【推荐1】This may be music to your ears.

Researchers P. Jason Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling gave 3,500 people a personality quiz. “We found that the musical styles people like are closely linked to their personalities,” Gosling says.

RAP/HIP-HOP

Known for their quick speech, some rappers can say more than 700 syllables（音节）a minute!

If you like rap/hip-hop, you are energetic（精力充沛的）and have a way with words. You put a fresh spin on things, whether it’s new moves on the dance floor or your hip style.

CLASSICAL

In the 18th century, classical musicians were like rock stars. Beethoven and Mozart, for example, played in crowded concert halls.

If you like classical, you are open to new ideas and like debating with friends. Creative and imaginative, you can easily spend many hours scrapbooking, writing or painting.

COUNTRY

Country music came from the folk songs of English, Scottish, and Irish settlers of the southeastern United States.

If you like country, you express your opinions well, which makes you the ideal class president or team captain. Traditional and loyal, you enjoy spending time with your family.

POP

Pop music is designed to attract almost everyone, and it does. Each year, the industry brings in about 30 billion dollars!

If you like pop, you are attractive to your friends. You can make big things happen, like planning for a huge party or inspiring your team to victory.

ROCK/ALTERNATIVE

In the 1950s, rock music created a brand-new culture. Teenagers, for the first time, had an identity separate from adults and children.

If you like rock/alternative, you are a risk-taker who never accepts no for an answer. You rise to any challenge, like doing very well in a big exam or landing the lead in the school play.

If these personality profiles（人格剖析）don’t match you, that’s OK. These are just for fun.

Taking charge of yourself involves putting to rest some very prevalent myths. At the top of the list is the notion that intelligence is measured by your ability to solve complex problems, to read, write and compute at certain levels, and to resolve abstract equations quickly.     1    It encourages a kind of intellectual prejudice that has brought with it some discouraging results. We have come to believe that someone who has more educational merit badges, who is very good at some form of school discipline is "intelligent". Yet mental hospitals are filled with patients who have all of the properly lettered certificates. A truer indicator of intelligence is an effective, happy life lived each day and each present moment of every day.     2    

Problem solving is a useful help to your happiness, but if you know that given your inability to resolve a particular concern you can still choose happiness for yourself, or at a minimum refuse to choose unhappiness, then you are intelligent. You are intelligent because you have the ultimate weapon against the big N. B.D. --Nervous Break Down.

"Intelligent" people do not have N. B. D. because they are in charge of themselves.     3    

You can begin to think of yourself as truly intelligent on the basis of how you choose to feel in the face of trying circumstances. The life struggles are pretty much the same for each of us. Everyone who is involved with other human beings in any social context has similar difficulties. Disagreements, conflicts and compromises are a part of what it means to be human.     4    But some people are able to make it, to avoid immobilizing depression and unhappiness despite such occurrences, while others collapse or have an N, B. D. Those who recognize problems as a human condition and don't measure happiness by an absence of problems are the most intelligent kind of humans we know; also, the most rare.

【推荐3】My father loves his garden. He planted some seeds in it. But at that time, I didn’t understand why working in the dirt excited him so much.

Unfortunately, in early May, my father was seriously injured in an accident. He had to stay in bed for a while. My mother had several business trips, so she couldn’t take care of the garden. I didn’t want my father to worry, so I said that I would take care of his garden until he recovered. I assumed that the little plants would continue to grow as long as they had water, and luckily it rained fairly often, so I didn’t think much about the garden.

One Saturday morning, my father said to me, “Christine, the vegetables should be about ready to be picked. Let’s have a salad today!” I went out to the garden and was upset to see that many of the lettuce leaves and carrots had been half eaten by bugs. There were hundreds of bugs all over them!

I panicked for a moment but then I quietly went to the nearest store to buy some vegetables.

When I gave the salad to him, he said, “Oh, Christine, what a beautiful salad! I can’t believe the carrots are this big already. You must be taking very good care of my garden. I felt a little bit guilty.

Coming home, my mother saw the bag from the supermarket in the kitchen. I was embarrassed and I admitted, “Dad wanted a salad, but the garden was a disaster. I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I went to the store.” She laughed but promised to help me in the garden and weeks later I was finally able to pick some.

I carefully made a salad and took it to my father. He looked at it with a hint of a smile. “Christine, the carrots are smaller in this salad, but they taste better.”

Now, I better understand how putting a lot of effort into caring for something can help you appreciate the results more, however small they may be. Perhaps this was one of the reasons for my father’s love of gardening.

【推荐1】For those of us who have ever been to Ocean Park, the best part was probably seeing the beautiful and friendly dolphins. And the luckier people among us may have even had the chance to swim with these amazing creatures. At the same time, however, we can’t help but think that these animals would be happier in the wild, rather than be forced to perform for humans in captivity (圈养).

According to a recent study though, we needn’t think like that. The study, which was published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, was led by scientist.

As the first of its kind, the study’s aim was to look at captivity from the animals’ point of view, according to BBC News. Over the course of three years, Clegg and her team put together a series of experiments to figure out how captive dolphins felt about their lives. “We wanted to find out what activities in captivity they like most,” she told BBC News.

There were three kinds of experiment : one in which the dolphins were let alone, one in which toys were added to their pool, and one in which a human played with the dolphins.

It was found that of the three types of experiment, the dolphins seemed to enjoy playing with humans the most. “Their leaping from the water during training and their curious approaches to the edge of the pool appeared to be enthusiastic,” wrote BBC News science correspondent Victoria Gill. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean dolphins are happier in captivity than they are in the wild.

According to wildlife and nature platform One Green Planet, being raised in captivity could actually be harmful to dolphins. “By being born into captivity, they will never learn the skills necessary to survive in the wild. This means that any animal that is born in captivity can never be sent back into the wild,” it wrote on its website.

But while this may be true, at least it seems that captive dolphins still enjoy happy moments with humans.

【推荐2】Fast-food chains including Burger King and Starbucks have brought in plant-based meat products in China in an effort to promote healthy eating and protect the environment. Readers share their opinions.

Linda (China)

I just don’t get it. If you want something that tastes like meat, you’d better eat meat. Plant-based meat is highly processed. It is not as healthy as vegetables. It contains unhealthy amounts of fat, salt and artificial additives. Regular exercise, along with a well-balanced diet, is the best way to stay healthy.

Terryfoy (UK)

Our human body was not designed for us only to eat vegetables. We are designed to eat meat. The protein that our body must have to survive comes from the meat we eat. Our bodies function properly with the correct balance of meat and vegetables. Too much meat and we get fat, too little meat and we get skinny and weak. If you want to be healthy, you must eat a balanced diet of both meat and vegetables.

Taikor (Malaysia)

Start with a huge cutdown on meat. Regarding pigs, do you know they could outsmart you on Playstation games? Don’t be surprised. They’re much smarter than dogs. So they do better at video games than some primates (灵长类动物). Pigs are extremely clever animals. They're gentle, defenseless creatures. Start doing it now. It’s time we made a change.

Sockmonkey (Singapore)

I could never be a vegetarian. I eat very little meat, but I love the meat I do eat! If one has to cut down on meat, it seems that red meat is the first thing to be minimized since it’s not as good for you as other types.

【推荐3】Amazon sells 1,161 kinds of toilet brushes. I know this because I recently spent an evening trying to choose one of them for the bathroom in my new apartment. Nearly an hour later, after having read countless contradictory(矛盾的) reviews and considering far too many choices, I felt tired and simply gave up. The next day, I happily bought the only toilet brush the local dollar store offered.

Too many choices exhaust us, make us unhappy and lead us to sometimes flee from making a decision altogether. Researcher Barry Schwartz calls this “choice overload”. And it’s not just insignificant details like which brush to wipe the inside of the toilet with — having too many choices in our creative and professional lives can lead us to avoid making important decisions.

Understanding how and why we make decisions can perhaps help us make better choices down the line. We make poorer decisions when we are tired. It’s caused by decision fatigue(疲劳). The mind can only sort through so many choices and make so many choices before it starts to run out of steam. That’s why impulse buys like candy bars and magazines at the checkout aisle in the grocery store can be hard to resist. We’ve exhausted all our good decision-making skills.

The same goes for our workday. Making lots of decisions not only exhausts us; it can put us in a bad mood. That’s why it’s necessary to make your most important decisions in the morning rather than at the end of an exhausting day when your energy has been used up. The idiom “sleep on it” is indeed effective when it comes to making big decisions.

When we’re tired, we tend to conserve our energy by making choices based on a single factor like price, rather than considering all the other determinants that go into making the best decision. When you’re doing this, you are acting as what researchers call a cognitive miser(小气鬼).

To conclude, letting yourself have fewer choices to choose from can help you arrive at a more creative answer.

【推荐1】“Your mind is a garden; your thoughts are the seeds. The harvest can either be flowers or weeds,” William Wordsworth wrote. In the above quote, William suggests that the process of gardening mirrors human life. Depending on what we “plant” in our lives, we bloom (生长茂盛) or don’t. Before you start to work in your garden, it’s necessary to have a vision for it. Thinking of what you want to grow in your garden and how to lay it out is a good first step in making your vision a fruitful reality. In life, you should consider what you want to create and what you want to achieve, because your mind-garden is like the white paper and the possibilities are endless.

Regardless of what you choose to plant, poor soil isn’t suitable for growth. This is why gardeners take the time and energy to upgrade the soil before planting. So, creating the right soil is important to the realization of your goals and dreams. Fortunately, there are countless ways to make your personal bedrock better. Getting an education is one of the most effective ways, which can help you enrich your life’s soil.

You don’t have to be an enthusiastic gardener to understand the meaning of “You harvest what you sow.” When a gardener wants tomatoes, they just need to plant tomato seeds. It’s a very clear act that produces an expected result. Each of us has the power to decide which “life seeds“ to plant. For example, if you plant ill seeds, it’s likely that you’ll experience pain in return. Contrarily, if you plant seeds of kindness and understanding, your life will bloom with happiness and love.

A gardener’s truly hard work begins after the seeds are in the ground because a garden requires a lot of care and attention. Regular watering and weeding are required for a healthy garden. So, to ensure your dreams take root, you should be devoted, aware, and present. After countless hours and energy spent, the crops have grown well and are finally ready to be harvested.

【推荐3】Benjamin Franklin clearly knew how to get things done. After scanning the long list of Benjamin Franklin’s achievements, one can only come to one conclusion that the American man probably never had a wasted day in his life. When he was 84 years old, he became a successful author, printer, politician, postmaster, inventor, musician, and diplomat.

There’s much we can learn from Benjamin Franklin’s work habits and opinions on life that can increase our own productivity. Here are some ways Franklin overcame lazy, wasted days.

Start a group and share knowledge. When Franklin was 21, he was a struggling printer in Philadelphia. To increase his connections and to learn more about his industry, he created a group. The group was in great need of books, but books were expensive. Franklin helped start a library where books were bought and lent to members. This sharing of knowledge, experience, and connections helped Franklin become a famous and respected printer in Philadelphia.

Attack opportunities. “To succeed,” Franklin wrote, “jump as quickly at opportunities as you can.” We can all agree, but when an opportunity comes we often look the other way. It’s because the opportunity isn’t dressed the way we expect. We often think that the opportunity was only in the form of a golden egg or a million-dollar lottery ticket or a new job offer. But more often than not, the opportunity comes in smaller, less beautiful packages.

Time is something in short supply. Franklin wrote “ Lost time is never found again”. This may sound like it came from the pen of a poet, but it’s really an inspirational call to action. Franklin worked, created, and lived knowing that time is scarce. He never put off his work.

While Franklin was an able inventor we can be sure that his notebook contained a few unsuccessful ideas. Franklin wrote, “ Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.”