Some years ago industries had more freedom than they now, and they did not need to be as careful as they must today. They did not need to worry a lot about the safety of the new products that they developed. They took little notice of the health and safety of the people who worked for them. Often new products were dangerous for the people who used them and conditions in the work place had very bad effects on the health of the workers.

    Of course, sometimes there were real disasters which attracted the attention of governments and which showed the need for changes. Also scientists who were doing research into the health of workers sometimes produced information which governments could not ignore. At such times, there were inquiries into the causes of the disasters or the problems. New safety rules were often introduced as a result of these inquiries; however, the new rules came too late to protect the people who died or who became seriously ill.

    Today many governments have special departments which protect customers and workers. In the U. S, for example, there is a department which tests new airplanes and gives warnings about possible problems. It also makes the rules that aircraft producers must follow. Another department controls the foods and drugs that companies sell. A third department looks at the places where people work, and then reports any companies that are breaking the laws which protect the health and safety of workers. Of course, new government departments and new laws cannot prevent every accident or illness, but they are having some good results. Our work places are safer and cleaner than before. The planes and cars which we use for travel are better. Producers are thinking more about the safety and health of the people who buy and use their products.

    A lot of kids and adults say they get nervous during social situations. Maybe it's speaking up in class or making a phone call or just trying something new. You might feel butterflies in your stomach, or your heart may beat faster or you get suddenly sweaty. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} And if fear of being embarrassed or making a mistake is getting in your way, there are some things you can try on your own to help.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    Experts agree that avoiding situations that make us anxious can actually make things worse in the long run. Getting out of something you didn't want to do might make you feel better in the moment, but you will still feel anxious the next time you're asked to do it.

    Push yourself.

    While leaving your comfort zone isn't easy, it can be very good for you. That's because anxiety tends to go away when you start doing the things that make you anxious.{#blank#}3{#/blank#}You might find you have the skills to handle it. And next time you're in that situation you might feel less self-conscious.

    Practice a lot.

    As an experiment, try doing something that makes you nervous.{#blank#}4{#/blank#} Whatever you do, you'll find that it gets easier over time. That's because by practicing the things that make you nervous you are actually improving your ability to easily handle them.

    Relax yourself.

    Instead of trying to relax by watching television or visiting a website, try a deep relaxation practice that has a physical effect on the mind.{#blank#}5{#/blank#}

A. Don't avoid something.

B. Being nervous is uncommon.

C. Pay no attention to your original thoughts.

D. Those things are your body's reaction to fear.

E. Start with little things like answering questions in class.

F. So try to face your anxiety and fear and see what happens.

G. For example, doing things like yoga can also help you stay calm.

    Before there was the written word, there was the language of dance. Dance expresses love and hate, joy and sorrow, life and death, and everything else in between.

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#}We dance from Florida to Alaska, from north to south and sea to sea. We dance at weddings, birthdays, office parties and just to fill the time.

    “I adore dancing,” says Lester Bridges, the owner of a dance studio in Iowa. “I can't imagine doing anything else with my life.” Bridges runs dance classes for all ages. “Teaching dance is wonderful. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}It's great to watch them. For many of them, it's a way of meeting people and having a social life.”

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#}“I can tell you about one young couple,” says Bridges. “They're learning to do traditional dances. They arrive at the class in low spirits and they leave with a smile. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}”

    So, do we dance in order to make ourselves feel better, calmer, healthier? Andrea Hillier says, “Dance, like the pattern of a beating heart, is life. Even after all these years, I want to get better and better.{#blank#}5{#/blank#} I find it hard to stop! Dancing reminds me I'm alive.”

A. So why do we dance?

B. Dance in the U.S. is everywhere.

C. If you like dancing outdoors, come to America.

D. My older students say it makes them feel young.

E. I keep practicing even when I'm extremely tired.

F. Dancing seems to change their feeling completely.

G. They stayed up all night long singing and dancing.

    Taking good notes is a time-saving skill that will help you to become a better student in several ways. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Second, your notes are excellent materials to refer to when you are studying for a test. Third, note-taking offers variety to your study time and helps you to hold your interest.

    You will want to take notes during classroom discussions and while reading a textbook or doing research for a report. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} Whenever or however you take notes, keep in mind that note-taking is a selective process. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    The following methods may work best for you.

    ●Read the text quickly to find the main facts and ideas in it.

    ●Carefully read the text and watch for words that can show main points and supporting facts.

    ●Write your notes in your own words.

    ●{#blank#}4{#/blank#}

    ●Note any questions or ideas you may have about what was said or written.

    As you take notes, you may want to use your own shorthand (速记). When you do, be sure that you understand your symbols (符号) and that you use them all the time. Otherwise, you may not be able to read your notes later.

The urge to share our lives on social media

    People have long used media to see reflections of themselves. Long before mobile phones or even photography, diaries were kept as a way to understand oneself and the world in which one lives. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as diaries became more popular, middle-class New Englanders, particularly white women, wrote about their everyday lives and the world around them.

    These diaries were not a place into which they poured their innermost thoughts and desires, but rather a place to chronicle (记录) the social world around them. The diaries captured the everyday routines of mid-19th-century life, and women diarists in particular focused not on themselves but on their families and their communities.

Diaries today are, for the most part, private. But things were different for these New England diaries. Young women who were married would send their diaries home to their parents as a way of maintaining kin (血缘) relations. When family or friends came to visit, it was not uncommon to sit down and go through one's journal together.

    Diaries are not the only media that people have used to document lives and share them with others. We have long used media like photo albums, baby books and even slide shows as a means of creating traces (痕迹) of our lives. We do this to understand ourselves and to see trends in our behaviour. We create traces as part of our identity and part of our memory.

    Sharing everyday life events can strengthen social connection and intimacy (亲密感). For example, you take a picture of your child's first birthday. It is not only a developmental milestone: the photo also strengthen the identity of the family unit itself. The act of taking the photo and proudly sharing it further reaffirms (再次证实) one as a good and attentive parent. In other words, the media traces of others figure in our own identities.

    Today's social media platforms are, by and large, free to use, unlike historical diaries, which people had to buy. Today, advertising subsidises (补贴) our use of networked platforms. Therefore these platforms encourage use of their networks to build larger audiences and to better target them. Our pictures, our posts, and our likes are commodified—that is, they are used to create value through increasingly targeted advertising.

    Instead of social media merely connecting us, it has become a craze (狂热) for information, continually trying to draw us in with the promise of social connectivity—it's someone's birthday, someone liked your picture, etc. There's a multibillion-dollar industry pulling us into our smartphones, relying on a longstanding human need for communication.

    The urge to be present on social media is much more complex than simply narcissism (自恋).

    Social media of all kinds not only enable people to see their reflections, but to feel their connection as well.

    Pretending you're someone else can make you creative

    One great irony(讽刺) about our collective fascination with creativity is that we tend to frame it in uncreative ways. That is to say, most of us marry creativity to our concept of self: We are either "creative" people or we aren't, without much of a middle ground.

    Pillay, a tech businessman and Harvard professor has spent a good part of his career destroying these ideas. Pillay believes that the key to unlocking your creative potential is to dismiss the conventional advice that urges you to "believe in yourself". In fact, you should do the exact opposite: believe you are someone else.

    In a recent column for Harvard Business Review, Pillay pointed to a 2016 study showing the impact of stereotypes(刻板印象)on one's behavior. The authors, education psychologists Denis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar, divided their college student subjects into three categories, instructing the members of one group to think of themselves as "eccentric(古怪的) poets" and the members of another to imagine they were "rigid librarians" (people in the third category, the control group, were left alone for this part). The researchers then presented participants with 10 ordinary objects, including a fork, a carrot, and a pair of pants, and asked them to come up with as many different uses as possible for each one. Those who were asked to imagine themselves as "eccentric poets" came up with the widest range of ideas for the objects, while those in the "rigid librarian" group had the fewest. Meanwhile, the researchers found only small differences in students' creativity levels across academic majors—in fact, the physics majors inhabiting(寄生) the personas(伪装的外表) of "eccentric poets" came up with more ideas than the art majors did.

    These results, write Dumas and Dunbar, suggest that creativity is not an individual quality, but a "malleable(可塑的) product of context and perspective." Everyone can be creative, as long as they feel like creative people.

    Pillay's work takes this a step further: He argues that identifying yourself with creativity is less powerful than the creative act of imagining you're somebody else. This exercise, which he calls "psychological halloweenism", refers to the conscious action of inhabiting another persona—an inner costuming of the self. It works because it is an act of "conscious unfocus", a way of positively stimulating the default mode(默认模式) network, a collection of brain regions that spring into action when you're not focused on a specific task or thought.

    Most of us spend too much time worrying about two things: How successful/unsuccessful we are, and how little we're focusing on the task at hand. The former feeds the latter—an unfocused person is an unsuccessful one, we believe. Thus, we force ourselves into quiet areas, buy noise canceling headphones, and hate ourselves for taking breaks.

    What makes Pillay's argument stand out is its healthy, forgiving realism: According to him, most people spend nearly half of their days in a state of "unfocus". This doesn't make us lazy people—it makes us human. The idea behind psychological halloweenism is: What if we stopped judging ourselves for our mental down time, and instead started using it? Putting this new idea on daydreaming means addressing two problems at once: You're making yourself more creative, and you're giving yourself permission to do something you'd otherwise feel guilty about. Imagining yourself in a new situation, or an entirely new identity, never felt so productive.

Title: Pretending you're someone else can make you creative