【推荐1】World Elephant Day is the perfect time to find out more about these amazing animals and what we can do to preserve them so they do not go the way of the mammoth（猛犸象）.

World Elephant Day was created in 2011 by two Canadian filmmakers Patricia Sims and Thailand’s Elephant Reintroduction Foundation and was first celebrated on August 12, 2012. They made the documentary Return to the Forest, a fascinating 30 minute film about the reintroduction of caught Asian elephants to the wild.

Currently, the demand for ivory（象牙）is becoming bigger and bigger, whose price is higher than that of gold, making elephants bigger targets than ever. Habitation loss is also a danger to the world’s elephant population as it robs elephants of the hundreds of pounds of food they need every day, making it more difficult for them to breed and making it easier for hunters to track them down. Circuses and tourism are also serious threats to the animals’ well-being.

The best way to celebrate this day is to take the opportunity to educate yourself about these magnificent（巨大的）mammals and share your knowledge with others. As ever, simply spreading the word about the dangers these magnificent mammals face via social media can actually make a real change. Expose that “training” elephants often involves tying and beating them daily for months on end. If you want to get a bit more involved, you could choose to make a donation to a foundation dedicated to protecting elephants from hunters or relocating them to locations better suited to their needs.

Whichever way suits you best, make sure that you spend this day in a way that helps elephants all over the world, so we, in turn, can continue to wonder at them and their uniquely fascinating way of life.

【推荐2】Christmas Traditions

Since about 400 AD, Christmas day has been celebrated on 25th December. This date was the old mid-winter festival in pre-Christian times, around the time of the longest night and the shortest day. Christmas in the 21st century has many traditions.

Shops can make about 60 per cent of their year's income in the three months before Christmas. So most shops get ready for it in October. The shopping centres are beautifully decorated and stay open late at night. The first time this happened was in 1867 when Macys', a famous shop in New York, stayed open until midnight on Christmas Eve (24th December).

By mid-December, almost every house, shop and street has a Christmas tree. This tradition was started by the Germans as early as 700 AD. In the northern countries of the world, winter is cold and dark and most trees lose their leaves. The beautiful green trees decorated with lights and coloured glass balls give people hope that spring will come again.

Father Christmas is known across the world with his white hair, red coat and big bag of toys. Young children are told that he lives it in the north of Finland and makes toys for them. By tradition, he brings the toys to children at midnight, on the night before Christmas.

On Christmas day a traditional meal is eaten, usually turkey and a rich, spicy cake. Some people hate Christmas. Others feel it is a magical and exciting time. They love seeing family and friends; they also love the traditions. Love it or hate it, Christmas is a time to look back over the old year and forward to the new one.

【推荐2】It turns out that nodding off (睡觉) in class may not be a bad idea, as a new study has shown that going to sleep shortly after learning new materials is the best way to remember them.

According to US lead author Jessica Payne, a psychologist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, nodding off after learning something new is like “telling” the sleeping brain what to remember. Along with colleagues, she studied 207 students who slept for at least six hours per night. Students were randomly (随机地) assigned to study something declarative (陈述的) at 9 am or 9 pm, and returned for testing 30 minutes, 12 hours or 24 hours later.

Declarative memory refers to the ability to consciously (有意识地) remember facts and events, and can be divided into memory for events and memory for facts about the world. People use both types of memory every day — remembering where they parked today or learning how a colleague prefers to be called.

At the 12-hour retest, memory was better following a night of sleep compared to a day of wakefulness (不眠). At the 24-hour retest, with all students having received both a full night of sleep and a full day of wakefulness, students’ memories were greater when sleep happened shortly after learning rather than following a full day of wakefulness.“Our study confirms that sleeping directly after learning something new is beneficial for memory. What’s special for this study is that we have shown sleep’s influence on declarative memory,” Payne said. “Since we found that sleeping soon after learning benefited both types of memory, this means that it would be a good thing to go over any information you need to remember before going to bed. In some sense, you may be telling the sleeping brain what to consolidate (巩固).”

【推荐1】Today I’m glad to be here to share with you my idea of success. What’s your idea about success? Some people say that beginners have all the luck, while others believe that success comes only with practice. In fact, I feel both of these statements are not true all the time. Each is true in some ways but not in others.

For example, I went to a drawing competition many years ago and won first prize surprisingly. As a prize, I got a film ticket to see Titanic. I was really lucky because it was the first time I had taken part in a competition. Thinking that I might be lucky again, I tried joining in other art competitions. But the result was that I never won again. I accepted the fact that the other people had a greater artistic ability than I did. Art was not what I was especially interested in and I had never practiced the different art skills. So, the drawings I produced were not of a very high standard.

These experiences taught me a lot. Though I might have been lucky at first, I also need to put in hard work. As we know, practice makes perfect. So I believe success builds on less luck and chance.

【推荐2】Most young people enjoy some form of physical activity. It may be walking, cycling or swimming, or in winter, skating or skiing. It may be a game of some kind of football, hockey, golf, or tennis. It may be mountaineering.

Those who have an interest in climbing high and difficult mountains are often looked upon with astonishment. Why are men and women willing to suffer cold and hardship, and to take risk on high mountains? This astonishment is caused probably by the difference between mountaineering and other forms of activity to which men give their leisure.

Mountaineering is a sport and not a game. There are no man-made rules, as there are for such games as golf and football. There are, of course, rules of a different thing that it would be dangerous to ignore, but it is this freedom from man-made rules that makes mountaineering attractive to many people. Those who climb mountains are free to use their own methods.

If we compare mountaineering and some other sports, we might think that one big difference is that mountaineering is not a “team game”. We should be mistaken in this. There are, it is true, no “matches” between “teams” of climbers, but when climbers are on a rock face linked by a rope on which their lives may depend, there is obviously teamwork.

The mountain climber knows that he may have to fight forces that are stronger and more powerful than men. He has to fight the forces of nature. His sport requires high mental and physical qualities.

A mountain climber continues to improve in skill year after year. A skier is probably past his best by the age of thirty, and most international tennis champions are in their early twenties. But it is not unusual for a man of fifty or sixty to climb the highest mountains in the Alps. They may take more time than younger men, but they probably climb with more skill and less waste of efforts, and they certainly experience equal enjoyment.

【推荐3】Remittance (汇款) increase living standards in the country of origin. Remittances m a large share of the GDP of many developing countries. A study on remittances to Mexico found that remittances lead to a considerable increase in the availability of public services in Mexico, surpassing government spending in some localities.

Research finds that emigration and low migration barriers have net positive effects on human capital formation in the sending countries. This means that there is a “brain gain” instead of a" brain drain to emigration.

One study finds that sending Countries benefit indirectly in the long run from the emigration of skilled workers because those skilled workers are able to innovate more in developed countries, which the sending countries are able to benefit as a positive externality. Greater emigration of skilled workers consequently leads to greater economic growth and welfare improvements in the long run.

Research also suggests that emigration, remittances and return migration can have a positive impact on political institutions and democratization in the country of origin. Research also shows that remittances can lower the risk of civil war in the country of origin. Return migration from countries with liberal gender norms has been associated with the transfer of liberal gender norms to the home country.

Research suggests that emigration causes an increase in the wages of those who remain in the country of origin. A 2014 survey of the existing literature on migration finds that a 10 percent emigrant supply shock would increase wages in the sending country by 2 % - 5.5 %. A study of emigration from Poland shows that it led to a slight increase in wages for high-and medium-skilled workers for remaining Poles. A 2013 study finds that emigration from Eastern Europe after the 2004 EU enlargement increased the wages of remaining young workers in the country of origin by 6%, while it had no effect on the wages of old workers. The wages of Lithuanian men increased as a result of post-EU enlargement emigration. Return migration is associated with greater household firm revenues(收入).

Some research shows that the remittance effect is not strong enough to make the remaining natives in countries with high emigration flows better off.

It has been argued that high-skill emigration causes labor shortages in the country of origin. This remains unsupported in the academic literature though. According to economist Michael Clemens, it has not been shown that restrictions on high-skill emigration reduce shortages in the countries of origin.

【推荐1】There is a popular saying (格言) in the English language: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

Well, that is not true. Unkind words, name calling or even the so-called “the silent treatment” can hurt children as much as being physically hit, sometimes even more so.

Martin Teicher and his team studied young adults aged 18 to 25. The researchers asked the young people to assess their childhood exposure to verbal abuse (辱骂) from both parents and other children. Then the researchers performed imaging (成像) tests on these young adults.

The images showed that the individuals who reported suffering verbal abuse from their peers (同龄人) in middle school had poorly developed connections between the left side and the right side of the brain. The researchers tested the mental and emotional condition of all the young people in the study. The tests showed that this same group of individuals had higher levels of fear, depression, anger and drug abuse than others in the study.

The middle school years are a time when the brain connections are developing. We cannot control what other people say to our children, but we can prepare them. A website called CreativeWithKids.com offers 60 things that all children need to hear.

Here are the top 5.

1. I am curious to know what you think.

2. You are creative. I believe in you.

3. You can ask for help. I’ll always be there.

4. You are a good friend.You make me smile.

5. You are imperfect. So am I.

Share one or more of these statements with a child in your life. Actually, maybe we all need to hear some of these statements.

【推荐2】A month after Hurricane Katrina, I returned home in New Orleans. There lay my house, reduced to waist-high rains, smelly and dirty.

Before the trip, I'd had my car fixed. When the office employee of the garage was writing up the bill, she noticed my Louisiana license plate. "You from New Orleans?" she asked. I said I was, "No charge." She said, and firmly shook her head when I reached for my wallet. The next day I went for a haircut, and the same thing happened.

As my wife was studying in Florida, we decided to move there and tried to find a rental house that we could afford while also paying off a mortgage (抵押贷款) on our ruined house. We looked at many places, but none was satisfactory. We'd began to accept that we'd have to live in extremely reduced circumstances for a while, when I got a very curious e-mail from a James Kemmedy in California. He'd read some pieces I'd written about our sufferings for state, the online magazine and wanted to give us ("no conditions attached") a new house across the lake from New Orleans. It sounded a good to her return, but I replied, thinking him for his exceptional generosity, then we to go back. Then the University of Florida offered to let him house to me. While he want to England on his one year, paid leave. The rent was rather reasonable. I mentioned the poet's offer to James Kemdedy, and the next day he sent a check covering our entire rent for eight months.

Throughout this painful experience, the kindness of strangers has done much to bring back my faith in humanity. It's almost worth losing you wordy possessions to be reminded that people really when given had a channel.

【推荐3】Many teachers believe frequent quizzes(小测验) help students better grasp classroom material. Crede, an associate professor of psychology, was skeptical that something as simple as a quiz could positively affect students’ academic performance. He decided to dig deeper and conduct an analytic study of existing research to see if there was any proof to the idea. What he discovered truly surprised him.

Crede analyzed data from previously published studies that examined 52 classes with almost 8,000 students, primarily college-level courses, to determine if frequent quizzes improved the students’ academic performance. Laboratory settings were kept out of the study because Crede wanted to observe whether similar studies from labs would apply to general classrooms.

Crede discovered that when students are quizzed over class material at least once a week, they tend to perform better on midterm and final exams compared to students who did not take quizzes. He also found that students who took frequent quizzes were less likely to fail the class, especially if they were struggling with the course content. Students who struggle the most in a class seem to benefit the greatest from frequent quizzes. The other surprising thing was how much quizzes helped reduce failure rates in classes. The chances of passing a class went through the roof where instructors used this. In addition to quiz frequency, another factor that seemed to positively affect students’ performance was immediate feedback from instructors. Also, quizzes that required students to answer with written responses proved more beneficial to their understanding of class material compared to multiple-choice questions.

Asking teachers to grade written quizzes daily or weekly may discourage some from carrying them out in their classes. Instead, it is recommended that instructors give online quizzes that can be automatically graded by a course management system. Quiz attributes(属性) proved insignificant in the study, including whether the tests were pop quizzes or planned, or if they were online or on paper.