier and more sociable.

    The annual campaign gives participants a great opportunity to experience the many virtues（优点）of walking. These include the physical health benefits of becoming fitter; the environmental advantages of not using vehicles（车辆）; the joy of local discoveries seeing more of your local area on foot; the enjoyment of walking with other people, whether family, friends or work colleagues and finally the stress relief that comes from walking—walking can clear your head.

    Walk to School Week, 19 to 24 May, is part of the month's activities and its aim is to encourage parents to send children to school on foot, rather than take them in the car or let them use public transport. The movement was started in 1995 with only five participating schools and now two decades later, more than one million children take part.

    Similarly, there is Walk to Work Week, 12 to 16 May, where grown-ups are encouraged to walk. In the morning, getting off the bus a stop early or parking a few streets away is a good way to add more steps to the daily total. And during the working day, rather than having lunch at the desks or in the canteen, take a walk and get some fresh air. Walk home with your workmates and chat away about everything under the sun but work!

    The value-packed, all-inclusive sight-seeing package that combines the best of Sydney's harbor, city, bay and beach highlights.

    A SydneyPass gives you unlimited and flexible travel on the Explorer Buses: the ‘red' Sydney Explorer shows you around our exciting city sights while the ‘blue' Bondi Explorer visits Sydney Harbour bays and famous beaches. Take to the water on one of three magnificent daily harbor cruises (游船). You can also travel free on regular Sydney Buses, Sydney Ferries or CityRail services (limited area), so you can go to every corner of this beautiful city.

    Imagine browsing at Darling Harbour, tasting the famous seafood at Watsons Bay or enjoying the city lights on an evening ferry cruise. The possibilities and plans are endless with a SydneyPass. Wherever you decide to go, remember that bookings are not required on any of our services so tickets are treated on a first in, first seated basis.

    SydneyPasses are available for 3, 5 or 7 days for use over a 7-calendar-day period. With a 3 or 5-day pass you choose on which days out of the 7 you want to use it. All SydneyPasses include a free Airport Express inward trip before starting your 3, 5 or 7 days, and the return trip is valid  for 2 months from the first day your ticket was used.

    SydneyPass Fares

*A child is defined as anyone from the ages of 4 years to under 16 years. Children under 4 years travel free.

**A family is defined as 2 adults and any number of children from 4 to under 16 years of age from the same family.

    We all fail,all the time.We might miss a call with a client because of an emergency work meeting,or miss that meeting because another project has suddenly become urgent.And then we (or our families) get sick,and we have to shift priorities around again.

    These unsystematic failures are benign,though.They reflect that all of us have limited resources.There simply is not enough time,energy,or money,to do everything you want to do all the time.Part of being a responsible adult is learning to make trade offs: balancing your conflicting goals and trying to get as much done as you can in the time you have.

    The thing you really need to watch out for is the systematic failure.The systematic failure happens when there's a particular goal you want to achieve,but never get to.The causes of systematic failures usually boil down to some combination of these three factors:

    1).Short-term pressures versus long-term goals.Most of us prefer to achieve pressing short-term goals rather than put time into long-term projects.Lots of research suggests that our brains are wired to prefer tasks that pay off in the short term rather than those whose benefit is long-term.The people who do manage to accomplish their long-term goals create regular space to make progress on them.

    2)._________Without even realizing it,we often do what is easiest to accomplish rather than what we say is most important.Email is a great example.If you are like most people,you keep your email program open at work all day. Consequently,each new message is an invitation to drop what you are working on to check it.It feels like work and it's much easier than finishing that 100-slide presentation.Simply shutting off email for a few hours a day can remove this source of distraction from the environment.

    3).Working for too long.Many workplaces create pressure to stay at the office for more and more hours,which (paradoxically) creates opportunities for systematic failures.Work is not an iron man competition where the last person there wins.Most people have an optimal（最佳的）number of hours they can work each day.For example,I can be productive at work for about 8-9 hours a day.If I spend any more time at work than that,then at some point,I start doing "fake work."

    The next time you run into trouble,assess whether it's an unsystematic failure or a systematic one.When you notice a systematic failure in your life,you need to make a change in your behavior.If you don't make a change,you will continue to fail.

    Finally,if you experience a lot of unsystematic failures,it might be worth rethinking the number of tasks you are taking on.Perhaps you need to offload some responsibilities onto someone else,before you start experiencing more systematic failures.

    Norman Garmezy, a development psychologist at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. A nine-year-old boy in particular stuck with him. He has an alcoholic mother and an absent father. But each day he would walk in to school with a smile on his face. He wanted to make sure that "no one would feel pity for him and no one would know his mother's incompetence." The boy exhibited a quality Garmezy identified as "resilience".

    Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. People who are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity (逆境) won't know how resilient they are. It's only when they're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, comes out. Some give in and some conquer.

    Garmezy's work opened the door to the study of the elements that could enable an individual's success despite the challenges they faced. His research indicated that some elements had to do with luck, but quite large set of elements was psychological, and had to do with how the children responded to the environment. The resilient children had what psychologists call an "internal lens of control(内控点)". They believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the arrangers of their own fates.

    Ceorge Bonanno has been studying resilience for years at Columbia University's Teachers College. He found that some people are far better than others at dealing with adversity. This difference might come from perception(认知) whether they think of an event as traumatic(创伤), or as an opportunity to learn and grow. "Stressful" or "traumatic" events themselves don't have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. "Exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning," Bonanno said. "It's only predictive if there's a negative response." In other words, living through adversity doesn't guarantee that you'll suffer going forward.

The good news is that positive perception can be taught. "We can make ourselves more or less easily hurt by how we think about things," Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of adversity in different ways--to reframe it in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally "hot"—changes how they experience and react to the adversity.

Vancouver Tours

    Vancouver Stanley Park Tour

    If you want to see the major sights in Vancouver and come home with amazing photographs, this 3-hour photography tour is the way to go. Walk through Vancouver's top sightseeing locations; get guidance on photography basics and find the best spots to photograph the city. From Stanley Park's totem poles and old-growth trees to the most popular beaches and dining spots, you leave with beautiful mementos of the city.

    Historical Chinatown Walking Tour

    Explore the colorful past of Canada's oldest Chinatown, in Victoria, British Columbia. This guided walking tour will lead you through the streets and storied allies of the historic neighborhood, as your guide tells you the interesting, sometimes sad tales of the people who helped build the city and shape Canada as well as modem China.

    Small Group Sea to Sky Tour

    The Sea to Sky Highway is one of the world's most beautiful and celebrated roadways. You don't have to take your eyes off the scenery on this small group tour because someone else is doing the driving. Tour stops include a short hike to impressive Shannon Falls, the gorgeous Sea to Sky gondola, and award-winning Britannia Mine Museum.

    Eagle Viewing River Float Tour

    Dress warmly under a blanket with a cup of hot chocolate for a winter float on the river. The area is the winter habitat of bald eagles, and this trip gives you the opportunity to learn about the birds as you float through their area. After the boat ride, return to dry land just in time for a free, hearty meal before heading back to Vancouver.

    The world maps will soon be altered to reflect an eighth continent! Dubbed "Zealandia" the landmass that lies east of Australia covers 4.9 million km. Over 94 percent of it is submerged (淹没的) in the southwest Pacific Ocean, with just the islands of New Zealand and New C aledonia visible above sea level.

    To be clear, the underwater land is not a recent find. Researchers have known about its existence since 1995 when Bruce Luyendyk discovered and proposed an eighth continent that he called Zealandia. At the time, the area was dismissed as a collection of islands and land fragments (碎片), or at the most, classified as a micro continent—a landmass of continental crust that is not geologically connected to the nearest continent, in this case, Australia.

    However, after observing the areas features on an underwater topography map, New Zealand geologist Nick became convinced that Zealandia is a continent. Mortimer says that while Zealandia is much smaller than our seven continents, at over half the size of Australia, it is unfair to classify it as a microcontinent. The geologist argues, “If you could pull the plug on the world's oceans, then Zealandia would probably long ago have been recognized as a continent.”

    Geologist Christopher Scotese argues that too much of the landmass is underwater, asserting it's "almost a continent the way Pluto is almost a planet." Richard Ernst, a geologist, proposes coining a new term minicontinent—for Zealandia. He thinks this is perfect given that it is too large to be called a microcontinent and too small to be classified as a full-sized continent. Given that there is no international panel to decide the fate of Zealandia, its future as a continent is uncertain. Mortimer hopes that if supporters start using the term Zealandia, it may eventually catch on. Whether that happens remains to be seen, but for now, we will have to be satisfied with just seven continents!