Put a group of strangers in a room together, and they'll probably start a conversation. "Hot today, isn't it?"one might say. "You said it." another replies.

       Why do we talk so much about the weather? When we meet new people, we don't begin by telling them our life story. We start with small talk, a polite conversation about something like traffic or weather.

       Research suggests that small talk can build new friendships. When we begin conversations with new people, we want to feel comfortable, and so do they. We use small talk to find common interests. Once we have a common interest, a friendship can begin.

Small talk even helps people get hired. In order to impress at a job interview, you need to bond with the interviewer right away. Proper small talk can make that first impression get you the job.

        So, how can you make small talk lead to a new friendship or job? First off, find common ground. Select something around you that you share with the other person.

        Next, keep the conversation going. Compliment (赞美) the other person to make himor her feel comfortable, and ask questions to show interest.

        Third, keep eye contact (接触). When you look people in the eye, they feel you appreciate what they are saying. It makes you appear honest and builds trust.

         Naturally, shy people might not have enough confidence to start up conversations with strangers. Talking to someone you don't know is not the easiest thing to do! Some experts say with more practice, small talk does get easier.

         Some people avoid small talk because they dislike discussing things like traffic or weather. For them, they are just too small. However, when you think about it, small talk is anything but small. In fact, it is actually a very big deal!

    The Internet has opened up a whole new online world for us to meet, chat and go where we've never been before. But just as in face to face communication, there are some rules of behavior that should be followed when on line.

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Imagine how you'd feel if you were in the other person's shoes. For anything you're about to send，ask yourself, ＂Would I say this to the person's face?＂ If the answer is no, rewrite and reread.{#blank#}2{#/blank#}

     If someone in the chat room is rude to you, your instinct (本能) is to fire back in the same manner. But try not to do so. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} If it was caused by a disagreement with another member, try to fix the situation by politely discussing it. Remember to respect the beliefs and opinions of others in the chat room.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#} Offer advice when asked by newcomers, as they may not be sure what to do or how to communicate. When someone makes a mistake, whether it's a stupid question or an unnecessarily long answer, be kind about it. If it's a small mistake, you may not need to say anything. Even if you feel strongly about it, think twice before saying anything. Having good manners yourself doesn't give you license to correct everyone else. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} At the same time, if you find you are wrong, be sure to correct yourself and apologize to those that you have offended. It is not polite to ask others personal questions such as their age, sex and marital status. Unless you know the person very well, and you are both comfortable with sharing personal information, don't ask such questions.

Do you think you could learn a language in an hour?

    We know, we know! We would expect you to be skeptical. It's ridiculous to think you can learn a language in 60 minutes. You wouldn't even get through the As in a bilingual dictionary in that amount of time! Best-case situation: in an hour, most of us could probably stuff a few words and ready-made phrases into our short-term memory (with a high likelihood of forgetting it all by the following day). Accomplishing anything more than that in one hour? Impossible. Unless…

    We posed the one-hour language challenge to four polyglots(通晓数种语言的人) who are experts on how to study languages. To keep the challenge from becoming completely impossible, we gave them a bit of a break: to learn Romanian in one hour. Why Romanian? Because it's a Romance language and shares many similarities with the languages that the polyglots already know: French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese. And to make sure their hour of learning was as effective as possible, all of them were assigned a personal Romanian tutor to help coach them on their way to success.

    Although each polyglot has a different technique for picking up and remembering a new language, all four methods offer valuable insights to anyone, from casual learners to hard-core language enthusiasts.

Alex Rawlings — UK

    "I'm a bit nervous. This is probably the craziest language-learning thing I've ever done, but learning languages has always been about fun. I expect that, after this, I'll be prepared to have a simple chat over a coffee in Romanian. Is that reasonable?"

    Method: Learn the verbs first

    With only an hour until he had to start demonstrating his grasp of Romanian, Alex knew he had to start talking quickly. He chose to focus first on commonly used verbs and how to conjugate（动词变形） them. Once he had some verbs down, he could start collecting nouns from his tutor and plugging them in to make more interesting and relevant sentences.

Luca Lampariello — Italy

    "Every time I have a conversation with native speakers, it really motivates me. Human contact is really important when learning a language."

Method: Start speaking right away

    Speaking doesn't mean speaking perfectly. Speaking even a little bit is a huge confidence boost. When you can say something in a new language and people actually understand you, it's very motivating. Yes, you'll make mistakes, but you'll also learn faster than if you try to get it all perfect in your head first.

Michael Youlden — UK

    "We all speak a variety of Romance languages which I think will help us get into Romanian quickly."

Method: Write everything down

    Language learning is about recall; there's no use learning something if you don't remember it. Speaking new words aloud is very important, but so is writing them down — after all, words exist as sounds and in written form. Taking notes is a proven way to put new vocabulary and grammar into your memory. Writing supports memorizing which supports speaking... it's a cycle. Plus, you have an easy reference when you want to review what you've learned.

Matthew Youlden — UK

    "I'm going to look for the patterns and similarities with languages I already know. We won't be able to speak fluently after an hour of study, but we should be able to get by with some basic vocabulary and phrases."

Method: Look for cognates

    Cognates are words in different languages that look and sound similar and have the same meaning, due to a common origin. Almost every language combination contains cognates (even if two languages aren't seemingly related), but languages from the same language family have many more. Whichever language you are learning, identify the familiar words and then use them to anchor the new words that aren't so familiar. To use English as an example, because it's a sort of Germanic-Romance hybrid, English already has many words that cognate with German, Dutch and Swedish on one hand, and on the other hand it also has lots of words that cognate with French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and, of course, Romanian!

    Learn a language with courses designed by the experts. Start here, today!

    Pick a language to learn. German, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Swedish.

Ways to create calm in your daily life

    Most of us need some space for calm in our lives. A few simple minutes can create much needed moments of calm.{#blank#}1{#/blank#}You can use these small skills to create calm in your busy schedule.

    Go walking. Walking is perfect and you can do it well anywhere. Simply walking and taking in the view is stress reducing.{#blank#}2{#/blank#} It makes room for new ideas to develop.

    Appreciate nature when we think of nature we think of getting into the countryside or forests, and that is great if you can.{#blank#}3{#/blank#} Actually, nature is everywhere. Find a park or a small patch(小块地)of green, or just stick your head out of the window! You have many ways to appreciate nature.

    Listen to music. Many people listen to music to calm themselves down. Music actually lifts us out of ourselves. It can also draw our attention from boring and tiring things{#blank#}4{#/blank#}.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} Certain activities like yoga and tai chi need quiet focus. They are perfect for active calming. They are good for the body, mind and spirit.

    Try out some of these ways and you'll soon be practicing “moments of calm”.

A. Do some activities.

B. But what if you are in the city?

C. Notice the animals around you.

D. It is a time to get stressful thoughts out of your head.

E. Music is a way to express the way that they are feeling.

F. With enjoyable music even work can be “music to your ear”.

G. You don't have to find a mountain to sit on, or empty your mind of all thoughts for hours.

    Pretending you're someone else can make you creative

    One great irony(讽刺) about our collective fascination with creativity is that we tend to frame it in uncreative ways. That is to say, most of us marry creativity to our concept of self: We are either "creative" people or we aren't, without much of a middle ground.

    Pillay, a tech businessman and Harvard professor has spent a good part of his career destroying these ideas. Pillay believes that the key to unlocking your creative potential is to dismiss the conventional advice that urges you to "believe in yourself". In fact, you should do the exact opposite: believe you are someone else.

    In a recent column for Harvard Business Review, Pillay pointed to a 2016 study showing the impact of stereotypes(刻板印象)on one's behavior. The authors, education psychologists Denis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar, divided their college student subjects into three categories, instructing the members of one group to think of themselves as "eccentric(古怪的) poets" and the members of another to imagine they were "rigid librarians" (people in the third category, the control group, were left alone for this part). The researchers then presented participants with 10 ordinary objects, including a fork, a carrot, and a pair of pants, and asked them to come up with as many different uses as possible for each one. Those who were asked to imagine themselves as "eccentric poets" came up with the widest range of ideas for the objects, while those in the "rigid librarian" group had the fewest. Meanwhile, the researchers found only small differences in students' creativity levels across academic majors—in fact, the physics majors inhabiting(寄生) the personas(伪装的外表) of "eccentric poets" came up with more ideas than the art majors did.

    These results, write Dumas and Dunbar, suggest that creativity is not an individual quality, but a "malleable(可塑的) product of context and perspective." Everyone can be creative, as long as they feel like creative people.

    Pillay's work takes this a step further: He argues that identifying yourself with creativity is less powerful than the creative act of imagining you're somebody else. This exercise, which he calls "psychological halloweenism", refers to the conscious action of inhabiting another persona—an inner costuming of the self. It works because it is an act of "conscious unfocus", a way of positively stimulating the default mode(默认模式) network, a collection of brain regions that spring into action when you're not focused on a specific task or thought.

    Most of us spend too much time worrying about two things: How successful/unsuccessful we are, and how little we're focusing on the task at hand. The former feeds the latter—an unfocused person is an unsuccessful one, we believe. Thus, we force ourselves into quiet areas, buy noise canceling headphones, and hate ourselves for taking breaks.

    What makes Pillay's argument stand out is its healthy, forgiving realism: According to him, most people spend nearly half of their days in a state of "unfocus". This doesn't make us lazy people—it makes us human. The idea behind psychological halloweenism is: What if we stopped judging ourselves for our mental down time, and instead started using it? Putting this new idea on daydreaming means addressing two problems at once: You're making yourself more creative, and you're giving yourself permission to do something you'd otherwise feel guilty about. Imagining yourself in a new situation, or an entirely new identity, never felt so productive.

Title: Pretending you're someone else can make you creative

China's Entering a New Era of AI

They have beaten us at chess and co-written a Europop album with human beings. Now computers are taking a step into a very human territory: the reading comprehension test, a headache of schoolchildren everywhere. Alibaba on Monday said its artificial outperformed mortals (凡人) in a global reading comprehension.

Luo Si, chef scientist of natural language processing at Alibaba's research department, the Institute of Data Science of Technologies, called the machines' victory "a milestone".{#blank#}1{#/blank#}Some of these uses are already being handled by chatbots globally.

In the test administered last week, companies subjected their artificial intelligence systems to questions from the Stanford Question Answering Dataset, which assessed reading comprehension. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}In top place were

Microsoft, the US software giant, and Alibaba, the Chinese tech group that began with e-commerce and is - like its peers at home and abroad investing more funds into AI.

{#blank#}3{#/blank#}Baidu made an early bet on AI. and is leading its rivals in autonomous driving, some of which was on show at Customer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Tencent, which boasts of I billion monthly active users on its social media WeChat app, and Alibaba have adopted AI in operations such as customizing news and ads, and are investing in new fields.

China aims to make use of its vast treasures of data, collected from its 1.4 billion population including 730 million who are online, and deep pockets to overtake the US in creating a SI50 billion industry that is seen as the next industrial revolution. Excitedly, AI is already being applied in many fields from driverless cars to text analysis. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}The most asked ones include "Where's my package?" especially on Alibaba's Single Day shopping festival.

A. Though China s drive is led by government, it is cultivating homegrown tech giants to leap ahead of the US.

B. Private investment in the AI sector has been expanding 62 percent a year on average for the past four years.

C. The technology has many applications, from customer service to museum tutorials to medical inquiries.

D. The computers' answers to the questions were compared against average human responses and ranked.

E. For example, this technology has already been used to answer general questions on e-commerce platforms.

F. Like all utilities, AI will be boring, even as it transforms the Internet, the global economy, and civilization.