Welcome to Adventureland!

    Everyone loves Adventureland! The parks and exhibitions were built for you to explore(探索), enjoy, and admire their wonders. Every visit will be an unforgettable experience. You will go away enriched, longing to come back. What are you going to do this time?

The Travel Pavilion

    Explore places you have never been to before, and experience different ways of life. Visit the Amazon jungle(丛林)village, the Turkish market, the Tai floating market, the Berber mountain house and others. Talk to the people there who will tell you about their lives, and things they make. You can try making a carpet, making nets, fishing…

The Future Tower

    This exhibition shows how progress will touch our lives. It allows us to look into the future and explore the cities of the next century and the way we'll be living then. Spend some time in our space station and climb into our simulator(模拟装置)for the Journey to Mars!

The Nature Park

    This is not really one park but several. In the Safari Park you can drive among African animals in one of our Range Cruisers: see lions, giraffes, elephants in the wild. Move on to theOcean Park to watch the dolphins and whales. And then there is still the Aviary to see…

The Pyramid

    This is the center of Adventureland. Run out of film, need some postcards and stamps?

    For all these things and many more, visit our underground shopping center. Come here for information and ideas too.

    To us, it seems so natural to put up an umbrella to keep the water off when it rains. But in fact the umbrella was not invented as protection against the rain. Its first use was as a shade against the sun.

    Nobody knows who first invented it, but the umbrella was used in very ancient times. Probably the first to use it were the Chinese, way back in the eleventh century B.C..

    We know that the umbrella was also used in ancient Egypt and Babylon as a sunshade. And there was a strange thing connected with its use: it became a symbol of honor and power. In the Far East in ancient times, the umbrella was allowed to be used only by those in high office or by royal people such as the kings or queens.

    In Europe, the Greeks were the first to use the umbrella as a sunshade. And the umbrella was in common use in ancient Greece. But it is believed that the first persons in Europe to use the umbrellas as protection against the rain were the ancient Romans. During the middle ages in Europe, the use of the umbrella most disappeared. Then it appeared again in Italy in the late sixteenth century. And again it became a symbol of power.

    Umbrellas have not changed much in style during all this time, though they have become much lighter in weight. It wasn't until the twentieth century that the umbrellas for women began to be made in all kinds of colors.

    Changing technology stimulates (刺激) the brain and increases intelligence. But that may only be true if the technology challenges us. In a world run by intelligent machines, our lives could get a lot simpler. Would that make us less intelligent?

    After the Industrial Revolution, machines began to replace manual workers. The process played out in agriculture as well as manufacturing so that groups of agricultural workers were replaced and forced to move to cities to make a living.

    When machines took away much of the manual work, people became less physically active and gained weight. The sedentary (久坐的) lifestyle contributed to a worldwide spreading of overweight and related metabolic disorders such as heart disease, secondary diabetes and kidney disease .

    As our bodies rested, our brains were forced to work harder, however. It is much more difficult to drive through an overcrowded modern city than it is to move around in a small rural village, for instance. Modern jobs are also more complex and urgent and they require more education because employees need to process new information quickly. Even during our leisure time, our brains work harder due to greater availability of books and explosion of audiovisual media, for entertainment, study, music, news, and so forth.

    Now in the Internet age, the amount of information grows fast along with the advance of electronic technologies. The number of people with whom we interact electronically grows by leaps and bounds thanks to the ease of use of social media like Facebook and Twitter.

    All of this extra work for our brains makes us more intelligent. That helps explain why human intelligence increases steadily from generation to generation in all developed countries, a phenomenon named the Flynn Effect. Of course, there are other reasons, including improved nutrition, better medical practices that reduce brain damage, and improved sanitation and public health that reduce diseases of childhood.

    In the P.G Wodehouse novels, Bertie Wooster got away with being a fool because Jeeves was there to back him up with superior brain power. Similarly, people of the future are at risk of being less intelligent because machines will do their thinking for them.

    Artificial intelligence is taking over many human jobs. For instance, planes are being flown much of the time by automatic pilots. Moreover, the complex problem of controlling air traffic around large modern airports is also achieved by artificial intelligence that operates well beyond the capability of mere human air traffic controllers.

    Artificial intelligence exists in many fields of modern life for the simple reason that intelligent machines can already outperform humans, including some aptitudes (天资) which were once thought to be a human advantage, such as playing chess or recalling details in a game of Jeopardy.

    Machine intelligence is increasing much faster than human intelligence. As machines get smarter, they will do more of our thinking for us and make life easier.

    Instead of struggling to identify ourselves to some electronic system via passwords that are secure only if they are hard to remember, the system will work harder to identify us using biometrics (生物测定学) such as fingerprints or even the individual sound of our hearts. More technologies of the future may also be voice-activated so that we will talk with machines much as we would talk to a friend.

    In the future, the electronic assistant will develop to the point where it serves similar functions as a real living chief male servant of a house, fulfilling requests such as: “Organize a dinner party for six on Thursday, Jeeves, and invite the usual guests .”

    At that point, our long struggle with challenging technologies is at an end. Like Bertie Wooster, we can take it easy knowing that the hard work of planning and organizing is being done by a better brain—the electronic assistant. Starved of mental effort, our brains will return to an earlier or less advanced form.

    The future is still in the fog.

    A punctual person is in the habit of doing a thing at the correct time and is never late for anything.

    An unpunctual man never does what he has to do at the right time. He is always in a hurry and in the end loses both time and his good name. A lost thing may be found again, but lost time can never be got back. Time is more valuable than material things. In fact, time is life itself. An unpunctual person is always wasting his most important things as well as others'. An unpunctual person is always saying unhappily that he finds no time to answer letters or return calls. But the man who really has much to do is very careful of his time. He knows that he cannot finish all his work unless he carefully does every piece of work.

    Being unpunctual is the sign of disrespect towards others. If a person is invited to dinner and arrives later than the time when he should be there, he keeps all other guests waiting for him. Usually this will be thought as a great disrespect for the host and all the other guests.

    Not like a punctual person, an unpunctual one cannot do his duty wonderfully, whether it is public or personal. Imagine how it would be if those who should do important tasks failed to be on time. A man who is known to be unpunctual is never believed by his friends or fellow men.

    Unbelievable Stories of Animals Acting Just Like Humans

    Horses are picky eaters

    Horses have an even better sense of smell than humans do. When horses raise their noses and open their nostrils (鼻孔) , their nervous system allows them to sense smells we can't sense. This might explain why they refuse dirty water and carefully move around meadows, eating only the tastiest grasses, experts say.

    Whale says thanks

    In 2011, a whale expert spotted a humpback whale trapped in a fishing net and spent an hour freeing it. Afterward, in an hour-long display of thanks, the whale swam near their boat and leaped into the air about 40 times.

    Pandas like to be naughty

    Is there anything more lovely than a baby panda, except maybe a human baby? In fact, baby pandas sometimes behave like human babies. They sleep in the same positions and value their thumbs. Pandas are shy by nature for its shy behaviors such as covering its face with a paw of ducking its head when confronted by a stranger.

    A cat honors its owner

    Paper towels, and a plastic cup are just a few of the gifts that Toldo, a devoted three-year-old gray-and-white cat, has placed on his former owner Iozzelli Renzo's grave every day since the man died in September 2011. Renzo adopted Toldo from a shelter when the cat was three months old, and the two formed an inseparable bond. After Renzo passed away, Toldo followed the coffin to the cemetery, and now "stands guard" at the grave for hours at a time.

    Floating on the surface of the seas of the world are billions of tons of small plants and animals called plankton. Most of these plants and animals are too small for the human eye to see. They move about lazily with the currents, providing a basic food for many larger animals. Plankton has been described as the equivalent (相等的东西) of the grasses that grow on dry land, and the comparison is an appropriate one. In potential food value, however, plankton far outweighs that of land grasses. One scientist has estimated that while grasses of the world produce about 49 billion tons of valuable carbohydrates(碳水化合物) each year, the sea's plankton produces more than twice as much.

    Despite its enormous food potential, little effort was made until recently to farm plankton as we farm grasses on land. Now scientists have at last begun to study this possibility, especially as the sea's resources appear even more important as a means of feeding an expanding world population.

    No one yet has seriously suggested that “planktonburgers” may soon become popular around the world. As a possible farmed supplementary food source, however, plankton is gaining considerable interest among scientists.

    One type of plankton that seems to have great harvest possibilities is a tiny creature called krill(磷虾). Growing to two or three inches long, krill are a major food source for the giant blue whale, the largest animal ever to live on the Earth. Realizing that this whale may grow 100 feet and weigh about 150 tons, it is not surprising that each one swallows more than one ton of krill daily.

    Krill swim about just below the surface in huge schools sometimes wide, mainly in the cold Antarctic. Because of their pink color, they often appear as an entire reddish mass when viewed from a ship or from the air. Krill are very high in food value. If krill can feed such huge creatures as whales, many scientists reason, they must certainly be competitors among possible new food sources for humans.