Some Actor

“What’s this—Ben is trying out for Mr. Zuckerman?” My ears burned at hearing my name. It was Lindsey, the most popular eighth-grader, looking at the tryout schedule for Charlotte’s Web. “What if he ruins（毁掉）the whole play? He’s never acted before.”

Lindsey was _______. I’d never been in a play. At lunch I told Trevor, my best friend, that I’d changed my mind. I’d join the technical crew（技术人员）instead.

It was fun to learn all the technical stuff and to watch the actors from backstage. By the third week I’d remembered everyone’s _______.     

And then, only a week before the performance, Josh, who played Mr. Zuckerman, broke his leg. “We can’t get someone else ready by next week. We’ll have to put off or even cancel the play.” Mrs. Stevens told us.

Then I heard Trevor’s voice. “Ben can do it. He _________ all the lines.”

Mrs. Stevens asked, “Is that right?”

I nodded.

Mrs. Stevens clapped. “Ben, you’ve saved the show, but we have a lot of work to do. Ben, Lindsey—can you stay?”

Mrs. Stevens started us on the first act. I spewed（喷涌）my lines so _________ and it sounded like a movie on fast-forward. I even backed up too far and knocked over some scenery（舞台布景）．

Lindsey sighed. “Maybe we should put off the show until Ben gets better.”

I was ready to ___________ with her, but Mrs. Stevens spoke first. “No, we have some time yet. Let’s see how it goes tomorrow.”

The next day, Mrs. Stevens helped and taught me during lunch time. I ___________ a lot in the following days.

It was opening night. Before the play, my hands turned cold and sweaty. Throughout the whole opening scene, I stood backstage, frozen with fear.

The audience clapped. End of scene one. My entrance was next. The lights came up. I took a deep breath and walked on. It seemed like just a minute later that the play was over. I’d made it through without _________ a line or knocking anything over.

As we all walked offstage, Lindsey nudged（轻推）me and said, “You turned out to be some _________.”

I smiled. Maybe next year I’ll try out for the lead.

We’ve known that sitting for long periods of time every day has countless health consequences（后果）, like a higher risk of heart disease. But now a new study has found that sitting is also bad for your brain.

A study published last week, conducted by Dr.Prabha Siddarth at the University of California, showed that sedentary（久坐不动的）behavior is related to reduced thickness of the medial temporal lobe（中颐叶）, a brain area that is critical to learning and memory.

The researchers asked a group of 35 healthy people, aged 45 to 70, about their activity levels and the average number of hours each day spent sitting and then scanned their brains. They found that the subjects who reported sitting for longer periods had the thinnest medial temporal lobes. It means that the more time you spend in a chair, the worse it is for your brain health, resulting in possible damage to learning and memory.

What is also interesting is that this study did not find a significant relation between the level of physical activity and thickness of this brain area, suggesting that exercise, even severe（剧烈的 ）exercise, may not be enough to protect you from the harmful effects of sitting.

It then surprisingly turned out that you don’t even have to move much to improve cognition（认知）; just standing will do the trick（获得成功）. For example, two groups of subjects were asked to complete a test while either sitting or standing. Participants were asked to name the color, like the word “green” in blue ink. Subjects thinking on their feet beat those who sat by 3 milliseconds.

The cognitive effects of severe physical exercise are well known. But the possibility that standing more and sitting less improves brain health could lower the standard for everyone.

I know, this all runs counter to（与……背道而驰）received ideas about deep thought, from our grade school teachers, who told us to sit down and focus, to Rodin’s famous “The Thinker”, seated with chin on his hand.

They were wrong. You can now all stand up.

Handwriting is gradually becoming a dying art. Most college students type nearly everything. Elementary and high schools across the country now view typing courses as the main choice. But what are we losing as handwriting loses its significance（重要性）in society? It’s brain power, according to some studies.

Researchers from Princeton University and the University of California conducted a series of studies to prove the differences between students who wrote out their notes and those who typed notes. Participants（参与者）took notes on a lecture using one of the two methods and were tested on the material 30 minutes after the lecture and again a week later. The results of the research appeared in Psychological Science. The authors of the study noted that, while past studies on this topic tended to focus on the distractions（干扰）that resulted from using a computer, in this study, participants were using the laptops only to take notes. And handwriting still emerged as（成为）the champion.

That’s not to say that typing doesn’t have its benefits. Clearvue Health recently took a deep dive into the findings of a study to assess pros and cons（评估利弊）of writing and typing. The typists could copy down significantly more words than the writers. But while more of the lecture’s content was retained in the computer when typing. The tests that the participants took proved this. On the test 30 minutes after the lecture, typists and writers did more or less equally well on questions about the basic facts of the lecture, but typists faltered（结巴）when it came to more conceptual questions. Students who take handwritten notes need to quickly process the lesson and rewrite it in a way they can understand, giving them an advantage in remembering new concepts（概念）in the long term.

As for the later quiz, well, the results were similar. Students with handwritten notes were able to remember and still understand the concepts of the lecture after a week had passed. These participants were also more open to understanding new ideas. Clearly, writing by hand can make you smarter.

Computers aren’t going away anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean paper notebooks need to become obsolete. If your goal is to be able to set down facts, the efficiency of typing might best benefit you. But when it comes to truly dissecting（剖析）information, truly learning from it in the sense of making connections between analyzing the material, and retaining it in the long run, writing by hand is a better choice.