I still remember my first day at school in London and I was half-excited and half-frightened. On my way to school I wondered what sort of questions the other boys would ask me and practiced all the answers: “I am nine years old. I was born here but I haven't lived here since I was two. I was living in Farley. It's about thirty miles away. I came back to London two months ago.” I also wondered if it was the custom for boys to fight strangers like me, but I was tall for my age. I hoped they would decide not to risk it.

    No one took any notice of me before school. I stood in the center of the playground, expecting someone to say “hello”, but no one spoke to me. When a teacher called my name and told me where my classroom was, one or two boys looked at me but that was all.

    My teacher was called Mr. Jones. There were 42 boys in the class, so I didn't stand out there, either, until the first lesson of the afternoon. Mr. Jones was very fond of Charles Dickens and he had decided to read aloud to us from David Copperfield, but first he asked several boys if they knew Dickens' birthplace, but no one guessed right. A boy called Brian, the biggest in the class, said: “Timbuktu”, and Mr. Jones went red in the face. Then he asked me. I said: “Portsmouth”, and everyone stared at me because Mr. Jones said I was right. This didn't make me very popular, of course.

    “He thinks he's clever,” I heard Brian say.

    After that, we went out to the playground to play football. I was in Brian's team, and he obviously had Dickens in mind because he told me to go in goal. No one ever wanted to be the goalkeeper.

    “He's big enough and useless enough.” Brian said when someone asked him why he had chosen me.

    I suppose Mr. Jones, who served as the judge, remembered Dickens, too, because when the game was nearly over, Brian pushed one of the players on the other team, and he gave them a penalty (惩罚). As the boy kicked the ball to my right, I threw myself down instinctively (本能地) and saved it. All my team crowded round me. My bare knees were injured and bleeding. Brian took out a handkerchief and offered it to me.

    “Do you want to join my gang (帮派)?” he said. At the end of the day, I was no longer a stranger.

    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一that plays music and vide is called “iTeddy”. A slimmed-down version(简装本) of London's Independent newspaper was stated 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 first came into use.

    Most “i” products are targeted at 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 intcractive, Thorne told BBC Magazines. “Even when Apple created the iPod, it seems it didn't have one clear definition,” he says.

    “However, thanks to Apple, the term is now connected with portability.” 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.

    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. How ever, as we entered the new century, the fashion disappeared.

    Galdwell's book, Blink, is all about first impressions and what he calls “rapid cognition（认知）”. In his own words, “It's a book about the kind of thinking that happens in a short time. When you meet someone for the first time or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions.”

    Galdwell points out that most scientific tradition is based on a great deal more than two seconds' thought though years of scientific study can come from a quick observation. As for rapid cognition, Gladwell realizes some first impressions don't seem to be based on anything. He noticed that Americans support taller candidates（候选人）. In fact, since 1900, only four candidates have beaten men who are taller than themselves. With this in mind Gladwell got in touch with 500 companies in the US and found that almost all of their managers were tall. Gladwell said, “That's weird. There is no connection between height and intelligence or height and decision-making…But for some reason companies chose tall people for leadership roles. I think that's an example of bad rapid cognition.”

    As an example of good rapid cognition, he tells the story of the Emergency Room doctors at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. A few years ago, the hospital changed the way they diagnosed（诊断）heart attacks. Their doctors took no notice of the patient's age, weight and medical history and gave most of their attention to a few really important pieces of information, such as blood pressure and heart rate. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States for diagnosing chest pain.

    Gladwell believes the power of first impressions should be studied further. “The first task of Blink is to show the fact: decisions made very quickly can be as good as decisions made slowly and carefully.”

Teaching Poetry

    No poem should ever be discussed or "analyzed", until it has been read aloud by someone, teacher or student. Better still, perhaps, is the practice of reading it twice, once at the beginning of the discussion and once at the end, so the sound of the poem is the last thing one hears of it.

    All discussions of poetry are, in fact, preparations for reading it aloud, and the reading of the poem is, finally, the most telling "interpretation" of it, suggesting tone, rhythm, and meaning all at once. Hearing a poet read the work in his or her own voice, on records or on film, is obviously a special reward. But even those aids to teaching can not replace the student and teacher reading it or, best of all, reciting it.

    I have come to think, in fact, that time spent reading a poem aloud is much more important than "analyzing" it, if there isn't time for both. I think one of our goals as teachers of English is to have students love poetry. Poetry is "a criticism of life", and "a heightening of life". It is "an approach to the truth of feeling", and it "can save your life". It also deserves a place in the teaching of language and literature more central than it presently occupies.

    I am not saying that every English teacher must teach poetry. Those who don't like it should not be forced to communicate this to anyone else. But those who do teach poetry must keep in mind a few things about its essential nature, about its sound as well as its sense, and they must make room in the classroom for hearing poetry as well as thinking about it.

    People always think men are more skilled than women in driving. Nowadays women appear to have a positive image of themselves as safer drivers than men.

    In a survey done by insurer MetLife, 51% of women said they drive more safely. The evidence is on their side: Men are 3.4 times more likely than women to get a ticket for careless driving and 3.1 times as likely to be punished for drunk driving. "Women are on average less aggressive and more law abiding (手法的) drivers, which leads to fewer accidents," the report says. However, not all male drivers share the same opinion. Of the men surveyed by MetLife, 39% claimed male drivers were safer. The findings did back them up on one point: automotive knowledge. The report showed that more men are familiar with current safety equipment such as electronic stability control, which helps prevent rollover accidents.

    Auto safety unavoidably matters to money. Insurance companies focus on what classes of drivers have the lowest dollar amounts of claims, and for now, that mainly includes women. In general, women pay about 9% less for auto insurance than men. A study by the website Insweb also showed that auto insurance rates are lower for women in most states. Among individual states, women get the greatest advantage in Wyoming (where they pay 20% less), South Dakota and Washington, D.C., where their insurance costs are 16% lower.

    "More than 11, 9000 male drivers died in U.S. traffic accident in 2009, compared with just under 4,900 women drivers," according to the study. "Based on miles traveled, men died at a rate of 2.5 deaths per 100 million miles traveled, vs. 1.7 deaths for women."

In the movie, The Day After Tomorrow, many climate changes including an ice age are caused by global warming. Much of the science in the movie has been questioned by people. However, there may be some truth to the idea in the movie that global warming could cause an ice age.

The theory starts with an understanding of why Europe and Scandinavia are not colder already. After all, other places at the same latitude(纬度) are covered with ice. The ocean current called the Gulf Stream brings warm waters from the Caribbean to the UK and Europe. These waters warm the countries around their path. This is why the UK, Europe and Scandinavia have a warmer climate than Alaska. Global warming has nothing to do with this. Global warming is significant. It could slow the Gulf Stream, or even stop it. If this were to happen, the cold waters would stay in the area of Europe, the UK, Scandinavia and the Northeastern US. It could mean an ice age for those regions.

Some weaknesses in the Gulf Stream could happen for different reasons. These days, it could happen due to global warming, caused by human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels.

If a new ice age happened, it would probably be caused by the melting of the polar ice. This will lead large quantities of cold and fresh water to come into the ocean, which would disrupt the Gulf Stream and cause the cooling of many areas that now have a mild climate.

Scientists have gathered a lot of data from the oceans and the land to try to determine whether an ice age could be caused by global warming. With all this information at hand, it appears that it is indeed possible that global warming could lead to an ice age.