Finding Your Hidden Talents

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    What sorts of things do you like to read about, watch or do? What are your favorite shows on television? Which column of the newspaper and magazines do you like to read? To know what you are interested in is the first step towards finding your hidden talents.

 ● Try out different things.

    If y ou want to find out your dexterity (灵巧) in each of the things that interest you, then try them out.{#blank#}2{#/blank#} Locate a safe environment, where you can try out different things without anybody's interference (干扰).

 ●Find your passion（激情）

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#}. However, there will be only a thing or two, which you are passionate about. What is the one thing that you love to do the most, with most enthusiasm (热情)? Get the answer to the question and you will come to know what exactly you are passionate about.

 ●Improve yourself

    After you come to know about the areas of your interest, it is the time to improve yourself. Read lots of books and learn from people. One of the best ways to learn something is to teach.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}. This will help increase your depth of knowledge. In this process, you will be able to discover all your hidden talents.

 ●Know your limits

    In the process of finding your strengths or talents, you should not ignore your weaknesses as well. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}. Know what makes you struggle. You will then come to know about your talents as well as the areas that you need to work on.

A. Find your interests.

B. Know your strengths.

C. Therefore, teach what you have learnt.

D. You may be a person of various interests.

E. Carry out experiments and explore things.

F. It needs observation and analysis （分析）of one's own self.

G. Find out the things which you are not good at.

    Norman Garmezy, a development psychologist at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. A nine-year-old boy in particular stuck with him. He has an alcoholic mother and an absent father. But each day he would walk in to school with a smile on his face. He wanted to make sure that "no one would feel pity for him and no one would know his mother's incompetence.” The boy exhibited a quality Garmezy identified as “resilience”.

    Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. People who are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity (逆境) won't know how resilient they are. It's only when they're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, comes out. Some give in and some conquer.

    Garmezy's work opened the door to the study of the elements that could enable an individual's success despite the challenges they faced. His research indicated that some elements had to do with luck, but quite large set of elements was psychological, and had to do with how the children responded to the environment. The resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal lens of control(内控点)”. They believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the arrangers of their own fates.

    Ceorge Bonanno has been studying resilience for years at Columbia University's Teachers College. He found that some people are far better than others at dealing with adversity. This difference might come from perception(认知) whether they think of an event as traumatic(创伤), or as an opportunity to learn and grow. “Stressful” or “traumatic” events themselves don't have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. "Exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning,” Bonanno said. "It's only predictive if there's a negative response.” In other words, living through adversity doesn't guarantee that you'll suffer going forward.

The good news is that positive perception can be taught. "We can make ourselves more or less easily hurt by how we think about things," Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of adversity in different ways--to reframe it in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally “hot”—changes how they experience and react to the adversity.

    Hummingbirds (蜂鸟) are very small birds. This small bird is quite an acrobat (杂技演员). Only a few birds, such as kingfishers and sunbirds, can hover, which means to stay in one place in the air. But no other bird can match the flying skills of the hummingbird. The hummingbird can hover, fly backward and fly upside down!

    Hummingbirds got their name because their wings move very quickly when they fly. This causes a humming sound. Their wings move so fast that you can't see them at all. This takes a lot of energy. These little birds must have food about every 20 minutes to have enough strength to fly. Their favorite food is nectar (花蜜). Nectar is the sweet water deep inside a flower. Hummingbirds use their long, thin bills to drink from flowers. When a hummingbird drinks nectar, it hovers in front of a flower. It never touches the flower with its wings or feet.

    Of all the birds in the world, the hummingbird's colors are among the brightest. Some are bright green with red and white markings. Some are purple. One kind of hummingbird can change its color from reddish-brown to purple to red!

    The hummingbird's nest is special, too. It looks like a small cup. The inside of the nest is very soft. This is because one of the things the mother bird uses to build the nest is the silk from a spider's web (蜘蛛网).

    I've recently published a book of letters from 32 amazing Australian women about their experiences of new motherhood. Perhaps the most common question I've been asked since publication is why more of the mothers didn't ask for help. If those early months were so hard and so exhausting as they were described, then why didn't more of these women simply ask for help?

Embedded (把……牢牢地嵌入) deep in this enquiry is the assumption that if you ask, you shall receive—and that you shall receive without judgment. And if there is any experience of new motherhood in the 21^st century it is the inescapability of judgment. By asking for help new mothers open themselves up to a wave of quiet—and not-so-quiet—disapproval of why on earth they need it.

    The earliest moments of motherhood are synonymous with sacrifice(等同于牺牲). A mother sacrifices her body for not nine but almost ten long months, sharing her shell with a new being. A mother sacrifices her control, and often her mental and physical health, during the painful process of childbirth. A mother, in the weeks and months that follow, puts the needs of another before her own, sacrificing her sense of self, her ambition and all too often, her happiness.

    We don't normally use the word sacrifice to describe the newborn period. It's supposed to be sweet and milky and warm but a sacrifice is exactly what it is. And when we sacrifice we should be entitled (使享有权利) to mourn—a privilege new mothers are expressly prevented from.

    We have reached the point where being a mother who admits she needs help is like saying your child isn't worth the sacrifice. The suffering has become a badge(徽章) of honor, worn in service to your family.

    The role of mothering is not an easy one, nor will it ever be. But it could be made more manageable if we were all to offer help or support.

    Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is an important ecological screen for the north of China and even the whole country. Building a green great wall to ensure China's ecological security is one of the most important things of autonomous region.

The largest ecological function zone in the north of China, Inner Mongolia has a variety of landscapes, including forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers and lakes. In recent years, the region's environment has improved, with its forest and grassland area having increased and desert reduced.

    However, it still faces a number of challenges in ecological preservation. For instance, the region faces severe water shortages with the number of lakes dropping from 427 in 1987 to 145 in 2010. In addition to a lack of rainfall, huge water consumption in agricultural and industrial production has worsened the water shortage. Too much use of fertilizers has damaged the soil and affected the growth of grass, accelerating the expansion of the desert, which results from a lack of water.

The local government encourages planting trees on grassland as they can get more pay for trees than by growing grass. However, the trees they plant often have a low survival rate as they have a high water consumption rate. Also, to treat wetlands, some areas have planted a large number of a single tree species. This practice may damage biodiversity (生物多样性) and endanger the survival of certain animals.

Experts suggest taking the region's water resources and weather conditions into consideration in future ecological projects.

    In recent years, a growing body of research has shown that our appetite and food intake are influenced by a large number of factors besides our biological need for energy, including our eating environment and our perception（感知）of the food in front of us.

    Studies have shown, for instance, that eating in front of the TV (or a similar distraction) can increase both hunger and the amount of food consumed. Even simple visual clues, like plate size and lighting, have been shown to affect portion size and consumption.

    A new study suggested that our short-term memory also may play a role in appetite. Several hours after a meal, people's hunger levels were predicted not by how much they'd eaten but rather by how much food they'd seen in front of them—in other words, how much they remembered eating.

    This disparity (新旧研究的差异）suggests the memory of our previous meal may have a bigger influence on our appetite than the actual size of the meal, says Jeffrey M. Brunstrom, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Bristol.

    "Hunger isn't controlled individually by the physical characteristics of a recent meal. We have identified an independent role for memory for that meal," Brunstrom says. "This shows that the relationship between hunger and food intake is more complex than we thought."

    These findings echo earlier research that suggests our perception of food can sometimes trick our body's response to the food itself. In a 2011 study, for instance, people who drank the same 380-calorie milkshake on two separate occasions produced different levels of hunger-related hormones （荷尔蒙），depending on whether the shake's label said it contained 620 or 140 calories. Moreover, the participants reported feeling more full when they thought they'd consumed a higher-calorie shake.

    What does this mean for our eating habits? Although it hardly seems practical to trick ourselves into eating less, the new findings do highlight the benefits of focusing on our food and avoiding TV and multitasking while eating.

    The so-called mindful-eating strategies can fight distractions and help us control our appetite, Brunstrom says.