China is a country on the move—especially around its Lunar New Year holiday. This year, the holiday crush（客流量） promises to be even heavier than before.

    Government officials estimate that Chinese people will take to the air, roads and railways 3.62 billion times over a 40-day period around the nation's most important holiday this year as people push their way home for family gatherings or to satisfy their new-found passion for travel.

    Getting tickets to all those would-be travelers is a discounting challenge that annually tries patience. And it is the railway system that routinely is most unable to cope. Railways are the transport of choice for low-cost long-distance travel, and that's where the ticketing system routinely falls down.

    Much of the criticism has, focused on the railway's online purchasing system, which has been unable to keep pace with the huge demand and also failed to stop scalpers（票贩子） from ending up with many of the hard-to-find tickets.

    While insisting that online sales were the fairest way to get tickets for travelers, railway officials told reporters that the public need to be patient. Efforts were being made to provide online identity checks that would reduce the ticket scalping problems. While officials had little good news for rail passengers, they did manage to bring a few smiles to those traveling by car as the country's extremely expensive highway tolls （通行费） will be free of charge for the period of the official holiday.

    Palaces are known for their beauty and splendor, but they offer little protection against attacks. It is easy to defend a large building, but usually these buildings are not designed with the comfort of a king in mind. When it comes to structures that are both beautiful and defensive, the European castle is a big success.

    Castles were originally built in England by the Normans in 1066. They built towers and walls to secure the land they had taken. These castles provided the Normans with a quiet and safe place. They also served as bases of operation for attacks. In this way castles served both defensive and offensive roles. Besides, castles served as offices for governors. Those that were socially beneath the governor would come to report affairs and express their respect. They would address problems, handle business, feast, and enjoy festivities in castles. So castles served as social centers as well.

    The first castles were made from earth and wood, and they were likely to suffer from attacks by fire. Then wooden castles were gradually replaced by stone, which greatly increased the strength of these towers and walls. However, attackers could throw flaming objects into castles through the windows or burn the wooden doors. This led to moving the windows and entrances off of the ground floor and up to the first floor to make them more difficult to access.

    During the Middle Ages, attacks increased in regularity, so castle defenses were updated. Arrow-slits were added. They were small holes in the castle, which allowed defenders to fire without being hurt. Towers were built from which defenders could provide fire on both sides. The towers were connected to the castle by wooden bridges, so that if one tower fell, the rest of the castle was still easy to defend. A lot of rings of castle walls were constructed, so that even if attackers went past one wall, they would be caught on a killing ground between inner and outer walls. All of these increased the defense of castles.

    The end of castles can be attributed to gunpowder. During the 15th century, artillery, a kind of large guns, became powerful enough to break through stone walls. This greatly made the role of castles less effective. Though castles no longer serve their original purposes, remaining castles receive millions of visitors each year who wish to experience the situations of ancient times.

    Travis is the manager of G&G where he is responsible for forty employees (雇员)and profits (利润) of over $2 million per year. He's never late to work. He does not get upset on the job. When one of his employees started crying after a customer screamed at her, Travis took her away. "Your working uniform is your shelter," he told her. "Nothing anyone says will ever hurt you. You will always be as strong as you want to be."

    Travis picked up that lecture in one of his G&G training courses, an education program that began on his first day and continues throughout an employee's occupation. The training has, Travis says, changed his life. G&G has taught him how to live, how to focus, how to get to work on time, and how to master his emotions (情绪). Most importantly, it taught him willpower.

    At the center of that education is an extreme focus on an all-important habit; willpower. Dozens of cases show that willpower is the single most important habit for a person's success.

     And the best way to strengthen willpower is to make it into a habit. "Sometimes it looks like people with great self-control aren't working hard—but that's because they've made it automatic," Angela Duckworth, one of the University of Pennsylvania researchers said. "Their willpower occurs without them having to think about it."

     The company spent millions of dollars developing programs of study to train employees on self-control. Managers wrote workbooks that serve as guides to how to make willpower a habit in workers' lives. Those courses arc, in part, why G&G has grown from a sleepy company into a large one with more than seventeen thousand stores and profits of more than $10 billion a year.

    A study of 27, 000 men showed those skipping (不吃) breakfast were at a greater risk of heart problems. The British Heart Foundation said breakfast helped people resist (抵制) sugary snacks before lunch.

    The men, aged 45-82, were studied for 16 years. During that time there were more than 1, 500 heart attacks or cases of deadly heart failure. However, people who skipped breakfast were 27% more likely to have heart problems than those who started the day with a meal. The researchers took into consideration other lifestyle risk factors (因素) such as smoking and exercise.

    Researcher Dr. Leah Cahill told the BBC: "The take-home message is to eat in the morning when you wake up, preferably within an hour. The results show that something is better than nothing, but it's always better to have something healthy and balanced."

    She said the timing of the meal seemed to be key and waiting until lunch rather than "having breakfast" may be straining (损伤) the body over time. This could be increasing the risk of high blood pressure and fatness which could in turn damage the heart. "Don't skip breakfast," Dr. Cahill suggested.

    Victoria Taylor, an expert with the British Heart Foundation, said: "These researchers only looked at men aged over 45, so we would need to see further research to prove that breakfast has the same effect on the heart health of other groups of people. What we do know is that a healthy breakfast can make that mid-morning biscuit less tempting, as well as giving you another opportunity to widen the variety of foods in your diet. Cereals (谷类食品) with low fat milk are a good way to start the day. Try a banana or dried fruit on top and you'll be on your way to a fine day before you've even left the house."

    Like many other people who speak more than one language, I often have the sense that I'm a slightly different person in each of my languages­more confident in English, more relaxed in French, more emotional in Czech. Is it possible that, along with these differences, my moral compass (指南针) also points in somewhat different directions depending on the language I'm using at the time?

    Psychologists who study moral judgments have become very interested in this question. The findings of several recent studies suggest that when people are faced with moral dilemmas (困境), they do indeed respond differently when considering them in a foreign language than when using their native tongue.

    In a 2014 paper led by Albert Costa  volunteers were presented with a moral dilemma known as the "trolley problem": imagine that a runaway trolley is moving quickly toward a group of five people standing on the tracks, unable to move. You are next to a switch that can move the trolley to a different set of tracks, therefore sparing the five people, but resulting in the death of one who is standing on the side tracks. Do you pull the switch?

    Most people agree that they would. But what if the only way to stop the trolley is by pushing a large stranger off a footbridge into its path? People tend to be very hesitant to say they would do this, even though in both situations, one person is sacrificed to save five. But Costa and his colleagues found that presenting the dilemma in a language that volunteers had learned as a foreign tongue dramatically increased their stated willingness to push the sacrificial person off the footbridge, from fewer than 20% of respondents working in their native language to about 50% of those using the foreign one.

    Why does it matter whether we judge morality in our native language or a foreign one? According to one explanation, such judgments involve two separate and competing ways of thinking­one of these, a quick, natural "feeling," and the other, careful deliberation about the greatest good for the greatest number. When we use a foreign language, we unconsciously sink into the more careful way simply because the effort of operating in our non-native language signals our cognitive (认知的) system to prepare for difficult activity.

    An alternative explanation is that differences arise between native and foreign tongues because our childhood languages are filled with greater emotions than are those learned in more academic settings. As a result, moral judgments made in a foreign language are less filled with the emotional reactions that surface when we use a language learned in childhood.

    There's strong evidence that memory connects a language with the experiences and interactions through which that language was learned. For example, people who are bilingual (双语的) are more likely to recall an experience if reminded in the language in which that event occurred. Our childhood languages, learned in the middle of passionate emotion, become filled with deep feeling. By comparison, languages acquired late in life, especially if they are learned through limited interactions in the classroom or dully delivered over computer screens and headphones, enter our minds lacking the emotionality that is present for their native speakers.

    A large number of people enjoy listening to various types of music while they paint, write, or draw. Many believe that music helps creativity.

    However, an international study conducted by English and Swedish researchers is challenging that opinion. Psychologists from Lancaster University, The University of Gävle, and The University of Central Lancashire say that their findings show music actually blocks creativity.

    To come to their conclusions, researchers had participants( 参与者) complete verbal insight problems designed to inspire creativity while sitting in a quiet room, and then again while music played in the background. They found that background music “badly affected” the participants' ability to complete tasks related to verbal creativity.

    The tasks were simple word games. For example, participants were given three words, such as dress, dial, and flower. Then, they were asked to find a single word related to all three that could be combined to form a common phrase or word. The single word, in this case, would be "sun" (sundress, sunflower, etc).

    Participants completed the tasks in either a quiet room, or while exposed to three different types of music; music with unfamiliar words, instrumental music, or music with familiar words. "We found strong evidence of damaged performance when playing background music in comparison to quiet background conditions," says co-author Dr. Neil McLatchie of Lancaster University.

    To conclude, the findings challenge the popular view that music encourages creativity, and instead prove that music consistently disrupts creative performance in dealing with problems.