Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Orkut are now estimated to have more than 700 million users worldwide. As users can create any profile of themselves they choose, you might expect them to portray themselves in the best possible way. When putting up a profile, it would be reasonable for them to present positive images, choose classy interests, and carefully express their thoughts so as to appear more intelligent than in real life. But according to recent research, this is not the case. Far from presenting themselves in a pleasing way, most users’ profiles reflect their true personalities, and reveal both psychological and natural physical weaknesses.

Research was carried out on 250 Facebook users who filled in a personality questionnaire. Results were compared with the same people’s Facebook profiles. The survey set out to assess not only the participants’ actual personality, but their “ideal” personality--in other words, what kind of person they would be if they actually possessed all their ideal characteristics. These results were then compared with the participants’ Facebook profiles. What emerged was astonishing: far from being idealized versions of themselves, people’s online profiles roughly resemble what they were really like. Their profiles accurately reflected how agreeable, outgoing, hardworking and sociable they were in real life.

It’s not entirely clear why online profiles display users’ personalities so accurately. It could be that users want to portray themselves as they really are, or it could be that people attempt to present an ideal image of themselves but in fact fail to do so. One thing seems clear: social networking sites can in no way be considered a false online world that is idealized and removed from reality; rather, they are simply another way in which people choose to interact with each other.

Online tutoring in America

It’s a nightly dilemma (困境)in many American families: a student hits a wall doing homework, and parents are too tired, too busy or too puzzled to help.

Ordering up a tutor is becoming as easy for kids as grabbing a snack. Students can use a credit card to connect with a live tutor. Such non-stop, no-appointment-needed services can be especially helpful to students with tight budgets or little time or those in remote areas although the quality of on-demand scholastic support may be uneven, and the unstable source of tutors may not be the best for those who need continuous help. Besides, language barriers can also cause problems on sites which rely on tutors from abroad.

Prices are lower than what many skilled tutors charge in a student’s home. Parents and students say the quick homework fix can ease stress and make evenings at home more peaceful.

Whenever Peggy Bennett of Dallas tries to help her daughter, Chloe Friedman, with her eighth-grade physics and maths homework, “We’d always end up with quarrelling,” Ms Bennett says, with Chloe often objecting that the teacher did it differently.

Chloe says she doubted when her mum helped her sign up last month for an online tutoring service. But after she logged in one evening for maths help, a tutor responded within a minute.

Chloe says she was guided to figure out the answers, using text chat and an interactive “whiteboard” that displayed their writing and calculations on a screen. And that took only about ten minutes. Ms Bennett says, “That was all that she needed.”

Most sites employ moonlighting or retired teachers, college professors or professionals with tutoring experience; most offer scheduled tutoring in addition to on-demand sessions. The most common users are middle-and high-schoolers, and college students who take basic courses.

Your ship is wrecked, and you and two other people survive on a life raft, drifting in the middle of the ocean. No food, no water, no hope of rescue. If one of them is eaten, there is a chance that the other two will survive. Otherwise, all three will starve to death.

Jenny Carter an NHS coordinator is an “extreme night owl,” one of an estimated 8.2% of the population whose natural inclination(倾向)is to fall asleep well after midnight. Left to her own devices, she’d prefer to go to bed around 3 a.m. and wake up about noon.

Why do night owls exist? There is no single     1     accepted theory, but evolutionary biologists think that communities with more variation in chronotypes(睡眠类型)may have been more likely to survive.

Another theory is that variation is     2     how genetics works. Right from birth, our personal biological clocks are already     3    . Genetics establishes a person’s chronotype. Colin Espie, professor of sleep medicine at the University of Oxford, says this     4     differences in hair eye and skin color or height.

Natural night owls are     5     different from insomniacs or people who stay up until the early hours because of family or work circumstances. Being a night owl isn’t a problem.

But this isn’t always well understood. Jessica Batchelor is a medical writer who feels most productive at 11 p.m. “I can’t tell anyone when I went to sleep, woke up, showered or ate a meal without being     6    ,” she says “I struggle with feelings of guilt and shame.”

This mentality is rooted in our agrarian(耕地的)past when farm work had to begin at dawn.

Our culture mistakenly associates sleeping little and rising early with     7    . It is often extolled(颂扬)as a habit of successful people: for instance in the     8     with Margaret Thatcher’s four-hour rest, or articles about “sleepless-elite” CEOs who start their days with a 4 a.m. jog.

Actually, there is nothing wrong with staying up late as long as you’re getting a good amount of sleep every night;     9    , early risers have no special biological advantage. What research has not disproved, however, is that morning people tend to get more done.

The productivity expert Laura Vanderkam     10     that people should consider switching their schedule not because it’s necessarily better but because it’s practical.

Waking up earlier to work out, make headway on a creative project or enjoy a stress-free cup of coffee can help make it easier to accomplish more without sacrificing time for yourself.

10 . Forty-five minutes was considered an appropriate amount of time to supply 12-year-old me — and 20 other teenagers — with enough information about eating disorders to last us through high school. A documentary shown on a dusty VHS tape that had obviously been in use since the early 2000s, about two girls suffering from anorexia and bulimia, had been my only source for eating disorder awareness for five years. No reflection time followed, no discussion was started, and no questions were asked.

Flash forward five years I still know nothing. It wasn’t until I was 16 that I learned, via TikTok, that my daily diet of 1,000 calories is barely enough for a two-year-old, let alone a developing teenager. Despite being educated in America’s sixth best county in education, I only had a single image of what an eating disorder looked like: a skin-and-bones teenage girl with sunken eyes. Schools are clearly ill-equipped to educate students on eating disorders and how they can prevent them.

Teenagers have failed to learn about the most common eating disorder in the country because it isn’t taught in many school curriculum: binge eating disorder (暴食症). It is more common than anorexia, affecting 2.8 million Americans, including 1.2 percent of all adolescents. Additionally, it’s reported that males make up 40 percent of those with binge eating disorder, which contradicts the existing opinion that only women are affected by eating disorders.

Instead of learning about eating disorders, my junior health class taught me how to count my calories. According to registered dietitian Christy Harrison, “disordered eating patterns began with calorie counting.” Despite this, health classes across the country continue to require students to track their daily calorie intake.

We need a developed and well-informed eating disorder curriculum. After all, the damage of a seemingly harmless 45-minute video may last someone a lifetime.