Owning a smartphone may not be as smart as you think. It may let you surf the Internet, listen to music and snap photos wherever you are…but it also turns you into a workaholic, it seems.

    A study suggests that, by giving you access to emails at all times, the all-singing, all-dancing mobile phone adds as much as two hours to your working day. Researchers found that Britons work an additional 460 hours a year on average as they are able to respond to emails on their mobiles.

    The study by technology retailer Pixmania reveals the average UK working day is between 9 and 10 hours, but a further two hours is spent responding to or sending work emails, or making work calls. More than 90 percent of office workers have email-enabled phones, with a third accessing them more than 20 times a day. Almost one in ten admits spending up to three hours outside their normal working day checking work emails. Some workers confess(承认) they are on call almost 24 hours a day, with nine out of ten saying they make work emails and calls outside their normal working hours. The average time for first checking emails is between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m., with more than a third checking their first emails in this period, and a quarter checking them between 11 p.m. and midnight.

    Ghadi Hobeika, marketing director of Pixmania, said, “The ability to access literally millions of apps, keep in contact via social networks and take photos and video as well as text and call has made smartphones invaluable for many people. However, there are drawbacks. Many companies expect their employees to be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and smartphones mean that people literally cannot get away from work. The more constantly in contact we become , the more is expected of us in a work capacity(容量).”

    Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4, 8, 5, 3, 7, 9, 6. Read them loud. Now look away and spend 20 seconds memorizing them in order before saying them out loud again. If you speak English, you have about a 50% chance of remembering those perfectly. If you are Chinese, though, you're almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because we most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within a two-second period. And unlike English, the Chinese language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.

    That example comes from Stanislas Dahaene's book The Number Sense. As Dahaene explains: Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be spoken out in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is “si” and 7 “qi”). Their English pronunciations are longer. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length.

    It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and fiveteen.  But we don't. We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen and fifteen. For numbers above 20, we put the “decade” first and the unit number second (twenty-one, twenty-two), while for the teens, we do it the other way around (fourteen, seventeen, eighteen). The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on.

    That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children. Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to 40. American children at that age can count only to 15. By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian friends in the most fundamental of math skills.

    The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to change the words to numbers (37+22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation(等式) is right there, in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: it's five-tens-nine.

When it comes to math, in other words, Asians have a built-in advantage. For years, students from China, South Korea, and Japan — outperformed their Western classmates at mathematics, and the typical assumption is that it has something to do with a kind of Asian talent for math. The differences between the number systems in the East and the West suggest something very different — that being good at math may also be rooted in a group's culture.

    Electric Shock

    Injuries caused by electric shock are fairly common. When a person has received an electric shock, no one should go near him/her until the current has been turned off.

    If a shock occurring at work or at home causes someone to lose consciousness（知觉）, electrical connection must be broken before anyone tries to give assistance. You should either turn off the switch at the mains or, if that is not possible, push the person away with a dry piece of wood.

    Treatment of Shock

    Look out for signs of shock. People who have been injured or who may have lost a lot of blood, or those who have had heart attacks, may be in deep shock. The signs to look for are faintness, paleness, a moist, sticky skin, shallow, rapid breathing and a fast but weak heartbeat.

    Shock can prove fatal, and it is essential to do something to prevent its developing. The best way to treat or prevent shock is to keep the patient lying down , better with the legs higher than the head; if possible, raise the lower part of the body on a rolled-up packet or similar object. Make the patient as comfortable as possible, loosening any tight clothing, and comfort him/her because fright increases the effects of shock.

    I had about 10 minutes to exercise before I had to pick up my two older daughters from school yesterday. It was a busier day than usual for me with a couple of meetings besides my regular work.

    Years ago, I would have put off my workout and would have left things for the next day. But since it was a busy day as well, I knew that I may not have all that much time either. So, I picked up my kettle-bell (哑铃) and went to town for 4 minutes.

    See, 4 minutes, if that's all you've got, is enough to give your body a great fat-burning exercise. How did I get a killer workout in 4 minutes? I used a training workout discovered 10 years ago by a Japanese Sports Scientist called a TABATA.

    It includes 20-second periods of warm-up, followed by 10-second periods of rest and 4-minute straight exercise. How is a 4-minute exercise able to burn fat? It all depends on the quality of work you do. Not on the quantity. Here's how I did it yesterday.

    You should never forget your warm-up. A TABATA workout is 20 seconds of 2-arm Kettle-bell swings, 10 seconds rest, 20 seconds push-ups, and 10 seconds rest. You should do those 4 rounds. That's it. I was done in a total time of 8 minutes by the time and when I got to school my heart was still pumping pretty hard.

    A healthy body is needed for studying and working, and efficiency (效率) is the key to building a great body in the least amount (数量) of time possible and you can't get more efficient than a 4-minute workout.

    When it comes to learning a foreign language, many people wonder if they will be able to memorize enough vocabulary. But this question never happens about their mother tongue, and yet, it was a foreign language once. However, among all the questions that new parents ask, no doctor has ever heard: "Will my baby be able to learn my language?" Be honest, do you know all the words of your mother tongue? The answer is: "no".

    New words, and new ways of using old words, appear every day. Twenty years ago, who could have been able to understand a sentence like this: "Click here to download your digital book."? Nobody. You never stop learning new vocabulary and you never know how long you will need it.

    Sometimes, you have the word on the tip of your tongue...and it sticks there! But you do know this phenomenon(现象) and don't think that it is because of a bad memory. You should not give this phenomenon more importance in the language you are learning than in your mother tongue.

    You need to learn only 2000 or so basic words to be able to create any phrase you need. You can't avoid some work in order to learn these necessary words and all the more if you want to learn quickly. And before you consider buying into any method, be sure it is right for you. It is not wise to depend on any method based upon mnemonics(记忆群). The first few words seem very easy to learn, so you buy the course, but then you discover quickly, though too late, that a dozen words later, it is all the more difficult to learn a new word when you have also to learn the trick to memorize it.