2 . In the more and more competitive service industry, it is no longer enough to promise customer satisfaction. Today, customer “delight” is what companies are trying to achieve in order to keep and increase market share.

It is accepted in the marketing industry, and confirmed by a number of researches, that customers receiving good service will promote business by telling up to 12 other people; those treated badly will tell their tales of woe to up to 20 people. Interestingly, 80 percent of people who feel their complaints are handled fairly will stay loyal.

New lineages for customer care have come when people can obtain goods and services through telephone call centers and the Internet. For example, many companies now have to invest (投资) a lot of money in information technology and staff training in order to cope with the “phone rage (愤怒)” — caused by delays in answering calls ,being cut off in mid-conversation or left waiting for long periods.

“Many people do not like talking to machines,” says Dr. Storey Senior Lecturer in Marketing at City University Business School, “Banks, for example, encourage staff at call centers to use customer data to establish instant and good relationship with them. The aim is to make the customer feel they know you and that you can trust — the sort of comfortable feelings people have during face-to-face chats with their local branch manager.”

Recommended ways of creating customer delight include: under-promising and over-delivering (saying that a repair will be come out within five hours, but getting it done within two ); replacing a faulty product immediately: throwing in a gift voucher (购物礼券) as an unexpected “thank you” to regular customers; and always returning calls, even when they are complaints.

Aiming for customer delight is all very well, but if services do not reach the high level promised, disappointment or worse will be the result. This can be eased by offering an apology and an explanation of why the service did not meet usual standards with empathy (for example, “I know how you must feel”), and possible solutions (replacement, compensation or whatever suggests best meets the case).

Airlines face some of the toughest challenges over customer care. Fierce competition has convinced them that delighting passengers is an important marketing tool, while there is great potential for customer anger over delays caused by weather, unclaimed luggage and technical problems.

For British Airways staff, a winning telephone style is considered vital in handling the large volume of calls about bookings and flight times. They are trained to answer quickly, with their name, job title and a “we are here to help” attitude. The company has invested heavily in information technology to make sure that information is available instantly on screen.

British Airways also says its customer care policies are applied within the company and staff are taught to regard each other as customers requiring the highest standards of service.

Customer care is obviously here to stay and it would be a foolish company that used slogans such as “we do as we please”. On the other hand, the more customers are promised, the greater the risk of disappointment.

5 . Kindness is seen as a true strength, and the success of civilizations relies on kindness. As parents and teachers, we also teach children from a young age to “be kind to one another” and “treat others the way you want to be treated.”

In addition to being helpful to our interpersonal relationships, research has shown that kindness can even contribute to our well-being. According to the Mayo Clinic, when we perform acts of kindness, the pleasure center in our brain is activated, releasing the stress-reducing hormone (激素). Individuals who volunteer on a regular basis report greater life satisfaction. And what is even greater is that kindness rarely stops with just one person. There can be a positive contagion (扩散) effect, where other people are motivated to be nice if they receive a random act of kindness. The question then arises: Could kindness be harmful to us when it has such clear benefits? Let’s think about this in the workplace or in an organization.

You are the new person on the team and you want to be well-liked and respected by your colleagues. You are a kind person and tell your team, “Let me know how I can help you; I’m always available to help.” Though you may truly mean this, there are unfortunately people in this world who can see your kindness as a weakness. This can lead to you being taken advantage of by others.

Let’s fast forward a year. You have been in your position now for one year, and you are working with the same team. You are noticing that your colleagues continue asking for your help over and over again. In fact, the only time they communicate with you is when they need something. You have been so helpful to your colleagues and there has rarely been any return from them.

In a very broad sense, it is advantageous to be kind to others, and your kind acts will be appreciated and, perhaps, paid forward. However, you need to be willing to say “no”. Recognize when your plate is already too full. When people ask you a favor, assess if you have the time, energy, and attention to give to them. To truly be kind, sometimes you need to be more comfortable saying “no” to others and saying “yes” to yourself.

7 . Life can be challenging for teens. They must deal with schoolwork, family life and friends at the same time to fit. Feelings of sadness, frustration and irritability are common.     1     Their negative feelings don't come and go. Instead, those intense feelings can point to a disease called depression—one that may require treatment.

It's easy to think that depressed people simply feel sad or hopeless. For many teens that may be true.     2     Some kids withdraw from friends and family. Others respond with angry outbursts. Some teens may skip school or stop eating or sleeping. Teachers, parents or even a teen's close friends may find it hard to tell whether these behaviors are just part of being a teens or signs of something truly serious.

Even depressed teens may not realize they have this problem.     3     More than three million Americans between the ages of 12 and 17 experienced depression in 2019. However, a study by researchers at Harvard and Yale universities found that half of all teens with depression don't get help until they become adults. And only one in three will have been diagnosed by their doctor.

    4     "I can only work with what you give me," Dee says, the mental-health professional in Lincoln, Neb.

Dee says, peers should also seek for signs of depression. Keep an eye on your friends, she recommends. Watch for symptoms of isolation (孤立) or hopelessness.     5     Any of these behaviors could be a symptom of depression.

Overall, knowing who—and how—to help is essential for successfully treating depression in teens.

8 . As a CEO of a startup, you get used to hearing"no".You also face an endless continuation of what feels like shocking crises, like nearly running out of cash, losing a key customer,discovering a widespread product failure, or having to shut down operations because of a global pandemic. But it turns out that these disasters can actually be good for you. In fact,I'm not sure whether you can innovate without them. Here's what all our crises have taught me.

It's good to be uncomfortable. We once had a key customer request-a battery capability that we'd never developed before. The customer made it clear that if we couldn't develop this capability, they'd be less confident in our product. We wrestled with the risks, not least of which was the potential embarrassment if we couldn't meet the customer's needs. We knew we'd face many technical problems if we tried to go into operation. Yet we decided to try to satisfy the customer, even if it wasn't obvious at first how we could get it done. A few weeks later we delivered something beyond what the customer had asked for, and we've since grown this capability into a powerful sales tool and potential revenue stream-not to mention it strengthened our relationship with the customer.

Short-term failure is good. A few years ago, our company began to expand our manufacturing output in response to a customer's need. In the process we discovered something unusual we hadn't seen during smaller-scale production. Our team dived into failure analysis, and we finally put the problem down to a single material within the battery. We'd used this material for years, but now we needed a replacement. Once we made that change,the battery quality and reliability greatly improved.

It's okay to show weakness. One of my hardest days as CEO was the day when I found out I was pregnant.We were in the middle of raising a funding round, and I had been traveling nonstop for a year. Until that day, I had assumed that my role as CEO was to display strength and confidence. With the mounting pressure I was harder on myself than I needed to be, and now I had the added stress of being pregnant.I decided to acknowledge to my team that I was breaking down. They united together and found ways to operate more smoothly and communicate more effectively, supporting me to focus my time on most pressing goals. This gave me not only the space to plan for the company’s future,but also to prepare for my own new normal: leading while becoming a first-time mother.

9 . We’ve all seen them. They were the unfamiliar and often socially awkward kids. “Who are they?” we all whispered. When we asked our parents about these kids, they replied in that slightly high-nosed tone, “Oh, they’re homeschooled.”

Despite the disgrace which still surrounds homeschooling, parents who choose this form of education are finally getting their benefits. Since 1999, the number of parents who choose to homeschool their children has grown by 75%. And although the number of children in a homeschooling environment still only account for only 4% of the total number of school-going youth, the number of parents choosing to give up “traditional” public education is growing seven times faster than the rate of children being enrolled in public schools each year.

For those who argue that these numbers do not justify the effectiveness of a homeschooled education, we might instead look to the statistics. The typical homeschooled child scores in the 65th to 89th percentile on standardized testing, while the average child in a public school environment scores somewhere around the 50th percentile. Further, homeschooled children have been shown to score consistently higher on the ACT and go on to earn higher GPAs as college students. Homeschooled children have even been shown to achieve four year degrees at much higher rates than students from public school and private schools.

The benefits don’t stop there. Whereas the average total expenditures for a child in public school is near $10,000 a year, those for the homeschooled child average is somewhere between $500 and $600 a year. So not only does homeschooling provide educational benefits, but it provides financial payoffs as well.

But what about socialization? Homeschooled children are considered by many to lack basic social skills, supporters of homeschooling claim this is not true. The National Home Education Research Institute claims that homeschooled children have actually shown to become more socially engaged individuals than their peers, showing “healthy social, psychological, and emotional development, and success into adulthood.”

So what might the future bring? Will more parents opt for homeschooling than public schooling? And what can be done to stop the apparent downfalls in public schooling?

Is It the Pig from Angry Birds?

An ancient clay pig statue has become     1     hot topic, for it looked exactly like Green Pig, a main character in Angry Birds, a popular mobile game. The artwork     2     (discover)under the ruins of an ancient settlement     3     (date)back nearly 5,000 years in south-western China.

Archaeologists(考古学家）found the tiny pig statue     4     (accident)while digging in the remains of a small ancient community outside Guanghan in Sichuan province.

The village was situated about eight kilometres outside Sanxingdui, a Bronze Age kingdom.     5     likely came into being around 5,000 years ago, and the pig statue is thought to be 3,200 years old. The pig statue has been described     6     “cute,vivid and delicate” by the researchers, who say it represents the advanced standards of the region’s prehistoric residents.

Chinese Internet users expressed their amazement. On Weibo, one person expressed his     7     (admire) excitedly: “It is the pig from Angry Birds!” Another commenter joked: “The pig in Angry Birds. You have infringed (侵犯) the copyright.”

The research team claimed     8     (find) tracks of continuous human activity on this site from 5,000 years ago to the    9     (dynasty) of Ming and Qing. Officials plan to dig 7,000 square metres of the site, which is officially named Guanghan Joint Ruins. By the end of June, they     10     (dig) 4,500 square metres.