Have you ever found yourself in his situation: You hear a song you used to sing when you were a child-a bit of nostalgia(怀旧) or “blast from the past,” as we say. But it is not a distant childhood memory. The words come back to you as clearly as when you sang them all those years ago.

    Researchers at the University of Edinburgh studied the relationship between music and remembering a foreign language. They found that remembering words in a song was the best way to remember even one of the most difficult languages.

    Here is what they did. Researchers took 60 adults and randomly divided them into three groups of 20. Then they gave the groups three different types of “listen-and-repeat” learning conditions. Researchers had one group simply speak the words. They had the second group speak the words to a rhythm, or beat. And they asked the third group to sing the words.

    All three groups studied words from the Hungarian language for 15 minutes. Then they took part in a series of language tests to see what they remembered.

    Why Hungarian, you ask? Researchers said they chose Hungarian because not many people know the language. It does not share any roots with Germanic or Romance languages, such as Italian or Spanish. After the tests were over, the singers came out on top. The people who learned these new Hungarian words by singing them showed a higher overall performance. They did the best in four out of five of the tests. They also performed two times better than those who simply learned the words by speaking them.

    Dr. Katie Overy says singing could lead to new ways to learn a foreign language. The brain likes to remember things when they are contained in a catchy 3, or memorable 4, tune 5.

    Dr. Ludke said the findings could help those who struggle to learn foreign languages. On the University of Edinburgh's website Dr. Ludke writes, “This study provides the first experimental evidence that a listen-and-repeat singing method can support foreign language learning, and opens the door for future research in this area.”

    Do you often lose things? Don't worry. Now a new tool that can be connected to any object you might lose may be the way to solve your problem. The Tile, a small square connected to your iPhone or iPad by means of Bluetooth, allows you to see how close you are to your missing item, within a 50-to-150-foot range (范围). If the item goes out of your phone's 150-foot range, it can still be found on other smart phones with the same app.

    When you drive the app on your phone, it shows you, with green bars that increase or decrease, how close or far away you are from the Tile. You can also program it to make a sound when you get close to the Tile. And you can connect your phone with up to ten Tiles. And if your lost object—a dog, for example, or a stolen bike—go out of your own phone's 150-foot Bluetooth range, you can set it as a “lost item”. If any of the phones with the Tile app comes within range of your lost item, a message will be sent to your phone, telling you its position. The Tile app also has the ability to remember where it last saw your Tile, so that you can easily find where you left it.

    Since the Tiles use Bluetooth rather than GPS, they are never out of battery or needn't to be charged, and they work for one year before needing to be replaced. And the app works with all generations of iPhones and iPads.

For further information, please visit www.tile666.com.

    Stress is a word we hear a lot these days. People have stressful jobs; they feel stressed while studying for exams; even family life can be stressful. Stress can cause headaches and lack of sleep arid research has shown that it is one of the main causes of heart disease. None of us can completely avoid stress. Everyone experiences it.

    In ancient times, stress served a different purpose. It kept us alive. When a caveman was walking along and was suddenly faced with a lion, the stress he experienced would make him run away faster than he could usually run. Stress is the state our bodies experience when we need to react to difficult or dangerous situations. While stress saved us back then, and it is still very helpful in difficult situations, we need a break from stress every now and again.

    Luckily, there are ways to relax and deal with stress and it seems that music might be our number one cure. A recent worldwide study showed that listening to music is what most people do to relax and reduce stress. The study was based on interviews with 1,000 people in 30 countries and 56% said that listening to music was the best way to relax. Watching TV, at 53%, was the next most popular way of reducing stress followed by taking a shower or bath at 49%. It is not really surprising that listening to music is such a popular way of relaxing. It is cheap and widely available on radio, TV and the Internet.

    Of course, musical tastes differ from person to person. Sam might love listening to loud heavy metal music to relax after a hard day's work, but his neighbour - a fan of Mozart - might find hearing his music extremely stressful. “Sam needs an iPod”, you- might be thinking and you are probably right. Mobile music players can provide music privately whenever and wherever it is needed; we could even call them the stress fighters of the 21st century. So the next time you fed stressed, take a deep breath, put on your earphones and ... relax.

    "Dreams may be more important than sleep. We all need to dream," some scientists say. Dreams take up about one quarter of our sleeping time. People have several dreams each night. Dreams are like short films. They are usually in colour. Some dreams are like old films. They come to us over and over again. That may be because the dreamer is worrying about something. Dreaming may be a way of trying to find an answer. Some people get new ideas about their work from dreams. They may have been thinking about their work all day. These thoughts can carry over into dreams.
    Sometimes we wake up with a good feeling from a dream. But often we can't remember the dream. Dreams can disappear quickly from memory. Too much dreaming can be harmful. The more we sleep, the longer we dream. The mind is hard at work when we dream. That is why we may have a long sleep and still wake up tired.

    Today's students are surrounded by information. The ability to figure out exactly why authors write ­ and not accept every opinion as fact ­ is a key skill. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} The following strategies teach them how to figure out why authors really write.

    Start with why. "Why did the author write this piece?" is the key question asked to identify author's purpose. To help students expand their understanding of "why," post various types of nonfiction (an advertisement, opinion article, news article, etc.) around your classroom and have students quickly identify a purpose for each. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    Talk about structure. Authors use different structures for different purposes. For example, one author may use time order to explain an event, while another author uses compare and contrast to put that event into context.

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#}Often when authors write, they're trying to get readers to feel a certain way. Perhaps the author of an article about whale conservation wants readers to feel sad about the difficult situation of whales. Or the author of a letter may want to make the recipient feel better about a situation. After students read a text, stop and ask: How do you feel? And how did the author get you to feel this way?

    Connect it to students' own writing. It doesn't have to be said that writing and reading go hand in hand. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} When students are asked to write about a topic that they think everyone should know about, to explain a procedure or to share a personal memory, they'll become more conscious of how authors approach writing.

    Observe how purpose changes within a text. Author's purpose is often studied through the text as a whole, but authors have different reasons for writing within texts as well. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} Then, they may launch into a list of facts that make the reader feel discouraged about the situation. And finally, they may conclude with an appeal. Take a short article and break it apart, identifying the different purposes so that students see how author's purpose changes as they read.

A. Get to the heart.

B. Identify the topic.

C. The readers may get more advanced in their work with informational text.

D. For example, an author may include a funny anecdote (轶事) to draw the reader in.

E. In particular, they'll need to figure out author's purpose and draw their own conclusions.

F. Expand students' awareness of why people write by having them write for different purposes.

G. Or keep a running Author's Purpose board with a list of the various reasons that authors write.

    According to the recently published cultural mindset study from Culture Trip, 60% of people in the US and UK say that their outlook on life is shaped by influences from different cultures. At the same time, the economic landscape of the last decade has resulted in younger generations being more interested in collecting experiences than possessions.

    Welcome to the "new culture economy"

    The collision of the two trends—globalization and the experience economy—has caused a new travel concept with cultural curiosity at its heart. This is the "new culture economy". The phenomenon is having a profound impact on people's interactions and definitions of cultural exploration and presents an incredible commercial opportunity.

    Education, travel, exposure to other customs and the cultural mashup that energes are the more influential social effects of globalization. More than half of respondents from the cultural mindset study have friends living overseas, while 78% have friends or family of different nationalities. Besides, the confines of student debt and unaffordable housing have created a shift in spending patterns, and so a new set of values has emerged in which experiences matter more than ownership.

    Why we travel

    People's social networks expose them to digital influencers and keep them connected to friends or family living in other parts of the world. The combination of these cultural, social and personal drivers has helped us to identify four cultural mindsets.

    ⒈Culturally aware—The motivation to travel among this group is anchored in pleasure. They seek out familiarity and select destinations close to home or reflective of their own culture.

    ⒉Culturally curious—Those with this mindset travel to discover new things and disrupt their everyday routines. They seek some familiarity, but also want to explore boundaries. They want to be seen as someone who is interested in culture, but this is often expressed in terms of visual interest and well－known sites.

    ⒊Culturally immersive—For this group, travel is all about adventure and personal growth. They want to be seen as highly cultured and as "explorers"; they are happy to celebrate when things go wrong, which they see as the key ingredient to making memories.

    ⒋Culturally fluid—The group's identity is shaped by their familiarity with travel. They feel at home everywhere and have adopted a hybrid cultural identity. Memories are often tied to experiences with people that represent the culture they are travelling to rather than sites.

    The environmental trade－off

    The cultural mindset research also sheds light on how people perceive the effect of tourism on the environment and the measures they take to reduce their impact. Two in five millennials—more than any other generation—worry that tourism has a negative impact on the environment and over a third limit how much they travel to reduce their impact.

    While most people won't control their desire to travel entirely, good news is that those who see the world are also the ones taking measures in their everyday lives to reduce their impact on the environment.