4 . When children do something wrong, parents expect an apology (道歉). Children often try to read their parents’ mind or butter up (奉承) their parents by saying, “I’m sorry.” Even though they did not do anything wrong, they will act in that way because they are scared to make their parents angry. Children always look timid (胆小的) because they have been anxious or nervous about being punished by parents.

When parents force them to apologize, they will lose the opportunity to think by themselves why they should apologize or what was wrong. So, how can we make them understand properly what was wrong?

If parents never give children a chance and say something like, “That’ s not good” or “Say   you’re sorry”, children cannot learn to reflect their behavior. So, the first thing that parents should do is listening to their children, asking questions such as what happened, why they did it. Once children have their parents’ attention and feel at ease, they can easily accept their parents’ words.

Children do not have enough skills to tell good or bad things, therefore, it is necessary for   parents to teach them what was wrong. When parents explain what was wrong to children, short   and simple words should be used as much as possible. Moreover, it would be more effective to tell children what kind of behavior makes parents feel a certain way. For example, it would be good to express mom’s feelings with something like “When you hit me, mommy will get hurt.” “When you call me stupid, I feel sad.”

In this way, children can understand that they hurt mom or they make her sad, therefore, they will become able to apologize naturally. That would be more understandable for children why their behavior was wrong than being scolded by parents something like “Hitting is not good!” “You cannot say stupid to someone else.”

Many people believe that children are too young to understand what parents say, however, children actually can understand parents’ feelings if parents use simple words and speak calmly. Parents should avoid speaking one-sidedly and always try to listen to children. Talking to each other would be the best way.

5 . Be a Good Tourist

Tourism can be both good and bad. Yes, it brings in money for the local economy and creates lots of jobs for locals, but it may also bring some problems.

    1     Tourists have used paint, rocks, or even keys to write on the Luxor Temple in Egypt, the Colosseum in Rome, Stonehenge in the UK and many, many other places.     2     If you want to leave a mark on the world, do it by changing someone’s life with kindness and love.

Another big problem in some places has been tourists disturbing (打扰) the local people and life.     3     For example, Chiang Mai University in Thailand and Yonsei University in South Korea have great numbers of tourists visiting their campuses and walking through their libraries and other public areas, taking pictures of students, and disturbing their studies.     4     Some tourists love to party there late into the night, making it difficult for locals to sleep. I have three words for tourists like this: please be considerate. Have fun in a way that does not disturb others.

The number of problems from tourists is endless. The only way to solve the problem of the terrible tourist is to make sure that you are not one!     5    

7 . Taking a trip to the grocery store with an empty belly is a risky business, as anyone who ever went to the market on an empty stomach and exited with a cart (手推车) full of chips and cookies can prove. We wonder how our brain works when making bigger decisions. A study conducted by researchers from the University of Dundee shows why we may want to have a small bite before making a big decision.

Benjamin Vincent from the University of Dundee’s Psychology department and his co-author Jordan Skyrnka tested 50 people two times: once when they followed their normal eating patterns and once when they did not eat anything during the day. Using three different types of rewards (food, money, and song downloads), the team discovered that when people were hungry they would choose a smaller reward immediately rather than a larger one in the future. In fact, the team noted that when presented with the option of receiving the reward now versus (与……相对) double the award at some point in the future, participants would usually volunteer to wait for 35 days to earn a double bonus, but when they were hungry, they said they would only wait three days.

“We wanted to know whether being in a state of hunger had a specific effect on how you make decisions only relating to food or if it had broader effects, and this research suggests decision-making gets more present-focused when people are hungry,” Vincent said in a story about the study on the university’s website.

In an earlier study of the subject by a team at Cambridge University in England, the researchers noted that serotonin (血清素) plays an important role in the decision-making process. “Since the raw material for making serotonin — an amino acid (氨基酸) called tryptophan — only comes from diet, levels of the chemical decline between meals,” reports a piece in the Telegraph about the study. “This can lead to decision-making resistance and thoughtlessness,” say the team. “Some foods are particularly rich in the amino acid, notably chicken soup and chocolate. Red meat, dairy products, nuts, seeds, bananas, tuna, shellfish, and soy products are also good sources.” Consequently, being in a state of hunger can throw your decision-making off balance. It’s best to grab a snack and refuel before making any important choice.

9 . The time a person spends on different smartphone apps is enough to identify them from a larger group in more than one in three cases, say researchers.

Researchers analyzed smartphone data from 780 people. They fed 4,680 days of app usage data into statistical models. Each of these days was paired with one of the 780 users so that the models learned people’s daily app use patterns.

The researchers then tested whether models could identify an individual when provided with only a single day of smartphone activity that was anonymous (匿名的). The models, which were trained on only six days of app usage data per person, could identify the correct person from a day of anonymous data one third of the time.

That might not sound like much, but when the models predict who the data belonged to, it could also provide a list of the most to the least likely candidates. It was possible to view the top 10 most likely individuals that a specific day of data belonged to. Around 75% of the time, the correct user would be among the top 10 most likely individuals.

In practical terms, a law enforcement (执法机构) investigation seeking to identify a criminal’s new phone with these models could reduce a candidate pool of approximately 1,000 phones to 10 phones, with a 25% risk of missing them.

Consequently, the researchers warn that software given access to a smartphone’s standard activity logging could make a reasonable prediction about a user’s identity even when they were logged-out of their account. An identification is possible without monitoring conversations or behaviors within apps themselves.

Therefore, it is important to acknowledge that app usage data alone, which is often collected by a smartphone automatically, can potentially reveal a person’s identity. While providing new opportunities for law enforcement, it also poses risks to privacy if this type of data is misused.

10 . Years ago it was popular to speak of a generation gap, a disagreement between young people and their elders. Parents said that children did not show them proper respect and obedience (服从), while children complained that their parents did not understand them at all. What had gone wrong? Why had the generation gap suddenly appeared? Actually the generation gap has been around for a long time. Many people argue that a gap is built into the fabric (结构) of our society.

One important cause of the generation gap is the chance that young people have to choose their own ways of life. In more traditional societies, when children grow up, they are expected to live in the same area as their parents, to marry people that their parents know and agree to, and to continue the family occupation. In our society, young people often travel great distances for their education, move out of the family home at an early age, marry or live with people whom their parents have never met, and choose occupations different from those of their parents.

In our easily changing society, parents often expect their children to do better than they did：to find better jobs, to make more money, and to do all the things that they were unable to do. Often, however, the strong wish that parents have for their children is another cause of the disagreement between them. Often, they discover that they have very little in common with each other.

Finally, the speed at which changes take place in our society is another cause of the gap between the generations. In a traditional culture, elderly people are valued for their wisdom, but in our society the knowledge of a lifetime may become out of date overnight. The young and the old seem to live in two very different worlds, separated by different skills and abilities. No doubt, the generation gap will continue to be a feature for some time to come. Its causes are rooted in the freedom and changes of our society, and in the rapid speed at which society changes.