Love to sink into your chairs and relax when you get to school? Then you will not be happy to hear that schools all over the world are seriously considering exchanging traditional desks for ones with no seats at all — Yes, that means you will be encouraged to stand through those already too long math and science lessons! Why would anyone even think of putting kids to such cruelty? Experts say it improves their health and helps fight obesity. While that may seem a little far-fetched (牵强的), the officials at the few schools around the world seem to agree.

    Among them are educators from the College Station Independent School District in Texas, who recently completed aweek-long experiment involving 480 students across three elementary schools. The 374 kids that agreed to participate in the study were provided with adevice that helped record step count and calorie consumption over the entireperiod.

    All 25 teachers involved in the study reported that students appeared to be more alert and concentrate better, when allowed to stand. The one thing that did surprise the researchers was that younger kids were more willing to stay standing than kids in higher grades. They believe this may have something to do with the fact that after years ofbeing asked to “sit still”, older kids have a harder time adjusting to this unexpected freedom.

    American schools are not the only ones reporting success with stand-up desks. Four Catholic schools in Perth,Australia, which have been testing them since October 2013, have seen similar results. In May 2014, Grove House Primary School in Bradford, West Yorkshire,became Europe's first test one, with a seven-week trial that involved the useof desks made by Ergotron in their fifth-grade classrooms. While official results are not out yet, early reactions from both teachers and students, have been extremely encouraging.

    The findings of these studies and othersdone previously, all seem to mean that allowing kids to move around in classrooms is a win-win for students and teachers — it helps kids get healthier and provides educators with a more engaged audience.

    Many people believe that you lose the ability to learn new languages as you get older. Language experts, however, will tell you that you're never too old to learn a new language. As you get older, it can be more difficult to learn a new language, though.

    Children and adults learn new languages in different ways. For children, language is their life. They study for thousands of hours every year, because they need to learn languages to become part of their communities. Adults, on the other hand, are already part of a language community. Learning a new language means becoming part of another language community, and adults rarely get the chance to practice as much as young children do.

    Moreover, children learning a new language are expected to make mistakes. This gives them freedom when learning to be daring and confident. Adults, however, often feel pressured to be perfect when learning a new language. This can discourage many people and make it even harder to learn a new language.

    When young children learn a new language, they come to see various languages as a “normal” part of society. This mindset(思维模式) helps them embrace learning a new language without feeling like they're doing something unusual or “too hard”.

    So if you want to learn a new language, go for it! It's never too late to learn a new language. If you're older, it may take more work, but it can be done. If you're a young child, though, now is the time to step out and learn a new language!

    For many years, machines have been doing work that people once did, including some difficult jobs. Search and rescue operations in dangerous environments are often seen as the first areas that will employ high technology robots. But there is another area where they may soon take jobs traditionally held by human beings: the restaurant industry.

    Teams from around the world competed in early June at the DARPA Robotic Challenge Finals in California. A team from R. O. Korea and its robot, called DRC-Hubo, won first place in the competition. The second and third place finishers were from the United States.

    The robots were required to drive a vehicle, climb up steps and do mechanical work. Such activities are easy for humans to perform, but more difficult for machines.

    Not all of the competitors were successful. The failures showed how difficult it is to design effective walking machines.

    Recently, crowds gathered for the food machinery and technology show in Tokyo, Japan. They witnessed a robotic chef preparing food. Other machines cooked, baked tasty pastries and even made sushi.

    Akihiro Suzuki works at Yaskawa Electric, a company that develops robots. He says robots cannot do everything a human can, but they are able to work without becoming tired.

    He says robots cannot taste food, change heating levels or seasonings to get the best flavor. But he says if a food can be easily prepared, a robot can repeat the same movement to reproduce the same meal.

    One Japanese woman who saw the robots working wanted to bring them home. Masayo Mori says she would like to have a husband who could work like a robot. Suzumo Machinery demonstrated its sushi maker robot. It performs the often difficult work of wrapping the popular Japanese food. Hiroshi Monden is an official with the company. He says people all over the world now eat sushi, but there are not enough skilled workers to prepare for it. He says his machine can help anyone make sushi.

    Italian Joseph Caspar Mezzofanti was said to have spoken more than 38 languages fluently at the time of his death in 1849, a skill that would have been useful in today's globalized economy. Unfortunately, when it comes to the high school Spanish lesson in the decades, most people nowadays have remembered that there is nothing more complex than "Donde esta la biblioteca". So we set out to uncover what's involved in learning a foreign language and which methods work best.

    Some advertisements say that some language learners believe they're just a 15-minute audio tape away from becoming UN interpreters. But experts say these get-fluent-fast programs are a complete sham." Actually, there is hardly a shortcut that can do that," says Dekeyser, a professor of second language acquisition at the University of Maryland." The only way to learn a language is to make quite a bit of effort on a daily basis."

    Many experts agree that the ideal learning method for language learners really depends on the individual." Find the method that works for you and stick with it," says Simcott, a polyglot who has professionally worked in over 14 languages at once for the British Foreign Service." If audio works for you, do audio. If you like taking classes, do classes. But remember to keep practicing every day."

    However, not all people are created equal. Some may have talent for language learning, but it doesn't mean they can passively await fluency. "Practice is an effective learning method," says Davidson." The more time that you spend during the day speaking your second language, the better at it you're going to be."

    Learning from multiple people is also a good way, especially when you are attempting to cultivate a native accent. "When you are exposed to a lot of people, you get a much better sense of what the sound of a word is supposed to be," says Davidson. "You avoid exposing yourself to what could be features in one individual's speech patterns."

    Rich countries are racing to dematerialise payments. They need to do more to prepare for the side-effects.

    For the past 3,000 years, when people thought of money they thought of cash. Over the past decade, however, digital payments have taken off— tapping your plastic on a terminal or swiping a smartphone has become normal. Now this revolution is about to turn cash into an endangered species in some rich economies. That will make the economy more efficient—but it also causes new problems that could hold back the transition(转型).

    Countries are removing cash at varying speeds. In Sweden the number of retail cash transaction per person has fallen by 80% in the past ten years. America is perhaps a decade behind. Outside the rich world, cash is still king. But even there its leading role is being challenged. In China digital payments rose from 4% of all payments in 2012 to 34% in 2017.

    Cash is dying out because of two forces. One is demand— younger consumers want payment systems that plug easily into their digital lives. But equally important is that suppliers such as banks and tech firms (in developed markets) and telecoms companies (in emerging ones) are developing fast, easy-to-use payment technologies from which they can pull data and pocket fees. There is a high cost to running the infrastructure behind the cash economy—ATMs, vans carrying notes, tellers who accept coins. Most financial firms are keen to abandon it, or discourage old-fashioned customers with heavy fees.

    In the main, the prospect of a cashless economy is excellent news. Cash is inefficient. When payments dematerialise, people and shops are less open to theft. It also creates a credit history, helping consumers borrow.

    Yet set against these benefits are a couple of worries. Electronic payment systems may risk technical failures, power failure and cyber-attacks. In a cashless economy the poor, the elderly and country folk may be left behind. And a digital system could let governments watch over people's shopping habits and private multinationals exploit their personal data.

    Curiosity is what drives us to keep learning, keep trying, keep pushing forward. But how does one generate (产生) curiosity, in oneself or others? George Loewenstein, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, offered an answer in the classic1994 paper, "The Psychology of Curiosity."

    Curiosity arises, Loewenstein wrote, "when attention becomes focused on a gap in one's knowledge. Such information gaps produce the feeling of deprivation (匮乏) labeled curiosity. The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce the feeling of deprivation." Loewenstein's theory helps explain why curiosity is such a force: it's not only a mental state but also an emotion, a powerful feeling that drives us forward.

    Scientist Daniel Willingham notes that teachers are often "so eager to get to the answer that we do not devote enough time to developing the question." Yet it's the question that stimulates (刺激) curiosity; being told an answer stops curiosity before it can even get going.

    In his 1994 paper, George Loewenstein noted that curiosity requires some basic knowledge. We're not curious about something we know absolutely nothing about. But as soon as we know even a little bit, our curiosity is aroused and we want to learn more. In fact, research shows that curiosity increases with knowledge: the more we know, the more we want to know. To get this process started, Loewenstein suggests, take steps with some interesting but incomplete information.

    Language teachers have long used communication in exercises that open an information gap and then require learners to communicate with each other in order to fill it. For example, one student might be given a series of pictures for the beginning of the story, while the student's partner is given a series of pictures showing how that same story ends. Only by speaking with each other (in the foreign language they are learning, of course) can the students fill in each others' information gaps.