In her new book, “The Smartest Kids in the World,” Amanda Ripley, an investigative journalist, tells the story of Tom, a high-school student from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, who decides to spend his senior year in Warsaw, Poland. Poland is a surprising educational success story: in the past decade, the country raised students' test scores from significantly below average to well above it. Polish kids have now outscored(超过……分数) American kids in math and science, even though Poland spends, on average, less than half as much per student as the United States does. One of the most striking differences between the high school Tom attended in Gettysburg and the one he ends up at in Warsaw is that the latter has no football team, or, for that matter, teams of any kind.

    That American high schools waste more time and money on sports than on math is an old complaint. This is not a matter of how any given student who plays sports does in school, but of the culture and its priorities. This December, when the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results are announced, it's safe to predict that American high-school students will once again display their limited skills in math and reading, outscored not just by students in Poland but also by students in places like South Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, Singapore, and Japan. Meanwhile, they will have played some very exciting football games, which will have been breathlessly written up in their hometown papers.

    Why does this situation continue? Well, for one thing, kids like it. And for another, according to Ripley, parents seem to like the arrangement, too. She describes a tour she took of a school in Washington D.C., which costs thirty thousand dollars a year. The tour leader—a mother with three children in the school—was asked about the school's flaws(瑕疵). When she said that the math program was weak, none of the parents taking the tour reacted. When she said that the football program was weak, the parents suddenly became concerned. “Really?” one of them asked worriedly, “What do you mean?”

    One of the ironies(讽刺) of the situation is that sports reveal what is possible. American kids' performance on the field shows just how well they can do when expectations are high. It's too bad that their test scores show the same thing.

    You're rushing to work and a man ahead of you collapses on the sidewalk. Do you stop to help? In a study of by-standers, it was found that some people avert their gaze and keep on walking rather than stop and get involved.

    "There is a tendency to decide that no action is needed." says a psychologist. "The first thoughts that pop into your mind often keep you from offering help. In order to take action, you have to work against them. " Here are some common thoughts that might prevent you from helping.

    Why should I be the one? I'm probably not the most competent (有能力的) person in this crowd. You might think someone older or with more medical knowledge should offer assistance.

    What if he doesn't really need my help? The fear of embarrassment is powerful; no one wants to risk looking foolish in front of others.

    No one else looks concerned—this must not be a problem. We can follow the people around us, but most people tend to hold back their emotions in public.

    "If you spot trouble and find yourself explaining inaction, force yourself to stop and assess the situation instead of walking on," says the psychologist. "Then retry to involve other people; you don't have to take on the entire responsibility of being helpful. Sometimes it's just a matter of turning to the person next to you and saying, 'It looks like we should do something.' Or asking someone if an ambulance has been called and, if not, to call for one. Once you take action, most people will follow you."

    An open office is supposed to force employees to cooperate. To have them talk more face to face. To get them off instant messenger (IM) and brainstorming new ideas. But a recent study by two researchers offers evidence to support what many people who work in open offices already know: It doesn't really work that way. The noise causes people to put on headphones and tune out. The lack of privacy causes others to work from home when they can. And the sense of being in a fishbowl means many choose email over a desk-side chat.

    Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, two Harvard Business School professors, studied two Fortune 500 companies that made the shift to an open office environment from one where workers had more privacy. Using “sociometric” electronic badges (徽章) and microphones, as well as data on email and instant messenger use by employees, the researchers found in the first study that after the organization made the move to open-plan offices, workers spent 73% less time in face-to-face interaction. Meanwhile, email use rose 67% and IM use went up 75%.

    The participants wore the badges and microphones for several weeks before the office was redesigned and for several after, and the company gave the researchers access to their electronic communications. The results were astonishing. “We were surprised by the degree to which we found the effect,” Bernstein said. The badges could tell that two people had a face-to-face interaction without recording actual spoken words. The researchers were careful to make sure other factors weren't in question—the business cycle was similar, for instance, and the group of employees were the same.

    In a second study, the researchers looked at the changes in interaction between specific pairs of colleagues, finding a similar drop in face-to-face communication and a smaller but still significant increase in electronic correspondence.

    Another wrinkle in their research, Bernstein said, is that not only did workers shift the way of communication they used, but they also tended to interact with different groups of people online than they did in person. Moving from one kind of communication to another may not be all bad—“maybe email is just more efficient,” he said—but if managers want certain teams of people to be interacting, that may be lost more than they think. The shift in office space could “have strong effects on productivity and the quality of work”.

    Bernstein hopes the research will offer evidence that will help managers consider the possible trade-offs of moving to an open office plan. In seeking a lower cost per square foot, they buy into the idea that it will also lead to more cooperation, even if it's not clear that's true. “I don't blame the architects,” he said. “But I do think we spend more of our time thinking about how to design workplaces based on the observer's angle”—the manager—“rather than the observed.”

    Twenty years ago, most experts believed that differences in how boys and girls behaved were mainly due to differences in how they were treated by their parents, teachers, and friends. It's hard to cling to that belief today. Recent research has shown that there are biological differences between boys and girls. Understanding these differences is important in raising and educating children.

    For example, girls are born with more sensitive hearing than boys, and the difference increases as kids grow up. So when a grown man speaks to a girl in what he thinks is a normal voice, she may hear it as yelling. Conversely (反过来), boys who appear to be inattentive in class may just be sitting too far away too hear the teacher.

    Likewise, girls are better in their expression of feelings. Studies reveal that negative emotions are seated in an area of the brain called the amygdala. Girls develop all early connection between this area and the cerebral cortex (大脑皮层), enabling them to talk about their feelings. In boys these links develop later. So if you ask a troubled adolescent boy to tell you what his feelings are, he often cannot say much.

    Dr. Sax, an advocate of single-sex education, points out that keeping boys and girls separate in the classroom has yielded striking educational, social, and interpersonal benefits. Therefore, parents and teachers should try to recognize, understand, and make use of the biological differences that make a girl a girl, and a boy a boy.

    One day, a man saw an old lady sitting inside her car at the side of the road. Though it was dark, he could see she needed help. So he stopped his car and walked towards her. The old lady was worried, even though she noticed the smile on his face. Was he going to hurt her? "I'll help you start your car, madam. By the way, my name is Bryan Anderson," he said.

    While Anderson was fitting a spare tire(备胎)to her car, the lady began to talk to him. She thanked him much for coming to help.

    Anderson just smiled as he put his tools away. The lady asked how much she should pay him. He told her that if she really wanted to pay him back, the next time she saw someone who needed help, she could give them the help they needed. He waited until she started her car and drove off.

    A few miles down the road, the lady saw a small restaurant. She went in and a waitress came over with a sweet smile. The old lady noticed the waitress was nearly eight months pregnant(怀孕的), but she never let the pains and aches change her smile when she served her

    The lady finished her meal and paid with a hundred-dollar bill. The waitress quickly went to get change, but the old lady was gone when the waitress came back. The waitress wondered where the lady could be. Then she found there was a note on the napkin(餐巾), "You don't need to give me anything back. Somebody once helped me out the way I'm helping you. If you really want to pay me back, here is what you do—do not let this chain(链子)of love end with you."

    Under the napkin were four more$ 100 bills.

A simple gesture can be formed into a child's memory so quickly that it will cause the child to give a false answer to a question accompanied by that gesture. A new finding suggests that parents, social workers, psychologists and lawyers should be careful with their hands as well as their words. 

Gestures can be as informative as speech, but hand gestures are so common that we rarely notice we're using them. 

While the recall of both adults and children are easy to react to suggestion, the memories of children are known to be particularly influenced, said lead researcher Sara Broaders of Northwestern University. Kids are used to looking to adults to tell events for them and can be misled even if not intentionally(故意地). 

Previous research, for example, has shown that detail-loaded questions often cause false answers; when asked, say "Did you drink juice at the picnic?", the child is likely to say "yes" even if no juice had been available. It is not that the child is consciously lying, but rather the detail is quickly formed into his or her memory. 

To avoid this problem, social workers have long been advised to ask children only open-ended questions, such as "What did you have at the picnic?" But an open-ended question paired with a gesture, briefly meaning a juice box, is treated like a detailed question. That is, children become likely to answer falsely. 

And it isn't just a few kids: 77% of children gave at least one piece of false information when a detail was suggested by an ordinary gesture. Gestures may also become more popular when talking with non-fluent language users, such as little kids, Broaders said as hand movements can impart meaning of unfamiliar words and phrases. "It certainly seems reasonable that adults would gesture more with children. "

In general, Broaders advises parents and other adults to "Try to be aware of your hands when questioning a child about an event. Otherwise, you might be getting answers that don't reflect what actually happened. "