Do you check your mobile phone often? Do you feel anxious if your mobile phone is not with you? ①When there is no WiFi or signal for your mobile phone, will you get nervous? If you say yes, then you’ve got addiction(上瘾) to mobile phones.

Nowadays, we can see the scene everywhere in the life: in subways, restaurants, roads, people are watching their mobile phones. From family party to dating with friends, people couldn’t stop checking their twitter, WeChat, facebook on the mobile phones and snubbing(忽视) the persons in front completely.②Phubbing (低头症) influences not only the young people, but also the old and even the kids.

“Phubbing” is a new word which comes from the words “phone” and “snub”. It describes the habit of snubbing someone in favor of a mobile phone. Because of playing phones, more and more people become silent. They do nothing but bow to play mobile phones.③time, spend, too, they, phones, much, the on. And they don’t have time to communicate with persons in real life.

If we keep playing with phones when we are with our friends or family, we will spend less time talking to them. In fact, they need and deserve to be cared for.

Let us put down the cell phones and enjoy the nature, the food, the books and all the beautiful things and persons around us.

2 . A new book, the bestseller, Willpower, says that having strong willpower (意志力) is necessary to a successful life. The book starts by describing a famous experiment: The Marshmallow (软糖) Test. In 1972, a psychology (心理学) professor Mischel tested the willpower of 600 kids. In the experiment, each child was left alone in a room for fifteen minutes with a marshmallow on a table in front of them. They were given two choices: they could either eat the marshmallow or, if they waited fifteen minutes, they’d be given a second marshmallow (and then they could eat both).

So, what did the kids do? 70% ate the first marshmallow within the fifteen minutes, but the other 30% showed willpower—they didn’t eat the first one and waited for the second marshmallow quietly.

Twenty years later, Mischel discovered something interesting. He got in touch with the children and found that those with strong willpower were getting better marks at university, were better behaved and were more popular. So, how important it is to have strong willpower!

But don’t worry if you aren’t good at controlling yourself. The authors say that willpower is like a muscle (肌肉). The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. However, just like any muscle, your “willpower muscle” can get tired. So, if you have to do lots of things that need willpower, take a break. That way, you’ll build up your willpower again.

Lastly, the authors mention that people who learn foreign languages usually have a lot of willpower. So, congratulations!

You may have already forgotten the days when you had to learn how to use chopsticks. Every Chinese kid struggles with them for some time. But chopsticks are not just simple tools to pick up food. They come with their own special rules and traditions. Let’s learn the rules and traditions behind chopsticks.

Generally, people should not make noise with chopsticks. Playing with chopsticks is seen as bad manners, just as playing with forks and knives in a Western country would be rude. There are also some superstitions（迷信 ） related to chopsticks. For example, some people believe that chopsticks should not be left standing upright in a bowl. It looks like the incense （香 ）that Chinese use to honor（祭奠 ）the dead. Doing it at the dinner table is believed to bring bad luck.

You should not tap chopsticks on the edge of the bowl either, as beggars（乞丐）do this to ask for food. Parents might get angry if children do this as they don’t want their children to be as poor as beggars in the future.

Chopsticks can also be a great gift. In Chinese, “chopsticks” are known as “kuaizi”, which means to have babies soon. Newlyweds（ 新 婚夫妇 ）sometimes receive chopsticks as a wedding gift. Skilled craftsmen（ 手艺人 ）paint beautiful images on chopsticks to make them look like fine artwork.

5 . Do you like eating instant noodles? The food is easy to make and cheap to buy. This year is the 60th anniversary of the invention of instant noodles. It was invented by Japanese businessman Momofuku Ando (安藤百福) .

China is the biggest market for instant noodles. It can be a snack for students, a meal on a train, or just a good choice for hungry workers. More than 46.2 billion instant noodle packets were sold on the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong in 2013, a BBC article reported. But by 2016, those sales had dropped to 38.5 billion packets, according to the World Instant Noodle Association.

One of the reasons for the drop could be the rise of online food delivery services (外卖服务). They can bring you food no matter where you are. They also offer more choices and tastier food. According to a 2016 survey by China Youth Daily, about 70 percent of young people order meals online at least once a week.

This shows that Chinese people now have higher expectations (期望) for the quality of their food, according to Shen Hongbing, a professor from Chongqing Technology and Business University.

Facing this challenge, instant food companies are trying to improve their products. They are making instant noodles with less fat and salt. They are also making new products, including self-heating hotpot and instant rice. Those can adapt (适应) to the tastes of young people.

Will instant noodles disappear one day? We don’t know. But they have surely left a mark on dining history.

6 . While I was jumping rope, my smartphone took a fall to the floor which created cracks (裂缝) on my screen. However, the music kept playing 30 minutes later, I could see only one tenth of my screen while the rest was black. The next morning, I decided not to use it for 24 hours. I felt a sense of calm that day, which led to my not using it for one week. One week ended up becoming 60 days in total without my smartphone.

Here are some advantages I noticed in this challenge.

—You’ll become “bored”

Without my phone, I became bored, but my mind went through all kinds of topics. Boredom（无聊) is a perfect way to create new ideas on a business or project. When you are bored, you allow your mind to relax to reach all possibilities.

—You’ll be able to reduce your “work” hours

A survey found that adults checked their smartphones 85 times a day, or once every 10 minutes. As I learned in my challenge, by not having my smartphone, I fell into deep work more easily, so I completed my tasks in a shorter time.

—You’ll improve your mental health

Without my phone, I avoided reading negative (负面的) news and comments. While that helped make a big improvement in my mental health, the biggest reason for it was truly communicating with people. It brought me more connections with humans in the real world. I went to more dinners with friends and asked more questions to strangers.

7 . There are many ways to help improve your health like eating healthy food, talking exercise and getting medical help. But the easiest and cheapest way to improve your health is just to sleep eight hours or more every night.

The problem with sleep is that more and more people in the world are not sleeping enough. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over half the people in the world may be sleep-deprived (睡眠不足). Having less sleep not only makes people feel tired but also causes accidents. In the United States alone, sleepy drivers cause at least 100,00 traffic accidents a year. Also sleep problems can cause medical problems such as high blood pressure (血压).

Why are so many people sleep-deprived? Part of the reasons may be cultural. In the American culture, people put a higher value on work than on sleep. In fact, people who sleep a lot are usually seen as “lazy”. Also, you can sometimes hear some people say proudly that they only sleep four or five hours a night. It seems that the less you sleep, the more work you’ll do.

How do we teach these people to learn the value of sleep? Perhaps they may listen to the advice of Dr. James Maas, an expert in sleep. He says, “Sleep is like a credit (信用) card. When you sleep less, you are only borrowing time. You always have to pay it back.”

For those who value work more than sleep, they should listen to what a famous person once said, “Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the night. That is a foolish idea which is held by people who have no imagination. You will be able to do more.”

8 . Many of us eat to satisfy our need for delicious food. But because of the NCP (新型冠状病毒肺炎), many Chinese people are changing their eating habits.

Because of busy work, ordering simple and quick meals online is common for many young people in China. Zhang Yuan, a 30-year-old woman from Dalian, was one of them. She usually ate in the office and seldom cooked at home. But during the NCP outbreak, staying at home for a long time has changed her eating habit. Now, she can cook for herself. “Cooking by myself sometimes needs more time, but it helps me have a healthy diet,” Zhang told China Daily.

Instead of eating at fast food chains (连锁店) or restaurants, cooking at home has become a new trend. “Some people even regard sharing food videos on their WeChat as a special way to say hello to each other when face-to-face dinner is not possible,” noted China Daily.

In addition to cooking at home, many people also eat separately and change the habit of using serving chopsticks and spoons.

In China, eating together has been a kind of habit for centuries. For Chinese people, eating one’s own dish would be considered rude. They usually share several dishes and sometimes share utensils (餐具) to show their respect and closeness. Though it seems polite, it’s really risky (有风险的). According to World Health Organization, foodbome (食物传播的) diseases are quite common, and saliva (唾液) is one of the most common ways for them to spread. So many cities in China, including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, have already called on people to order separate meals.

Though these habits formed the pandemic (大流行), they are good for people’s health and safety. So we should keep them from now on.