【推荐1】Can you imagine a world without music? Studies show that public schools across the country are cutting back on music classes to save money. Even worse, some schools have never had music classes to begin with. But without them, students' academic growth and spiritual health could suffer. In fact, music classes are necessary for all students in schools.

Recent studies Brown University have shown that students who received music education classes were better in math and reading skills than those without music classes. Another study by The College Board found that students taking music and art classes got higher points. Students' academic success seems to depend on their taking part in music education.

Music programs in public schools also help to add to a student's sense of pride and self-confidence. Teens today have too many learning tasks. Besides, they have family problems, self-confidence problems, relationship troubles, and choices about smoke and alcohol. All of these can stop academic success, but music education can help. A study by The Texas Commission on Drug and Alcohol Abuse found that students who took part in school music programs were less likely to turn to smoke. Music programs encourage students to work together to produce an excellent performance.

Music crosses language, class and culture. Music allows students from different countries to connect. For example, at a school talent show, a new Japanese student played a piano duet with an American classmate. Two students from different cultures worked as a team with self-confidence and common purpose through music.

The gift of music is priceless. We need to be sure to have necessary music classes for all students. The world is losing its music, and putting music into schools is the first step to get it back.

【推荐2】Is there a friend of yours who always sings out of tune (曲调) but never realizes it? Don’t be so hard on them — they may have amusia (失音症) — the inability to tell the difference in tunes.

Apart from singing out of tune, people with amusia may also find it hard to recognize music they’ve heard before without the help of song lyrics. Besides, people who suffer from amusia can have difficulty in recognizing melodies and a total inability to tell between different musical sounds, according to Live Science. However, people with amusia can recognize common environmental sounds as well as the high and low sounds in human voices, meaning that this inability can be specially related to music.

In many cases, people who have amusia are born with it, as 46 percent of these individuals’ family members were found to have similar conditions, according to a 2017 study. Brain imaging shows that their brains receive and respond to music pitch (音高) information, but it is not reaching conscious awareness, meaning that the mind can’t understand the information.

Scientists at the University of Otago in New Zealand also think that amusia is related to people’s special processing skills. They invited people with amusia, musicians and students from non-musical backgrounds to perform a task related to spacial (空间的) imagination. They were asked to decide whether pairs of images are the same object moving around or mirror images.

The result showed that the amusia group made more mistakes than the other two groups. Amusia might be related to the way brain stores information about the high and low sounds in songs, according to the study.

Although those who aren’t confident about their singing skills often say they’re “tune-deaf”, people with amusia only make up about 1.5 percent of the population, as shown in the study. “Like dyslexics (诵读困难者) can learn how to read, those with amusia should be able to better their ability to recognize tunes if they start early enough,” Isabelle Peretz, a professor of psychology from the University of Montreal in Canada, told Live Science.

【推荐3】Music makes you more creative.     1    , they come up with more creative solutions, according to researchers. It may be because music improves your brain’s flexibility. Another reason may be that it relaxes you enough for the creative juices to flow. But don’t play music too loudly.

Music can help during surgery.    2     . After surgery, it helps reduce pain. An analysis of 73 studies confirmed that listening to music before, during or after surgery reduces anxiety and pain levels, which in turn means less pain medication.

    3     . Studies have found that when you’re running, biking or walking, you’ll go farther with music on. Music relieves your discomfort and motivates you to stay on. The effect is so obviously great that the author of a review examining the psychological effects of music on exercise called music a type of legal performance-improvement drug.

Music aids sleep. Listening to music before bed can help you fall asleep faster and wake up less often during the night.     4    . In one study, seniors with sleep problems who listened to 45 minutes of soft slow music before bed reported a 35 percent improvement in their sleep.

Music gets you to ignore the passing of time. Scientists have shown repeatedly that people judge a period of waiting shorter when music is playing. Businessmen use that to their advantage, playing music so you stay longer and spend more. For instance, more drinks and food are sold in bars and restaurants when music is played.    5    .

【推荐3】“A lie can travel half way around the world before the truth can put its bots on.” That quote is attributed to Mark Twain. In today’s Internet world of “fake（假的）news”, lies spread even faster than the truth is having trouble finding its boots.

To make matters worse, most young people get news from social media sites where facts are mixed with rumors（谣言）, half-truths and complete lies. This has led to young people becoming confused. In the latest PISA, which tested 15-year-old worldwide on academic subjects, fewer than one in ten of the examinees were reported to be able to distinguish fact from opinion. A Stanford University study showed that students at all levels of education could not tell real news from fake news. In one instance, 80 percent thought that a paid advertisement was a real news story.

Fake news is spread by people who have a prejudice. They want to influence public opinion either for or against something or someone. It is important, then, for young people to recognize when they are being used and to be skeptical of online information.

Traditional media, such as newspapers and television, are still the more credible sources of information. Reporters are professionally trained to look for facts, and editors have the job of making sure those facts are correct. However, if you getting most of your information online, you have to be your own editor. In that case, the first thing to do is to look at the writer of a post. Is this person known to be credible? Does the site where you read the post have a prejudice? Next, look for other sources from mainstream media to confirm the information. In other words, by putting on your truth boots you won’t be fooled into chasing lies.

【推荐1】Dieters have long sworn that grapefruit helps them lose weight. The Grapefruit Diet, also called the Hollywood Diet, dates back to the 1930s and has a host of celebrity fans including singer Kylie Minogue. It involves having grapefruit or grapefruit juice with every meal while cutting back on calories.

Now, scientists are beginning to believe them.

A study has found that drinking grapefruit juice when eating fatty food lowers the amount of weight put on by up to a fifth.

The research also suggested that grapefruit could be as good as prescription drugs at keeping blood sugar levels under control—a key part of managing diabetes.

The experiments were conducted on mice—but researchers say the results are true for humans. Professor Joseph Napoli, of the University of California, Berkeley, said, “We see all sorts of tricks about nutrition. But these results, based on controlled experiments, make it necessary to study the potential health-promoting properties of grapefruit juice further.”

The researchers found that when the mice were fed fatty food for three months, those given grapefruit juice to drink gained up to 18 percent less weight than those given water.

They also had lower blood sugar and insulin levels—despite eating the same number of calories and doing the same amount of exercise as the mice who drank water. In fact, grapefruit juice was as good at controlling insulin as the widely used diabetes drugs, the journal PLOS ONE reports.

However, the fruit juice only had an effect on weight when the animals ate fatty food. The researchers said they did not know how grapefruit stops the pounds from piling on.

Spokesman Mariette Abrahams, a dietician, said until then it is too early for people to try grapefruit diets. “Grapefruit should be part of a healthy balanced diet, but it shouldn’t be the focus of the diet.” she said.

【推荐2】Nothing succeeds like success, as every parent of a straight-A student knows, but trying to stress academic excellence by telling your child, “You’re so smart!” may be counterproductive. Why? According to a 2017 study, children who think their intelligence is fixed are less likely to pay attention to and bounce back（重新振作）from mistakes than children who think intelligence can grow and change.

In the study, researchers looked at 123 children. The team assessed the children to determine whether they had a “growth mindset”(believing that you can work harder to get smarter), or a “fixed mindset” (believing that your intelligence is unable to change). They then asked the children to complete a fast-paced computer accuracy task while their brain activity was recorded. During the recording, researchers noted that brain activity stopped within a half-second after making a mistake, as children became aware of their mistake and paid closer attention to what went wrong. The larger the brain response was, the more the child focused on the mistake. Based on the data, they concluded that children with a “growth mindset” were much more likely to have a larger brain response after making a mistake. While children with a “fixed mindset” were able to “bounce back”, only if they gave their full attention to the mistake.

For parents, the lessons are clear. Don’t pay your children compliments that suggest that intelligence is fixed. If your child hands you an A+ score, don’t say, “You’re so smart!” Instead, say, “Wow, that studying really paid off!” or “You clearly mastered this material-way to go!” Note the effort, not the intelligence.

Besides, many parent shy away from addressing a child’s mistakes, telling them “It’s OK. ”You’ll get it next time. ” without offering them the chances to figure out what goes wrong. Instead, it’s better to reassure your children that mistakes happen, and work to figure out where and how they make the mistake.

【推荐3】In November 2019, Luke Summerscales and Jessica Jacobs were in a remote mountain range of New South Wales, fighting some of the worst bush-fires on record in Australia, when another disaster struck: a fellow firefighter collapsed from a heart attack. The nearest ambulance was more than an hour away and the terrain（地形）was too steep for a rescue helicopter to land, so the pair started doing CPR on 53-year-old John Kennedy until he was able to breathe on his own.

In November 2020, the Country Fire Authority recognized their actions by giving them both Chief Officer Commendation awards. But they're volunteers. Summerscales builds houses for a living; Jacobs works as a university lab technician. Starting in late 2019, as record fires spread fast across their nation during its summer season, they joined tens of thousands of Australians who set aside their usual lives to help stop the spread of the fires.

As climate change heightens both the frequency and intensity（强度）of bushfires, firefighters are being tested to new extremes. Australia unusually relies on volunteer labor in the state of New South Wales, which suffered some of the country's most severe fires during the 2019-2020 bushfire season, close to 90% of the men and women fighting fires were volunteers. It's been this way for more than a century in Australia, with ordinary citizens working together to protect the land.

2019 was Australia's hottest and driest on record, and the resulting fires all but exhausted the men and women constantly called to battle them. Peter Holding, 66, who has been a volunteer firefighter for 43 years, says he's never seen anything as severe as last summer's bushfire season. Still, as Australia's fire season intensifies in late 2020, its volunteer firefighters are preparing to do battle again.