【推荐2】Good note-taking can be very important to academic and professional success.     1     However, you may not be sure how to take notes. To do so, use note-taking techniques for written texts or presentations such as lectures, seminars (研讨会), and meetings.

    2     Keep your notes organized by writing important details at the top of each page, Include information such as the date, bibliographic (书目的) information, and page number of your notes. Noting details can make it easier for you to return to your notes and get important information.

Use your own language.     3    . Avoid noting anything in the text verbatim, or word for word, unless it is a phrase or quote you may later use. Taking notes in your own words actively engages your brain, helps you better understand the text, makes you more likely to retain the information, and may minimize the risk of plagiarism (剽窃).

Develop your own system of sighs and abbreviations that can help you more quickly take notes and review them.     4     .

Skip lines on the paper for later review. As you write your keywords and ideas down, leave space between each line.     5     This helps you quickly have and identify all of the relevant material to that keyword or thought.

【推荐2】Some of the most successful people have done their best work in coffee shops. Pablo Picasso, JK Rowling, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bob Dylan ---whether they’re painters, writers, philosophers, or singer-songwriters, people across nations and centuries have tapped into their creativity working away at a table in a café.

There are many ways coffee shops stimulate our creativity in a way offices and homes don’t. Research shows that the stimuli in these places make them effective environments for work; the combination of noise, visual variety and casualness can give us just the right amount of distraction to help us be at our sharpest and most creative.

Some of us put on our noise-cancelling headphones as soon as we sit down to work in a public setting. But background noise can benefit our creative thinking. A 2012 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research showed that a low-to-moderate level of background noise in a place like a cafeteria can actually increase our creative output. Another study from 2019 had similar findings: the right amount of noise benefits our senses. And while that right level of noise is different for everyone, audio (听觉的) stimuli in the background also help us improve decision-making. So, the jazz music, light conversation and noises from coffee bar workers aren’t vexatious —they could help you come up with your next masterwork.

Also, one thing that can make working from home and the office dull is the unexciting visual environment. “Visual stimulation has an effect on peoples creative thinking process. Coffee shops generally have visual stimuli,” says Sunkee Lee, whose research suggests that visual variety “helps you to think outside the box”. Korydon Smith, who co-wrote a recent article on the benefits of working in coffee shops, says, “People come and go. The daylight changes. The colours of food vary. These activities inspire our brains to work a bit differently than at home”.

And while the typical coffee shop user might be a lone worker, experts say these café settings can also benefit work groups who are brainstorming. “There is an implied formality when gathering on office-based or digital meeting platforms. By contrast, there is an air of informality when meeting up at a bar or café. Agendas are not required to meet someone for coffee, but are inbuilt in a scheduled meeting, virtual or otherwise, which can kill creativity,” says Smith.

【推荐3】Jet lag, a sleepy side effect of travel, happens when our body clock is out of step with the time of day, causing tiredness and difficulty sleeping. It’s commonly caused by long flight, but it takes more than just a long journey to give you jet lag. If you flew from England to South Africa, even though it’s a long flight, there’s no jet lag because there’s no change in time zone. The difference with jet lag is that it messes up the body clock.

Animals, plants and bacteria all have a body clock. What it does in humans is make us active in the daytime, and inactive and able to go to sleep at night. This clock gives you stability (稳定) so that if you do wake up in the middle of the night, you’ve got a better chance of getting back to sleep.

When we fly to a different time zone, the change is too sudden for our clocks. The body clock is slow to adjust, and that mismatching causes jet lag. Environmental factors like mealtimes and the light-dark cycles of the days help the clock to adapt, but how long it takes depends on how far you’ve travelled. It’s equal to about one or two time zones per day. If you fly to Los Angeles, which is eight time zones to the west of you, it’ll take you about four days to adjust.

Medical experts generally agree that flying eastward may cause more extreme jet lag symptoms than flying toward the west. That’s because our body can adapt more quickly to staying up late than going to bed earlier than usual.

It’s still not clear why jet lag hits some people harder than others, but genetics (遗传学), fitness and age have all been suggested.

【推荐1】Motorola set out a special training plan programme for children last week with the aim of developing children’s business skills and preparing them for a future as entrepreneurs.

Eighty-seven children aged between 12 and 16 from Beijing and Tianjin attended the one-week training programme called Youth Discovery directed by Motorola University’s (MU) instructors and marketing specialists. The children learned about dealing with a practical problem-marketing and worked out a marketing plan by themselves. Last week 26 children of Motorola employees in Tianjin completed their training in the MU-Tianjin Learning Center.

Through the training programme, children learned how to get information through different kinds of sources, determine end-user needs, make up messages of value to customers, and communicate using various means and equipment.

Educators acted only as team directors, providing children to discover their own answers. The children gave their solutions to Motorola’s management and their parents on the last day of the programme.

The children, most of whom were primary and middle school students, presented themselves freely. The students said that they preferred the open and practical way of learning. Youth Discovery, started by Motorola’s former president Robert Galvin, designed and carried out by Motorola University, aimed to bring the talents of young people into full play and encouraged them to discover how their skills can contribute to a team to help it reach an aim.

【推荐2】“What are your plans for next fall?”

It’s a question that high school seniors start to hear quite often at the beginning of the school year.

At Sheboygan South High School, the 300 or so seniors scheduled to graduate each year used to get the question far later — in an interview survey as they were leaving high school. About 80 percent of respondents (调查对象) would check the box “four-year college.” The responses, it turns out, were quite misleading.

In reality, only about 45 percent of the school’s graduating seniors went to four-year colleges in the fall. Between 5 percent and 10 percent went to two-year technical colleges, 1 to 2 percent enlisted in the military (军队), and the remaining graduates entered the workforce.

“A good number of students were undecided,” said Steve Schneider, a school counselor at the school. “I think they figured: If I put that on the survey, it gets everyone off my back.”

Luckily, that was over ten years ago. Now, Sheboygan South students get those questions much earlier. Starting from freshman year of high school, all Sheboygan South students are assigned (分配) to an advisory group (by grade level) with about 20 students to each adviser-teacher, who remains with them for all four years. The program centers on a planning process for life after high school. Students learn about their own skills and preferences, all the possibilities open to them, and how best to prepare for those opportunities.

“Crazy beneficial” is how Brenda Binversie, a parent of four children, describes this planning process. The program wasn’t in place for her oldest daughter, but she said it provided timely help for her second daughter, “She likes to act without planning,” Binversic said. “The process really helped her see what she needed to do to get where she wanted.” That daughter is now a senior in college studying food science.

【推荐3】The baguette, a long, thin French bread, is being added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH，非物质文化遗产) list.

UNESCO experts gathering in Morocco this week decided that the simple French bread—made only of flour, water, salt, and yeast—was worth U.N. recognition, after France’s culture ministry warned of a “continuous drop” in the number of traditional bakeries (烘焙店), with some 400 closing every year over the past half century.

The UN cultural agency’s chief, Audrey Azoulay said, “the decision honors more than just bread; it recognizes the ‘graceful skills of bakers’ and ‘a daily ritual (仪式)’.” Azoulay added, “It is important that such baking knowledge and social practices can continue to exist in the future.”

With the bread’s new status (地位), the French government said it planned to create a baguette day, called the “Open Bakehouse Day”, to connect the French better with their heritage. Bakers in France seemed proud, if unsurprised. “Of course, it should be on the list because the baguette symbolizes the world,” said Asma Farhat, a baker at Julien’s Bakery. “If there’s no baguette, you can’t have a proper meal. In the morning you can toast it, for lunch it’s a sandwich, and then it accompanies dinner.”

Today, France’s 67 million people still buy baguettes at a variety of sales points, including in supermarkets. According to France’s “Bread Observatory”, the French eat 320 baguettes of one form or another every second. “It’s very easy to get bad baguette in France. It’s the traditional baguette from the traditional bakery that is in danger,” said one local resident, Marine Fourchier.

The baguette joins other food on the Intangible Cultural Heritage list, which UNESCO says, celebrates “traditions or living expressions from our ancestors (祖先) and passed on to our next generations.”