1 . Cultural Differences of Teenagers

Knowing the cultural differences between yourself and others of your age can help you understand friends who are of a different race or culture.     1     You’ll also know if you arc misunderstanding your friend’s behaviour when it seems like he/she is being rude. The major differences between Asian and American teenagers lie in the following aspects:

Family

Family comes first in the Asian culture.     2     While Asian families have a greater dependence on each other, American families encourage their children and teenagers to be independent.

Friendship

Some Asian teens generally prefer having a small group of life-long friends. They are committed and loyal to their friends. Americans often prefer a larger group of friends. There might be less commitment to keeping friends for life because of their bigger pool of possible friendships.

Working Relationships

If you are working on a group project with teens from China or other Asian countries, they might focus on developing a good relationship with you.     3     Developing relationships with their group members might come second.

    4    

In China and many other Asian countries, making direct eye contact is considered rude and disrespectful. However, in America and some European countries, it is not only seen as appropriate but also necessary because it means the person is paying attention. In Asian culture people are usually more comfortable with less personal space than Americans arc. A touch on the shoulder or an arm is common for Asians even if you don’t know one another.

3 . It’s perhaps the world’s most famous underwater attraction that remained in film and in legend: the Titanic. But now experts say the ocean liner, once a wonder of the high seas, is falling to pieces.

Capt. Alfred McLaren, the scientist who in July led the most recent expedition to the ship’s underwater grave, said his team saw clear signs of the accelerating damage of the wreck (残骸). There was damage likely caused by rust and sea life, and the captain’s cabin had collapsed.

“I was absolutely astonished,” McLaren said.

Worse still, the fallen mast (桅杆) that crushed the ship’s deck is believed by many to be the result of an unapproved salvage (打捞) operation. “It was almost depressing to see how quickly she was getting worse,” McLaren says. “I would be really surprised if there’s very much standing up from the bottom, two decades from now.”

Ed Kamuda, who runs the Titanic Historical Society in Springfield, Mass., says adventure tourists — who pay $36,000 each to visit the wreck — are also contributing to the destruction of it.

“This is something I expected. I just didn’t expect it to happen so quickly,” Kamuda said. “People are going down just as an ego trip to say ‘I was there.’ All this takes a fare on the ship.”

The Titanic has sat at the bottom of the Atlantic since it sank after hitting an iceberg on its maiden voyage on April 14, 1912. More than 1,500 people died that night. The ship came to rest at the bottom of the freezing North Atlantic, more than 2 miles beneath the waves. The wreck was discovered in 1985, and since then it has been repeatedly visited by treasure hunters.

But still some scientists say those divers, and other thrill seekers are not necessarily to blame for the Titanic’s current problems.

Capt. Craig McLean of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration went on an expedition to the Titanic in June as part of a government study that is monitoring the condition of the ship. He says it’s unclear what part of the damage is from Mother Nature and which is from human nature.

“It’s too early and there isn’t enough evidence to put our fingers on anything,” McLean said.

Regardless, most agree there’s little that can be done for this most famous of wrecks. And soon, the mighty Titanic could well be lost again.

4 . People tend to cut corners and allow trusted workmates to do their work when working as a team. Now researchers have found that the same thing happens when humans work with robots.

Dietlind Cymek at the Technical University of Berlin in Germany and her colleagues designed an experiment to test whether humans would put in less effort when they think that their personal contribution to a task won’t be noticed.

In the experiment, the researchers asked a group of 42 people to examine images of circuit boards (电路板) for errors using a computer that tracked their work. Half of them looked at boards that had already been checked by a robot, and half were told that they were the only ones responsible for quality control.

People working in partnership with the robot caught fewer errors, after they had already seen that the robot had successfully flagged lots of errors.

The researchers say such teamwork could lead to a drop in motivation if individual effort isn’t visible and warn that there could be safety risks if teams of people and robots work on safety-related tasks in the same way.

Kathleen Richardson at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, says it is fine to use robots as long as they are effective, but that they should be considered tools rather than workmates or team members. “It just strikes me that workers think when a tool can do something, they let it,” says Richardson.

This is probably down to poor management style, in which individual work isn’t recognised. “I bet you if there was an motivation behind it, and if the humans could get extra pay for spotting errors in the circuit boards, then they’d put a bit more effort into it,” she adds.

6 . Carried by the wind, dust particles (微粒) from places such as the Sahara Desert can float halfway around the world before settling to the ground. As the plastics abandoned by humans break down into tiny pieces in the environment, they, too, travel through the atmosphere. Now scientists are a step closer to understanding how these microplastics travel in the globe — both locally and on long-distance flights.

Researchers spent more than a year collecting microplastics from 11 national parks and wilderness areas in the western U.S. They examined the particles that settled on dry days and those that fell along with rain or snow. In addition to making clear how microplastics move around, the results, published on Thursday in Science, reveal the seriousness of the problem: more than 1 million kilograms of microplastics — the weight of 120 million to 300 million plastic water bottles — fall on protected lands in the country’s western region each year.

The new findings add to scientists’ concern over microplastic pollution’s potential impacts on the environment and human health. “We’re not supposed to breathe in this material,” says Steve Allen, a microplastics researcher at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, who was not involved in the new study. “Plastics in the environment “carry all sorts of pesticides (农药), heavy metals and all the other chemicals that we’ve made over time,” he adds. “They’re going to carry them directly into our lungs.”

Since their discovery in oceans in the 1970s, microplastics — which can be as large as a grain of rice or smaller than a particle of dust — have been found nearly everywhere researchers have looked: in cities, in Arctic snow, on remote mountaintops. Their presence in areas distant from the place where human live has pointed to them being carried by winds.

7 . Teenagers are spending more money than ever. Just last year, 31.6 million teens spent 155 billion, according to the North-brook, Illinois-based market research group Teenage Research Unlimited.     1    

Shocked at how much money kids spend? Maybe you haven’t checked the price tags lately on some of the younger generation’s must-haves. To some, such luxurious spending on the changeable young might seem unbearable.     2     Timothy Marshall, an associate professor of developmental psychology at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, analyzed the widespread phenomenon after some research.

One factor is surely the sheer power of marketing through mass media. Teenagers are exposed to an estimated 3,000 advertisements each day. Combine the ads with programming itself, like the fashion-, music- and skin-filled shows on MTV, and you’ve got a large number of messages telling kids what they should own if they want to fit in.

Many working parents probably compensate by spending money on their kids.     3     But also, spending money is often more convenient in our fast-paced society than going to baseball games or other activities.

For many families, of course, keeping up with their children’s costly demands for designer clothing, CDs, and concert tickets is a financial impossibility. Marshall says, even for those families who can afford such luxurious spending, striking a compromise between spoiling the kids and denying them is tricky, but possible.

    4     Instead of just giving children the toys or clothing they desire, give them an allowance and show them how they can save up for whatever they want. And don’t be afraid to just say no. Most of the parents are working nine-to-five or even working overtime to make ends meet. Therefore, shoulder the responsibility of instructing the kids to tell right from wrong, and developing healthy habits of spending money is of great importance.     5    

8 . A person with a photographic memory could remember every detail of a picture, a book or an event many years later, but no one has proved that there are people who really have photographic memories. Yet, there are some people who do have amazing memories. For example, Daniel Tammet can remember the first 22,514 digits of pi (π) and Stephen Wiltshire can draw a detailed picture of a city from memory after flying over it in a helicopter. They are both good at remembering particular things for a limited time. As most of us do not have amazing memories like them, when memorising detailed learning materials, we simply need to focus on the important ideas and be curious about what we learn. Asking questions about what we learn also helps with memorisation. Another effective technique to remember things is to group similar ideas or information together so that they can be easily connected to things that are already known.

9 . Studying and passing your classes can be difficult, and finding effective ways to study may seem impossible.     1    . If you are looking for a way to improve your studying, try integrating daily exercise into your routine.

There are so many activities you can do for aerobic exercise. You can swim, jump rope, or hike with a heavy backpack.     2    . Any aerobic activity should be performed for at least 10 minutes at a time to gain brain-boosting benefits.

Sit down and list all your commitments, activities, and study hours. Don’t forget to list sleep times, meal times, and time for other things, like showering. Look for places where you can put in exercise. Or you can break up exercises into smaller parts, such as three 10-minute fast walks.

Consistent daily workouts are more effective than trying to get 150 minutes of physical activity in on the weekend.     4    . In that case, the consistent physical activity will boost your brain during the week, closer to when you study.

    5    . Therefore, try not to make the physical activity a stressful part of your day. You can listen to music while exercising. Numerous studies have linked music to stress relief and the reduction of anxiety. Or you can exercise with a friend. This can do two things at once: get physical activity into your day while letting you socialize.

10 . A few years ago, I stood underneath a red overhanging cliff (悬崖) near my husband’s hometown, Carbondale, Colo. I was tied in, ready to climb.

Just as I was about to climb, nerves in my body said hello. That’s not good for any athlete.

Desperate, I painted a coat of confidence on my inner walls of doubt.

“You can do this,” I told myself determinedly. “If you believe, success is certain.”

I visualized myself at the top, celebrating.

It didn’t work. I fell near the top. Defeated, I lowered to the ground and realized, powerfully, that the desire to climb the route had kept me from doing it. My self worth was linked at that moment to my success or failure, and that set off a chain reaction: unnatural desire, pressure, performance anxiety, expectation, a mind fixed on the top but a body struggling below, bad decision-making, irregular movement, distraction, disappointment. All in that order, too.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I told myself that on my next attempt, success or failure was irrelevant. “Make one move at a time. That’s all.” I gave myself a pass from whatever would happen. Case closed.

It worked. I reached the top.

That moment got me thinking, and then researching. At some point, I described this experience for myself in terms of simple mathematics: When I added (determination, courage, self-confidence, desire), I failed. When I took away (the desire for success), my body moved with greater naturalness. I improved. I enjoyed it more as well, which, as an athlete of 30 years, I didn’t think was possible.

I discovered the power of subtraction (减法).

The French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote one of my favorite books Wind, Sand and Stars. In it, I found one of the smartest lines ever written on the human condition: “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add but when there is nothing left to take away.”