【推荐2】Exams cause a lot of worry: the silence of the hall; the ticking of the clock; the confident expression of the student who has finished 15 minutes early. It therefore seems hardly surprising that those who worry about taking tests do systematically worse than those who do not. What is, perhaps, unexpected, according to research published by Maria Theobald, is that it is not the pressure of the exam hall which causes the problem. It is the pressure of revision.

Dr. Theobald theorised if anxiety was truly intervening a student’s ability to transfer known information from brain to paper, then those with high levels of it would perform worse in a real exam than in a mock or during online practice sessions.

She therefore invited 309 German medical students to participate in a test which consisted of 230 questions. During the 100 days before the actual papers, volunteers used a digital-learning platform which presented them with old exam questions and recorded their performance. They also sat a mock examination, clearly presented to them as such, 40 days before the real exam. To assess their levels of anxiety, they were asked, every day for 40 days in the run-up to the real exam and also on the test day, to respond on a five-point scale to statements like, “I feel tense and nervous.”

Dr. Theobald found that anxiety on the day of the test did not predict exam performance at all. What it did predict was the level of knowledge a student displayed in the mock exam and the digital-learning activities. What actually hampered students, it turned out, were high levels of anxiety during the weeks before the exam took place. The greater a student’s anxiety in the days before the exam, the lower his or her knowledge-gain was during that period, leaving that student with less material to recall during the exam itself.

【推荐3】Peer pressure is the phenomenon where we tend to get influenced by the lifestyles and the ways of thinking of our peers. Peer pressure can prove beneficial but it is often observed to have negative effects on society.     1     How does it affect us?

We tend to get influenced by the lifestyles of our peer group. The changing ways of life of our peers often force us to change our ways of looking at life and leading it. It's a human tendency to do what the crowd does.     2    

When you do not like a particular idea, it is obvious that you won't like to follow it. For sure, you won't like to go that way. But it is your peer group that may force you to do something you hate. In such cases, there are chances that you won't do well in those things.     3     You cannot become successful in something you have never liked doing. So, it is important that you should not lose happiness of your life by giving in to peer pressure.

There are many teenagers who experience great pressure from their peer group that forces them to take to drinking.     4     In such cases, being overly pressurized by their peers can be harmful to their living. Some teenagers actually ruin their lives by giving in to peer pressure.

    5     Extreme peer pressure may force you to go through everything they think right. You adopt their tastes of fashion, clothing, hair, music and general living. Then you lose your tastes of life and begin liking what they like.

【推荐1】Companies are developing drone(无人机) delivery services. In 2013, Amazon, an online retailer, announced an experimental drone delivery service. Packages containing anything from toothpaste to a new smartphone would arrive at your front door by drone.The drone would land, drop your parcel, and fly away. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said at the time that the service would take four or five years to develop. But it’s been a little more than 10 years. “It will continue to take time.” Amazon added.

Widespread drone delivery could have a huge impact. But as Amazon’s struggles show, there are plenty of challenges, including the need for more warehouses(仓库) and concerns about airspace safety.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, also has a drone delivery service called Wing. James Ryan Burgess is Wing’s CEO. You can imagine a future where there are delivery drone aircraft spread throughout a city, he says. Those aircraft can serve the community whenever somebody has a need to receive or send a package.

Wing’s drones can wirelessly charge at a landing pad when they return from a delivery. Routes are determined based on factors such as distance, and airspace rules. Deliveries are dropped in front of homes, which means human interaction(互动) is unnecessary.

Samaras is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He says that drone delivery could impact flying wildlife. And if drone delivery increases, providers will need space to ship and maintain drones. That means more warehouses. You have to heat, light, and power those warehouses. And that amount of energy reduces the benefits. This leads to an important question that people need to ask themselves: Do we want hundreds or thousands of drones over all of our cities?

【推荐3】As the underwater robot OceanOneK carefully navigated toward the upper deck railing of the sunken Italian steamship Le Francesco Crispi about 500 m below the Mediterranean’s surface this month, roboticist Oussama Khatib felt as though he himself were there.

OceanOneK looks like a human diver from the front, with eight multi-directional thrusters (推进器) that allow careful operation underwater. The robot’s touch-based feedback system and 3D vision produced incredibly realistic sensations that equaled what he would have experienced were he down below, rather than above onboard the control ship. Observing through OceanOneK robot’s eyes and feeling through its hands, Khatib perceived a new dimension of colorful life — pink and green and orange — layered on and around the ship. He felt the resistance of the water and could recognize the shapes of the historic relic around him.

The mission of OceanOneK to these depths had two purposes: to explore places no one has gone to before and to show that human touch, vision, and interactivity can be brought to the sites far-removed from where people can operate.

While OceanOneK had many noteworthy adventures and successes during two multi-stop trips around the Mediterranean, the accomplishment of the team and the ship’s crew was demonstrating functional autonomy at nearly 1,000 m down. It was this advance that earned OceanOne’s renaming to OceanOneK.

“This is the first time that a robot has been capable of going to such a depth, interacting with the environment, and permitting the human operator to feel that environment,” said Khatib. “It has been an incredible journey.”

“Distancing humans physically from dangerous and unreachable spaces while connecting their skills and experience to the task promises to fundamentally alter remote work,” said Khatib. “Robotic avatars (化身) will search for and acquire materials, build structures, and perform disaster prevention and recovery operations — be it deep in oceans and mines, at mountain tops, or in space.”

【推荐2】Childhood can bring much awe — the emotion caused by mysterious experiences of things or ideas that we’ve never encountered before. For example, our children can feel awe looking up at a dark night sky that’s filled with more stars than they’ve ever imagined. As parents, it’s deeply moving to witness our children’s experience of awe — their breaths taken away, speechless apart from saying “Wow!” —   because we see how it enriches their individual lives. And research suggests that awe can also boost our children’s desire to give as they feel small in the vastness of expanded awareness.

A recent study by researchers Eftychia Stamkou and her colleagues invited children between eight and 13 years old to watch different videos.

In the awe group, children watched a video from the movie Song of the Sea that features a child transforming into a seal and flying over a city. In the joy group, children watched a video from the movie Fantasia that shows friends celebrating. In the third group, children watched an instructional video of a boring activity.

Researchers measured children’s kindness toward poor families by inviting children to support a donation campaign by spending as much time as they wanted on figuring out the number of donated items, to make sure those in need got access to the donated food as quickly as possible. They also invited children to donate the reward they earned from participating in the research to a poor family.

The results? Children who watched the awe-inspiring video spent more time counting food donations and donated their rewards to poor families more often compared to the children in the other groups.

“Although children from an early age are more likely to help in-group than out-group members, the findings show that awe can open them up to helping members of a national minority,” says Dacher Keltner, a renowned scholar of awe. “These findings highlight that awe-inspiring art can encourage children to give what they can offer to people who have been forcibly displaced from their countries of origin. That can serve as inspiration for educators.”