If you are a teacher, join Youngzine and sign up your class for free today! Youngzine is an online News Magazine for school age children. It provides an educational, entertaining, yet safe way for kids and adults to get the latest news from around the world.

    Many educators have said that Youngzine is a perfect complement to academic material, and can be a great resource for teachers and their classes. Learning through current events not only makes students more aware of what's going on in the world, but also helps absorb concepts better.

    Moreover, Youngzine now provides a safe “blog” environment for classrooms—a constructive, creative and controlled way for teachers to create classroom assignments (任务) and push for discussions on current events!

    Youngzine provides special features just for you. If you sign up as a teacher:

    Each of your classes get a “Classroom Code” that identifies the students in that class. For each class, you get a “Blog” where you can post assignments and have students respond. You can include specific articles and quizzes in each assignment.

    For each of your classes, you get to see a foil report of each student's activities just by going to your classroom tab (标签): their comments, assignment, responses, points and quiz results.

    If you are a teacher of homeschool, when you and your students share a computer, it requires each of you to log in/out separately. If it is inconvenient, you can use a single account in your class on Youngzine.

    It only takes 2 minutes to get started:

    JOIN YOUNGZINE (if you haven't already done so) and SIGN UP YOUR CLASS!

    If you have any questions or comments, let us know—we'd love to make this work for your class.

    As kids, my friends and I spent a lot of time out in the woods. "The woods" was our part-time address, destination, purpose, and excuse. If I went to a friend's house and found him not at home, his mother might say, "Oh, he's out in the woods," with a tone (语气) of airy acceptance. It's similar to the tone people sometimes use now a days to tell me that someone I'm looking for is on the golf course or at the gym, or even "away from his desk". For us ten-year-olds, "being out in the woods" was just an excuse to do whatever we feel like for a while.

    We sometimes told ourselves that what we were doing in the woods was exploring (探索). Exploring was a more popular idea back then than it is today. History seemed to be mostly about explorers. Our explorations, though seemed to have less system than the historic kind something usually came up along the way. Say we stayed in the woods, throwing rocks, shooting frogs, picking blackberries, digging in what we were briefly persuaded was an Indian burial mound.

    Often we got "lost" and had to climb a tree to find out where we were. If you read a story in which someone does that successfully, be skeptical; the topmost branches are usually too skinny to hold weight, and we could never climb high enough to see anything except other trees. There were four or five trees that we visited regularly-tall beeches easy to climb and comfortable to sit in.

    It was in a tree, too, that our days of fooling around in the woods came to an end. By then some of us has reached seventh grade and had begun the rough ride of adolescence (青春期). In March, the month when we usually took to the woods again after winter, two friends and I set out to go exploring. We climbed a tree, and all of a sudden it occurred to all three of us at the same time that we really were rather big to be up in a tree. Soon there would be the spring dances on Friday evenings in the high school cafeteria.

    Carlos had been in New York for five months now, and he detested it. He would never forget the day when the plane landed. His parents had big smiles on their faces as they discussed the wonderful new life they would have in this great city. His older sister and brother looked in wonder and excitement at the buildings. Uncle Miguel and Aunt Esperanza thought of the good jobs they would get. Grandmother and Grandfather told him what a lucky boy he was to come to this wonderful city. But Carlos was lonely. The city looked big, cold, and dirty to him.

    They lived in an apartment in Manhattan. There were stores and cinemas close to their home. But Carlos didn't want these things. He loved his home in the country in Puerto Rico; he loved the green fields, the hot sun, and the lovely beaches.

    He didn't want to go to school because it made him think of his friends at home. And he didn't want to learn a new language that could never describe the world as beautifully as his own.

    He began to go down to the dock(码头), because this made him feel closer to Puerto Rico. He sat down and watched the ships. He would often find a man also sitting there looking at the sea. The man was Eric-a taxi driver who came there to escape from the noisy traffic.

    Eric noticed the young boy and felt his sadness. One day he said, “Yes, it's hard to leave your homeland. I remember when I left Norway 15 years ago. I know it's hard to start a new life in a new country, but let's face it. I did it and you can do it, too.”

    From then on the taxi driver and the young boy began to develop a deep friendship.

How Room Designs Affect Our Work and Feelings

    Architects have long had the feeling that the places we live in can affect our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. But now scientists are giving this feeling an empirical（经验的，实证的） basis. They are discovering how to design spaces that promote creativity, keep people focused and lead to relaxation.

    Researches show that aspects of the physical environment can influence creativity. In 2007, Joan Meyers-Levy at the University of Minnesota, reported that the height of a room's ceiling affects how people think. Her research indicates that higher ceilings encourage people to think more freely, which may lead them to make more abstract connections. Low ceilings, on the other hand, may inspire a more detailed outlook.

    In additions to ceiling height, the view afforded by a building may influence an occupant's ability to concentrate. Nancy Wells and her colleagues at Cornell University found in their study that kids who experienced the greatest increase in greenness as a result of a family move made the most gains on a standard test of attention.

    Using nature to improve focus of attention ought to pay off  academically, and it seems to, according to a study led by C. Kenneth Tanner, head of the School Design & Planning Laboratory at the University of Georgia. Tanner and his team found that students in classrooms with unblocked views of at least 50 feet outside the window had higher scores on tests of vocabulary, language arts and maths than did students whose classrooms primarily overlooked roads and parking lots.

    Recent study on room lighting design suggests than dim（暗淡的） light helps people to loosen up. If that is true generally, keeping the light low during dinner or at parties could increase relaxation. Researchers of Harvard Medical School also discovered that furniture with rounded edges could help visitors relax.

    So far scientists have focused mainly on public buildings. "We have a very limited number of studies, so we're almost looking at the problem through a straw（吸管）," architect David Allison says. "How do you take answers to very specific questions and make broad, generalized use of them? That's what we're all struggling with."

    Elephants are able to know the difference between a man and a woman, and can tell an adult (成年人) from a child—all from the sound of a human voice. This is according to a study in which researchers played voice recordings to wild African elephants.

    The animals showed more fear when they heard the voices of adult Masai men. Usually Masai people hunt elephants, and this suggests that animals have grown to listen for and avoid them.

    Prof. Karen McComb and Dr Graeme Shannon from the University of Sussex led the study. They explained that in former research they had used similar experiments to show that elephants could tell—from the sound of a lion—whether the animal was a female (雌性) or a more dangerous male (雄性).

    Prof  McComb wanted to find out if the animals used their very sharp sense of hearing to recognize danger from humans.

    The scientists recorded Masai men, women and children saying, in their own language, "Look, look over there, a group of elephants are coming." They also recorded Kamba men saying this phrase.

    Masai people often come across elephants, which can result in violent (暴力的) hunting. Kamba people, however, mainly feed on agriculture, which does not generally bring them into violent touch with the animals.

    When the team played recordings of these different voices through a hidden speaker, they found that elephant family groups showed more fear in response to the voice of a Masai man, than to a Kamba man's voice. And the adult male Masai voices caused far more violent response than the voices of women or boys.

    When I was nine years old, I loved to go fishing with my dad. But the only thing that wasn't very fun about it was that he could catch many fish while I couldn't catch anything. I usually got pretty upset and kept asking him why. He always answered, "Son, if you want to catch a fish, you have to think like a fish." I remember being even more upset then because, "I'm not a fish!" I didn't know how to think like a fish. Besides, I reasoned, how could what I think influence what a fish does?

    As I got a little older I began to understand what my dad really meant. So, I read some books on fish. And I even joined the local fishing club and started attending the monthly meetings. I learned that a fish is a cold-blooded animal and therefore is very sensitive to water temperature. That is why fish prefer shallow water to deep water because the former is warmer. Besides, water is usually warmer in direct sunlight than in the shade. Yet, fish don't have any eyelids (眼皮) and the sun hurts their eyes. The more I understood fish, the more I became effective at finding and catching them.

    When I grew up and entered the business world, I remember hearing my first boss say, "We all need to think like sales people." But it didn't completely make sense. My dad never once said, "If you want to catch a fish you need to think like a fisherman." What he said was, "You need to think like a fish." Years later, with great efforts to promote long-term services to people much older and richer than me, I gradually learned what we all need is to think more like customers. It is not an easy job. I will show you how in the following chapters.