Confident, smart and high-tech, they’re followers of pop culture and know what social networking is all about. They’re tweens, children between the ages of 10 and 12. These young people are no longer little kids but they are not yet teenagers, because tweens are in a state of transition(转变).

The tween years are hard for children. From a social point of view, tweens are dealing with quite a lot. They have to face changing relationships, middle school and a whole lot of pressure(压力) to succeed and fit in. They may become angry over seemingly small things. A bad test grade, an argument with a friend, a bad day on the ball field, or a request to clean a bedroom might set them off.

Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, a parenting expert in London and author of Talking to Tweens, says, “The tween years are when young people begin to realize the wider world and to see themselves as separate from their families.”

Right now, tweens’ friends are everything to them. It’s universal for the age, but they show it in different ways. For boys, the whole friendship thing is through technology and sports. Girls like to talk.

Tweens are also a hot market. What do tweens consider cool? Music is at the top of the cool list, followed by going to the movies. “Being smart” comes third, tied with video games, followed by electronics, sports, fashion and protecting the environment, according to a report.

Undoubtedly, tweens have great spending power in the United States. It was the tween market that made Justin Bieber and Harry Potter household names. Retailers(零售商) know tweens are a hot market for clothes, music and entertainment. Tweens have their own sense of fashion and enjoy their own parts of popular culture.

It’s nothing unusual for people to multitask nowadays. But the ability to do a number of things at the same time could be different between the two sexes.

A team of UK researchers recently compared the performances of 120 women and 120 men in a computer test about switching(转换) between tasks of counting and shape recognition.

Men equalled women when tasks were done one at a time. But when the tasks were mixed up, there was a clear difference. According to the paper published in the journal BMC Psychology, both women and men slowed down and made more mistakes as the switching became more rapid. But men were slower, taking 77 percent longer to answer, while women took 69 percent longer.

To make the experiment more connected to day-to-day life, researchers tried a second test. A group of women and men were given eight minutes to complete a series of everyday tasks, such as finding restaurants on a map, doing simple math problems, answering a phone call, or deciding how they would search for a lost key in a field.

Once again, women performed better than men in the test, especially in the key-searching task.

Where do women get the ability to keep organized under pressure better than men? Researchers believe that it has its origins in evolution(进化). In ancient times, women had to keep an eye on children while cooking meals. Meanwhile, men only needed to focus on hunting.

However, as with all studies, the results don’t necessarily apply to every single person in the world. “We don’t mean that men can’t multitask, or that only women can,” researcher Keith Laws of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, told BBC News. “We are saying that the average woman is better able to organize her time and switch between tasks than the average man.”

Eating out is such a pleasure ― the food, the wine, the joy of having it all brought to you by someone else ― that it’s a pity to ruin the experience by sharing it with other people.

Well, I do like visiting restaurants with friends. But dining out alone has its own very special attractions. For a start you can give all your attention to the food. There’s nothing worse than having to invent and deliver an opinion on school league tables or Sanchez’s move to Manchester United, plus listen to everyone else’s opinions, when all you really want to do is enjoy each mouthful along the way.

A second great thing about eating out alone is the chance to combine food with one of life’s other true pleasures: reading. You have to plan this carefully: Indian or Chinese restaurants are best ― you need food you can eat with just one hand, leaving the other free to hold your reading material.

But perhaps the biggest attraction of a table for one is the chance it gives to people-watching. Restaurants and the different reasons for visiting them ― first date, business meeting, night out with friends ― produce human behaviour of surprising richness and variety. Will the man selling his business idea get any joy out of his possible investor(投资者)? Will the married couple think of anything to say to each other before their main courses arrive?

This “human zoo” part of eating out alone is one of the reasons I’d hate to be famous: everyone would be watching you, so you wouldn’t be able to watch them. The snooker player Steve Davis says this was one of the strangest consequences(后果) of becoming well-known: he got very worried about his eating in public, almost to the level of doubting whether he was “doing it right.”

So next time you’re considering your eating out choices, remember the advice of the businessman Nubar Gulbenkian: “The best number for a dinner party is two ― myself and a super head waiter.”

It is now possible to watch live sport on television on any day of the week, and the present amount of reporting will undoubtedly increase further in years to come. This is certainly having an influence on the live sports events themselves, and there are both benefits and shortcomings to this.

    11     For one thing, with digital broadcasting, there are now many more TV channels than there were even ten years ago. Moreover, sport has become an important form of entertainment, attracting both men and women.

What are the benefits of this televised sport?     12     Large football clubs benefit financially(财政上) from TV income and the top players can be well paid. Less popular sports also receive money that can be used in training and advertising. What’s more, there is a health benefit to some of the population.     13    

However, there will be some disadvantages if so much sport is on television. Considering football again, many small clubs have suffered financial losses recently, as they cannot compete with the large ones.     14     Fewer people watch live matches nowadays, preferring to watch from the comfort of their living room. And ticket prices have risen greatly.

In a word, watching live sport on television has both good and bad effects. Televised sport has created many chances and benefited certain people and clubs very much.     15