Digital Nomads (游牧人)
How would you like to answer your work emails from a beachfront café in Thailand or a coffee shop in Portugal? If that appeals to you, being a digital nomad might be for you. Digital nomads can literally work from anywhere as their jobs are online. Digital nomads rely on portable devices with wireless Internet capabilities such as laptops, tablets and smartphones. Typically, they work from coffee shops, restaurants, co-working spaces, apartments or internet cafés — places with an Internet connection.
Worldwide, statistics show the number of digital nomads hit 35 million in 2021. So what is it that makes the lifestyle of digital nomads so fascinating? First and foremost, digital nomads get to live in different countries and cultures while they work, providing them with opportunities to have adventures and experience new things. These folks have also found the most flexible means of online incomes, allowing them to head out at a moment’ notice and go where they please. “I’m free,” says Nimisha Walji, “I can go where the wind takes me and live any place I choose! If I feel like a change, I can pursue that in a matter of days, sometimes hours.”
You may think that being a digital nomad is all sunshine and rainbows. It is not necessarily so. Job finding is one of the hardest tasks for the digital nomad, given that they have no permanent home, no office address, and no one knows them. To apply for a job, they need to find the employer and persuade him to hire them. Most of the employers hire from their own city, and that’s why it’s so hard for a nomad to find a job. Access to stable Wi-Fi and adequate workspace can be difficult. If someone struggles to stay focused at home, there can’t be a worse place than a fascinating holiday location. Few people can manage to be productive faced with the temptations and distractions. It seems that living the life of a digital nomad isn’t for everyone.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________假设你是美国一所中学的学生Sam，最近你班要召开一次主题为“不让霸凌成为青春的一道疤”的班会。根据主题内容，写一篇发言稿（所给材料可供参考）。
| Here are the national statistics about bullying in the USA About 20% of students aged 12-18 experienced bullying nationwide. Students aged 12-18 who reported bullied said they thought those who bullied them: -- had the ability to influence other students’ perception of them (56%). -- were physically stronger or larger (40%). -- had more money (31%). | |
| Word box: bully v/n 恐吓；伤害；/ 恃强凌弱者 | |
Ignoring Your Biggest Regrets
Regrets, people often feel, are to be avoided. Mistakes may be unavoidable, but they should be kept to a minimum. And when they do occur, the best course of action is to ignore them as inevitable steps on our journey. That seems logical, at least until you consider that one of the criteria for mental illness is an inability to feel regret. As author Kathryn Schulz argues, “If you want to be fully functional, and fully human, and fully humane, I think you need to learn to live not without regret, but with it.” Counterintuitively, she and other experts argue feeling regret is essential for living your best life. No one is saying, of course, that getting trapped in your past mistakes is a good idea. But neither is a “no regrets and never look back” mentality.
Regret forces us to engage in a reflective analysis to understand why we thought or acted the way we did and makes us try things differently in the future. If you keep telling yourself “no regrets,” then learning isn’t going to happen. Besides, hiding from regret doesn’t make it hurt less. Action does. Action, recent research shows, is the best way to make regret hurt less. So if you’re troubled by your failure to travel when you were young, science suggests you consciously plan an adventurous trip now that you’re older and wiser. Upset about a broken friendship? Act to try to repair it.
Acknowledging our mistakes, rather than ignoring them, reminds us that we are valuable and worthy despite our faults. That sort of acceptance is the basis both of real self-confidence and of true kindness. As Schulz sums up in her talk: “Regret doesn’t remind us that we did badly. It reminds us we know we can do better.”
Getting rid of dirt, in the opinion of most people, is a good thing. However, the attitudes to dirt are always changing.
In the early 16th century, people thought that dirt on the skin was a means to block out disease, and washing off dirt with hot water could open up the skin and let ills in. A particular danger was thought to lie in public baths. By 1538, the French king had closed the bath houses in his kingdom. The king of England did something similar in 1546. Thus began a long time when the rich and the poor in Europe lived with dirt in a friendly way. France’s Henry IV was famously dirty. Upon learning that a nobleman had taken a bath, the king ordered that, to avoid the attack of disease, the nobleman should not go out.
Though the belief above was long-lived, dirt has no longer been regarded as a nice neighbour ever since the 18th century. Scientifically speaking, cleaning away dirt is good to health. Clean water supply and hand washing are practical means of preventing disease. Yet, it seems that standards of cleanliness have moved beyond science since World War II. Advertisements repeatedly sell the idea; clothes need to be whiter than white, cloths ever softer, surfaces to shine. Has the hate for dirt, however, gone too far?
Attitudes to dirt still differ hugely nowadays. Many first-time parents nervously try to warn their children off touching dirt, which might be responsible for the spread of disease. On the contrary, Mary Ruebush, an American immunologist(免疫学家) , encourages children to play in the dirt to build up a strong immune system. And the latter position is gaining some ground.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Humans Evolved to Be Lonely
Loneliness hurts and, over time, it can put the body into a state that increases our risk of everything from heart attack to diabetes and cancer. So, evolutionarily speaking, why do we experience it? Stephanie Cacioppo, a neuroscientist, says that countless studies have helped researchers formulate a holistic(全面的) purpose for loneliness.
Being social had its downsides even back then—competition for food, for example, or contribution to the spread of pathogens(病原体). But scientists think we evolved to feel loneliness because it was more important to work with one another to accomplish tasks and protect everyone. “The pain of loneliness drove us to renew the social structure so we could survive and promote key features like trust, cooperation and collective action,” explains Cacioppo.
She says that, for years, researchers thought of loneliness as a “disease with no compensatory features”.But now, they’re realizing that it’s more of a biological hunger signal that reminds us when it’s time to reconnect with those around us to promote our short-term survival. If the outcomes of loncliness were entirely negative, it would no longer be a part of our DNA. “Hunger and thirst protect our physical body while loneliness protects our social body,” says Cacioppo.
Interestingly, while loneliness sends a signal to the brain that it’s time for connection, at the same time it’s also looking for danger. This “contradictory signal,” according to Cacioppo, reminds us to be careful of whether the people we are connecting with are enemies or friends. She calls this need to be watchful even as we’re socializing a “self-protection mechanism.” That means in situations where you feel lonely even when surrounded by others, you’re subconsciously thinking that this crowd might not be a good evolutionary fit for your survival.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Learning to write effectively
I’ve been writing for most of my life. The book Writing Without Teachers introduced me to one distinction and one practice that has helped my writing processes tremendously. The distinction is between the creative mind and the critical mind. While you need to employ both to get to a finished result, they cannot work in parallel no matter how much we might like to think so.
Trying to criticize writing on the fly is possibly the single greatest barrier to writing that most of us encounter. If you are listening to that 5th grade English teacher correct your grammar while you are trying to capture a fleeting(lasting only a short time)thought , the thought will die. If you capture the fleeting thought and simply share it with the world in raw form, no one is likely to understand.
The practice that can help you past your learned bad habits of trying to edit as you write is what Elbow calls “free writing.” In free writing, the objective is to get words down on paper non-stop, usually for 15-20 minutes. No stopping, no going back, no criticizing. The goal is to get the words flowing. As the words begin to flow, the ideas will come from the shadows and let themselves be captured on your notepad or your screen.
Now you have raw materials that you can begin to work with using the critical mind that you’ve persuaded to sit on the side and watch quietly. Most likely, you will believe that this will take more time than you actually have and you will end up staring blankly at the pages as the deadline draws near.
Instead of staring at a blank, start filling it with words no matter how bad. Halfway through your available time, stop and rework your raw writing into something closer to finished product. Move back and forth until you run out of time and the final result will most likely be far better than your current practices.
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Should Hand Feeding Dolphins Be Encouraged?
Some tourist centers train Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins to approach beachside public sighting areas or boats by hand-feeding them small amounts of fish every day. Because hand-fed males aggressively attack each other over the food, putting themselves and nearby humans in danger, tourist centers focus their hand feeding only on female dolphins, says Valerie Senigaglia at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia
But recent studies have shown that only 38% of the calves (崽) of hand-fed wild dolphins survive to three years of age, which is much lower than the average 77% survival rate for wild calves in general. To better understand why, Senigaglia and her colleagues evaluated the social behavior of dolphins around the Bunbury coast in Western Australia. In particular, they observed the individual behavior and movement of 35 dolphins, including 13 that had been hand-fed using a small boat. They regularly followed each dolphin for periods lasting from 20 minutes to 3 hours for two years in a row for a total of 180 hours.
They found that hand-fed dolphins swam in relatively large groups, but more readily broke away from them to join different ones. In general, they created weak ties with other group members. “You can feel lonely in a room full of people and it’s the same thing for dolphins,” says Senigaglia. Free-swimming dolphins that are fed by hand become less socially involved with their peers. As a result, their calves may grow up lacking vital social skills-which could explain, at least in part, why they are twice as likely to die before reaching adulthood as wild calves generally.
No wonder animal right activists are calling on the practice of hand-feeding dolphins to be stopped.
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Fun Ways to Get a Mental Workout
Your grandfather is sitting in the living room working on a crossword puzzle on a Saturday morning. He thinks these word puzzles are fun, but he also does them for another reason — a mental workout.
The term “mental muscles” describes your brain’s ability to accomplish certain tasks. Like the muscles in your body, your brain’s “muscles” need exercise. While your brain works all the time, the work does not necessarily exercise your brain. In addition, sometimes your brain just needs time to relax and play. It is believed that brain games, like crossword puzzles, make your brain work while playing. They build your concentration by making you focus on certain skills for a long time. For example, when doing a Sudoku puzzle, you focus on organization. Other games that may improve brain power are jigsaw puzzles, mahjong and chess. They can help you to recognize patterns, solve problems and memorize information.
Games build your brain by making you think differently than you normally do. For example, crosswords use clues to help you fill in a grid with words. A crossword clue might be “a fruit with yellow skin.” Your answer must fit in the grid. The word for this clue has six boxes. To fill in those boxes, you need to answer the clue with the word “banana.” Other words in the puzzle share some of the same letters. Because of this, answers to previous clues help you find answers to other clues. Crosswords make you remember the words you know and also help you learn new words. Therefore, filling out crosswords builds vocabulary and memory.
A puzzle that is too hard isn’t any fun. So pick out something that is fun for you, and enjoy building you brain. A game that doesn’t challenge you doesn’t makes your brain work hard enough. So choose a game that will improve a skill yow are working on.
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The Achievement Gap in the United States
The achievement gap in the United States refers to the observed, persistent disparity(差异)in measures of educational performance among subgroups of U. S. students, especially groups defined by socio-economic status, race and gender. The achievement gap can be observed on a variety of measures including standardized test scores, grade point average, dropout rates, and college enrollment and completion rates.
Research into the causes of the disparity in academic achievement between students has been ongoing since 1966. Many experts argue that achievement gaps are the result of more subtle environmental factors and “opportunity gaps” in the resources available to poor versus wealthy children.
Home environments have a stronger impact on school achievement than in-school factors, in part, because children spend more time outside of school than in school. Studies have found that children in poverty whose parents provide engaging learning environments at home do not start school with the same academic readiness gaps seen among poor children generally.
In addition, the out-of-school factors influencing academic performance differ significantly between children living in poverty and children from middle-income households. Being raised in a low-income family, for example, often means having fewer educational resources at home, in addition to poor health care and nutrition.
The achievement gap has become a focal point of education reform efforts by a number of non-profit organizations and advocacy groups. Attempts to minimize the achievement gap by improving equality of access to educational opportunities have been numerous, such as multicultural education, finance equalization, and interventions to improve school testing, teacher quality and responsibility.
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