【推荐1】Paris is the city of dreams. If you plan to head to Paris for a study period, then perhaps a little reality check is in order. But my experience was a romantic one.

I paved my path to Paris through an exchange program. On arrival in Paris, I was constantly reminded of the official processes I had to complete-forms to be filled in, meetings to attend, the list seemed endless.

Then the real work began. Once classes were underway, I found myself volunteering to do oral presentations and assignments first, rather than last. This method proved to be very helpful.

Once I had finished class for the week, I had an ever-increasing list of museums to visit, neighborhoods to explore, and cafes to sit in. Read books about Paris. Talk to locals and other foreigners living there. But the one thing that reading a book or talking to someone cannot do is to provide you with the experience of wandering Paris on foot. The people watching, the sounds of the city, the colors as the seasons change, they all add to the ecstasy that I experience in Paris as an exchange student.

After spending five months wandering through the charming neighborhoods, fell in love with the atmosphere that came out from every open door, and with every spoken word. There is something comforting about walking to the market each Sunday to en joy the beautiful display of fruits, vegetables and dairy products. There is warmth in saying “bonjour” (你好) to the passers-by.

On my last day in Paris, I confidently said, “Bon jour Monsieur,” as I passed the little store down the street, I guess the best part about going on exchange in Paris is falling in love with the city in your own way. And I know mine is unique and special to me, my own little pieces of Paris.

【推荐2】In Europe, many people make friends across the borders between their countries through town twinning. Town or city twinning means two towns in different countries agree and decide to become “twins” with sister city relationship.

Their citizens find pen friends in the twin town. They exchange newspapers and stamps. The school teachers discuss teaching methods with the teachers in the twin town. Officials visit the twin town for celebrations. Ordinary citizens travel to the twin town, too, but not very often if it is far away.

Sometimes, schools even exchange their classes for two or three weeks! For example, German middle school students study for a while at the school in their twin town in Britain, staying with British families. A few months later, their British friends come to study in Germany.

Some towns even arrange exchange visits for theatre groups, choirs（合唱团）and orchestras（管弦乐队）.Others send lecturers to the twin town who tell the people there all about their own town，and show photos and slides.

Town twinning can help make friends and motivate（激励）people to learn from each other.It helps students to improve their language skills，and it contributes to（有助于）strengthening peace and understanding between different nations.

【推荐3】America is a mobile society. Friendships between Americans can be close and real, yet disappear soon if situations change. Neither side feels hurt by this. Both may exchange Christmas greetings for a year or two, perhaps a few letters for a while, then no more. If the same two people meet again by chance, even years later, they pick up the friendship. This can be quite difficult for us Chinese to understand, because friendships between us flower more slowly but then may become lifelong feelings, extending(延伸) sometimes deeply into both families.

Americans are ready to receive us foreigners at their homes, share their holidays, and their home life. They will enjoy welcoming us and be pleased if we accept their hospitality(好客) easily.

Another difficult point for us Chinese to understand Americans is that although they include us warmly in their personal everyday lives, they don't show their politeness to us if it requires a great deal of time. This is usually the opposite of the practice in our country where we may be generous with our time. Sometimes, we, as hosts, will appear at airports even in the middle of the night to meet a friend. We may take days off to act as guides to our foreign friends. The Americans, however, express their welcome usually at homes, but truly can not manage the time to do a great deal with a visitor outside their routine. They will probably expect us to get ourselves from the airport to our own hotel by bus. And they expect that we will phone them from there. Once we arrive at their homes, the welcome will be full, warm and real. We will find ourselves treated hospitably.

For the Americans, it is often considered more friendly to invite a friend to their homes than to go to restaurants, except for purely business matters. So accept their hospitality at home.

【推荐2】GENETIC testing cannot tell teachers anything useful about an individual pupil’s educational achievement. That is the conclusion of a study that looked at how well so-called polygenic scores for education predict a person’s educational achievements, based on a long-term study of thousands of people in the UK. “Some people with a very low genetic score are very high performers at age 16. Some are even in the top 3 percent,” says Tim Morris at the University of Bristol, UK.

And while Morris expects the accuracy of polygenic scores for educational achievements to improve, he doesn’t think they will ever be good enough to predict how well an individual will do. Even relatively simple qualities such as height are influenced by thousands of genetic variants, each of which may only have a tiny effect. It has been claimed that polygenic scores can be used to make useful predictions, such as a person’s likelihood of developing various diseases. One company is even offering embryo screening (screening of an unborn baby in the very stages of development) based on polygenic scores for disease risk.

Some researchers — notably Robert Plomin of King’s College London — think that schools should start using polygenic scores for educational achievement. In most cases, the scores may reflect qualities such as persistence as well as intelligence.

To assess the usefulness of polygenic scores in education, Morris and his colleagues calculated them for 8,000 people in Bristol who are part of a long-term study known as the Children of the 90s. The participants’ genomes have been queued and their academic results are available to researchers. Among other things, the team found a correlation of 0.4 between a person’s polygenic score and their exam results at age 16. But there would need to be a correlation of at least 0.8 to make useful predictions about individuals, says Morris. Plomin, however, argues that the results support his opinion. “A correlation of 0.4 makes it the strongest polygenic predictor in the behavioural sciences,” says Plomin. “It’s so much stronger than a lot of other things we base decisions on. So it’s a very big finding.”

Morris says schools already have access to other predictors that are more accurate, such as a pupil’s earlier test results. Looking at parents’ educational achievements is also a better predictor of a pupil’s academic results than studying their genome, his results show. Providing teachers with an extra predictor based on genetics would just confuse matters, says Morris, and the cost cannot be justified.