A couple of days ago, as the test results came out, my son and a group of his 13-year-old friends piled into the back seat of my car, ready for the last-day-of-school party at McDonald's. “Jack got a laptop for getting straight A's, and Laurie got a cell-phone,” one boy said. “Oh, yeah, and Sarah got an iPad, and she's only in third grade,” said another. “And how about Brian? He got $10 for each A.”

    I suddenly became concerned. These payoffs might get parents through grammar school, but what about high school and beyond? What would be left after the electric guitar, the cell-phone, and the DVD player?

    I saw the road ahead:As the homework load increased, my income would decrease.I saw my comfortable lifestyle disappear before my eyes — no more of those $5 bags of already-peeled organic carrots. No more organic anything!

    I started to feel surprised and nervous. Would every goal achieved by my two children fetch a reward? A high grade point average? A good class ranking? Would sports achievements be included in this reward system: soccer goals, touchdowns? What about the orchestra? Would first chair pay more than second? I'd be penniless by eighth-grade graduation.

    “We never paid anything for good grades,” said my neighbor across the street, whose son was recently accepted at MIT. “He just did it on his own. Maybe once in a while we went out for pizza, but that's about it.”

    Don't you just hate that? We're all running around looking for the MP3 player with the most updates, and she's spending a few dollars on pizza. She gets motivation; we get negotiation. And what about the primary grades? What do these students get? “When the teacher asked if anyone got rewards for good grades, everyone in my class raised their hands and said they got ice cream cones ,” said one third-grader.

    Josh Hill, a biology teacher at Mar Vista High School in California, US, often gets sick after swimming in the ocean at Imperial Beach in California.

    He and a group of students are raising awareness(意识)about water pollution by taking weekly water samples(样本)of the ocean and publishing their results online.

    Every Thursday, Hill and his students collect water from the ocean. Students then take the samples to their school and test them for levels of bacteria. Usually, samples closer to the border have higher levels of bacteria, Hill said.

    “Water quality is usually the worst at the southern end and it increasingly gets better,” he said.

    Hill collects the samples on Thursdays so that students can publish the results on the Surfrider Foundation's website in time for the weekend. The Surfrider Foundation has give Mar Vista lab equipment and promote the students' results on its site.

    Most of Hill's students grew up in Imperial Beach. Many have gotten sick from the water or know someone who has.

    Cameron Bell, 17, who is currently applying to college, wants to pursue a STEM career. He appreciates the fact the he can get lab experience at school. “Our research really impacts our community because it's keeping people safe,” he said.

    On a recent Thursday morning, Anthony Gass, 15, collected some samples. Before he got into the water, his classmates helped him put on waterproof(防水的)clothes and tie a rope around his waist to protect him from the onrush of water.

    Hill said the protection probably wasn't necessary, but that it was better to be safe than to be sorry. “We just want to make sure we protect the students,” he said.

    After finishing a meal at an American Chinese restaurant you probably expect to receive a handful of fortune cookies after you pay the bill. Fortune cookies are in Chinese restaurants throughout the United States. It's rather satisfying to crack open a cookie at the end of your meal and read your “lucky fortune” on the slip of paper inside.

    The exact origin of the fortune cookie is unknown. It is thought that the tasty snack was the first introduced into San Francisco in 1914, after an immigrant began distributing the cookie with “thank you” notes in them. These “thank you” notes were intended as symbols of appreciation for friends who stood with him through the economic hardship and discrimination of his early life in America.

    There is an alternate origin story. Los Angeles is regarded as the site of the fortune cookie's invention. In this version of the story, David Jung, a Chinese immigrant residing in L. A., is thought to have created the cookie in order to uplift the spirits of the poor and homeless. In 1918, Jung handed out the cookies for free to the poor outside his shop and each cookie contained a strip of paper with an inspirational sentence printed on it.

    Fortune cookies first began to gain popularity in mainstream American culture during WWII. Chinese restaurants would serve them in place of desserts, as desserts were not popular in traditional Chinese cuisine. Today fortune cookies are not tied to Chinese-American culture. In fact, the largest fortune cookie manufacturer is located in the United States and it produces 4.5 million fortune cookies a day —— an evidence to the modern-day popularity of the snack. However, an attempt to introduce the fortune cookie to China in 1992 was a failure, and the cookie was cited for being “too American.”

    So the next time you break open a fortune cookie and read a fortune about the many successes you should expect in your future, remember that the conclusion to your Chinese restaurant meal may not be as Chinese as you think.

    If you're planning on travelling, there are a few simple rules about how to make life easier both before and after your journey.

    First of all, always check and double­check departure (起程) time. It is amazing how few people really do this carefully. Once I arrived at the airport a few minutes after ten. My secretary had got the ticket for me and I thought she had said that the plane left at 10：50. When I arrived at the airport, the clerk at the departure desk told me that my flight was closed. Therefore, I had to wait three hours for the next one and missed an important meeting.

    The second rule is to remember that even in this age of credit cards, it is still important to have at least a little of the local currency (货币) with you when you arrive in a country. This can be necessary if you are flying to a place few tourists normally visit. Once I arrived at a place at midnight and the bank at the airport was closed. The only way to get to my hotel was by taxi and because I had no dollars, I offered to pay in pounds instead. "Listen! I only take real money!" the driver said angrily. Luckily I was able to borrow a few dollars from a clerk at the hotel, but it was embarrassing.

    The third and last rule is to find out as much as you can about the weather at your destination before you leave. I feel sorry for some of my workmates who travel in heavy suits and raincoats in May, when it is still fairly cool in London or Manchester, to places like Athens, Rome or Madrid, where it is already beginning to get quite warm during the day.

Africa's Most Amazing Places to Visit

    Pyramids of Giza, Egypt

    The most famous of the structures at Giza, near Cairo, the Pyramid of King Khufu was built around 2650 BC from 2.5 million blocks of stone. Its sides face north, south, east and west.

    Sahara Dunes, Morocco

    The most user-friendly part of the Sahara is accessible from the northern edge of Morocco. You can camp out in Tazzarine, where runners from all over the world complete the weeklong Marathon every spring. The foot of the Merzouga Dunes is the best location for gazing at stars, totally free of light pollution.

    Lake Retba (Lac Rose), Senegal

    There are few pink lakes in the world and one of them, Lake Retba, also called Lac Rose by locals is in the Cap-Vert peninsula in Senegal. The best times to see the lake at its pinkest is during Senegal's dry season, between November and June.

    Nyika Plateau National Park, Malawi

    With a plateau cut by numerous rivers that reach Lake Malawi by way of waterfalls off the eastern edge of the mountains, Nyika, the largest national park in Malawi, is one of the most beautiful in Africa. The eastern border of the plateau forms the wall of the Great Rift Valley. The great domes of hills have gentle slopes, making Nyika perfect for both hiking and mountain biking as well as Jeep exploration.

Research spanning several decades demonstrates that you are more likely to think the information that is repeated to be true than the information you hear only once. You usually assume that if people put in effort to repeat a statement, this reflects the truth of the statement. This tendency-also called the truth effect-is a bias （偏见） that can lead you to draw incorrect conclusions. 

To what degree are people aware of the truth effect? This question was addressed in a paper in the journal Cognition early this year. 

In the critical study in this paper, participants did two sessions. In one session, they read about a hypothetical （虚构的） study in which they were exposed to some statements and then were asked whether both statements they had heard before as well as these new statements were true. They were asked to predict the proportion （比例） of each statement that would be judged as true. They did this both as a prediction of other people's performance as well as a prediction of how they would do in this study. 

At another session a few days later, participants actually performed this study, reading a set of 20 statements in the hypothetical study again and then judging the truth of altogether 40 statements, half of which were from the hypothetical study and the other half of which were new. 

This study did replicate the well known truth effect. People were more likely to judge statements they had seen before as true than statements that were new. Two interesting findings emerged from the prediction. First, participants tended to underestimate the size of the truth effect for everyone. T hat is, while they did expect some difference in judgments between the statements seen before and those that were new, they thought this difference would be smaller than it actually was. Second, participants more significantly underpredicted the truth effect for themselves compared to that for other people. 

This study is particularly important in light of the amount of misinformation present in social media. Many people have the power to influence public opinion about important matters. Flooding social media feeds with misinformation will lead people to believe this information is true just because it is stated. Recognizing that we are all susceptible to this influence of repeated information should lead us to mistrust our intuition （直觉） about what is true and to look up important information prior to using it to make important judgments and decisions.