【推荐1】My motivation for starting our family tradition of reading in the car was purely selfish: I could not bear listening to A Sesame Street Christmas for another 10 hours. My three children had been addicted to this cassette on our previous summer’s road trip.

As I began to prepare for our next 500-mile car trip, I came across a book Jim Trelease’s The Read Aloud Handbook. This could be the answer to my problem. I thought. So I put Roald dahl’s James and the Giant Peach into my bag. When I began to read aloud the tale of the boy who escapes the bad guys by hiding inside a giant peach, my three kids argued and wrestled in their seats. But after several lines, they were attracted into the rhythm of the words and began to listen.

We soon learned that the simple pleasure of listening to a well-written book makes the long miles pass more quickly. Sometimes the books we read became highlights of the trip. I read Wilson Rawls’s Summer of the Monkeys as we spent two days driving to the beach. We arrived just behind the power crews restoring (恢复) electricity after a tropical storm. The rain continued most of the week, and the beach was covered with oil washed up by the storm. When we returned home, I asked my son what he liked about the trip. He answered without hesitation, “The book you read in the car.”

Road trips still offer challenges, even though my children now are teenagers. But we continue to read as we roll across the country. And I'm beginning to see that reading aloud has done more than help pass the time. For at least a little while, we are not shut in our own electronic worlds. And maybe we’ve started something that will pass on to the next generation.

【推荐1】Nightly Sleep Is Key to Student Success

For young adults, college is a time of transition. It may be the first time students have the freedom to determine how to spend their time, but this freedom comes with competing interests from academics, social events and even sleep.

A multi-institutional team of researchers conducted the first study to evaluate how the duration of nightly sleep early in the semester affects first year college students’ end-of-semester grade point average (GPA). Using sleep trackers, they found that students on average sleep 6.5 hours a night, but negative outcomes built up when students received less than six hours of sleep a night.     1    

David Creswell, the William S. Dietrich II Professor in Psychology and Neuroscience at the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, led a team of researchers to evaluate the relationship between sleep and GPA.

“Animal studies have shown how critical sleep is for learning and memory,” said Creswell. “    2     The less nightly sleep a first-year college student gets at the beginning of the school term predicts lower GPA at the end of the term. Lack of sleep may be hurting students’ ability to learn in their college classrooms.”

    3     The researchers found that students who receive less than six hours of sleep experienced a pronounced decline in academic performance. In addition, each hour of sleep lost corresponded to (相对应) a 0.07 decrease in end-of-term GPA.

“Once you start dropping below six hours, you are starting to add massive sleep debt that can harm a student’s health and study habits, damaging the whole system,” said Creswell. “    4    ”

“A popular belief among college students is valuing studying more or partying more over nightly sleep,” said Creswell. “Our work here suggests that there are potentially real costs to reducing your nightly sleep on your ability to learn and achieve in college. There’s real value in budgeting for the importance of nightly sleep.”

【推荐3】Take a quick alcohol and you could find yourself speaking a second tongue more naturally, according to a new research.

The foreign language skills of participants in the study were found to be improved after a drink of alcohol, which suggests the way alcohol can put us at ease outweighs the negative effects on our brain — at least for the first drink, anyway. The international team of researchers states it could reveal some interesting insights into the anxiety associated with speaking another language, and how alcohol can help us overcome it. “Our study shows that acute alcohol consumption may have beneficial effects on the pronunciation of a foreign language in people who recently learned that language,” says one of the team, Inge Kersbergen from the University of Liverpool in the UK.

The study involved 50 native German speakers studying Dutch at a Dutch university, who had recently learned to speak, read, and write in the new language. Based on random selections, participants were either given alcohol or water as a control beverage. The amount of alcohol varied based on body size, but was equal to just under a pint (460 millilitres) of 5 percent beer for a 70kg male. They then chatted to a researcher for five minutes, before an audio recording was assessed by two native Dutch speakers who weren’t told whether alcohol had been consumed or not. The participants were also asked to rate their own Dutch language skills over the course of the chat.

While the alcohol didn’t affect how the students rated themselves, those people who had been given the alcoholic drink were given better ratings by the observers, especially for their pronunciation. With only 50 people involved in the research, we should be cautious of making too many summaries on this study alone, but it’s an interesting pointer towards how a little bit of drink could oil the wheels as far as talking in a foreign language is concerned.

“It is important to point out that participants in this study consumed a low dose of alcohol,” adds one of the team. “Higher levels of alcohol consumption might not have beneficial effects on the pronunciation of a foreign language.”