C

    The idea of spending a year away from home is something that attracts nearly everyone. So why is taking a gap year still considered the wild card（百搭牌）?

    Choosing to take a year out can help you gain valuable experience as well as give you the opportunity to save up some funds to help you with accommodations when you go to university.

    For a teenage student, the prospect of providing for yourself, miles away from home, can be discouraging. But with an increasing number of gap year companies providing travel and trips abroad to suit any need, it is becoming easier to tailor a dream trip.

    You can also find gap year companies that cover everything from internships（实习）abroad to paid work and volunteering. Such companies offer ideas and inspiration to kick-start your travelling dream.

    But gap years don't have to be all about travel. You can have a beneficial year out of education and stay right where you are. Stephanie Wood wants to be a mental health nurse, but with related health courses being some of the most exclusive and competitive around, she is taking a year off from education in order to gain an edge through work experience: “My plan is to get a job that directly relates to my course for the next few months. Working there over a stretch of time will both give me an impression and insight into the working world of nursing—knowledge to help me through university when I choose to go.”

    Gap years aren't for everyone. Readjusting to an academic timetable after spending time abroad can be a shock. You also need to consider the practicalities, from financing your gap year to surviving without home comforts.

    A pretty face is never forgotten. Do you believe so? But maybe it is untrue! Psychologists believe beautiful people are less likely to be recognized. A new study suggests that attractiveness can actually prevent the recognition of faces, unless a pretty face has particularly distinctive features, such as Angelina Jolie's.

    German psychologists think the recognition of pretty faces is distorted (扭曲) by emotions. Researchers Holger Wiese, Carolin Altmann and Stefan Schweinberger at the University of Jena, Germany, discovered in a study that photos of unattractive people were more easily remembered than pretty ones when they showed them to a group of people.

    For the study, which was published in science magazine Neuropsychologia, the psychologists showed photos of faces to test subjects. Half of the faces were considered to be more attractive and the other half as less attractive, but all of them were being thought of as similarly distinctive looking. The test subjects were shown the faces for just a few seconds to memorize them and were shown them again during the test so that they could decide if they recognized them or not.

    The researchers were surprised by the result. “Until now we assumed that it was generally easier to memorize faces which are being considered as attractive, just because we prefer looking at beautiful faces,” Dr. Wiese said. But the study showed that such a connection cannot be easily proven. He assumes that remembering pretty faces is distorted by emotional influences, which enhance the sense of recognition at a later time. The researchers' idea is backed up by evidence from EEG-recordings (脑电图记录) they used during their experiment which show the brains' electric activity.

    The study also revealed that in the case of attractive faces, considerably more false positive results were detected. In other words, people thought they recognized a face without having seen it before. “We obviously tend to believe that we recognize a face just because we find it attractive.” Dr. Wiese said.

    Reading may be fundamental, but how the brain gives meaning to letters on a page has been a mystery. Two new studies fill in some details on how the brains of efficient readers handle words. One of the studies, published in the April 30 Neuron, suggests that a visual-processing area of the brain recognizes common words as whole units. Another study, published online April 27 in PLOSONE, makes it known that the brain operates two fast parallel systems for reading, linking visual recognition of words to speech.

    Maximilian Riesenhuber, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University in Washington, D. C. , wanted to know whether the brain reads words letter by letter or recognizes words as whole objects. He and his colleagues showed sets of real words or nonsense(无意义的词语)words to volunteers undergoing FMRI scans. The words differed in only one letter, such as “farm” and “form” or “soat” and “poat”, or were completely different, such as “farm” and “coat”or “poat” and “hime”.The researchers were particularly interested in what happens in the visual word form area, or VWFA, an area on the left side of the brain just behind the ear that is involved in recognizing words.

    Riesenhuber and his colleagues found that neurons(神经元)in the VWFA respond strongly to changes in real words. Changing “farm” to “form”, for example, produced as great a change in activity as changing “farm” to“coat”, the team reports in Neuron. The area responded slowly to single-letter changes in made-up words.

    The data suggests that readers grasp real words as whole objects, rather than focusing on letters or letter combinations. And as a reader's exposure to a word increases, the brain comes to recognize the shape of the word. “Meaning is passed on after recognition in the brain”, Riesenhuber says.

    The researchers don't yet know how longer and less familiar words are recognized, or if the brain can be trained to recognize nonsense words as a unit.

    One summer I was driving from my home town of Tahoe City, Calif., to New Orleans. In the middle of the desert, I came upon a young man standing by the roadside. He had his thumb out and held a gas can in his other hand. I drove right by him. There was a time in the country when you'd be considered a jerk if you passed by somebody in need. Now you are a fool for helping. With gangs, drug addicts, murderers, rapists, thieves lurking everywhere, "I don't want to get involved" has become a national motto.

    Several states later I was still thinking about the hitch­hiker. Leaving him standing in the desert did not bother me so much. What bothered me was how easily I had reached the decision. I never even lifted my foot off the accelerator.

    Does anyone stop any more? I wondered. I recalled Blanche DuBois's famous line: "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers". Could anyone rely on the kindness of strangers these days? One way to test this would be for a person to journey from coast to coast without any money, relying solely on the good will of his fellow Americans. What kind of Americans would he find? Who would feed him, shelter him, carry him down the road?

    The idea intrigued me.

    The week I turned 37, I realized that I had never taken a gamble in my life. So I decided to travel from the Pacific to the Atlantic without a penny. It would be a cashless journey through the land of the almighty dollar. I would only accept offers of rides, food and a place to rest my head. My final destination would be Cape Fear in North Carolina, a symbol of all the fears I'd have to conquer during the trip.

    I rose early on September 6, 1994, and headed for the Golden Gate Bridge with a 50­pound pack on my back and a sign displaying my destination to passing vehicles: "America".

    For six weeks I hitched 82 rides and covered 4,223 miles across 14 states. As I traveled, folks were always warning me about someplace else. In Montana they told me to watch out for the cowboys in Wyoming; in Nebraska they said people would not be as nice as in Iowa. Yet I was treated with kindness everywhere I went. I was amazed by people's readiness to help a stranger, even when it seemed to run contrary to their own best interests.

Coding(编码) apps and programming apps for kids are becoming increasingly popular. Here are some of the best apps for teaching kids to code.

Scratch

Scratch is by far the most popular coding app for kids, and it is now used in many schools all over the world. It is available for free on the web as well as for Android and iOS, which is why it is so popular. Created in 2003 by MIT students and staff, its coding language is designed for children aged 7 to 16.

The language employs visual blocks or bricks that can be dragged and dropped on a workspace to construct logical chains. As a result, the child will have a better understanding of the fundamental principles of coding.

Daisy the Dinosaur

Daisy the Dinosaur is a free iPad and iPhone programming app. What distinguishes it from the rest is that it is designed specifically for children aged 4 to 7. The app was developed by the same team that created the Hopscotch coding app for kids. If you've ever used that app, Daisy the Dinosaur has a similar user-friendly interface with limited features that is best for beginners.

Cargo-Bot

Cargo-Bot is a free coding app that is available for both Android and iOS devices. It is appropriate for children aged 10 and up. This app specialises in puzzle challenges involving a robotic arm that must be programmed to perform various tasks, most notably moving coloured boxes to create a specific design or pattern.

Kodable

Another relatively well-known coding app for kids is Kodable.' It is free for: both the iPhone and iPad, but there is no option for Android or the web. Kodable is appropriate for both younger children and older teenagers(from 8 years old and up). It is also remarkable for guiding users from a basic to a complex level of coding.

The approach is very game-like, with users able to select a character to guide them through the levels.