I could feel the judging eyes of my family burning a hole into the back of my head as I picked up my phone. All of a sudden, the chattering in the living room died and all I could hear was the sound of the turkey sizzling (发出嘶嘶声) in the oven.

    “Look at her! She's been on her phone all day long! It's all your fault! Children will never respect elders if they are not taught how to behave! ” my grandmother shouted.

    I was very shocked and angry! I opened my mouth to say something, but words failed me and I just sat down quietly on the chair like a mouse in its trap. I thought “Here we go again.” I truly love my family and I would do anything for them. I also know that they would do anything for me as well. However, there are moments that make me feel that they are just stuck with me. They all agree on one thing: technology is wrecking me.

    If I am going to be treated like a child or completely ignored, I will most likely not enjoy your company, and I feel that this applies to (适用于) the majority of the people. So I sometimes simply shut myself in my room and listened to the voices coming from the living room, thinking: They all grew up in a world so different that it amazes me how they have actually gotten this far. They did not have phones or any type of advanced technology, which is both good and bad. Bad because they had almost no type of fast communication, and good because they were forced to interact (互动) with one another, which is something today's society is lacking in. However, maybe if they made an effort to be aware of how things work nowadays, they would not be so against everything.

    We are naturally drawn to friends and colleagues with familiar voices, scientists have found. People prefer those who have a similar accent, intonation and tone of voice to themselves, they discovered.

    Previous research has focused on how male or female a voice sounds. Men with deeper voices and women with slightly higher voices were thought to sound more attractive, because they suggest a bigger or a smaller body.

    But the new study, published by a linguistics expert in Canada, suggests there is a more complex mechanism (机制) at play. Dr Molly Babel, from the University of British Columbia in Canada, said, “The voice is an amazingly flexible tool that we use to construct our identity. Very few things in our voices are changeless, so we felt that our preferences had to be about more than a person's shape and size.”

    She recorded 30 volunteers' voices and asked each to rate the others' attractiveness on a range from one to nine. Each participant was from western America, with similar accents. The people we assessed were all in the same dialect group, but they showed that dialect to different degrees.

     “We seem to like people who sound like we sound, and we like people who fit within what we know,” Dr Babel said. She also found that breathy voices in women—typified by the famous American actress Marilyn Monroe-were seen as more attractive.

    The breathy tone, caused by younger and thinner vocal cords (声带), implied youthfulness and health. A creaky (咯吱作响的) voice, suggesting a person has a cold, is tired or smokes, was seen as unattractive. The participants preferred men who spoke with a shorter average word length and deeper voices.

    Wondering what to see and do in India in November? November is an excellent month to visit India. Here are the best festivals in November, 2018 in India.

    International Yoga and Music Festival

    Organized by Nada Yoga School every year since 2008, the International Yoga and Music Festival features 50 of the best professional yoga teachers Ayurvedic（印度草药按摩）doctors， dancers, musicians, and philosophers from Rishikesh and abroad. Free classes and lectures are held with topics including yoga, Ayurveda, philosophy, and Indian classical music. There's an Indian classical music concert in the evenings as well.

    Time: November 1-7, 2018. Location: Rishikesh, Uttarakhand.

    Wangala Festival

    Also known as the 100 Drum Wangala Festival this is the biggest harvest festival of Meghalaya's Garo tribe in northeast India. Held in honor of the Sun God of fertility, the festival marks the end of the seeding season and agricultural year. It's celebrated by the beating of drums, blowing horns, and traditional dancing.

    Time: November 6, 2018. Location: Garo Hills, Meghalaya. Bandra Wine Festival

Being popular with local people for six years, the Bandra Wine Festival is a fun opportunity to sample the best wines in India. In addition to tasting wine, there are market stalls, food stalls, live music in the evenings, and dancing.

    Time: November 7-8, 2018.

    Location: D'Monte Park, Bandra West, Mumbai.

    Pushkar Balloon Festival

    The International Hot Air Ballooning Festival is an added attraction at the Pushkar Camel Fair. Similar to the Taj Balloon Festival in Agra, it's hosted by Sky Waltz, and features hot air balloons from around the world and a Night Glow Music Concert. Accommodation and balloon flight packages are offered to visitors.

    Time: November 21-23, 2018. Location: Pushkar, Rajasthan.

    Why do some people live to be older than others? You know the standard explanations: keeping a moderate diet, engaging in regular exercise, etc. But what effect does your personality have on your longevity? Do some kinds of personalities lead to longer lives? A new study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society looked at this question by examining the personality characteristics of 246 children of people who had lived to be at least 100.

    The study shows that those living the longest are more outgoing, more active and less neurotic（神经质的）than other people. Long-living women are also more likely to be sympathetic and cooperative than women with a normal life span. These findings are in agreement with what you would expect from the evolutionary theory: those who like to make friends and help others can gather enough resources to make it through tough times.

    Interestingly, however, other characteristics that you might consider advantageous had no impact on whether study participants were likely to live longer. Those who were more self-disciplined, for instance, were no more likely to live to be very old. Also, being open to new ideas had no relationship to long life, which might explain all those bad-tempered old people who are fixed in their ways.

    Whether you can successfully change your personality as an adult is the subject of a longstanding psychological debate. But the new paper suggests that if you want long life, you should strive to be as outgoing as possible.

    Unfortunately, another recent study shows that your mother's personality may also help determine your longevity. That study looked at nearly 28,000 Norwegian mothers and found that those moms who were more anxious, depressed and angry were more likely to feed their kids unhealthy diets. Patterns of childhood eating can be hard to break when we're adults, which may mean that kids of depressed moms end up dying younger.

    Personality isn't destiny, and everyone knows that individuals can learn to change. But both studies show that long life isn't just a matter of your physical health but of your mental health.

    18-year-old Kayla Perkins explains what is in her bedroom, "I throw something on the floor and I know right where it is." However, her parents, Steve and Deborah Perkins, of McKinney, Texas, haven't caught on. Even Kayla admits that, at the worst, her room is a mess.

    Most families at some point have at least one child whose room looks like a landfill(垃圾堆). The mess can disturb the whole household. Dirty clothes pile up; dirty dishes get lost in the mess and smell bad; homework is lost; and valuable things are ruined.

    Some parents let it go, believing that a bedroom is private space for children to manage as they wish. Others lecture their children, offer rewards for cleaning, or punish them when they don't. What doesn't work, parenting experts say, is constant lectures, verbal(口头的,言语的) threats or getting very angry. Mrs. Perkins says they picked up all the clothes on Kayla's floor and hid them. They cleaned everything up. When Kayla came back to a bare bedroom, there was screaming and shouting, "How can I live without my clothes?" Mrs. Perkins asked Kayla to earn her clothes back by doing housework. These days, she keeps her room clean.

    Humour can help, too. For example, since Jessica, the 14-year-old daughter wasn't bothered by the dirty clothes all over her floor, the whole family started using her room as a place to store dirty clothes. Her attitude changed after her family did that. By the time she gave in and cleaned up her room a few days later, even she was laughing.

Parenting expert, Jim Fay, also recommends that parents first ask children in a nice way to clean up and agree on a reasonable time limit. Children often behave better if you treat them in the way you would want to be treated by your boss at work—with respect and high expectations.

    Carrots are grown on farms and in family gardens throughout the world. Carrots are easy to raise and easy to harvest. They taste good.

    When people think of carrots, they usually picture in their minds a vegetable that is long, thin and orange in colour. But carrots come in many different sizes and shapes. And not all carrots are orange. For the best results, carrots should be grown in sandy soil that does not hold water for a long time. The soil also should have no rocks. To prepare your carrot garden, dig up the soil, loosen it and turn it over. Then, mix in some plant material or animal fertilizer. Weather, soil conditions and age will affect the way carrots taste. Experts say warm days, cool nights and a medium soil temperature are the best conditions for growing carrots that taste great.

    Carrots need time to develop their full sugar content. This gives them their taste. But carrots loose their sweetness if you wait too long to remove them from the ground. The best way to judge if a carrot is ready to be harvested is by its colour. Usually, the brighter the colour, the better the taste.

    Carrots are prepared and eaten in many different ways. They are cut in thin pieces and added to other vegetables. They are cooked by themselves or added to stews. Or, once they are washed, they are eaten just as they come out of the ground.