People can be addicted to different things, e.g. alcohol, drugs, certain foods, or even television. People who have such an addiction are compulsive, i.e they have a very powerful psychological need that they feel they must satisfy. According to psychologists, many people are compulsive spenders; they feel that they must spend money. This compulsion, like most others, is irrational-impossible to explain reasonably. For compulsive spenders who buy on credit, charge accounts are even more exciting than money. In other words, compulsive spenders feel that with credit, they can do anything. Their pleasure in spending enormous amounts is actually greater than the pleasures that they get from the things they buy.

    There is even a special psychology of bargain hunting. To save money, of course, most people look for sales, low prices, and discounts. Compulsive bargain hunters, however, often buy things that they don't need just because they are cheap. They want to believe that they are helping their budgets, but they are really playing an exciting game: when they can buy something for less than other people, they feel that they are winning. Most people, experts claim, have two reasons for their behavior: a good reason for the things that they do and the real reason.

    It is not only scientists, of course, who understand the psychology of spending habits, but also business people. Stores, companies and advertisers use psychology to increase business: they consider people's need for love, power, or influence, their basic values, their beliefs and opinions, and so on in their advertising and sales methods.

    Psychologists often use a method called “behavior therapy” to help individuals solve their personal problems. In the same was, they can help people who feel that they have problems with money.

    Melinda Skaar wasn't expecting any phone calls. Skaar was working late in her office at the First Internet bank of California. By 10:45 that night she was almost ready to go home when the phone rang. Picking it up, she heard a guard shouting, "There is a fire! Get out of there." Skaar didn't panic. She figured that it was just a small fire. Her office building was huge. There were 62 floors and her desk was on the 37th floor. Skaar called out to office mate Stephen Oksas, who also stayed late to work. But when they got out to the hallway, they were met by a cloud of black smoke. Rushing back, Skaar shut the door and filled the space at the bottom of the door with her jacket to keep the smoke out.

    Then they called 911. Before they could call their families, however, the line went dead. That meant that they were completely cut off from the outside world. All they could do was wait and hope someone would come to rescue them.

    Minutes ticked by. Smoke began to float into the office. Soon it became hard for them to breathe. Looking around, Skaar noticed a small workroom. It seemed to have cleaner air. So they crowded there. That helped for a while, but in time even the workroom was filled with deadly smoke. Hopeless, they tried to break the windows, but the glass was not breakable. Everything they threw at it just bounced back. Defeated, they struggled back to the workroom. They felt weak and dizzy. Soon Skaar found Oksas had passed out.

    As Skaar and Oksas lay near death, rescuers were rushing to find them. At last, at about 4 a.m., firefighters found them.

    Skaar and Oksas knew they were lucky to be alive. Sunday is my birthday, Skaar told a reporter. She would be turning 29, but she knew she had already got the best present possible—the gift of life.

    Today, the Chinese traditions of Qixi have combined with Western celebrations of love and romance. Lovers often use flowers, chocolates, sweet gifts or grand declarations to express feelings deep in their hearts.

    But this year, you could let your love take off by traveling with that special someone on a romantic adventure. Where should you travel? Find inspiration (灵感) from these four romantic movies, which all took place in breathtakingly beautiful places. Choose one as the ideal setting for your own real-life love story.

    Trevi Fountain in Rome

    Trevi Fountain is the largest Baroque fountain in the city and one of the most famous fountains in the world. It has appeared in several notable films, including Roman Holiday. In the film, Ann (played by Audrey Hepburn) has her hair cut a barbershop near the fountain, which becomes the style-setting “gamine” haircut in fashion history.

    Empire State Building, New York

    The Empire Sate Building is an American cultural icon and has been featured in more than 250 TV shows and movies. In the comedy-drama Sleepless in Seattle, Annie (played by Meg Ryan) writes a letter to Sam (Tom Hanks) suggesting meeting on top of the Empire State building on Valentine's Day. After twists and turns, they finally see each other on the observation deck on top of the building.

    Somerset House in London

    Located in central London, Somerset House is a popular filming location with its exterior featuring in several big budget Hollywood films. In the winter, its central courtyard is turned into an open-air ice rink, as seen during the well-received film Love Actually.

    Daocheng, Sichuan Province

    Daocheng is a county in Southwest China's Sichuan Province, located at the eastern Hengduan Mountains. This magical place combines the beauty of snow mountain, glacier, lake, grassland and waterfall. After the film I Belonged to You, Daocheng grows to be a major tourist attraction, a remote sacred place for unchanging love.

    Grown-ups are often surprised by how well they remember something they learned as children but have never practiced ever since. A man who has not had a chance to go swimming for years can still swim as well as ever when he gets back in the water. He can get on a bicycle after many years and still ride away. He can play catch and hit a ball as well as his son. A mother who has not thought about the words for remember the story of Cinderella or Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

    One explanation is the law of overlearning, which can be stated as follows: Once we have learned something, additional learning trials increase the length of time we will remember it.

    In childhood we usually continue to practice such skills as swimming, bicycle riding, and playing baseball long after we have learned them. We continue to listen to and remind ourselves of words such as "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" and childhood tales such as Cinderella and Goldilocks. We not only learn but overlearn.

    The multiplication tables(乘法口诀表)are an exception to the general rule that we forget rather quickly the things that we learn in school, because they are another of the things we overlearn in childhood.

    The law of overlearning explains why cramming (突击学习)for an examination, though it may result in a passing grade, is not a satisfactory way to learn a college course. By cramming, a student may learn the subject well enough to get by on the examination, but he is likely soon to forget almost everything he learned. A little overlearning, on the other hand, is really necessary for one's future development.

    When Oliver Sacks, 82, died on Aug 30 at his home in New York City, the world was saddened by the loss of a brilliant neurologist (神经学者)and a truly beautiful mind.

     London-born Sacks was most famous for his writing. A Forbes obituary (讣告)calls him "one of the greatest writers of science of the past 50 years. Maybe the greatest".

    In his best-selling 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife far a Hat, Sacks described man who could not tell the difference between his wife's face and his hat, because his brain had difficulty telling what he saw.

    In 2006, Discover magazine ranked it among the 25 greatest science books of all time, declaring, "Lots of neuroscientists now looking into the mysteries of the human brain cite (列举)this book as their greatest inspiration."

     His 1973 book. Awakenings, is about a group of patients who were frozen in a decades-long sleep until Sacks tried a new treatment The book led to a 1990 movie in which Sacks by Robin Williams. It was nominated (提名)for Academy Awards.

    Another book. An Anthropologist on Man、published in 1995, described cases like that of a painter who lost his color vision in a car accident but found new creative power in black-and-white images. Sacks also wrote the story of 50-year-old man who suddenly regained sight after nearly a lifetime of blindness. The experience was a disaster. The man's brain could not make sense of the visual world. After a full and rich life as a blind person, he became "a very disabled and miserable (悲惨的）sighted man," Sacks wrote. "When he went blind again, he was rather glad of it."

    Despite the drama and unusual stories. Sacks' books were not meant to be freak shows. "Oliver Sacks humanizes illness…he writes of body and mind, and from every one of his case studies there shows a feeling of respect for the patient and for the illness," Roald Hoffinann, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, said in 2001.

     When Sacks received the Lewis Thomas Prize for science writing in 2002, the citation (荣誉状)declare, "presses us to follow him into unknown areas of human experience and forces us to realize, once there, that we are facing only oureclves."

    A study examining the children of people evacuated(撤离) during the WWII showed the daughters of female evacuees were up to four times more likely to suffer from serious mental health conditions compared to those whose parents stayed at home.

    In the largest enquiry ever of its kind, researchers examined the health records of 3000 children of Finnish people evacuated to Sweden during the 1941-1945 conflict with Soviet Russia. The evacuees, many of whom were at a pre-school age, were placed with foster families in Sweden and were forced to learn Swedish, later returning to Finland. The study found that the female children of these girls had an increased risk of being hospitalized for conditions such as depression. However, this was not the case with children of boys evacuated during the war.

    The study could not determine why. One possibility is that the stress of the evacuees' experience affected their psychological development in ways that influenced their parenting style. Another possibility is that the evacuees' experience resulted in epigenetic changes—changed in the way genes are expressed. For example, the researchers mentioned an earlier finding that Holocaust survivors have higher levels of methyl groups bound to the FKBP5 gene and have passed his change on to their children. This higher level of methyl groups appears to change the production of cortisol, a hormone(荷尔蒙) that controls the stress response.

    "The Finnish evacuation was intended to protect children from the harm associated with the country's wars with the Soviet Union", said study co-author Dr Torsten Santavirta, from Uppsala University.

    "Our observation of the long-term psychiatric(精神病的) risk that reached into the next generation is concerning and stresses the need to weigh benefits as well as potential risks when designing policies for child protection".