3 . How good are you at maths? Some people love the challenge of algebra (代数) or enjoy working out number puzzles. Maths is all around us, from working out the bill after a meal, to calculating your daily bills. But many are confused about the moment when they have to deal with numbers and figures.     1     Also, you’re definitely not alone. Actually, our anxieties and fears over maths don’t necessarily reflect our ability.

    2     Research has found that maths teachers, who are nervous about teaching the subject, can pass on their anxiety to the pupils. Girls may be more likely to be affected than boys. The Programme for International Student Assessment found that around 31% of 15 and 16-year-olds across countries reported they got very nervous while doing maths problems, and 33% said they got tense while doing maths homework. Other students said they worried maths classes.     3    

Writing for BBC Future, David Robson says “    4    The fact that there’s a right or wrong answer — there’s no room for frightening — might make you more worried about poor performance.” And once we believe we’re not a “maths person”, we avoid solving things that we probably could do. Some experts suggest that teachers should encourage children to see a maths test as a challenge, not a threat. Ideally, we need to think positively about maths and give it a second chance.

6 . Live streaming (直播) is booming, with viewers watching nearly 4 billion hours of live stream, in the gaming sector alone, in 2020.

To stream or not to stream—that is the question with over 50 million American online creators. With over seven-in-ten people in the US using social media such as YouNow, Facebook Live, YouTube Live and Twitch, sharing a moment, routine, or an exciting experience with others has never been easier for US streamers.

For some, the motivation to live stream is for the fun of it, while others are seeking to become the next celebrity (名人).

Back in 2016, researchers studied live streams originating from the US, Japan and Germany on the platforms YouNow, Periscope and UStream. They found a wide variety of motivations driving each streamer, with a large majority using live streaming services for their own entertainment.

The main motive of US streamers was to reach a specific target group, for example, by performing music. Their goal was to improve their personal image and to cultivate their fan base. On the other hand, socializing was the main motivation for Japanese streamers. The need to communicate with their audience was especially strong. Finally, German streamers’ primary motivations were to relieve their boredom. And they’re not alone. Boredom was also a strong motivator found in both American and Japanese streamers back in 2016. Simply put, many people turned to live streaming to help pass the time and to relieve their boredom.

And then there’s a new type of live streaming where streamers don’t perform for, interact or even communicate with their viewers. Instead, the live stream broadcasts uninterrupted everyday activities such as sleeping and studying. Streamers position their cameras on their beds and go to sleep. In February 2020, Chinese streamer YuanSan broadcast his 2-day “sleep-stream” which, to his surprise, attracted 18 million viewers. In an interview, YuanSan claimed that his motivation was to relieve his boredom. “I was so bored that I decided to live stream myself sleeping. What I discovered was that viewers on the internet were even more bored than I was.”

7 . Many kids help out around the house with chores such as emptying the dishwasher, putting laundry away, and taking out the trash. In exchange, some kids get allowances or other rewards such as extra computer time.

But some people do not think that kids should get rewards for doing chores. Susie Walton, a parenting educator and family coach, believes that by rewarding kids, parents are sending a message that work isn’t worth doing unless you get something in return. “Running any kind of household is a team effort,” Susie said. “A home is a living space for everyone in the family. It’s important for kids to see that we all have responsibilities in the house, and that families decide together how they want their home to look, and how they are going to keep it looking like everyone wants it to look.”

Other people believe that getting a cash allowance or other rewards motivates kids to do chores, and it also teaches them real world lessons about how we need to work to earn money. There are also new applications that give kids points and digital gifts that can be redeemed (兑取) either online or in the real world. With the Chore Monster app, kids earn digital points by completing chores that they can turn in for real-life rewards such as extra Xbox time or a trip to the mall. “Our goal is to encourage kids to earn rewards.” says Chris Bergman, founder of Chore Monster. “Kids need positive reinforcement to help motivate them.”

What do you think? Should kids be rewarded for doing chores? Or should kids help out around their homes without getting anything in return?

Write a 200-word response. Send it to tfkasks4you@timeforkids. com. Your response may be published in a future issue of Time For Kids. Please include your grade and contact information of your parent or teacher if you want your response to be published. The deadline for responding is 18 February.

8 . While teenagers who are at risk of depression with risky behaviors — drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes and cutting classes often alert parents and teachers that serious problems are brewing, a new study finds that there’s another group of adolescents who are in nearly as much danger of experiencing the same mental symptoms.

These teens use tons of media, get insufficient sleep and have a sedentary (不爱活动的) lifestyle. Of course, that may sound like a description of every teenager on the planet. But the study wars that it is teenagers who engage in all three of these practices in the extreme that are truly in a dangerous position. Because their behaviors are not usually seen as a red flag, these young people have been called the “invisible risk” group by the study’s authors.

The study’s authors surveyed 15,395 students and analyzed nine risk behaviors, including excessive alcohol use, illegal drug use, heavy smoking and high media use. Their aim was to determine the relationship between these risk behaviors and mental health issues in teenagers. The group that scored high on all nine of the risk behaviors was most likely to show symptoms of depression; in all, nearly 15% of this group reported being depressed, compared with just 4% of the low-risk group. But the invisible group wasn’t far behind the high-risk set, with more than 13% of them exhibiting depression.

The findings caught Carli off guard. “We didn’t expect that,” he says. “The high-risk group and low-risk group are obvious, but this third group was not only unexpected. It was so distinct and so larger — nearly one third of our sample — that it became a key finding of the study.”

Carli says that one of the most significant things about his study is that it provides new early warning signs for parents, teachers and mental health-care providers. And early identifications, support and treatment for mental health issues, he says, are the best ways to keep them from turning into full-blown disorders.

10 . We all have a tendency to fake laugh, particularly when authority figures in our lives try to make a joke that just doesn’t land. Though it might feel rude not to laugh when your in-laws or boss try to say something funny, pretending to do so might not be much better. It turns out, even if you think that your forced laughing sounds genuine, people are usually pretty good at separating truly spirited belly laughs from fake ones. But how can they possible know the difference?

Well, when researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles studied the acoustic and perceptual differences between real and fake laughter, they found that some of the sounds associated with genuine laughter is “really hard to fake.” In their study, the researchers determined that subjects were only fooled by 37 percent of fake laughter.

The most prominent factor distinguishing real laughter from fake laughter is duration — or, more specifically, the number of breaths taken in in between sounds. Seeing as it takes more effort and concentration to fake a laugh as opposed to do it genuinely, people tend to pause more in between their “ha-ha’s” when they’re faking it. Evidently, that pausing is pretty noticeable.

“A fake laugh is basically an imitation of a real laugh, but produced with a slightly different set of vocal muscles controlled by a different part of our brain,” Greg Bryant, the lead UCLA researcher on the study, explained. “The result is that there are subtle features of the laugh that sound like speech, and ... people are unconsciously quite sensitive to them.”

People have also proven to be emotionally sensitive to laughter as well. “Our rains are very sensitive to the social and emotional significance of laughter,” said Carolyn McGettigan, a scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London.

McGettigan conducted a 2014 study that recorded participants’ brain responses as they listened to the same people produce genuine laughter by watching funny videos, as opposed to fake laughter. “During our study, when participants heard a laugh that was posed, they activated regions of the brain associated with mentalizing in an attempt to understand the other person’s emotional and mental state,” she said.

So, while we may understand that certain social situations sometimes require fake laughter, most of the time, our instincts and emotional intelligence are just too smart to buy into them.

According to McGettigan, that’s a good thing. “Evolutionarily speaking, it’s good to be able to detect if someone is authentically experiencing an emotion or if they’re not,” she said. “Because you don’t want to be fooled.”