Grandparents who help out occasionally with childcare in their community tend to live longer than seniors who do not care for other people, according to a study from Berlin, Germany.
“Having no contact with grandchildren at all can negatively impact grandparents’ health. This link could be deeply rooted in our evolutionary past when help with childcare was important for the survival of the human species,” said Sonja Hilbrand, one of the researchers.
The findings are drawn from data on more than 500 people over age 70. Overall, after accounting for grandparents’ age and general state of health, the risk of dying over a 20-year period was one-third lower for grandparents who cared for their grandchildren, compared with grandparents who provided no childcare.
Caregiving was associated with a longer life even when the care receiver wasn’t a relative. Half of all childless seniors who provided support to friends or neighbors lived for seven years after the study began, while non-helpers lived for four years on average.
“Caregiving may give caregivers a purpose of life because they may feel useful for others and society. Caregiving may be thought also as an activity that keeps caregivers physically and mentally active,” said Professor Bruno Arpino.
Arpino noted, however, that caregiving is not the only activity that can improve health and that too many caring responsibilities can take away from other beneficial activities like working, being in social clubs, or volunteering. “Children should take into account their parents’ needs, willingness, and desires and agree with them on the timing and amount of childcare,” he suggested.
“It is very important that every individual decides for himself/herself, what proper amounts of help means,” Hilbrand said, adding, “As long as you do not feel stressed about the intensity (强度) of help you provide you may be doing something good for others as well as for yourself.”
1. What is the caregiving study based on?| A．Human evolutionary history. | B．Demand modern society. |
| C．Social contact between relatives. | D．Data on many elderly people. |
| A．is sure to keep old people away from illnesses |
| B．allows old people to live a more meaningful life |
| C．creates more job opportunities for old people |
| D．makes social activities inaccessible to old people |
| A．Consider. | B．Ignore. |
| C．Favor. | D．Limit. |
| A．Grandparents can do anything in their own interests. |
| B．Grandparents should share more social responsibilities. |
| C．Proper amounts of childcare do good to grandparents. |
| D．Caregiving guarantees every grandparent a longer life. |
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【推荐1】It is said that we do not properly value a thing until we have lost it. It is only when a friend dies that we find out how much he was to us. So it is with health.
How can we keep our health?
Then how to keep fit? Everyone has his own answers to this question.
| A．Health is our most important possession. |
| B．Without it, any lofty aspiration turns to be a daydream. |
| C．Only by knowing and carefully obeying the laws of health. |
| D．But I think three principal suggestions should be followed. |
| E．Some people don’t pay enough attention to their health. |
| F．When we are young and strong and have good health, we think little about it. |
| G．In order to keep fit,I force myself to keep away from the “junk food”, although it usually tastes good. |
【推荐2】Five Easy Ways to Feel Your Best
During the busiest days, people often withstand great stress. Stress is no good for your mind or your body. Studies have found that your chance of a heart attack increases 9.5 times after an intense event. Anxious feelings can also lead to sore skin.
One: Make Time for Meditation (冥想)．
You don’t need to meditate for hours to reap the benefits — just ten minutes a day can make a difference. The key is to find quiet moments you can commit to. Whether you opt (选择) for the moment in the morning or just before bed, you’ll feel calmer in no time.
Two:
Essential oils smell amazing, and they’ve also been associated with reduced stress levels and may even be able to kill the flu virus. Whether you prefer peppermint or lavender, fifteen minutes is a great way to keep your mood on the up and up.
Three: Listen to Music.
Four: Take a Walk.
Plenty of research has shown how bad sitting all day can be for your productivity and your overall health, but it also turns out a lunchtime stroll may be even more beneficial than it’s thought previously.
Five: Take Vitamins.
When we are under great pressure, we tend to desire sugary and fatty foods. Stocking up on betterforyou snacks is one way to avoid diet problems.
| A．Smell the Difference. |
| B．Breathe the Fresh Air. |
| C．Making sure you remember to take your vitamins is another. |
| D．One study found that a short walk can boost creative thinking. |
| E．The following five steps can make the busiest days easy and fun. |
| F．Now it’s time to focus your enterprising spirit using the following five steps. |
| G．Multiple studies have shown that enjoying a little music can reduce stress. |
【推荐3】In every level of education, students experience more or less stress and pressure. Several courses at a time, exams, homework, social challenges, homesickness, etc. are some common factors that make a student worried. In many cases, students struggle to adjust to heavy schedules and deadlines demanded by their institutions.
Exercise
Doing exercise or participating in different kinds of sports helps to reduce stress and allows us to have a fresh and cheerful mind.
Healthy diet
Many students like to eat junk food rather than a healthy diet. But everyone should know that a balanced diet helps to boost energy and brainpower. Eating green vegetables and fruits enriched with vitamin C helps to make the immune system stronger and more effective.
Sleeping well
Sleeping can be the best medicine for you to increase your productivity and energy. Even a thirty minutes nap makes one more relieved. In many cases, we see that students packed with heavy schedules and deadlines put themselves in a sleepless and restless state.
Many students don’t know how to reduce tension in the exam. The key to reducing the tension and stress of the exam is to use time wisely. Setting up a daily schedule for your study is necessary to complete your lessons and homework properly.
| A．Time management |
| B．On the other hand, eating street food or junk food like pizza, or burger makes you overweight. |
| C．Here are some tips on how to reduce stress for students. |
| D．But it is very harmful to both body and mind. |
| E．Students should have enough sleep and sports every day. |
| F．Stress reduction. |
| G．Walking thirty minutes daily or doing everyday workouts helps to feel better. |
【推荐1】Sometime in the early 1960s, a significant thing happened in Sydney, Australia. The city discovered its harbor. Then, one after another, Sydney discovered lots of things that were just sort of there — broad parks, superb beaches, and a culturally diverse population. But it is the harbor that makes the city.
Andrew Reynolds, a cheerful fellow in his early 30s, pilots Sydney ferryboats for a living. I spent the whole morning shuttling back and forth across the harbor. After our third run Andrew shut down the engine, and we went our separate ways — he for a lunch break, I to explore the city.
“I’ll miss these old boats,” he said as we parted.
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Oh, they’re replacing them with catamarans. Catamarans are faster, but they’re not so elegant, and they’re not fun to pilot. But that’s progress, I guess.”
Everywhere in Sydney these days, change and progress are the watchwords (口号), and traditions are increasingly rare. Shirley Fitzgerald, the city’s official historian, told me that in its rush to modernity in the 1970s, Sydney swept aside much of its past, including many of its finest buildings. “Sydney is confused about itself,” she said. “We can’t seem to make up our minds whether we want a modern city or a traditional one. It’s a conflict that we aren’t getting any better at resolving.”
On the other hand, being young and old at the same time has its attractions. I considered this when I met a thoughtful young businessman named Anthony. “Many people say that we lack culture in this country,” he told me. “What people forget is that the Italians, when they came to Australia, brought 2000 years of their culture, the Greeks some 3000 years, and the Chinese more still. We’ve got a foundation built on ancient cultures but with a drive and dynamism of a young country. It’s a pretty hard combination to beat.”
He is right, but I can’t help wishing they would keep those old ferries.
1. What can we know about Sydney’s harbor?| A．It is a culturally respected area. | B．It used to be a striking architecture. |
| C．It’s crucial to Sydney’s development. | D．It was a famous tourist attraction in 1960. |
| A．Anxious. | B．Negative. | C．Doubtful. | D．Supportive. |
| A．Controlling. | B．Discovering. | C．Solving. | D．Distinguishing. |
| A．A city being young and old is more attractive. |
| B．A city built on ancient cultures is more dynamic. |
| C．Modernity is usually achieved at the cost of elegance. |
| D．Italians bring Australians more cultures than Chinese. |
【推荐2】Digital reading appears to be destroying habits of “deep reading”. Amazing numbers of people with year of schooling are in effect illiterate (不识字的). Admittedly, some people have been complaining about new media since 1492, but today’s complaints have an evidential basis, Ljubljana Reading Manifesto says, “The digital area may lead to more reading than ever in history, but it also offers many attractions to read in a shallow and scattered (碎片化的) manner — or even not to read at all. This increasingly endangers higher-level reading.”
Digital literacy has changed reading. When you read a book on paper, you can be entirely inside the experience, absorbing hundreds of pages to capture the world’s complexity. Online, says Maryanne Wolf of UCLA, we are “skimming, scanning, scrolling”. The medium is the message: doing deep reading on your phone is as hard as playing tennis with your phone. Recently, a bright 11-year-old told me I was wasting time on books: he absorbed more information faster from Wikipedia. He had a point. But digital readers also absorb more misinformation. And they seldom, absorb nuanced (微妙的) ideas.
In the white paper that underlies the Ljubljana Reading Manifesto, experts catalogue the passive parts of digital reading: “Recent studies of various kinds indicate a decline of... critical and conscious reading, slow reading, non-strategic reading and long-form reading.” In the 2021 international PISA survey, 49 percent of students agreed that “I read only if I have to”, 13 percentage points higher than in 2000.
As professors from Northwestern University foresaw in 2005, we are returning to the days when only an elite (精英的) “reading class” consumes long texts — despite more people spending longer in education and book sales remaining robust.
People who lose higher-level reading skills also lose thinking skills. That’s horrible, because “higher-level reading” has been essential to civilization. It enabled the Enlightenment, and an international rise in sympathy for people who aren’t like us.
1. What is the advantage of the digital reading?| A．It makes more people start to read widely. |
| B．It makes more people begin to think deeper. |
| C．It helps the young to make use of the Internet. |
| D．It helps people take advantage of their spare time. |
| A．Supportive. | B．Opposed. | C．Objective. | D．Unconcerned. |
| A．Teens should change the critical and conscious reading. |
| B．Nearly half of the teens never read at all. |
| C．They don’t believe what the experts indicate. |
| D．The trend of reading books is increasingly declining. |
| A．More and more books are purchased. |
| B．It’s unnecessary for people to buy books. |
| C．More and more people like to visit the bookstores. |
| D．The sales of books keep still for a really long time. |
【推荐3】Tim Berners-Lee. If you don’t know his name, you’ve surely used his famous invention —the World Wide Web.
On Oct. 29, the Internet officially turned 50 years old. To mark the day, Berners-Lee wrote online, “The Internet & the web it enabled have changed billions of lives for the better. But their power for good is under threat.”
Speaking at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he pointed out three problems affecting today’s web-criminal behavior, ad-based clickbait websites, and offensive online communication.
In the contract, he mentioned the need for companies to make sure that everyone has web access, called for a reduction in offensive material, and more personal data privacy. The latter is a hot topic right now. Big companies, like Facebook, have misused users’ personal information by sharing it with advertisers.
In this digital age, the Internet connects the world through social media, cashless payments and has become an instant source of information. It can also make a positive difference through campaigns that push for positive change, education or aid.
One such campaign is November. The movement, held every November, encourages men to grow a mustache for the whole month, post pictures online, and donate.
Not to mention, the Internet is also a source of fun. From funny kitten videos on Weibo to your very own Douyin videos, the Internet allows you to share what you create.
Speaking to the Web Foundation, Berners-Lee said, “The web has become a public square, a library, a doctor’s office, a shop, a school, and it has given marginalized groups a voice.”
“In the next 30 years, if we give up on trying to build a better web...we will have failed it.
| A．This birthday must mark the moment we take on the fight for the web we want. |
| B．Tim Berners-Lee is planning to save the World Wide Web. |
| C．November draws public attention to mental health issues. |
| D．We need to come together as a global community. |
| E．These problems led Berners-Lee to create the Web Foundation and a contract for it. |
| F．The charity promotes physical health, mental health, and suicide prevention for men. |
| G．Despite all the negatives, we shouldn’t forget about all the benefits the Internet brings. |
