1 . This question has fascinated behavioural scientists for decades: why do we give money to charity?

The explanations for charitable giving fall into three broad categories, from the purely altruisic (利他的)— I donate because I value the social good done by the charity. The “impurely” altruistic— I donate because I extract value from knowing I contribute to the social good for the charity. And the not-at-all altruistic— I donate because I want to show off to potential mates how rich I am.

But are these motives strong enough to enable people to donate as much as they would want to? Most people support charities in one way or another, but often we struggle to make donations as often as we think we should. Although many people would like to leave a gift to charity in their will, they forget about it when the time comes.

Many people are also aware that they should donate to the causes that have the highest impact, but facts and figures are less attractive than narratives. In a series of experiments, it was found that people are much more responsive to charitable pleas that feature a single, identifiable beneficiary(受益者), than they are to statistical information about the scale of the problem being faced. When it comes to charitable giving, we are often ruled by our hearts and not our heads.

The good news is that charitable giving is contagious—seeing others give makes an individual more likely to give and gentle encouragement from an important person in your life can also make a big difference to your donation decisions— more than quadrupling them in our recent study. Habit also plays a part— in three recent experiments those who volunteered before were more likely to do donate their time than those who had not volunteered before.

In summary, behavioural science identifies a range of factors that influence our donations, and can help us to keep giving in the longer term. This is great news not just for charities, but also for donors.

2 . The pandemic has affected nearly all aspects of modern life, from the clothes we wear to the food we eat. There is one thing, however, that has remained almost unchanged: the emojis we send.

According to data from the Unicode Consortium (统一码联盟), nine of the 10 most-used emojis from 2019 also ranked among the top 10 this year. The tears of joy emoji ranked No.1, despite members of Gen Z deeming it uncool.

“It speaks to how many people use emojis. If emojis were a purely Gen Z thing, then you wouldn’t see it so highly ranked,” said Alexander Robertson, an emoji researcher at Google. “Because of the large number of people using emojis, even if one group thinks something is lame, they have to be a really big group to affect these statistics.”

And it makes sense that Gen Z would think that certain emojis aren’t fashionable. It’s part of the “teenager experience of creating a sense of subculture where there’s a right way and a wrong way of behaving.” Plus, there is a range of laughter that can be expressed: There’s light chuckling. There’s acknowledgement laughter, which is just a marker of empathy. Using emojis, such as the skull face (“I’m dead”) or crying face ( uncontrollable tears of laughter), can help to illustrate that range.

“It basically indicates that we have what we need to communicate a broad range of expression, or even very specific concepts,” Mr Robertson said. “You don’t necessarily need a Covid emoji.”

“We did see a rise in the use of the virus emoji. But it wasn’t made remotely into the most-commonly used ones because we still had plenty to laugh about and plenty to cry about, whether it was because of the pandemic or not,” said Lauren Gawne, a senior lecturer in linguistic at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

“Even in the midst of this massive global pandemic that preoccupied so much of our time,” She added. “We still spent a lot of time wishing each other happy birthday or checking or laughing about some new and unexpected elements of this slow-burning weirdness.”

3 . What goes on in our brains when we decide to hit the share button, and what makes something go viral? Since the dawn of the Internet, businesses, media outlets and influencers alike have been trying to answer these questions. Now, researchers have come one step closer to cracking this mysterious model by shining a light on the neuroscience (神经科学) of viral content.

“Our study finds a way to obtain brain signals that would predict how much information gets shared.” said Emily Falk, professor of communication, psychology and marketing and Hang-Yee Chan, a lecturer of communication.

Their new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on October 23, investigated both the U. S. and the Netherlands using a broader range of news categories—including health and climate change.

“When we see greater activation of regions that track self-relevance (Is it important to me) and social-relevance (Is it important to people I know), the news articles are more likely to be shared widely,” Falk and Chan said. By studying these brain responses, the team managed to build a value-based model to accurately predict how widely the articles would be shared online. This link between brain activity and sharing was seen in both the American and Dutch participants, suggesting that this model is accurate across cultures.

“Seeing how people’s brains react inside the scanner gives us insight into why people ultimately share information nowadays,” Chan said. “If we understand these signals, we might be able to use that knowledge to help important news get shared and stop misinformation from going viral.” It is also helpful for content creators to maximize their reach. “Our current study demonstrates how tapping into the brain would help content creators optimize their messages’ influence,” Falk and Chan said. “We are interested in building on these results to develop ways to counter harmful information and false news, in addition to spreading high-quality content.” “A lot of our most pressing problems in society are influenced by the decisions people make, and the decisions we make are influenced by the news. What you share matters, and so understanding why you share it matters, too.”

5 . In a fast developing world, many old-fashioned skills seem to be disappearing. It’s hard to find people who know such skills as sewing, but a few decades ago, it was common for every person to learn them.

Now many would think sewing isn’t as useful today. The garment (服装) industry is producing clothing that is cheaper, faster and more fashionable than ever, making it possible to buy a suit for less than $10 at home.

However, that doesn’t mean clothing isn’t indestructible (破坏不了的). Garments with simple tears that could be fixed in seconds with a needle are just thrown away. This causes more than 26 billion pounds of garbage and millions of dollars wasted because of a tear. Even dirty or worn clothing that still has plenty of usable cloth is being thrown away.

The ability to create hand-made clothes doesn’t only reduce waste. It is also tailor-made just for you. Most buy clothes made for a general body type, and to get it tailored by a professional is expensive. So why not do it yourself?

Perhaps the greatest problem of sewing is simply the time involved. Buying a skirt online takes a few seconds. Making a skirt can take weeks. But learning to sew doesn’t always involve complicated projects. Instead they might just be simple adjustments to help the garments fit or match your style.

Schools could easily teach sewing. Yet, they focus more on college preparations, ignoring traditional skills. Actually sewing is a valuable skill to be used in daily life. It wouldn’t take much time to teach children how to sew.

So, instead of letting old things die in this new age of the Internet, how about learning some of the lost skills that helped us for so long?

Have you ever wondered what life is like now     1     (compare) to, say, the 1980s or the 1990s? I went to ask some people I know who were adults in the ‘80s and 90s’, and the answer I got was that “Overall, life is a lot     2     (good) now!” This didn’t really surprise me. I mean, these days we’ve got mobile phones and the internet and so on — but     3    (actual) those weren’t the things they talked about.

So what did they talk about? For     4     start, we don’t have to work physically hard since now there are a lot of things like dishwashers for housework. Then there’s the matter of how, these days,     5     is possible to work at home — it’s mainly     6    (computer) that have made this possible. Not only that, there’s a lot more     7     (equal) now. It’s easier for all people, whatever their social background, gender (性别), colour and so on, to have equal access     8     a variety of career opportunities.

That said, it’s not all a matter of improvement. Quite a few people told me that they feel more stressed these days because they rely a lot on technology and they are always     9    (anxiety) about security on the internet. Plus, we spend a lot of our time     10     (use) smartphones. One person said, “Wouldn’t it be great to be off the grid (不上网) for a few days?”

7 . Obese people experience discrimination (歧视) in many parts of their lives, and the workplace is no exception. Studies have long shown that obese workers, defined as those with a body-mass index (BMI) of 30 or more, earn significantly less than their slimmer co-workers.

Yet the costs of weight discrimination may be even greater than previously thought. “The overwhelming evidence,” wrote the Institute for employment Studies, “is that it is only women living with obesity who experience the obesity wage penalty (薪资损失).” They were expressing a view that is widely aired in academic papers. To test it, The Economist has analyzed data concerning 23,000 workers from the American Time Use Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Labour Statistics. Our number-processing suggests that, in fact, being obese hurts the earnings of both women and men.

The data we analyzed cover men and women aged between 25 and 54 and in full-time employment. At a general level, it is true that men’s BMIs are unrelated to their wages. But that changes for men with university degrees. For them, obesity is associated with a wage penalty of nearly 8%, even after accounting for the separate effects of age, race, graduate education and marital status.

The conclusion — that well-educated workers in particular are penalized for their weight — holds for both sexes. Moreover, the higher your level of education, the greater the penalty. We found that obese men with a Bachelor’s degree (学士学位) earn 5% less than their thinner colleagues, while those with a Master’s degree earn 14% less. Obese women, it is true, still have it worse: for them, the equivalent figures are 12% and 19%, respectively (分别地).

Your line of work makes a difference, too. When we dealt with the numbers for individual occupations and industries, we found the greatest differences in high-skilled jobs. Obese workers in health care, for example, make 11% less than their slimmer colleagues; those in management roles make roughly 9% less, on average. In sectors such as construction and agriculture, meanwhile, obesity is actually associated with higher wages.

These results suggest that the total costs of wage discrimination borne by overweight workers in America are greater than expected. Now, it’s time for our governments to take it seriously.