For many people, history classes are seen as no more than requirements for getting degrees in chemistry, biology, business, marketing, etc. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}． Below are a few reasons why it's vital that today's people continue to learn about the past.

    Understanding where people come from plays a key role in understanding who they are.{#blank#}2{#/blank#} For this reason, it's extremely important to learn history in order to understand why people are the way that they are.   

    Through history classes, you can experience a shift (改革) in the way you think. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}It's important to develop minds to be able to consider problems from different angles. Finally, this shift can improve your ability to analyze and understand situations, to make educated decisions and to learn how to weigh the consequences related to each choice before you.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#}The idea that history repeats itself is rooted in truth. From wars to fashion to political trends, historians are often able to make predictions about the future based upon the past. By having a deep understanding of what happened in the past, today's people can better prepare for brighter futures by making the right decisions—instead of repeating old mistakes.

    Many people may not believe that a degree in history can lead to a well-paid job. In fact, students who graduate with degrees in history can become lawyers, business owners, think tank members, educators, leaders in historical organizations writers and so on. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}.

    Have you ever lost your temper? Did you yell or scream at those around you, even people you like or love? Did you want to break something or hit someone?

    Everyone gets angry. We have lots of emotions. At different times, we may be happy, sad or jealous{#blank#}1{#/blank#}

It's perfectly okay to be angry at times— in fact, it's important to get angry sometimes. Anger can even be a good thing. When we are treated unfairly, anger can help us stand up for ourselves.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}Some people keep their anger buried deep inside. If you do this, you might get a headache or your stomach might start to hurt. You may just feel crummy (糟糕的) about yourself or start to cry. It's not good to hide your anger, so you should find a way to let it out without hurting yourself or others.

    When you start to feel angry, you can count to 10, draw a picture of anger, play a video game, run as fast as you can or do something active. An effective way is to talk to a friend you can trust.{#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#}Instead, admit to yourself that you are angry and try to figure out why you are angry and what you can do to keep the situation from happening again.

    Never getting angry is impossible. But, you should always remember that how you act when you're angry can make the situation better or worse.{#blank#}5{#/blank#}Take charge of it!

A. Taking it out on others never solves anything.

B. Once you talk about anger, those bad feelings usually start to go away.

C. Here is an important way to deal with anger.

D. Anger is just another way we feel.

E. But anger must be released in the right way.

F. Don't let anger be the boss of you.

G. Every coin has two sides.

    Something happens to many children when they are out of school over the summer months. It is called the “summer slide.” This may sound like a ride at a water park. But it's not. Summer slide is when children forget much of what they learned during the latest school year.

    To fight the effects of summer slide, teachers often give students homework over the summer. Many parents may send children to all kinds of camps or find other activities to keep them learning. Some even try to build up their children's strengths by getting them into extra tutoring.

    However, experts say keeping children busy all the time is not good for them. The result is often a tired child with an overcrowded schedule. This keeps a child's brain active constantly—learning, gathering information and preparing for the next event. And this may have the opposite effect the parents are not hoping for.

    What should parents do instead? Nothing. According to Lea Waters, a psychologist specializing in positive psychology and positive education, slowing down actually helps children become the best they can be. Machines need to be reset, while kids need to goof off（偷懒）. She says that goofing off really allows kids to have some downtime, when they're not focused on a specific task but are free to do something that they're interested in doing and that they can do more automatically and get enjoyment from, like shooting baskets or listening to the music.

    She also adds that goofing off does not mean the brain isn't working. It just goes into this default network mode（默认网络模式）and uses that time to process all the information it had during the day, to integrate（整合）new information. It makes a kind of decision about what information to put into memory and what to get rid of, which in fact helps to improve memory.

    What is your favourite colour? Do you like yellow, orange, red? {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Do you prefer greys and blues? Then you are probably quiet, shy, and you would rather follow than lead． You tend to be pessimist. At least, this is what psychologists tell us, and they should know, because they have been seriously studying the meaning of colour preference, as well as the effect that colours have on human beings.{#blank#}2{#/blank#} If you happen to love brown, you did so, as soon as you opened your eyes, or at least as soon as you could see clearly.

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#} A yellow room makes most people feel more cheerful and more relaxed than a dark green one; and a red dress brings warmth and cheer to the saddest winter day.{#blank#}4{#/blank#} A black bridge over the Thames River, near London, used to be the scene of more suicides(自杀) than any other bridge in the area——until it was repainted green. The number of suicide attempts immediately fell sharply. Perhaps it would have fallen even more if the bridge had been done in pink or baby blue.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} It is an established fact that factory workers work better, harder, and have fewer accidents when their machines are painted orange rather than black or grey.

A. On the other hand, black is depressing.

B. They tell us, among other facts, that we do not choose our favourite colour as grow up——we are born with our preference.

C. The rooms are painted in different colours as you like.

D. If you do, you must be an optimist, a leader, an active person who enjoys life, people and excitement.

E. Light and bright colours make people not only happier but more active.

F. Life is like a picture or a poem, full of different colours.

G. Colours do influence our moods—there is no doubt about it.

    There's a contradiction in the way many of us behave online: we know we're being watched all the time, and disapprove of the monitor by Google and the government. But the bounds of what's considered too personal to be uploaded or shared online seems to shrink by the day.

    I complain about the lack of privacy, for example, and yet I willingly and routinely trade it for convenience. I no longer run the risk of unforeseen delays on public transport; Google Maps will inform me of the fastest route to my destination; I no longer need to remember my friends' birthdays; Facebook will urge me, and invariably appeal to me to post an update to remind people I exist. All I have to do is make my location, habits and beliefs transparent to their parent companies whenever they choose to check in on me.

    So what's going on? “Visibility is a trap,” explained the French philosopher Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison(1975). Allowing oneself to be watched, and learning to watch others, is both attractive and dangerous. He took for example “Panopticon”, a prison where prisoners were observed from a tower manned by an invisible occupant. The prisoners would believe in the presence of the mysterious watchman, whether or not anyone was actually inside, and behave themselves.
    According to Foucault, the dynamics of the Panopticon are similar to how generally people self-monitor in society. In the presence of ever-watching witness, people police themselves. They don't know what the observers are looking for, or what the punishments are for disobedience (不顺从). But they willingly accept and follow this invisible discipline.
    Foucault claimed that such monitoring is worrisome, not just because of what companies and states might do with our data, but because the act of watching is itself a terrible exercise of power, which may influence behavior without our fully realizing it.
    But something's not right here. Why does the self-display continue when we are sure that we are watched from everywhere and nowhere?
    Social media provides a public space that often operates more like a private one, where many people hold the belief that there they won't suffer the consequences of what they say online, as if protected by technology.
    Plato would be alarmed by the lack of shame online. His point about moral knowledge is this: we already know the right way to live a just and fulfilling life, but are constantly distracted(转移) from that noble aim. For him, then, shame helps us be true to ourselves and to pay attention to the moral knowledge within. A man without shame, Plato says, is a slave to desire — for material goods, power, fame, respect. Such desire, by its nature, cannot be satisfied.

    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