Four smart ways to help build your children's vocabulary

    “Johnny next door can name his colors, but Gloria can hardly even say her own name. What am I doing wrong?”{#blank#}1{#/blank#}But the good news is that children really are born to absorb the language around them. The following are some ways to help build your child's vocabulary.

Never use baby talk

    Young children understand so much more than they can initially repeat.{#blank#}2{#/blank#}Of course you are not going to start speaking to a baby in difficult English, but it's important to speak to them the way that you'd speak to anybody else. Even if your child can't or doesn't use the same vocabulary when he talks, it is helping his language development.

Follow your child's lead

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#}Trying to turn her attention away from the clown (小丑) so that you can point out the word for “elephant”, is not only frustrating, but also it's probably not doing much good. Instead of driving the conversation, you'll be more successful in making words “stick”, if you look at what your child is paying attention to.

Encourage any kind of reading.

    Even young kids who haven't yet learned to read will memorize books that they've often heard. So go ahead and have your child “fill in” words as you're reading together.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}For older children who are already readers, it's important to let them choose their own reading material.

{#blank#}5{#/blank#}

    At two years of age, some kids may only use about 30 words while others may be able to use 300 words. But there's very little evidence that those children with 30 words at age two will have worse outcomes by the time they are five or six years of age.

A. So don't talk down to them.

B. Correct pronunciation gently.

C. Don't panic if your child is slow to talk.

D. It will help with their vocabulary development.

E. That sort of comparison can lead to a lot of parental anxiety.

F. Let's say you're taking a trip to the circus with your young daughter.

G. The best thing that parents can do is really just talk to their children all the time.

    We were high in the mountains of Xishuangbanna, as far south as you can get in Yunnan, skirting the borders of Myanmar and Laos. The drive was typical, textbook beauty: mountains thick with rubber tree forests, pu'er tea plantations and banana palms and tiny Dai villages. Hidden among the fields of green, I spotted an odd collection of wooden boxes near a tent on the side of the road{#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    We had run into the current home of Wei Dajing, a 17-year-old apprentice (学徒) beekeeper who was manning his hives. Wei was fresh to the beekeeping life, and had been on the job for just two months and was here to learn from a master beekeeper. Their tent and hive set-up is always temporary{#blank#}2{#/blank#}This particular spot was stationed at a sunny patch of yellow flowers. Once these flowers die, the rubber trees will be flowering, so we will move toward them,” he told Sam.

    Like thieves in the night, the beekeepers will stealthily pack up their hives in the dark once the bees go to sleep. “They are most active around midday when they are collecting their nectar (花蜜){#blank#}3{#/blank#}Wei explained.

    The hives were humming, and bees were invasively buzzing around Wei as he spoke to us. Pieces of fruit lay drying among the hives, used to feed the bees and give them an extra boost of energy once Wei bottles up their hard-earned honey. Sam, who also has a couple of his own small hives in his backyard, tells us you must always leave a little bit of honey in the hive{#blank#}4{#/blank#}

    We waved goodbye to Wei. Back at Sam's house, he gave us a bowlful of local honey{#blank#}5{#/blank#}Lacking the usual sweetness of honey but instead rich with a more savory, spiced flavor, it tasted just like China.

A. It was smooth, thin and runny.

B. Wei skillfully collected honey from the hives.

C. Otherwise the bees get fed up and abandon you.

D. Maybe it is the flowers that give such unique taste to the honey.

E. By 10 pm they are asleep in their hives, which is when we move.

F. I asked our excellent guide and new best friend, Sam, to pull over.

G. Wei and his master move their camp as the flowers bloom and die.

    What Is Emotional Eating?

    Emotional eating is when people use food as a way to deal with feelings instead of satisfying hunger{#blank#}1{#/blank#}Have you ever finished a whole bag of chips out of boredom or downed cookie after cookie while preparing for a big test? But when done a lot — especially without realizing it — emotional eating can affect weight, health, and overall well-being.

    Not many of us make the connection between eating and our feelings.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}One of the biggest myths about emotional eating is that it's caused by negative feelings. Yes, people often turn to food when they're stressed out, lonely, sad, anxious, or bored. But emotional eating can be linked to positive feelings too, like the romance of sharing dessert on Valentine's Day or the celebration of a holiday feast. Sometimes emotional eating is tied to major life events, like a death or a divorce{#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    Emotional eating patterns can be learned: A child who is given candy after a big achievement may grow up using candy as a reward for a job well done.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}It's not easy to “unlearn” patterns of emotional eating. But it is possible. And it starts with an awareness of what's going on.

    We're all emotional eaters to a degree. But for some people emotional eating can be a real problem, causing serious weight gain or other problems. The trouble with emotional eating is that once the pleasure of eating is gone, the feelings that cause it remain{#blank#}5{#/blank#}That's why it helps to know the difference between physical hunger and emotional hunger.

Next time you reach for a snack, wait and think about which type of hunger is driving it.

A. Believe it or not, we've all been there.

B. If a crying boy gets some cookies, he may link cookies with comfort.

C. One study found that people who eat food like pizza become happy afterwards.

D. And you often may feel worse about eating the amount or type of food you like.

E. Understanding what drives emotional eating can help people take steps to change it.

F. Boys seem to prefer hot, homemade comfort meals, while girls go for chocolate and ice cream.

G. More often, though, it's the countless little daily stresses that cause someone to seek comfort in food.

    Have you ever cleaned and organized your increasingly high-tech households, your hard drive, phone or tablet? It's not just stuff. Your privacy needs a cleanup too. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    ⒈Clean up your browsers（浏览器）

    Cookies are blocking everything up and keeping your computer from running fluidly. A free program called CCleaner helps you sort out the cookies and archives（存档）you don't really need. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}. Cleaner analyses its backlog of information and lists the data that seems unnecessary.

    ⒉Speed up your smartphone

    Most of us already know about e desktops, but what about smartphones? Our phones are essentially handheld computers, and when they overflow with useless information, their operations can also slow down. These aren't necessarily apps, but overburdened call logs, search history, and saved texts.

    For Android users, there's 1Tap Cleaner, an app that earns its name. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Most of us are surprised by how many updated messages and URLs get archived, a data stream that we will probably never refer to again. Then again, you do want to make sure irreplaceable bits (landmark texts, unsaved photos) survive the deep clean.

    ⒊{#blank#}4{#/blank#}

    Digital photos are easy to shoot, upload and copy, which is handy in almost every respect, especially if you grew up lugging rolls of film to the one-hour photo lab. The downside is that you may end up with multiple copies of the same picture. If you're shooting with a decent camera, each shot could take 10MG or more of space. This volume adds up.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} This is the premise behind Duplicate Photo Fixer, which is designed to filter through your photo collection in search of double takes.

A. Make your photos shine.

B. The app gathers that data in one place, letting you decide what to keep.

C. This aim of this app is to clean your smartphones.

D. Remove redundant images.

E. When you download the app, you can focus on a specific browsers that you would like to clean up.

F. Here are three tools that can help you organize your virtual (and real) environments.

G. The trick is to safely delete redundant photos without losing the original image.

    Much of the work in today's world is accomplished (完成) in teams. Most people believe the best way to build a great team is to gather a group of the most talented individuals. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Companies spend millions hiring top business people. Is their money well spent?

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#} They focused on football, basketball and baseball. The results are mixed. For football and basketball, adding talented players to a team proves a good method, but only up to the point where 70% of the players are top talent; above that level, the team's performance begins to decline. Interestingly, this trend isn't evident in baseball, where additional individual talent keeps improving the team's performance.

    To explain this phenomenon, the researchers explored the degree to which a good performance by a team requires its members to coordinate (协调) their actions. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} In baseball, the performance of individual players is less dependent on teammates. They conclude that when task interdependence is high, team performance will suffer when there is too much talent, while individual talent will have positive effects on team performance when task interdependence is lower. If a basketball star is, for example, trying to gain a high personal point total, he may take a shot himself when it would be better to pass the ball to a teammate, affecting the team's performance. Young children learning to play team sports are often told, "There is no I in TEAM." {#blank#}4{#/blank#}

    Another possibility is that when there is a lot of talent on a team, some players may make less effort. Just as in a game of tug-of-war (拔河比赛), whenever a person is added, everyone else pulls the rope with less force.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#}. An A-team may require a balance-not just a players, but a few generous B players as well.

    How do you relax after a stressful day in the office? There are many ways to help you relax. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} It takes a little effort to get there but the benefits are great for our stressed-out lives. I am talking about the activity of forest bathing.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#} It was introduced as a national health programme by the country's government. Stressed Japanese workers are today still relaxing and reconnecting with nature. The Forest Therapy Society has certified 62 forest therapy sites in the country and the forest bathing movement is also booming in other parts of the world. It says, "Just as bathing in a hot spring helps to soak your cares away, going for a walk in the woods is said to have a comforting effect."

    Forest bathing is about taking time to wander through woodland with no fixed plan or route and just expose yourself to the forest atmosphere. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}That's particularly good for people with mental health issues. A study conducted in 24 forests across Japan found that walking among trees lowered blood pressure, the pulse rate, thus improving our immune systems.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}

    Another study carried out a few years ago by Stanford University in the US, found similar benefits. Brain scans showed reduced activity in an area of the brain linked to the risk of mental illness in participants who took a 90-minute walk among oaks, birds and squirrels. One of the researchers, Gregory Bratman, said, "There's an increasing body of evidence showing that natural areas benefit us at least emotionally with our mood and our physical development too." The evidence seems clear that forest bathing is a shot in the arm for stressed-out workers. So now is the time to get out and lose yourself in the natural environment, {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

A. But the best way lies in the great outdoors.

B. Connecting with nature has never been more urgent.

C. Forest bathing is rising in popularity around the world.

D. Having this exposure to nature seems to promote well-being.

E. You could even hug a tree as it could be your new best friend!

F. The Japanese concept of forest bathing dates back to the 1980s.

G. It also found forest bathing can decrease stress, anxiety, and depression.