1 . How to Read Candidates’ Body Language in an Interview

Body language matters, especially in interviews.     1     Our posture, gestures, movements or facial expressions can shape our reputations. Learning to read body language is about understanding candidates’ motives.

Reading body language during interviews can provide valuable insights into a candidate’s personality.     2     Here are some common interview body language signals that you can learn to read.

Observe extreme behaviour. A candidate’s harmless action doesn’t mean they won’t fitin well at your company. But be careful about extreme behaviours, like a person constantly checking their phone.

    3     You can read people’s body language by observing changes in their movements or posture. Imagine, for example, that a candidate suddenly starts tapping their foot. Maybe they feel the interview is taking too long. Or perhaps they’re facing an uncomfortable question.

Connect the dots.     4     For example, people may cross their arms when they’re cold. But, when you see a candidate crossing their arms, crossing their legs and balling their fists at the same time, prepare yourself for an aggressive (咄咄逼人的) answer.

Candidate experience greatly depends on an interviewer’s body language. Positive body language can make candidates relax and open up. Negative body language can spark (引发) defensive and reserved reactions.     5    

2 . Right now someone is speaking or thinking in a language that is on the verge of disappearing. Of the world’s roughly 7,000 spoken languages, one dies every 40 days, according to one estimate — languages like Babanki, spoken in Cameroon.

And some of the places where rare languages are the most concentrated are also most vulnerable (易受影响的) to climate change. Especially, linguists call global warming the final nail in the coffin (致命一击) for more than half of humanity’s language disappearing.

Let’s take Vanuatu, a South Pacific island nation, for example. It’s very small, but it has 110 languages spoken there, which is the highest density (密度) of languages in the world. It is also one of the countries most at risk of sea level rise and climate change. There, you can often see perfect hurricanes.

So if rising seas or storms force people in Vanuatu to move to Australia, what happens to the language they speak? Well, what often happens is that they aren’t necessarily displaced with the same people in their community, and also, even if they are displaced with other people in their community, they and their children will often adopt the language of Australia, the dominant language there because it’s economically advantageous for them to speak the new language, the dominant language. And their language dies.

However, there is so much culturally lost when a language dies. It is because the language carries so much local knowledge and culture.

In fact, in the 1970s, it was something like 2,000 native speakers of Hawaiian remained. But activists launched some schools where children are taught from birth, usually by kind of grandparents, and now more than 18,700 people speak it. And the same thing happened in New Zealand in the 1970s. Only 5% of young Maori people spoke the language, but now something like 25% now speak it.

5 . When it comes to travel, sometimes wandering is one of the most exciting things you can do. In a time when travellers are both more adventurous and eco-conscious than ever, it’s no surprise that there’s a wealth of new vocabulary to describe how we travel, when we travel and how the experience makes us feel. Here are eight of our favourite travel words that you may not have heard before.

We’ve kicked off a blog with the staycation, “a holiday in one’s own country”. The term first became popular in the mid-2000s, when the global financial crisis meant people had less income to spend on flash holidays and instead searched for cheaper local choices. Since 2020, the staycation is experiencing a revival (复兴). Benefits of staycations include cheaper travel costs, no spending hours in the airport and, of course, no need to worry about whether your passport expired (过期) last year.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to meet new people on your travels, you could stay at a hostel or with a host on Airbnb. Now, you can couch surf. And not just in “the staying at various friends’ houses until you find a new place to rent” sense: couch surfing is quickly becoming a hot new travel trend. Travellers can now choose to couch surf all across the world via a website which treats travel as a cultural exchange, allowing people to connect with willing hosts and crash on their sofas.

Given that single-use and climate strike were selected as the Collins 2018 and 2019 Words of the Year respectively, it’s clear that the climate crisis is very much on everybody’s mind. This desire to make more sustainable choices is also affecting the way we spend our vacation days. Ecotourism is another popular travel trend, defined as tourism that is designed to contribute to the protection of the environment. Examples of ecotourism include ditching short-haul flights, staying at eco-friendly resorts, or booking a staycation.

7 . Cultural intelligence, or cultural quotient (CQ) is the ability to manage cultural diversity.     1     It also involves understanding and appreciating cultural differences and being able to adapt to those differences.

    2     For one thing, it can help you avoid misunderstandings and communication breakdowns with people from other cultures. For another, it enables you to build strong relationships with them. Want to improve your CQ? Try the following tips.

If you’re unfamiliar with the culture, chances are you’re not going to adapt well to it. So the first practical aspect of CQ you need to improve is your CQ drive.     3     This drive is the first step towards higher CQ that may help you be open to new possibilities. All you have to do is explore the new situation you find yourself in.

After you’ve motivated yourself to get a bit more familiar with the culture, it’s time to go one step further.     4     Of course, this doesn’t mean you need to become an expert in the said culture. Simply, you should try to get to know the ways in which that culture forms and influences its people’s values and behavior.

Lastly, you need to use what you have learned and come up with a strategy that will help you improve your CQ. You can expose yourself to various media. This is a useful and easily accessible way to learn about how culture affects behavior. Again, it helps if you learn the language of the culture. This may open a whole new world for you.     5    

8 . There are close to 7, 000 languages spoken on Earth. However, it’s estimated that by the end of this century, up to 50% of them may be lost.

It’s commonly thought that majority languages tend to be valued for being useful and for promoting progress, while minority languages are seen as barriers to progress, and the value placed on them is seen mainly as sentimental (感情用事的). But is sentimentality really the only motivation for preserving language diversity?

Speakers of endangered languages often live in remote areas with unique landform. It is quite common for these languages to distinguish between hundreds more types of plants and animals than those known to modern science. For example, in Southeast Asia, some tribes have discovered the medicinal properties of over sixty-five hundred plant species. This has led to many of landmark achievements in medicine.

It was once believed that the limits of one’s language defined the limits of one’s thought. This theory, called the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis (假说), has been largely rejected in favor of the improved version, which assumes that the language we speak does not set the limits of our thoughts, but it does direct our focus in certain ways. For example, English is a tense-based language. It’s nearly impossible to talk about doing something without specifying the time — i. e. I went to the party(past), I’m going to the party(present), or I’ll go to the party (future). This differs from Chinese, where it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “I go to the party” without defining the “when”. Thus, part of the richness of language is that it allows us to organize the world in so many unique ways.

Some languages categorize the world in ways so different from our own that they are difficult to conceptualize (概念化). The United States employed native Navajo speakers to create a system of message coding during the Second World War. The Japanese were never able to break it, and the “code talkers” are often cited today as having helped decide the outcome of the war.

As we’ve already seen, minority languages are valuable for many practical reasons. In conclusion, I’d say the short answer is yes — dying languages are certainly worth saving!