The Canadian red and white maple leaf (枫叶) flag is officially called the National Flag of Canada. The Canadian flag shows a stylized red maple leaf with 11 points on a white background, with red borders down each side. The Canadian flag is twice as long as it is wide. The white square containing the red maple leaf is the same width as the flag.

    The red and the white used in the National Flag of Canada were proclaimed the official colors of Canada in 1921 by King George Ⅴ. Although the maple leaf did not have its official status as a symbol of Canada until the announcement (宣告) of the national flag in 1965, it had historically been used as a Canadian symbol, and was used in 1860 in decorations for the visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada. The 11 points on the maple leaf have no special significance.

    In the early days，the Royal Union Flag，or the Union Jack, was still flown in British North America. In 1925 and again in 1946, the Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King tried to get a national flag of Canada adopted, but failed. In 1964，Prime Minister Lester Pearson appointed a 15-member, all-party committee to come up with a design for a new flag. The committee was given six weeks to complete its task.

    The committee studied 2,000 submitted(提交的) designs as well as 3,900 that had been gathered as a result of the 1946 committee's study. Those designs with a chance of being accepted were given to the full committee for further study.

    The suggestion of a red and white single maple leaf design for the Canadian flag came from George Stanley, a professor at the Royal Military College. After a heated discussion, they finally decided on his suggestion.

    In her new book, “The Smartest Kids in the World,” Amanda Ripley, an investigative journalist, tells the story of Tom, a high-school student from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, who decides to spend his senior year in Warsaw, Poland. Poland is a surprising educational success story: in the past decade, the country raised students' test scores from significantly below average to well above it. Polish kids have now outscored(超过……分数) American kids in math and science, even though Poland spends, on average, less than half as much per student as the United States does. One of the most striking differences between the high school Tom attended in Gettysburg and the one he ends up at in Warsaw is that the latter has no football team, or, for that matter, teams of any kind.

    That American high schools waste more time and money on sports than on math is an old complaint. This is not a matter of how any given student who plays sports does in school, but of the culture and its priorities. This December, when the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results are announced, it's safe to predict that American high-school students will once again display their limited skills in math and reading, outscored not just by students in Poland but also by students in places like South Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, Singapore, and Japan. Meanwhile, they will have played some very exciting football games, which will have been breathlessly written up in their hometown papers.

    Why does this situation continue? Well, for one thing, kids like it. And for another, according to Ripley, parents seem to like the arrangement, too. She describes a tour she took of a school in Washington D.C., which costs thirty thousand dollars a year. The tour leader—a mother with three children in the school—was asked about the school's flaws(瑕疵). When she said that the math program was weak, none of the parents taking the tour reacted. When she said that the football program was weak, the parents suddenly became concerned. “Really?” one of them asked worriedly, “What do you mean?”

    One of the ironies(讽刺) of the situation is that sports reveal what is possible. American kids' performance on the field shows just how well they can do when expectations are high. It's too bad that their test scores show the same thing.

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    How much weight a baby gains during its first month could determine its IQ, as a new research suggests. The study found that children who gain more weight, and whose heads grow quickly during the first month of life, tend to have a higher IQ when they start school.

    Researchers at the University of Adelaide, in Australia^ studied 13,800 children who were born at full-term. They found that those who put on 40% of their birth weight in the first four weeks had an IQ 1.5 points higher than those who only put on 15% of their birth weight. Those who experienced the biggest growth in head circumference (头围) also had the highest IQs by the age of six.

“Head circumference is an indicator of brain volume, so a greater increase in head circumference in a newly-born baby suggests more rapid brain growth,” says the led author of the study, Dr. Lisa Smithers.

    She added, “Overall, newly-born children who grew faster in the first four weeks had higher IQ scores later in life. Those children who gained the most weight scored especially high on verbal (言语) IQ at age 6. This may be because the neural (神经的) structures for verbal IQ develop earlier in life, which means the rapid weight gain during the first month could be having a direct cognitive benefit for the children.”

    Previous studies have shown the association between early postnatal (产后的) diet and IQ, but this is the first study of its kind to focus on the IQ benefits of rapid weight gain in the first month of life. Dr. Smithers says the study further highlights the need for successful feeding of newly-born babies. “We know that many mothers have difficulty establishing breastfeeding in the first week of their babies' life,” Dr. Smithers said.

    “The findings of our study suggest that if babies are having feeding problems, there needs to be early intervention (干预) in the management of that feeding.”

    I left university with a good degree in English Literature, but no sense of what I wanted to do. Over the next six years, I was treading water, just trying to earn an income. I tried journalism, but I didn't think I was any good, then finance, which I hated. Finally, I got a job as a rights assistant at a famous publisher. I loved working with books, although the job that I did was dull.

    I had enough savings to take a year off work, and I decided to try to satisfy a deep-down wish to write a novel. Attending a Novel Writing MA course gave me the structure I needed to write my first 55,000 words.

    It takes confidence to make a new start — there's a dark period in-between where you're neither one thing nor the other. You're out for dinner and people ask what you do, and you're too ashamed to say, “Well, I'm writing a novel, but I'm not quite sure if I'm going to get there.” My confidence dived. Believing my novel could not be published, I put it aside.

    Then I met an agent（代理商）who said I should send my novel out to agents. So, I did and, to my surprise, got some wonderful feedback. I felt a little hope that I might actually become a published writer and, after signing with an agent, I finished the second half of the novel.

    The next problem was finding a publisher. After two-and-a-half years of no income, just waiting and wondering, a publisher offered me a book deal - that publisher turned out to be the one I once worked for.

    It feels like an unbelievable stroke of luck -of fate, really. When you set out to do something different, there's no end in sight, so to find myself in a position where I now have my own name on a contract（合同）of the publisher -to be a published writer - is unbelievably rewarding（有回报的）.

Humans' overconsumption of resources is a leading contributor to global climate change, says University of Arizona researcher Sabrina Helm. Therefore, it's increasingly important to understand the choices consumers make and how those decisions affect the health of a planet with limited resources. In a new study, published in the journal Young Consumers, Helm and her colleagues explore how materialistic values influence pro-environmental behaviors in millennials, who are now the nation's most influential group of consumers.

The researchers focused on two main categories of pro-environmental behaviors: reduced consumption, which includes actions like repairing instead of replacing older items; and "green buying," or purchasing products designed to limit environmental impacts. The researchers also looked at how engaging in pro-environmental behaviors affects consumer well-being.

More materialistic participants, the researchers found, were unlikely to engage in reduced consumption. However, materialism did not seem to have an effect on their likelihood of practicing "green buying." That's probably because "green buying," unlike reduced consumption, still offers a way for materialists to fulfill their desire to get new items, Helm said.

Study participants who reported having fewer materialistic values were much more likely to engage in reduced consumption. Consuming less was, in turn, linked to higher personal well-being and lower psychological suffering. Green buying—which may have some positive environmental effects, although to a smaller degree than reduced consumption—was not found to improve consumer well-being, Helm said.

The take-home message for consumers: "The key is to reduce consumption and not just buy green stuff. Having less and buying less can actually make us more satisfied and happier," Helm said. "If you have a lot of stuff, you have a lot on your mind," she said. "For example, it requires maintenance and there's a lot of burdens of ownership, and if you relieve yourself of that burden of ownership, most people report feeling a lot better and freer."

Helm and her colleagues additionally looked at how materialism affects millennial consumers' proactive financial behaviors, such as budgeting and saving. Examining financial behaviors alongside pro-environmental behaviors provides a picture of how young adults proactively deal with resource limitations in two contexts: environmental and financial, Helm said.

As expected, Helm and her colleagues found that those who reported having more materialistic values engaged in fewer proactive financial behaviors than their less materialistic counterparts (对应的人). The researchers also found that, consistent with previous studies, proactive financial behaviors were associated with better personal well-being, life satisfaction and financial satisfaction, as well as lower psychological suffering.

Understanding how materialistic values impact consumer behaviors, and how those behaviors in turn affect personal and environmental well-being, is important, Helm said. However, she acknowledges that for many consumers, shifting behaviors to be more financially proactive and consume less will be challenging.