Current events about Olympic games!

The last Olympic Games in Vancouver are famous for their results!During two weeks athletes from  Canada  had achieved great success!

Olympic Games is a long-expected event,that held every two years, with Summer and Winter Olympic Games alternating, although they occur every four years within their respective seasonal games.It consists of countless variety of sport competitions, in which thousands of athletes participate.

Team U.S.A. kicked a ton of butt. The U.S. topped the medals table, winning 37 in all, the most by any single country in Winter Olympics history. The heavily hyped faces, like snowboarder Shaun White, downhill skier Lindsey Vonn, long-track speed skater Shani Davis, men's figure skater Evan Lysacek, all delivered golds. Apolo Ohno now has eight medals, more than any other U.S. Winter Olympian. Bode Miller, the Torino pariah who came out of retirement to give the Olympics one more go, showed that when expectations are lifted, and extracurricular drinking stilted, a supremely gifted skier can pick up a gold, silver and bronze.

As for Russia,her glory days were over.After the much-vaunted Russian hockey team was embarrassed by a 7-3 loss to Canada in the quarterfinals of the Vancouver Olympics, head coach Vyacheslav Bykov predicted the reaction the team would receive back home. "Let's put guillotines and scaffolds up on Red Square. We have 35 people in the squad — let's finish them all off," he told reporters. Unlike his team's shooting on Wednesday night, he was spot-on. "If you were asleep, you were lucky," cried the headline of the Sport Express daily on Friday. The state news agency RIA Novosti put it more succinctly: "Nightmare in Vancouver."The defeat was widely seen as the final humiliation for a Russian Olympic team that has struggled to live up to expectations, finishing in sixth place on the medals table, with only three golds — half the number won by South Korea. Not only did the Russians not medal in hockey, but for the first time since 1964, the Russian national anthem (which is the same as the Soviet one) was not heard at the figure-skating rink — a travesty for a nation with a glorious figure-skating history. It's been a startling decline from the days of Soviet domination: from 1956 to 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved, the country topped the medals table at all but two Winter Olympics. Its best showing was in 1988, when it won 29 medals, including 11 gold.

The Vancouver Olympics may have opened with an uneasy, sombre tone, but they closed in a spirit of celebration — with a tongue-in-cheek nod to everything Canadians are deeply proud to be.With cheers still ringing from Vancouver to St. John's after Canada's dramatic gold-medal win Sunday afternoon over the U.S. in men's hockey, the evening's Winter Games closing ceremony kicked off in hilarious fashion.It was a fitting nod to the mishaps, misfortune and insecurities that vibrated through a country that found itself, for better or worse, under the world's microscope for 17 long days, as over 2,500 athletes from 82 countries took part in the Games.

After the playing of O Canada, the athletes marched into BC Place, waving their flags and cheering with pride.

Enjoy Las Vegas!

Las Vegas is known as the world's neon playground! There is countless number of casinos and hotels in this "man-made mirage".I'd like to pay attention to one of the most popular hotel

 <<Luxor>>.

Luxor is the 30-story hotel, which is operated by MGM Resorts International, features a 120,000 sq ft (11,000 m²) casino floor that includes over 2,000 slot machines and 87 table games.

It has a new, highly modernized and contemporary design and contains a total of 4,400 rooms, including 442 suites, lining the interior walls of a pyramidstyle tower and within twin 22-story ziggurat towers that were built as later additions.

The hotel is named after the city of Luxor (ancient Thebes) in Egypt. Luxor is the second largest hotel in Las Vegas (the largest being the MGM Grand) and the third largest in the world. As of 2010, the Luxor has a 4 Key rating from the Green Key Eco-Rating Program, which evaluates "sustainable" hotel operations.

Luxor Las Vegas includes 20,000 sq ft (1,900 m²) of convention space, four swimming pools and whirlpools, a wedding chapel, Nurture Spa and Salon and 29 retail stores. Luxor is also connected to the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino through The Shoppes at Mandalay Place, a 310-foot (94 m)- long retail sky bridge with retailers such as Urban Outfitters, minus5 Ice Lounge & Lodge and a Nike Golf store.

Restaurants within the hotel consist of TENDER steak & seafood, T&T, Pyramid Café, MORE The Buffet and the Backstage Deli. There is also a Food Court on the Atrium level which contains a Quiznos, McDonald’s, Nathan's Famous, Little Caesars Pizza, Swensen's Ice Cream, and Starbucks Coffee.

The most specific thing about Luxor is the Sky Beam.It is the strongest beam of light in the world. Using computer designed, curved mirrors to collect the light from 39 Xenon lamps and focus them into one intense, narrow beam. The Sky Beam is visible up to 250 miles away to an airplane at cruising altitude, and is clearly visible from outer space.The Luxor Lightbeam appears in many (if not all) images of Las Vegas, from films to Computer Games. This is the case even if the Pyramid cannot be seen.

You don't believe it!

The Earth, the Sun, the Moon and other planets form our Universe. Have you ever thought about the life in other planets? Do you believe that aliens really exist?

It is hardly to imagine what success our science has achieved! During 15 years scientifics have been elaborating the real method  for trip to other planets!

In this year one japans’ scientific Ado Barrio  presented the model of cosmic machine! It is a mechanic engine, that moves with the help of modern computer technology. This machine can deliver you to the Venus! It is known that Venus is the brightest natural object in the night sky. And now you have a chance not only to see it at night, but make a visit to it. Venus is classified as a terrestrial planet and it is sometimes called Earth's "sister planet" due to the similar size, gravity, and bulk composition.

The first trip was made by the inventor himself. Of course, he is awarded as a Great innovator of new technologies! Everybody waites for accessible price to have a fortune and have such trip!

“Each of us inevitable , each of us limitless-each of us with his or her right upon the earth”

"A morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books." -Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892)

 was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendetialism  and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse.

 Walt Whitman, arguably America's most influential and innovative poet, was born into a working class family in West Hills on Long Island, on May 31, 1819, just thirty years after George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the newly formed United States.It is interesting to know that  the Birthplace was restored in 2001 and it is a fine example of native Long Island craftsmanship. The Birthplace is the only NYS Historic Site on Long Island listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1998, the White House Millennium Council named it an "American Treasure." In 2007, the Walt Whitman Trail, which begins at the Birthplace, was designated a National Recreational Trail by the US Dept. of the Interior.

Walt Whitman was named after his father, a carpenter and farmer who was 34 years old when Whitman was born.

By the age of eleven, Whitman was done with his formal education (by this time he had far more schooling than either of his parents had received), and he began his life as a laborer, working first as an office boy for some prominent Brooklyn lawyers, who gave him a subscription to a circulating library, where his self-education began. 

Always an autodidact, Whitman absorbed an eclectic but wide-ranging education through his visits to museums, his nonstop reading, and his penchant for engaging everyone he met in conversation and debate. While most other major writers of his time enjoyed highly structured, classical educations at private institutions, Whitman forged his own rough and informal curriculum of literature, theater, history, geography, music, and archeology out of the developing public resources of America's fastest growing city.

At age 16 in May 1835, Whitman left the Star and BrooklynHe moved to New York City to work as a compositor though, in later years, Whitman could not remember where. He attempted to find further work but had difficulty in part due to a severe fire in the printing and publishing district and in part due to a general collapse in the economy leading up to the Panic of 1837.In May 1836, he rejoined his family, now living in Hempstead, Long Island Whitman taught intermittently at various schools until the spring of 1838, though he was not satisfied as a teacher.

Whitman claimed that after years of competing for "the usual rewards", he determined to become a poet. He first experimented with a variety of popular literary genres which appealed to the cultural tastes of the period.As early as 1850, he began writing what would become Leaves of Grass, a collection of poetry which he would continue editing and revising until his death.Whitman intended to write a distinctly American epicand used free verse with a cadence based on the Bible^.At the end of June 1855, Whitman surprised his brothers with the already-printed first edition of Leaves of Grass. George "didn't think it worth reading"^.

In the months following the first edition of Leaves of Grass, critical responses began focusing more on the potentially offensive sexual themes. Though the second edition was already printed and bound, the publisher almost did not release it^. In the end, the edition went to retail, with 20 additional poems, in August 1856.Leaves of Grass was revised and re-released in 1860again in 1867, and several more times throughout the remainder of Whitman's life. Several well-known writers admired the work enough to visit Whitman, including Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau.

Walt Whitman has been claimed as America's first "poet of democracy", a title meant to reflect his ability to write in a singularly American character. A British friend of Walt Whitman, Mary Smith Whitall Costelloe, wrote: "You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of Grass... He has expressed that civilization, 'up to date,' as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of history can do without him."Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman "America's poet... He is America."Andrew Carnegie called him "the great poet of America so far".Whitman considered himself a messiah-like figure in poetry. Others agreed: one of his admirers, William Sloane Kennedy, speculated that "people will be celebrating the birth of Walt Whitman as they are now the birth of Christ".

Whitman's poetry has been set to music by a large number of composers; indeed it has been suggested his poetry has been set to music more than any other American poet except for Emily Dickinson and Longfellow. Those who have set his poems to music have included Kurt Weill, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Paul Hindemith, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, George Crumb, Roger Sessions and John Adams.

"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" and "O Captain! My Captain!" (1866) are two of his more famous poems. A poet who was ardently singing on life and himself, Whitman is today claimed as one of the few truly great American men of letters.

 

Holidays are knocking at the door!

The Winter Carnival de Quebec in Canada is the  marvellous

 place for spending Christmas holiday!

The snowman Bonhome Carnival is a king of  this carnival.

It's the largest winter festival in the world and annual gathering.

With the great variety of entertainment it's an excellent celebration for all family!

 Ice palace  is really an improbable creation!

Enjoy this video!

The natural wonders of America part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGxGpib-yHw&feature=related

VOA learning English

http://www.youtube.com/voalearningenglish#p/u/13/2stFw05I6Sg

If you want to improve your american pronounciation,this site can be your helper!
It consists of a lot of education videos.You can listen,read and  pronounce different stories!What is more,subtitles are also  include.Good luck!