When seeing the doctor, you feel better to know you will get some medicine. But the doctor knows that medicine is not always needed. Sometimes all a sick person needs is some reassurance (安想) that all will be well. In such cases the doctor may prescribe a placebo.

    A placebo is a sugar pill, a harmless shot, or an empty capsule. The patient thinks it is medicine and begins to get better. How does this happen?

    The study of the placebo opens up new knowledge about the way the human body can heal itself. It is as if there was a doctor in each of us. The doctor will heal the body for us if we let it. But it is not yet known just how the placebo works to heal the body. Some people say it works because the human mind fools itself. These people say that if the mind is fooled into thinking it got medicine, then it will act as if it did, and the body will feel better.

    Placebos don't always work. The success of this treatment seems to rest a lot with the relationship between the patient and the doctor. If the patient has lots of trust in the doctor and if the doctor really wants to help the patient, then the placebo is more likely to work. So in a way, the doctor is the most powerful placebo of all.

    A placebo can also have bad effects. If patients expect a bad reaction to medicine, then they'll also show a bad reaction to the placebo. Some doctors still think that if the placebo can have bad effects it should never be used. They think there is still not enough known about it.

    The strange power of the placebo does seem to suggest that the human mind is stronger than we think it is. There are people who say you can heal your body by using your mind. And the interesting thing is that even people who swear this is not possible have been healed by a placebo.

B

    Good Morning Britain's Susanna Reid is used to grilling guests on the sofa every morning, but she is cooking up a storm in her latest role-showing families how to prepare delicious and nutritious meals on a tight budget.

    In Save Money: Good Food, she visits a different home each week and with the help of chef Matt Tebbutt offers top tips on how to reduce food waste, while preparing recipes for under £5 per family a day. And the Good Morning Britain presenter says she's been able to put a lot of what she's learnt into practice in her own home, preparing meals for sons, Sam, 14, Finn, 13, and Jack, 11.

    "We love Mexican churros, so I buy them on my phone from my local Mexican takeaway restaurant," she explains. "I pay £5 for a portion(一份),but Matt makes them for 26p a portion, because they are flour, water, sugar and oil. Everybody can buy takeaway food, but sometimes we're not aware how cheaply we can make this food ourselves."

    The eight-part series(系列节目),Save Money: Good Food, follows in the footsteps of ITV's Save Money: Good Health, which gave viewers advice on how to get value from the vast range of health products on the market.

    With food our biggest weekly household expense, Susanna and Matt spend time with a different family each week. In tonight's Easter special they come to the aid of a family in need of some delicious inspiration on a budget. The team transforms the family's long weekend of celebration with less expensive but still tasty recipes.

    “Did you hear what happened to Adam Last Friday?”Lindsey whispers to Tori.

    With her eyes shining, Tori brags，“You bet I did, Sean told me two days ago.”

    Who are Lindsey and Tori talking about? It just happened to be yours truly, Adam Freedman, I can tell you that what they are saying is not nice and not even true. Still, Lindsey and Tori aren't very different from most students here at Linton High School, including me. Many of our conversations are gossip(闲话). I have noticed three effects of gossip: it can hurt people, it can give gossipers a strange kind of satisfaction, and it can cause social pressures in a group.

    An important negative effect of gossip is that it can hurt the person being talked about. Usually, gossip spreads information about a topic-breakups, trouble at home, even dropping out-that a person would rather keep secret. The more embarrassing or shameful the secret is, the juicier the gossip it makes. Probably the worst type of gossip is the absolute lie. People often think of gossipers as harmless, but cruel lies can cause pain.

    If we know that gossip can be harmful, then why do so many of us do it? That answer lies in another effect of gossip: the satisfaction it gives us. Sharing the latest rumor(传言)can make a person feel important because he or she knows something that others don't. Similarly, hearing the latest rumor can make a person feel like part of the “in group.” In other words, gossip is satisfying because it gives people a sense of belonging or even superiority(优越感).

    Gossip also can have a third effect: it strengthens unwritten, unspoken rules about how people should act. Professor David Wilson explains that gossip is important in policing behaviors in a group. Translated into high school terms, this means that if everybody you hang around with is laughing at what John wore or what Jane said, then you can bet that wearing or saying something similar will get you the same kind of negative attention. The do's and don'ts conveyed through gossip will never show up in any student handbook.

    The effects of gossip vary depending on the situation. The next time you feel the urge to spread the latest news, think about why you want to gossip and what effects your “juicy story” might have.

    For 63 percent of Americans, coffee is one of their daily essentials. This number has been this high since 2017, according to the National Coffee Association. The rise of coffee is due to its numerous benefits like preventing DNA damage, but it works best if you do this simple thing first: Eat.

    "Drinking coffee on an empty stomach, or early in the morning before you've had breakfast, can raise the level of cortisol (皮质醇) in your body. From the moment you open your eyes in the morning, your body starts releasing cortisol. It's a hormone (激素) that's responsible for ruling your immune response, metabolism (新陈代谢), and stress response," says Dr. Nikola Djordjevic, MD.

    "If you pump your body with caffeine(咖啡因) when your cortisol is at its peak," Djordjevic says, "you'll be forcing your body to bear even more stress." In a study that evaluated preference for caffeinated drinks among medical students, it's shown that 25 percent of students drank coffee in the morning on an empty stomach.

    These students are at an increased risk of mood changes and possible long-term effects on their health, as explained in the study. "Drinking coffee on an empty stomach can greatly encourage the acid in your stomach, producing a more acidic environment," says Dr. Jamie Long, a licensed clinical psychologist. Thus, a full stomach is important to control the amount of stomach acid produced.

    Since coffee increases your stomach acid, you're highly likely to experience heartburn and even develop gastric ulcers (胃溃疡), Djordjevic says. Clearly, drinking coffee on an empty stomach affects physical health. But it does harm to mental health, too. The overproduction of acid in the stomach can cause mood swings, nervousness, shaking and other withdrawal symptoms (症状). "And if you've already had the sign of experiencing anxiety, you're even more possible to be attacked by the effects of coffee," says Long.

    Base line: Know your limits so you can fully experience what coffee can offer, because here's exactly what happens to your body when you drink coffee daily.

    In the first few years of their lives, children brought up in English-speaking homes successfully master the use of hundreds of words, including those for objects, actions, emotions, and many other aspects of the physical world. However, when it comes to learning colour words, the same children perform very badly. If shown a blue cup and asked about its colour, typical two-year-olds seem as likely to come up with "red" as "blue".

    Cognitive (认知) scientists at Stanford University in California supposed that children's incompetence at colour-word learning may be directly linked to the way these words are used in English. They are used mostly in pre-nominal position (e.g. "blue cup"), in contrast to post-nominal position (e.g. "The cup is blue."). The difficulty children have may simply come down to the challenge of having to make predictions from colour words to the objects they refer to, rather than from the objects to the colour words.

    To explore this idea further, the research team recruited 40 English children aged between 23 and 29 months and carried out a three-phase experiment. It considered of a pre-test, followed by training in the use of colour words, and finally a post-test that was identical to the pre-test. The pre- and post- test materials comprised six objects that were unfamiliar to the children. There were three examples of each object in each of three colours — red, yellow and blue. The objects were presented on trays (托盘), and in both tests, the children were asked to pick out objects in response to requests in which the colour word was either a pre-nominal ("Which is the red one?") or a post-nominal ("Which one is red?").

    In the training, the children were introduced to five sets of familiar items (balls, cups, crayons, glasses, and toy bears) in each of the three colours. Half the children were presented with the items one by one and heard them labeled with colour words used pre-nominally, while the other half were introduced to the same items described with a post-nominal colour word. After the training, the children repeated the selection task on the novel items in the post-test. Correct choices on items that were consistent across the pre- and post-tests were used to measure children's colour knowledge.

    According to the assessment, children's performance was consistent when they were both trained and tested on post-nominal adjectives, and worst when trained on pre-nominal adjectives and tested on post-nominal adjectives. Comparing the pre- and post-test scores across each condition revealed a significant decline in performance when children were both pre- and post-tested with questions that placed the colour words pre-nominally.

Start of Summer, the 7th term of the year, begins on May 6 and ends on May 20 this year. It signals the transition of seasons. Here are four things to learn about it.

Greeting Start ofSummer

The term Start of Summer originated at the end of the Warring States Period. Since it is a crucial time for the harvest of summer crops, ancient Chinese emperors in different dynasties attached great importance to the Start of Summer.

CheckingOne'sWeight

The custom of weighing people at the Start of Summer originated from the Three Kingdoms Period and prevails in South China today. It was believed this practice would bring health and good luck to the people weighed. It is said those who were weighed would stay healthy in the hot summer and those who weren't would suffer illness.

EatingEggs

In ancient China, people believed a round egg symbolized a happy life and eating eggs on the day of Start of Summer was a prayer for good health. They put leftover tea into boiled water together with eggs. Later people improved cooking methods and added spices to the eggs to make them taste delicious. Today tea egg has become a traditional snack in China.

Taking Care of theHeart

According to Chinese traditional medicine, Start of Summer is a key time to moisten the heart. When the weather grows hotter, dampness and heat can affect human health. Food rich in vitamins and cool in nature is highly recommended. Vegetables, such as cucumber, tomato, and watercress and fruits like watermelon, pear and strawberry are top recommendations.