【推荐1】Listening to music is relatively inexpensive and everyone can do it easily. As is known to all, music has many benefits.     1     Meanwhile, you can also make use of it to create more joy in your life. Here are some ways.

Let music say “Good morning" to you.     2     This music eases you into the day like a beautiful sunrise, and starts you out in a good mood. This is easy to program if you have a Smartphone that allows you to choose a song as your alarm. A positive morning music ceremony is a sure way to start your day off in a better mood.     3    

Sing aloud with music as often as you can. If you want to take the positive effects of listening to music to another level, try singing. Singing is one of the best ways to regulate breathing and promote relaxation. Sing in the shower; sing in the car.     4     This is not about performing but about your relaxation. If you’ re going to sing, picking and singing the songs that you know will put you in a better mood, inspire you, or help you relax.

    5     If you have a daily exercise routine, try taking music along with you. A morning walk or run can become easier and more enjoyable if you have music as your personal coach and companion. Again, it is important for you to choose music that works for you and that you know will have the effect you are trying to achieve.

You have probably heard of the Mozart effect. It’s the idea that if children or even babies listen to music composed by Mozart, they will become more intelligent. A quick Internet search suggests plenty of products to assist you in the task. Whatever your age there are CDs and books to help you taste the power of Mozart’s music, but when it comes to scientific evidence that it can make you more clever, the picture is more mixed.

The phrase “the Mozart effect” was made up in 1991, but it was a study described two years later in the journal Nature that sparked real media and public interest about the idea that listening to classical music somehow improves the brain. It is one of those ideas that sound reasonable. Mozart was undoubtedly a genius himself; his music is complex （复杂的）and there is a hope that if we listen to enough of it, we’ll become more intelligent.

The idea got across to the public, with thousands of parents playing Mozart to their children, and in 1998 Zell Miller, the Governor of the state of Georgia in the US, even asked for money to be set aside in the state budget so that every newborn baby could be sent a CD of classical music. It was not just babies and children who were exposed to Mozart’s music on purpose, even an Italian farmer proudly explained that the cows were played Mozart three times a day to help them to produce better milk.

I’ll leave the debate on the impact on milk yield to farmers, but what about the evidence that listening to Mozart makes people more intelligent? More research was carried out but an analysis of sixteen different studies confirmed that listening to music does lead to a temporary improvement in the ability to handle shapes mentally, but the benefits are short-lived and it doesn’t make us more intelligent.

【推荐3】The first Europeans came to America in 1492 with Christopher Columbus. Since that time people have come to America from all over the world, from Europe, Africa, and Asia, and they have brought their music with them. This mixing of people and music has created American music.

Music is a very important part of our lives. Music is for dancing, drinking, eating, loving and thinking. Some songs remind us of our childhood or youth. Others remind of the people we love. Many important occasions, like weddings and funerals have special music. Every nation has a national song like the American ''The Star-Spangled Banner. '' In the U.S, high schools and colleges have school songs too.

Music is a part of the history of America. It expresses the problems and feelings of its people.

As the years pass, the music grows and changes.

Modern science has also changed music. Inventions like records, radios, movies, electric instruments, tape recorders, and videos have changed the way we play and listen to music. They have helped to make music an important form of international communication.

American music, from the earliest folk songs to modern ''pop'', is known around the world. Music is one of America’s most important exports. It brings the people of the world together. Even when people cannot understand the same language, they can share the same music. Many people learn and practice English by singing songs, and understanding American music can help you understand American people. ''Put a dime (10 cents) in the juke box (自动点唱机), baby. '' Let's listen to the music!

【推荐3】In the mid-1980s, a study compared mtDNA from people around the world. It found that people of African descent (后裔) had twice as many genetic differences from each other than as did others. Because mutations (基因突变) seem to occur at a steady rate over time, scientists were able to conclude that modern humans must have lived in Africa at least twice as long as anywhere else. They now calculate that all living humans descend from a single woman who lived roughly 150,000 years ago in Africa, “Eve”. If geneticists are right, all of humanity is linked to Eve through an unbroken chain of mothers. This Eve was soon joined by “Y-Chromosome (染色体) Adam”, the genetic father of us all, also from Africa. DNA studies have confirmed that all the people on Earth, with all their shapes and colors, can trace their ancestry to ancient Africans.

What seems certain is that at a remarkably recent date—probably between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago—one small group of people, the ancestors of modern humans outside of Africa, left Africa for western Asia, either by migrating around the northern end of the Red Sea or across its narrow southern opening.

Once in Asia, genetic evidence suggests, the population split. One group stopped temporarily in the Middle East, while the other commenced a journey which would last tens of thousands of years. Moving a little further with each new generation, they followed the coast around the Arabian Peninsula, India, and Southeast Asia, all the way to Australia. ''The movement was probably unnoticeable,'' says Spencer Wells. ''It was less of a journey and probably more like walking a little farther down the beach to get away from the crowd.''

Although archaeological evidence of this 13,000-kilometer (8,000-mile) migration from Africa to Australia has almost completely disappeared, genetic traces of the group that made the trip do exist. They have been found in the DNA of native peoples in the Andaman Islands near Myanmar, in Malaysia, and in Papua New Guinea, and in the DNA of nearly all Australian aborigines (土著). Modern discoveries of 45,000-year-old bodies in Australia, buried at a site called Lake Mungo, provide some physical evidence for the theories as well.

People in the rest of Asia and Europe share different but equally ancient mtDNA and mutations. The mutations which they possess show that most are descendants of the group that stayed in the Middle East for thousands of years before moving on. Perhaps about 40,000 years ago, modern humans first advanced into Europe.

【推荐1】Have you ever had the urge to open a book and stick your nose straight into the pages? The smell of old books can refresh any book lovers. We don’t know why, but it is just pleasant to us.

Describing the smell can be a challenge. And mere adjectives will likely be of little use to future generations of historians trying to document, understand or reproduce the scent of slowly decaying books. Now, that task may have just gotten easier thanks to the Historic Book Odor Wheel.

In one experiment, researchers asked visitors at the historic library to characterize the scents they smelled. All the visitors selected words like “woody”, “smoky” and “earthy” from the list, and described the smell’s intensity and perceived pleasantness. In another experiment, the study authors presented visitors to the Birmingham Museum with eight smells — one of which was an unlabeled historic book scent and seven were non-bookish, such as coffee, chocolate, fish market and dirty clothes. The researchers then had those museum goers describe the historic book smell.

The top two responses? Chocolate and coffee. “You tend to use familiar associations to describe smells when they are unlabeled,” study author Cecilia Bembibre says.

The team even analyzed the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) (挥发性有机化合物) in the book and the library. Using the data from the chemical analysis and visitors’ smell descriptions, the researchers created the Historic Book Odor Wheel to document the “historic library smell”. Main categories, such as “sweet/spicy”, fill the inner circle of the wheel; descriptors, such as “chocolate/cream”, fill the middle; and the chemical compounds likely to be the smelly source, like furfural, fill the outer circle. The researchers want the book odor wheel to be a tool that “untrained noses” can use to identify smells and the compounds causing them, which could address conservators’ concerns about material composition and historic paper conservation. And hopefully, smells of the past can be reproduced in the lab someday and museums and historians can use it to reconstruct a past we can no longer smell.