A new study, conducted by British company Mindlab International, has found that listening to music at work increases accuracy and speed, The Telegraph reported. Perhaps, some parents disagree with this idea, saying, "Switch off the music and concentrate!" Well, if that's the case with your parents, you might now be able to convince them that you have science on your side.

    The company gave 26 participants a series of different tasks for five days in a row, including spell checking, mathematical word problems, data entry, and abstract reasoning. The participants completed these tasks while listening to music or no music at all.

    The results showed that while music was playing, 88% of participants produced their most accurate test results and 81% completed their fastest work. David Lewis, chairman of Mindlab International, told The Telegraph, "Music is a very powerful management tool if you want to increase not only the efficiency of your workforce but also their emotional state... they are going to become more positive about the work."

    However, you may have a list of your favorite songs, but not all kinds of music match all homework. For maths or other subjects involving numbers or attention to detail, you should listen to classical music, the study found. In the study, pop music enabled participants to complete their tasks 58% faster than when listening to no music at all. If you are reviewing your English writing, pop music is the best choice, as it is the best kind for spell checking. It cut mistakes by 14%, compared to listening to no music. After finishing your homework, do you often take time to check your answers? Maybe, some dance music is suitable for you.

    Graph can be a very useful tool for conveying information especially numbers， percentages, and other data . A graph gives the reader a picture to interpret. That can be a lot more pages and pages and pages explaining the data .

    Graphs can seem frightening, but reading a graph is a lot like reading a story. The graph has a title ,a main idea ,and supporting details.You can use your active reading skills to analyze and understand graphs just like any other text .

    Most graphs have a few basic parts: a caption or introduction paragraph, a title , a legend or key, and labeled axes. An active reader looks at each part of the graph before trying to interpret the data. Captions will usually tell you where the data came from (for example, a scientific study of 400 African elephants from 1980 to 2005). Captions usually summarize the author's main point as well. The title is very important. It tells you the main idea of the graph by stating what kind of information is being shown. A legend, also called a key ,is a guide to the symbols and colors used in the graph. Many graphs, including bar graphs and line graphs, have two axes that form a corner, Usually these axes are the left side and the bottom of the graph .Each axis will always have a label. The label tells you what each axis measures.

Bar Graphs

    A bar graph has two axes and uses bars to show amounts. In Graph 1 ,we see that the x-axis shows grades that students earned, and the y-axis shows bow many students earned each grade .You can see that 6 students earned an A because the bar for A stretches up to 6 on the vertical measurement. There is a lot of information we can get from a simple graph like this(See Graph 1).

Line Graphs

    A line graph looks similar to a bar graph ,but instead of Bars, it plots points and connects them with a line .It has the same parts as a bar graph – two labeled axes –and can be read the same way .To read a line graph, it's important to focus on the points of intersection rather than the line segments between the points, This type of graph is most commonly used to show how something changes over time.

    Here is a graph that charts how far a bird flies during the first Five days of its spring migration (See Graph 2).

    The unit of measurement for the x-axis is days. The unit of measurement for the y-axis is kilometers. Thus we can see that ,on the first day, the pipit flew 20 kilometers. The line segment goes up between Day 1 and Day 2,which means that the bird flew farther on Day 2.If the line segment angled dawn, as between Day 4 and Day 5,it would mean that the bird flew fewer  kilometers than the day before. This line graph is a quick, visual way to tell the reader about the bird's migration.

    Pie Graphs

    A typical pie graph looks like a circular pie. The circle is divided into sections, and each section represents a fraction of the data. The graph is commonly used to show percentages; the whole pie represents l00 percent, so each piece is a fraction of the whole.

    A pie graph might include a legend，or it might use icons or labels within each slice. This pie graph shows on month's expense, (See Graph 3 ).

    Food $ 25

    Movies $ 12

    Clothing $ 36

    Savings $ 20

    Books $ 7

    Bike Share Toronto is the city's official bike share program, designed to give locals and visitors a fun, affordable and convenient alternative to walking taxis, buses and the subway. There are 200 Bike Share Toronto stations and 2,000 bikes across the city, making Bike Share the most accessible way to get around and explore.

    How it works

    Become an Annual Member or buy a day Pass to access the system.

    Find an available bike nearby, and get a ride code or use your member key to unlock it.

    Take as many short rides as you want while your pass or membership is active.

    Return your bike to any station, and wait for the green light on the dock(停靠点) to make sure it's locked.

    Choose a plan

    For Visitors

    Day Pass: $7. Unlimited 30-minute rides in a 24-hour period.

    3-Day Pass: $15. Unlimited 30-minute rides in a 72-hour period.

    For locals

    Monthly Pass: $25. Unlimited 30-minute rides for a month.

    Annual Membership: $90. Unlimited 30-minute rides for a whole year. The Annual Membership is the best deal for locals of Toronto and other frequent riders.

    The fee of the first 30 minutes of each ride is included with the membership or pass price. Don't charge extra fees if you drop off your bike within 30minutesatany other station. If you keep a bike out for longer than 30 minutes a time, you will be charged an extra fee, $1.50 for the first extra 30 minutes, $4 for the next 30 minute, and $7 for each additional 30 minutes after that.

    Contact us

    Customer Service: (855)898-2388

    Repair Service: (855)-2378

    Corporation Partners: (855)898-2398

    Employment Opportunities:(855)898-2498

    On a February day during an unusually mild winter, found myself missing the snowy beauty. I enjoyed the feeling that comes from watching snow fall gently from heaven while I'm cosy inside with a good fire burning in the stove. But there were more serious concerns, like the lack of rainfall making our woods more accessible to summer forest fires. Local ski fields and hotels, all dependent on a snowy season, felt sorry for the vacant lifts, empty restaurants and unused snowmobiles.

    Then I happened to see three little robins (知更鸟) fly into our yard. What were they doing here? West of us, in the Willamette Valley, wild flowers burst this time of year. But here in central Oregon, even if a groundhog (土拨鼠) had wanted to appear, it couldn't have broken through the frozen earth. And yet, these robins had arrived.

    Their presence brought me a flow of happiness. It felt like a celebration as I dug into my bag of birdseed and spread a handful on the ground. Above me, the deep blue sky was cloudless, perfectly quiet but for some smoke from a neighbor's chimney. The lively cold made the air fresh and clean.

    My robins jumped lightly toward the seed. My soul jumped with them, feeling equally carefree. Caught up in the moment of spring fever, I checked our snowless flower beds. To my delight, I spotted a green branch sticking out through the brown soil.

    Despite the cold, I wasn't ready to go back inside. Just a short meeting with those robins had renewed my spirit. The next day I would return to my outdoor work with a cheerful heart and a hopeful eye for these signs of spring.

In life, once on a path, we tend to follow it, for better or worse. What's sad is that even if it's the latter, we often accept it anyway because we are so used to the way things are that we don't even recognize that they could be different. This is a phenomenon psychologist call functional fixedness.

This classic experiment will give you an idea of how it works and a sense of whether you may have fallen into the same trap: People are given a box of tacks (大头钉) and some matches and asked to find a way to attach a candle to a wall so that it burns properly.

Typically, the subjects try tacking the candle to the wall or lighting it to fix it with melted wax. The psychologists had, of course, arranged it so that neither of these obvious approaches would work. The tacks are too short, and the paraffin (石蜡) doesn't stick to the wall. So how can you complete the task? The successful technique is to use the tack box as a candle-holder. You empty it, tack it to the wall. and stand the candle inside it. To think of that, you have to look beyond the box's usual role as a receptacle just for tacks and re-imagine it serving an entirely new purpose. That is difficult because we all suffer to one degree or another from functional fixedness.

The inability to think in new ways affects people in every corner of society. The political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase" frozen thoughts" to describe deeply held ideas that we no longer question but should. In Arendt's eyes, the self- content reliance on such accepted "truths" also made people blind to ideas that didn't fit their worldview, even when there was plenty of evidence for them.

Frozen thinking has nothing to do with intelligence. She said," It can be found in highly intelligent people."

When I teach research methods, a major focus is peer review. As a process, peer review evaluates academic papers for their quality, integrity and impact on a field, largely shaping what scientists accept as "knowledge"- By instinct, any academic follows up a new idea with the question, "Was that peer reviewed?"

Although I believe in the importance of peer review and I help do peer reviews for several academic journals-I know how vulnerable the process can be. 

I had my first encounter with peer review during my first year as a Ph. D student. One day, my adviser handed me an essay and told me to have my -written review back to him in a week. But at the time, I certainly was not a "peer"--I was too new in my field. Manipulated data （不实的数据） or substandard methods could easily have gone undetected. Knowledge is not self-evident. Only experts would be able to notice them, and even then, experts do not always agree on what they notice. 

Let's say in my life I only see white swans. Maybe I write an essay, concluding that all swans are white. And a "peer" says, "Wait a minute, I've seen black swans. "I would have to refine my knowledge. 

The peer plays a key role evaluating observations with the overall goal of advancing knowledge. For example, if the above story were reversed, and peer reviewers who all believed that all swans were white came across the first study observing a black swan, the study would receive a lot of attention. 

So why was a first-year graduate student getting to stand in for an expert? Why would my review count the same as an expert's review? One answer: The process relies almost entirely on unpaid labor. 

Despite the fact that peers are professionals, peer review is not a profession. As a result, the same over-worked scholars often receive masses of the peer review requests. Besides the labor inequity, a small pool of experts can lead to a narrowed process of what is publishable or what counts as knowledge, directly threatening diversity of perspectives and scholars. Without a large enough reviewer pool, the process can easily fall victim to biases, arising from a small community recognizing each other's work and compromising conflicts of interest. 

Despite these challenges. I still tell my students that peer review offers the best method for evaluating studies aird advancing knowledge. As a process, peer review theoretically works. The question is whether the issues with peer review can be addressed by professionalizing the field.