Parents who help their children with homework may actually be bringing down their school grades. Other forms of prenatal involvement, including volunteering at school and observing a child's class, also fail to help, according to the most recent study on the topic.
The findings challenge a key principle of modern parenting(养育子女) where schools except them to act as partners in their children's education. Previous generations concentrated on getting children to 
school on time, fed, dressed and ready to learn.
       Kaith Robinson, the author of the study, said, "I really don't know if the public is ready for this but there are some ways parents can be 
involved in their kids' education that leads to declines in their academic performance. One of the things that was consistently negative was
 parents' help with homework." Robinson suggested that may be because parents themselves struggle to understand the task." They may 
either not remember the material their kids are studying now, or in some cases never learnt it themselves, but they're still offering advice."
       Robinson assessed parental involvement performance and found one of the most damaging things a parent could do was to punish their children for poor marks. In general, about 20% of parental involvement was positive, about 45% negative and the rest statistically
 insignificant.
      Common sense suggests it was a good thing for parents to get involved because "children with good academic success do have involved
 parents ", admitted Robinson. But he argued that this did not prove parental involvement was the root cause of that success." A big 
surprise was that Asian-American parents whose kids are doing so well in school hardly involved. They took a more reasonable approach, conveying to their children how success at school could improve their lives."

    In order to help customers find what they want quickly, it's important to keep the thousands of titles in the Main Street Movies store organized properly. This section of the Employee Handbook will tell you how to organize videos.

    Each Main street Movies store has three main sections:

1). New Releases Wall.

2). Film library.

3). Video Games.

    New Releases Wall. Almost 70 percent of movie rentals are new releases, and that is the first place where most customers go when they enter the store. The center section of shelves on this wall holds Hottest Hits. When new titles come into the store, place them on this wall in alphabetical order. The shelves beside Hottest Hits are called Recent Releases. The New Releases Wall, including the Hottest Hits and Recent Releases shelves, holds about 350 titles.

    Film Library. The thousands of titles in the Film Library are organized into categories. The films within each category are displayed alphabetically. Here are the categories and their two-letter computer codes:

    Foreign Language titles include films that were originally made in a foreign language and films with foreign language subtitles. A sticker on the back of each box tells which type of film it is.

    Video Game. All the video games in Main street Movies are arranged in alphabetical order. Although video games represent only a small percentage of our inventory(库存), they are stolen more often than any other type of goods in our store. Therefore, video games are never displayed on the shelves. Shelves in the Video Game section hold cardboard with pictures and information about each game. When a customer wants to rent a particular game, you then find the game from the locked case behind the counter.

    Welcome to your future life!

    You get up in the morning and look into the mirror. Your face is firm and young-looking. In 2035, medical technology is better than ever. Many people your age could live to be 150, so at 40, you're not old at all. And your parents just had an anti-aging(抗衰老的) treatment. Now, all three of look the same age!

    You say to your shirt, “Turn red.” It changes from blue to red. In 2035, “smart clothes” contain particles(粒子) much smaller than the cells in your body. The particles can be programmed to change clothes' color or pattern.

    You walk into the kitchen. You pick up the milk, but a voice says,“ You shouldn't drink that!” Your fridge has read the chip (芯片) that contains information about the milk , and it knows the milk is old . In 2035, every article of food in the grocery store has such a chip.

    It's time to go to work. In 2035, cars drive themselves. Just tell your “smart car” where to go. On the way, you can call a friend using your jacket sleeve. Such “smart technology” is all around you.

    So will all these things come true? “For new technology to succeed,” says scientist Andrew Zolli ,”it has to be so much better that it replaces what we have already.” The Internet is one example—what will be the next?

Perhaps you think you could easily add to your happiness with more money. Strange as it may seem, if you're unsatisfied, the issue is not a lack of means to meet your desires but a lack of desires—-not that you cannot satisfy your tastes but that you don't have enough tastes.

    Real riches consist of well-developed and hearty capacities to enjoy life. Most people are already swamped with things. They eat, wear, go and talk too much. They live in too big a house with too many rooms, yet their house of life is a hut.

    Your house of life ought to be a mansion, a royal palace. Every new taste, every additional interest, every fresh enthusiasm adds a room. Here are several rooms your house of life should have.

    Art should be a desire for you to develop simply because the world is full of beautiful things. If you only understood how to enjoy them and feed your spirit on them, they would make you as happy as to find plenty of ham and eggs when you're hungry.

    Literature, classic literature, is a beautiful, richly furnished room where you might find many an hour of rest and refreshment. To gain that love would go toward making you a rich person, for a rich person is not someone who has a library but who likes a library.

    Music like Mozart's and Bach's shouldn't be absent. Real riches are of the spirit. And when you've brought that spirit up to where classical music feeds it and makes you a little drunk, you have increased your thrills and bettered them. And life is a matter of thrills.

    Sports, without which you remain poor, mean a lot in life. No matter who you are, you would be more human, and your house of life would be better supported against the bad days, if you could, and did, play a bit.

    Whatever rooms you might add to your house of life, the secret of enjoying life is to keep adding.

    Three important changes that will affect people's everyday life in the future.

    The cashless society

    Cash and bank notes will disappear almost completely. They will be replaced by smart cards with microchip (微芯片) "loaded" with some money. When we pay for goods, we will put our smart cards into a payment terminal (终端) and money will be transferred (转) from our cards to the retailer's (零售商的) card. When all the money is used up, we will be able to "reload" it by inserting it into a telephone, dialing our bank account and putting money to the card from the account. If we want to transfer money from our cards to a bank account, we will use the same method. Smart cards will be able to hold several different currencies at the same time. So if we go abroad, we will be able to use our smart cards in the same way.

    Interactive telephones

    Human telephones will be replaced by talking computers. These computers will recognize speech, ask us what information we need, find the information and change it to speech. If we want to book a flight or pay a bill by phone, we will ask a talking computer to do it. Of course, this won't happen until all the technology is in place, but when it is we will soon get used to using computers in this way.

    ________________

    Traffic congestion (拥挤) in cities will be reduced because drivers will use electronic maps to find the quickest way to their destinations and avoid traffic jams. Because people have to pay to drive in cities, they will stop using their cars and use public transport instead. Speed control systems will be built into cars. These systems will control the speed of the car according to the traffic and weather conditions and prevent accidents.

    You've heard the old advice that skipping meals is a sure-fire way to ruin a weight loss plan, but a new study presented this week at the annual Obesity Society Meeting in New Orleans suggests that perhaps we've overlooked the benefits of selective fasting. According to the research, eating during a smaller window of time each day and skipping your evening meal could have a positive health effect.

    The study concluded that overweight individuals who ate during the day and fasted during the evening reported fewer hunger swings and burned more fat at night, WebMD reported. However, although this diet plan results in more fat burned in the evenings, it did not seem to increase fat burning overall. Due to this, at this moment it's still unclear as to how this eating schedule can affect general weight loss.

    "At this point, we are not sure whether or not total fat burning is increased," study lead author Courtney Peterson told Medical Daily in a recent email." We will need to do a larger study to find out for certain whether or not time-restricted feeding improves fat burning."

    Still, although the results do not indicate a clear association between nighttime fasting and weight loss, they are still important for the world of nutrition. For example, Peterson told Medical Daily that she was surprised to find that participants did not report being hungrier than average, or have above-average swings in hunger levels, despite fasting daily for 18 hours.

    "So we overturned the belief that fasting for longer period each day when the same number of total calories are eaten makes a person hungrier, "wrote Peterson.

    While the effects of fasting and time-restricted feeding have been studied and proven to work in a rodent(贴齿动物)model, research on human subjects is still in its early stages. For this reason, Peterson explained that it is far too early to say, with factual evidence as backing, that time-restricted feeding will improve weight loss in humans. Still, Peterson explained that practicing this eating behavior does have obvious benefits, such as reducing overall food intake, and suggested that practicing time restricted eating a few times a week could be both practicable and healthy.

    "It could be used for short-term goals or longer-term goals，"concluded Peterson." As far as we know，it is safe for adults，although pregnant women and children should not try it."