Meeting people from another culture can be difficult. From the beginning, people may send the wrong signal. Or they may pay no attention to signals from another person who is trying to develop a relationship.

    Different cultures emphasize the importance of relationship building to a greater or lesser degree. For example, business in some countries is not possible until there is a relationship of trust. Even with people at work, it is necessary to spend a lot of time in "small talk", usually over a glass of tea, before they do any job. In many European countries, like the UK or France, people find it easier to build up a lasting working relationship at restaurants or cafe rather than at the office.

    Talk and silence may also be different in some cultures. I once made a speech in Thailand. I had expected my speech to be a success and start a lively discussion, instead there was an uncomfortable silence. The people present just stared at me and smiled. After getting to know their ways better, I realized that they thought I was talking too much. In my own culture, we express meaning mainly through words, but people there sometimes feel too many words are unnecessary.

    Even within Northern Europe, cultural differences can cause serious problems. Certainly, English and German cultures share similar values, however, Germans prefer to get down to business more quickly. We think that they are rude. In fact, this is just because one culture starts discussions and makes decisions more quickly.

    People from different parts of the world have different values, and sometimes these values are quite against each other. However, if we can understand them better, a multicultural environment will offer a wonderful chance for us to learn from each other.

Chopsticks

    Right now, millions of people are digging into their food with two sticks that have school the test of time as a utensil(烹调用具)for humans. But what's so special about them? {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Personally, I think they teach us the importance of:

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#} 

    If you're ever tried using them, you know that you can't get what you want by just randomly stabbing at the plate. To be able to get what you want, you have to aim for it. There's no way you can pick up everything in one go. Know what you want, and just do it. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} 

    Practice

    Using chopsticks doesn't come naturally. You can't learn to use them by just reading about them. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} It is the same with the real life. You can read as much as you like about all the things you want to do, but it will just amount to dreams and theory if you don't try actually doing it.

    Slowing Down

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} Why? Because it allows your stomach to tell your brain you're full before you overeat. Eating with chopsticks is a slower process, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes we need to slow down and take things one step at a time, so that we have time to think and realize that we don't have to keep charging full speed through life.

A. Aim

B. Motivation

C. What can we learn from them?

D. You have to practice using them

E. Those who eat too fast were less successful at losing weight

F. Sometimes, a little bit of focus makes the difference between failure and success

G. A common health tip is to try to eat with chopsticks when you can

    Two recent studies have found that punishment is not the best way to influence behavior.

    One showed that adults are much more cooperative if they work in a system based on rewards. Researchers at Harvard University in the United States and the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden did the study.

    They had about two hundred college students play a version of the game known as the Prisoner's Dilemma. The game is based on the tension between the interests of an individual and a group. The students played in groups of four. Each player could win points for the group, so they would all gain equally. But each player could also reward or punish each of the other three players. Harvard researcher David Rand says the most successful behavior proved to be cooperation. The groups that rewarded the most earned about twice as much in the game as the groups that rewarded the least. And the more a group punished itself, the lower its earnings. The study appeared last month in the journal Science.

    The other study involved children. It was presented last month in California at a conference on violence and abuse（虐待）. Researchers used intelligence tests given to two groups. More than eight hundred children were aged two to four the first time they were tested. More than seven hundred children were aged five to nine. The two groups were retested four years later, and the study compared the results with the first test. Both groups contained children whose parents used physical punishment and children whose parents did not.

    The study says the IQs of the younger children who were not spanked were five points higher than those who were. In the older group, the difference was almost three points. The more they are spanked, the slower their mental development.

    If you have a chance to go to Finland, you will probably be surprised to find how “foolish” the Finnish people are.

    Take the taxi drivers for example. Taxis in Finland are mostly high-class Benz with a fare of two US dollars a kilometer. You can go anywhere in one, tell the driver to drop you at any place, say that you have some business to attend to, and then walk off without paying your fare. The driver would not show the least sign of anxiety.

    The dining rooms in all big hotels not only serve their guests, but also serve outside diners. Hotel guests have their meals free, so they naturally go to the free dining rooms to have their meals. The most they would do to show their good faith is to wave their registration card to the waiter. With such a loose check, you can easily use any old registration card to take a couple of friends to dine free of charge.

    The Finnish workers are paid by the hour. They are very much on their own as soon as they have agreed with the boss on the pay. From then on, they just say how many hours they have worked and they will be paid accordingly.

    With so many loopholes (漏洞) in everyday life, surely Finland must be a heaven to those who love to take “petty advantages”. But the strange thing is, all the taxi passengers would always come back to pay their fare after they have attended to their business; not a single outsider has ever been found in the free hotel dining rooms. And workers always give an honest account of the exact hours they put in. As the Finns always act on good faith in everything they do, living in such a society has turned everyone into a real “gentleman”.

    In a society of such high moral practice, what need is there for people to be on guard against others?

    A typical school day in the UK starts around 8:30 am. This is often even earlier elsewhere in the world, with students sitting down to their first lesson at 7:30 am in the US. The average teenager ideally needs eight to nine hours' sleep each night, but in reality a lot of teenagers struggle to get this much. A lot of the problems happen because our sleep patterns are not fixed, and they change as we grow.

    So a later school start time could help to solve this problem, by ensuring to get their eight plus hours of sleep and react properly to their body's natural rhythms(规律). There has been a general change over the past 25 years to shorten the school day. This is not at the cost of teaching time (which has remained constant) but at the cost of natural breaks, which has led to reduced lunch time and lesson breaks.

    Later start times could help teens' grades and health. This is mainly because it makes the management of children easier. Managing hundreds of children "playing" requires effective staffing. And there is always the fear that behavior worsens during breaks. So the theory goes that having them in class and strictly managed must be better.

    But this means that students barely have enough time to absorb what they were doing in maths before suddenly they are forced to study ancient history. And teaching staff also move through from one class to another, with hardly a rest or time to refocus.

    Clearly rethinking the school day could benefit everyone included. Anyway, it could also lead to better achievement in teenagers and less of a struggle for parents in the mornings. For teachers, it could also mean a less stressful day all around and what could be better than that?

    Laughter is a kind of universal body language that is shared by people of all nationalities, skin colors, cultures and traditions. But did you know that the ability to tell real laughter apart from fake (假的) laughter also varies among cultures?

    Greg Bryant, a professor of communication at the University of California, published a study in late July. In the study, 884 people from 21 countries were asked to listen to random recordings of laughter. Some of the recordings were made up of laughs from the bottom of the heart, while others were made by people who were asked to laugh on command.

    The study showed that people around the world have the ability to pick out real laughter, although their abilities vary from country to country. Residents of the Samoan Islands, were particularly good at it, correctly identifying real laughter 56 percent of the time. According to Bryant, people from smaller, less industrialized nations “are more accurate in identifying a natural smile” because they rely heavily on emotional engagement in order to predict others' behavior and create stronger social relationships.

    But how do people from different cultures detect natural laughter so easily? And what characters does real laughter have? As Professor Jessica Wolf of the University of California told the Association for Psychological Science, in real laughter, we produce qualities, such as higher pitch (音调) and volume, as well as faster bursts of no clear sounds.

    By contrast, fake laughter will "sound like speech". According to Science Daily, fake laughter is controlled by the same brain system that controls the lips and tongue. Bryant further explained that this system has active ability, saying "with this speech system, you can make a lot of different noises, including crying, laughter or scream. That's where fake laughter comes from".

    So that? s something to think about: next time one of your friends laughs at something you say, will you be able to tell if it's real or fake?