It was a hot, humid day, and my brother Walt and I had decided that the only way to survive it would be to go swimming in a deep swimming hole across Mr. Blickez's pasture(牧场) and through some woods.

    The only problem with our plan was that this pasture was guarded by a huge, mean Hereford bull. Mr. Blickez had told us that Elsie was the meanest bull in the township, maybe even the county, and we believed him. But the hotter it got, the more we thought there was something fishy about his claim. For one thing, we remembered Mr. Blickez liked telling tall tales; for another, Elsie seemed like an odd name for a bull.

    Finally, I talked Mom into asking permission for us to walk through the pasture, but then another problem surfaced. Mom said she would talk to Mr. Blickez if we would take our cousin Joanie along with us. Joanie was almost two years older than me and a head taller. If her teasing ever got around my grade school, it would be all over for me. In fact, I still had a headache from a quarrel with her that morning. “I'm not going swimming with that dumb girl cousin.” I told my mom.

    “Either Joanie goes with, or you stay home alone,” Mom said in her serious tone. I gave in and we set out. On our way across the pasture, Walt yelled suddenly. Elsie had approached him quietly and was licking(舔) his back.Joanie and I dove under the wire fence, but while I was on the ground I looked up and saw that Elsie wasn't a big mean bull after all. She was going to keep licking my brother's back as long as he stood still.

    We had many good days growing up and visiting our secret swimming hole guarded by the so-called “big mean bull”. And as it turned out, for a girl cousin, Joanie hasn't been too bad. She's been one of my best friends over the years.

    The iPhone, the iPad: each of Apple's products sounds cool and has become a fad(一时的风尚). Apple has cleverly taken advantage of the power of the letter “i” --and many other brands are following suit. The BBC's iPlayer--which allows Web users to watch TV programs on the Internet--used the title in 2008. A lovely bear--popular in the US and UK--that plays music and video is called “iTeddy”. A slimmed-down version(简装本) of London's Independent newspaper was started last week under the name “i”.

    In general, single-letter prefixes(前缀) have been popular since the 1990s, when terms such as e-mail and e-commerce(电子商务) first came into use.

    Most “I” products are targeted at(针对) young people and considering the major readers of Independent's “I”, it's no surprise that they've selected this fashionable name.

    But it's hard to see what's so special about the letter “i”. Why not use “a”, “b”, or “c” instead? According to Tony Thorne, head of the Language Center at King's College, London, “i” works because its meaning has become ambiguous. When Apple uses “i”, no one knows whether it means Internet, information, individual or interactive, Thorne told BBC Magazines. “Even when Apple created the iPod, it seems it didn't have one clear definition(定义),” he says.

    “However, thanks to Apple, the term is now connected with portability (轻便).” adds Thorne.

    Clearly the letter “i” also agrees with the idea that the Western World is centered on the individual. Each person believes they have their own needs, and we love personalized products for this reason.

    Along with “Google” and “blog”, readers of BBC Magazines voted “I” as one of the top 20 words that have come to define the last decade(十年).

    But as history shows, people grow tired of fads. From the 1900s to 1990s, products with “2000” in their names became fashionable as the year was connected with all things advanced and modern. However, as we entered the new century, the fashion disappeared.

    They say the average person makes 35, 000 decisions a day. Yet in her new book, How Woman Decide, Therese Huston explores a widespread phenomenon that many women fail to notice. "There's a huge double standard when it comes to how men and women are viewed as decision﹣makers," explains Therese, a psychologist from Seattle University. Therese decided to write the book after looking at her bookshelf: At one end, there were bestselling books about how to be a clever decision﹣maker ﹣ all written by men and featuring interviews with men like athletes. At the other end were books aimed at women on gaining leadership skills and confidence.

    "Once those women are at the table, will their decisions be taken as seriously as men's？" Therese wondered. "Men are respected as decision﹣makers more than women, especially in the workplace, largely because there's this cultural belief that women are unable to make smart choices at work. "

    So, Therese set out to pick apart the stereotypes（固有印象）to see what scientific research had found. "Scientific research shows that men and women struggle with decision-making equally. The only disadvantage I found was that during the teenage years-teenage girls are more indecisive than teenage boys. Otherwise, there's little difference between the genders（性别）.

    However, there are some differences. "Women are more collaborative（协作的）, "says Therese. "A female boss is more likely to ask the opinions of those around her when making a choice. Women ask for input, which helps make better decisions. However, this is often seen as a weakness rather than a strength.

    Therese also found that during times of stress, men and women make different choices, and the outcomes are often better when women are involved.

    Study after study backs this view up. Neuroscientists Mara Mather and Nicole Lighthall from the University of Southern California studied the way men and women make decisions and found that in times of stress, they react very differently.

    During their study, which involved playing a virtual gambling（赌博）game, they found that when the females became stressed, they made smart decisions ﹣ quitting while they were ahead or taking safe bets. But when the men became stressed, they did the opposite, risking everything for a slim chance of a big win.

    Spending money on time-saving services reduces stress and boosts(增进）happiness, according to a new research, but shockingly, few of us do it.

    Whillans, a professor at HBS said, "Buying time helps to protect us from the stress in our lives caused by time pressure, and the feeling that we don't have enough minutes in the day to complete our tasks."

    The effect was clearest in the Canadian experiment, in which 60 working adults were given $40 to spend in two different ways. One weekend, they were told to spend the money on a material purchase—a gift for themselves. The next weekend, they were instructed to spend the $40 on anything that saved them time, from paying the neighbor ' s kid to run errands (跑腿）to taking an Uber instead of a bus.

    〇n the day they made the time-saving purchase, they felt happier, in a better mood, and lower feelings of time stress than on the day they bought a material purchase," said Whillans.

    The biggest surprise to the researchers was how few people would spend money on time-saving services. When they asked 98 working adults how they would spend a "windfall" of $40, only two percent named a purchase that would save them time.

    "One reason," said Whillans, is that we're very bad at remembering how much we hate doing certain tasks once the suffering has passed. That makes us less likely to take active steps to avoid that overburdened feeling in the future. "But another possible cause is good old-fashioned guilt." If you feel guilty about getting someone to clean your house for you, then you might get less happiness from outsourcing (夕卜包）that task," said Whillans, "or you might just be less likely to spend your money in that way."

    In the United States, when one becomes rich, he wants people to know it. And even if he does not become very rich, he wants people to think that he is. That is what "Keeping up with the Joneses" is about. It is the story of someone who tries to look as rich as his neighbors.

    The expression was first used in 1913 by a young American called Arthur Momand. He told this story about himself. He began earning $125 a week at the age of 23. That was a lot of money in those days. And he was proud of his wealth(财富). He got married and moved with his wife to a very rich neighborhood outside New York City. When he saw that rich people rode horses, Momand went horseback riding every day. When he saw that rich people had servants, Momand and his wife also hired a servant and gave big parties for their new neighbors. It was like a race, but one could never finish this race because one was always trying to keep up. The race ended for Momand and his wife when they could no longer pay for their new way of life. They moved back to an apartment in New York City.

    Momand looked around him and noticed that many people do things just to keep up with rich lifestyle of their neighbors. He saw the funny side of it and started to write a series of short stories. He called it"Keeping up with the Joneses", because"Jones"is a very ordinary(普通的) name in the United States. "Keeping up with the Joneses" came to mean keeping up with rich lifestyle of the people around you. Momand's series appeared in different newspapers across the country for over 28 years.

    People never seem to get tired of keeping up with the Joneses. And there are"Joneses"in every city of the world. But one must get tired of trying to keep up with the Joneses because no matter what one does, Mr. Jones always seems to be ahead.

Scientists have long thought about whether each animal species has a different language, much like different human languages that we cannot understand. Language experts agree on the fact that the way animals communicate through various calls does not fit the definition of human languages.

Animal calls are not considered a language because the calls are limited to signals related to food activities, warning about the presence of enemies and so on. They lack the characteristic of productivity that all human languages share. That is — humans create new expressions every day by combining different words to express meanings. Animal calls are fixed in their meanings, while human language goes further and includes expressions of complex ideas that do not have a limit.

However, animals do communicate. People who study humans believe that people speak with their entire bodies. To express a message, one does not always need words. Have you ever shared a private joke with your friends across the table? All you did was to give them a self-satisfied smile, Animals can communicate in much the same way as humans do. Although animals do not have the ability to speak words, they can use other methods, such as gestures, movements, calls and their sense of smell. In short, most of their communication is not related with speech.

If animals can make noises, why can't they talk? Humans and animals both have the necessary organs that produce sounds, such as lungs, throat, voice box, lips and tongue. But the differences lie in the movement and relative position of these organs that make it possible for us to speak.

When humans developed from apes, a lot of our features were improved to better shape sounds along the way. The mouth started getting smaller and the neck grew longer. All other animals, including our closest animal relatives — chimpanzees, have little similarity, which determines humans' ability to speak.