【推荐2】In the workplace, one of the most important skills to possess is good communication.     1    ; it means they are able to listen to others, as well as successfully convey their own ideas and opinions. While listening and speaking are important in effective communication, there are other skills that are vital to good communication in the workplace.

    2     . This means not only listening with your ears but also being able to comprehend what the person is saying. Giving co-workers your full attention when they are conveying an idea can go a long way in building relationships and furthering progress.

Having empathy （同理心）is very useful in communication.     3     Put yourself in the other person's position instead of judging or critizing based on your own beliefs. While this may be difficult for some, empathizing with others can be very helpful to keep in tune with your own emotions and ideas.

Encouraging others will heighten confidence and appreciation in the workplace.     4    , you help others feel they are wanted, welcomed and respected by co-workers. People are much more likely to spare no effort if they know they are valued.

Body language can greatly impact how others treat you in the workplace. Being extroverted（外向的） and friendly lets co-workers know you are open to hearing their opinions about projects or new designs.

    5     . Be sure to maintain eye contact the majority of the time you are speaking with someone, and use hand gestures to help you form clearer thoughts. Smiling offers encouragement and creates a noticeable difference in how you are treated. People who smile more are seen as more approachable and trustworthy.

While many of these good communication skills occur naturally in individuals, some may need to be learned and practiced in order to become second nature.

【推荐3】Are you patient? Do you have attention to detail, free time and access to a computer? Well, then a scientist might welcome your help. Researchers in the UK say it’s becoming important to count on common people to help them with their projects. They need people to examine data and submit their observations online.

British teenagers Sasha and Matthew are taking part in a study of penguins (企鹅) from the comfort of their homes. The pair look at pictures and tag (加标签于) photos identifying adults, chicks and eggs. Every click of their mouse is helping to build up a detailed picture of penguin colonies (群). They, and thousands of others, are helping scientists to understand why some colonies are growing and others are decreasing. Within the first four hours of Penguin Watch going live, “citizen scientists” marked more images than the research team did in five years.

Dr. Tom Hart, Penguin Watch Coordinator at Oxford University, says, “When you go beyond what a scientist can analyse to what a mass audience can do, then it increases beyond what any other project could do.”

The British Science Association says families are helping out with careful research. It made a difference to the Planet Hunters Project, which ran for five years. Volunteers looked at dots which showed how the brightness of a star changed at different points in its solar system.

According to Dr. Robert Simpson from Oxford University, who took part in the project, the volunteers discovered planets and these are now in published papers. He says with pride, “We can go and look at these planets with other telescopes and we know they exist because of those helpers.”

But how do scientists guard their research against accidental or deliberate mistakes in observation? Dr. Simpson isn’t worried. “We get lots of people looking at the same things, ”he says. The researcher warns that people who are mistakenly clicking on the site are very obvious and can be identified very quickly. So, there’s no fooling the scientists.

And to make sure things go well, the Penguin Watch paper will go through a peer review before being published. After that, every “citizen scientist” will be credited.

【推荐2】In a study published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Diana Deutsch of the University of California and her co-authors find that musicians who speak an East Asian tone language fluently are much more likely to have perfect pitch(音高).

Unlike English, many East Asian languages, such as Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese, are “tonal”, so that a word’s meaning often depends on the tone in which it is said. So learning perfect pitch is, for fluent speakers of a tone language, similar to learning a second tone language.

The study looked at 203 students at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music through a test. The students listened to the 36 notes. They attempted to identify the notes, and they self-reported their musical, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds — including whether they were very fluent in an East Asian tone language, fairly fluent or not at all fluent. Deutsch and her colleagues found that students who spoke an East Asian tone language very fluently scored nearly 100 percent on the test, and that students who were only fairly fluent in a tone language scored lower overall. Those students who were not at all fluent in speaking a tone language scored the worst on average.

Deutsch acknowledges that it still remains to be discovered why and how it is that some speakers of non-tone languages have perfect pitch. She expects it to be related to either an exceptionally long “critical window” for language acquisition, a very early musical upbringing, or both.

“Perfect pitch for years seemed like a beautiful gift — given only to a few genetically talented people. But our research suggests that it might be available to virtually everybody,” Deutsch said. She also proposed that parents who want their kids to acquire perfect pitch should expose them to musical tones from infancy onwards.