Machines work well at a constant speed ― and the faster the better. Whether they are spinning cotton     1     dealing with numbers, regular, repetitive actions are what they excel at.

Increasingly, our world is being designed by machines and for machines. We adapt to machines and hold ourselves to their standards: People     2     (judge) by the speed at which they respond, not the quality of their response. “Always on” becomes something to take pride     3    . When I ask people     4     they are doing, they almost always answer “busy”. Ticking things off the “to do” list becomes     5     means of defining ourselves.     6     (occupy) if not with work then with family or our social networks, most of us feel exhausted.

A few years ago, I became very interested in what it meant     7     (pause). I started to notice where pauses show up in my own work and life. For example, I realized when I was writing, a short walk was a(n)     8     (effective) way to focus than concentrating harder. The small walk acted as a pause,     9     (enable) me to rest, reflect or refresh, appreciate and break a block in my     10     (creative). I realized that pause is not nothing!

A minute eating ice-cream is not the same as a minute doing push-ups. Even time itself isn’t a uniform raw material ― as the physics of Einstein shows.

4 . The rise of social media has revolutionized human connectivity, but its overuse can make people feel increasingly unhappy and isolated.     1    

One significant problem with frequent social media use is comparing ourselves to others. Many individuals experience “Facebook envy”.     2     Gradually, it may result in self-doubt. To boost self-confidence, it is essential to reduce time on others’profiles, and focus on self-reflection.

Social media can also make it hard to form real friendships. Constant online interaction may make us feel lonely and left out when we see others having fun online. Stina Sanders, a former model, explained “When I see my friend’s photos of a party I didn’t go to, it can make me feel quite lonely and anxious”.     3    

Quality sleep is essential for mental health, but excessive phone use before bedtime can severely disturb it. The anxiety and envy induced by social media content can keep our brains alert, making it challenging to fall asleep.     4     Avoiding the phone for at least 40 minutes to an hour before bed can improve sleep.

“     5     However, it can also change the way we recall our life. If we direct all of our attention trying to take the perfect photo, less will be available to enjoy other aspects of the experience in real time,” said Dr. Bono. To decrease these effects, practicing self-discipline and limiting phone use can help us to stay focused and clear-minded.

If you feel like social media is beginning to affect you, why not consider allocating less social media time? The slight change can do you a lot of good.

5 . In 1970s, a psychologist named J. P. Guilford conducted a famous study of creativity known as the nine-dot puzzle (九点谜题). He challenged research subjects to connect all nine dots using just four straight lines without lifting their pencils from the page. All the participants limited the possible solutions to those within the imaginary square. Only 20 percent managed to break out of the confinement (束缚) and continue their lines in the white space surrounding the dots.

The fact that 80 percent of the participants were effectively blinded by the boundaries of the square led Guilford to jump to the sweeping conclusion that creativity requires you to go outside the box. The idea went viral. Overnight, it seemed that creativity experts everywhere were teaching managers how to think outside the box. The concept enjoyed such strong popularity that no one bothered to check the facts. No one, that is, before two different research teams-Clarke Burnham with Kenneth Davis, and Joseph Alba with Robert Weisberg-ran another experiment.

Both teams followed the same way of dividing participants into two groups. The first group was given the same instructions as the participants in Guilford’s experiment. The second group was told that the solution required the lines to be drawn outside the imaginary box. Guess what? Only 25 percent solved the puzzle. In statistical terms, this 5 percent improvement is insignificant as this could be called sampling error.

Let’s look a little more closely at the surprising result. Solving this problem requires people to literally think outside the box. Yet participants’ performance was not improved even when they were given specific instructions to do so. That is, direct and clear instructions to think outside the box did not help. That this advice is useless should effectively have killed off the much widely spread — and therefore, much more dangerous — metaphor (比喻) that out-of-the-box thinking boosts creativity. After all, with one simple yet brilliant experiment, researchers had proven that the conceptual link between thinking outside the box and creativity was a misunderstanding.

6 . Handing your baby a phone or a tablet to play with may seem like a harmless solution when you’re busy, but it could actually affect their development, a new study has found.

Having anywhere from one to four hours of screen time per day at age l is linked with higher risks of developmental delays in communication skills, fine motor skills, personal and social skills,and problem-solving skills by age 2, according to a study of 7,097 children published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. The study measured how many hours children used screens per day at age 1 and how they performed in these developmental domains (领域) at ages 2 and 4. Both measures were according to the mothers’ self-reports.

By age 2, those who had had up to four hours of screen time per day were up to 3 times more likely to experience developmental delays in communication and problem-solving skills. Those who had spent four or more hours with screens were 4.78 times more likely to have underdeveloped communication skills,1.74 times more likely to have poor performances in fine motor skills and two times more likely to have underdeveloped personal and social skills by age2. By age 4, risk remained only in the communication and problem-solving categories.

“One of the areas that is relatively understudied in the whole screen time literature is looking at the impacts of screen exposure on very young kids, especially when screens are introduced to babies,” said Dr. John Hutton, an associate professor of general and community pediatrics (儿科) at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. “It’s definitely a global concern, and I think the findings should really be applied to other countries as well.”

“Technology use can take time away from interpersonal relationships that develop social skills since real people are more multidimensional than characters on a screen.” Hutton added. Looking at people’s faces is when our brains turn on to figure out how to interact with them.

9 . “Shuan Q” is a meme(网络流行语)which can be used as a popular way to say “I’m speechless” with a matching emoji(表情包)at ached behind. No-one can deny the power of the Internet. Some believe it makes language weaker but some see a brighter side, believing it makes online communication easier between strangers.

An elementary school teacher in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, says that the evolution of Internet slang is not all fun and carefree. From his daily observations, he believes the “geographic boundary” between Internet slang and formal language is disappearing. On many occasions, the composition she has received from pupil have been flooded with abbreviated slangs(网络梗).

During last year’s Two Sessions, several representatives put forward proposals such as “regulating online language” and “banning vulgar(粗俗)words”, specifically to address this issue, expressing the need to reduce online language misuse and strengthen the protection of Chinese.

However, many experts and scholars of linguistics and communication including Feng Zhiwei disagree. Feng, believes that Internet language is a natural product of the dynamic development of language, and it is not necessary to ban it.

10 . “Reduce, reuse, and recycle”, this familiar environmentalist slogan tells us how to reduce the amount of rubbish that ends up in landfills and waterways. The concept is being used to deal with one possibly dangerous form of waste — electronic junk (电子垃圾), such as old computers, cell phones, and televisions. But this process for managing e-waste may be used in an unscrupulous (肆无忌惮的) way more often than not used, a recent report suggests.

“A lot of these materials are being sent to developing nations under the excuse of reuse — to bridge the digital divide (消除数字鸿沟),” said Richard Gutierrez, a policy researcher.

One of the problems is that no one proves whether these old machines work before they hit the seaways. Because of this, the report says, e-waste is a growing problem in Lagos, Nigeria, and elsewhere in the developing world. Much of the waste ends up being thrown away along rivers and roads. Often it’s picked apart by poor people, who may face dangerous exposure to poisonous chemicals in the equipment.

Businessmen also pay workers a little money to get back materials such as gold and copper. This low-tech recovery process could expose workers and the local environment to many dangerous materials used to build electronics. According to Gutierrez, this shadow economy exists because the excuse of recycling and reusing electronics gives businessmen “a green passport” to ship waste around the globe. “Developing nations must take upon some of the responsibility themselves,” Gutierrez said. But, he added, “A greater portion of this responsibility should fall on the exporting state (出口国).”

China, for example, has become a dumping place for large amounts of e-waste. The nation is beginning to take action to stop the flow of dangerous materials across its borders. The Chinese government, after many years of denial (拒绝) is finally beginning to take the lead.