This brief book is aimed at high school students, but speaks to anyone learning at any stage of life.

    Its formal, serious style closely matches its content, a school-masterly book on schooling. The author, W. H. Armstrong, starts with the basics: reading and writing. In his opinion, reading doesn't just mean recognizing each word on the page; it means taking in the information, digesting it and incorporating it into oneself just as one digests a sandwich and makes it a part of himself. The goal is to bring the information back to life, not just to treat it as dead facts on paper from dead trees. Reading and writing cannot be completely separated from each other; in fact, the aim of reading is to express the information you have got from the text. I've seen it again and again: some one who can't express an idea after reading a text is just as ineffective as someone who hasn't read it at all.

    Only a third of the book remains after that discussion, which Armstrong devotes to specific tips for studying languages, math, science and history. He generally handles these topics thoroughly and equally, except for some weakness in the science and math sections and a bit too much passion (激情) regarding history to his students, that was a hundred times more than my history teachers ever got across. To my disappointment, in this part of the book he ignores the arts. As a matter of fact, they demand all the concentration and study that math and science do, though the study differs slightly in kind. Although it's commonly believed that the arts can only be naturally acquired, actually, learning the arts is no more natural than learning French or mathematics.

    My other comment is that the text aged. The first edition apparently dates to the 1960s—none of the references(参考文献) seem newer than the late 1950s. As a result, the discussion misses the entire computer age.

    These are small points, though, and don't affect the main discussion. I recommend it to any student and any teacher, including the self-taught student.

    The oddness of life in space never quite goes away. Here are some examples.

    First consider something as simple as sleep. Its position presents its own challenges. The main question is whether you want your arms inside or outside the sleeping bag. If you leave your arms out, they float free in zero gravity, often giving a sleeping astronaut the look of a funny balled （芭蕾）dancer. “I'm an inside guy,” Mike Hopkins says, who returned from a six-month tour on the International Space Station. “I like to be wrapped up.”

    On the station, the ordinary becomes strange. The exercise bike for the American astronauts has no handlebars. It also has no seat. With no gravity, it's just as easy to pedal violently. You can watch a movie while you pedal by floating a microcomputer anywhere you want. But station residents have to be careful about staying in one place too long. Without gravity to help circulate air, the carbon dioxide you exhale (呼气) has a tendency to form an invisible （隐形的）cloud around you head. You can end up with what astronauts call a carbon-dioxide headache.

    Leroy Chiao, 54, an American retired astronaut after four flights, describes what happens even before you float out of your seat,”Your inner ear thinks your're falling . Meanwhile your eyes are telling you you're standing straight. That can be annoying—that's why some people feel sick.” Within a couple days —truly terrible days for some —astronauts' brains learn to ignore the panicky signals from the inner ear, and space sickness disappears.

    Space travel can be so delightful but at the same time invisibly dangerous. For instance, astronauts lose bone mass. That's why exercise is considered so vital that National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) puts it right on the workday schedule. The focus on fitness is as much about science and the future as it is about keeping any individual astronauts return home, and, more importantly, how to maintain strength and fitness for the two and a half years or more that it would take to make a round-trip to Mars.

    Bryan Laubscher, one of the world's leading astrophysicists, who study the physics and chemistry of the stars, planets, etc, is developing an invention called the Mars Elevator. To form a picture of this, you may want to imagine the story of Jack and the Beanstalk (《杰克与魔豆》). This is the story of a boy who grew a beanstalk that reached the heavens. Jack climbed the stalk and entered another world. The space elevator is similar but of course much more high-tech and better yet, it is real!

    Astrophysicists are designing a steel-like cable (缆绳) that will be connected to a platform (平台) in the ocean. This cable is designed to be pulled up into space, where it will then be connected to a space station. People will be able to travel up and down this elevator by the year 2020. There will be a number of space elevators so that both tourists and businesses can travel into space. To get there, space tourists will simply travel to the nearest ocean elevator entrance. The trip up into space will take about a week. When they arrive, space tourists will be inside a space station and will be able to stay there. There are other alternatives, too. Astronomers think it will be easy to travel from the space station to the moon, where space tourists can stay in a moon hotel — which is now being designed.

    The future looks bright for space tourists. It also looks bright for industry and scientists. Mining companies will travel to space to mine elements (元素) that are rare on Earth. Energy scientists will travel to space to set up space solar panels, which will collect a huge amount of energy from the sun and shoot it back to Earth where we can use it to heat our homes and meet our energy needs.

    More than one billion young people risk damaging their hearing through the overuse of smartphones and other audio devices, the UN warned Tuesday, proposing new safety standards for safe volume levels.

    Currently, about five percent of the global population, or some 466 million people, including 34 million children, suffer from disabling hearing loss. Young people are particularly likely to develop such risky listening habits. Around half of those between the ages of 12 and 35, or 1.1 billion people, are at risk due to "long and severe exposure to loud sounds, including music they listen to through personal audio devices," the UN health agency said.

    In a bid to safeguard hearing, the World Health Organization and International Telecommunications Union issued an international standard for the manufacture and use of audio devices. WHO considers a volume above 85 decibels for eight hours or 100 decibels for 15 minutes as unsafe. The safe listening devices and systems standard calls for a "sound allowance" software to be included in all audio devices, to track the volume level and duration of a user's exposure to sound, and to evaluate the risk posed to their hearing. This system could alert a user if they have dangerous listening habits.

    WHO is also calling for parental as well as automatic volume controls on audio devices to prevent dangerous use. While some smartphones and other audio devices already offer some of these features, the UN would like to see a uniform standard used to help protect against disabling hearing loss.

    "Think of it like driving on a highway, but without a speedometer in your car or a speed limit," Shelly Chadha of the WHO told reporters in Geneva. "What we've proposed is that your smartphones come fitted with a speedometer, with a measurement system which tells you how much sound you're getting and tells you if you are going over the limit".

    When the company was small, Google cared a lot about getting kids from Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. But Laszlo Bock, Google's former Senior Vice President of People Operations, said it was the "wrong" hiring strategy. Experience has taught him that there are exceptional kids at many other places, from state schools in California to those in New York. "What we find is that the best people from places like these are just as good if not better as anybody you can get from any Ivy League school," said Bock, who authored a book titled "Work Rules!"

    So what else does Google not care about:

    Grades: Google's data shows that grades predict performance for the first two years of a career, but do not matter after that.

    Brain-teasers: Gone are interview questions such as: Why are manhole covers (井盖) round? How many golf balls can fit in a school bus? "Our research tells us those questions are a waste of time," Bock said. "They're a really coachable skill. The more you practice, the better you get at it."

    Here's what Google does care about:

    Problem solvers: Your cognitive (认知的) ability, or how well you solve problems.

    Leaders: The idea is not whether you were president of the student body or vice president of a bank, but rather "When you see a problem, do you step in and help solve it?" and then critically, "Are you willing to let somebody else take over, and make room for somebody else? Are you willing to give up power?"

    Googleyness: That's what Google calls its cultural fit. It's not "Are you like us?" Bock said. "We actually look for people who are different, because diversity gives us great ideas."

    "What's most important is that people are intellectually humble, willing to admit when they're wrong, and care about the environment around them ...because we want people who think like owners not employees," Bock said.

    Since we've headed into the snowy part of the year, it seems like a good time to solve a language puzzle that Eskimos have a huge number of words for snow. The idea was popularized by the now well-known expert Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s. His number was approximately five Eskimo words for snow, but somehow the story was so wide spread and romantic that it got out of control and grew bigger and bigger.

    There are two problems with the concept of Eskimos having tons of words for snow.

    First, Eskimos speak at least two different languages—Inuit and Yupik. Just as we have talked about how English and many other languages developed from a common language called Proto-Indo-European, Inuit and Yupik come from a different common language called Eskimo-Aleut. So saying Eskimos have 100 words for snow is like saying Europeans have 100 words for kings or queens. It might be telling you something broad about culture, but it isn't really telling you much about language.

    The second problem is "What is a word?” The Inuit and Yupik languages make words in different ways from how we make words in English. For example, the West Greenlandic word 'siku,' (sea ice), is used as the root for 'sikursuit (pack ice), 'Sikuliaq (new ice), and 'sikurluk (melting ice). But it's not that West Greenlandic has so many more words for describing snow than English, it's just that West Greenlandic expresses ideas by combining meaningful units of language together into one word while English uses more phrases and compounds. We express all the same ideas; we just do it a little differently because of the way our language is built.

    So you're probably still wondering, "If it's not 50 or 100 or 400 words, how many is it?" Well, Woodbury lists 15 that are present in a Yupik dictionary published in 1984, but he says that depending on how you look at it this is not an exact number. It could be 12; it could be 24. But it's certainly not 100.

    Sometimes, the "hundred words for snow" puzzle is used to argue that because Eskimos have so many words for snow, they think about snow in ways that we can't even begin to imagine—that your language decides or limits your thoughts. Languages are just different. They don't decide what we are able to think about or are not able to think about. I can think about snow floating on water even if we don't have a word for that in English.

    So when you're out skiing or snowboarding or just shoveling your driveway this winter, don't believe the people who try to tell you that Eskimos have 100 words for snow.