Distance runners often worry about “hitting the wall” during training or races—that terrible moment when negative thoughts become so overpowering that they make it difficult to continue.

Hitting the wall typically happens around 20 miles in a marathon, when the body's supplies become exhausted. At this point, many runners feel exhausted and discouraged, slow their pace, have trouble focusing and want to quit or walk.

“Generalized tiredness, unintentionally slowing their pace, the desire to walk, and shifting focus to just surviving the marathon appear to be particularly common characteristics of it,” said Dr. Alistair McCormick, an exercise psychologist in England who co-authored a new study. “A marathon becomes a real mental battle when runners ‘hit the wall.'”

    Psychological blocks are an extremely common experience for recreational endurance (耐力) athletes, according to the study. To learn how they affect people, sports psychologists asked 30 recreational runners and cyclers about the psychological demands of training, preparing for and participating in competitions.

     “Recreational runners and cyclists found it stressful trying to find the time to train, McCormick said. “What was also interesting was the number of potential banana skins they met with before and during competition-disasters that could cause the athletes to lose their focus and their motivation to keep persevering.”

    These roadblocks included difficult environmental conditions and equipment failure, problems with nutrition or making a mistake, the study reported. The athletes in the study said they fell these obstacles (障碍) affected their motivation and concentration, negatively affecting their overall performance.

According to the study, 43 percent of marathoners are likely to hit the wall during a race. Finding ways to move past those kinds of experiences, then, could have major benefits for an athlete's performance and well-being.

    Traffic Light Reading is one of students' favorites! And it's so simple. Here's what to do: Take three pens in different colors, most suitably red, orange and green. But it's not too important as long as teachers and students are both clear on the colour code they're going to use.

    Students read a text, not worrying too much about how much they understand. Teachers can ask them to re-read when students are paying attention to vocabulary. Start by underlining the words that they understand completely (including names, numbers etc) in green.

    Then students re-read the text and underline the words that look familiar-they maybe know them but aren't too sure about them. You guessed it: in orange.

    Finally, students read the text a third time underlining the words they clearly don't understand in red. Sometimes teachers might want to set students a limit for how many red words they underline, telling them only to underline the words that they believe are seriously blocking their understanding of the text as a whole. Generally, however, students are pleasantly surprised by how few words are red and how many are green. Seeing their ability laid out in a visual way really helps to increase confidence.

    Once the whole text is underlined, teachers can give students a limit of 5, 10 or 15 words, depending on the length of the text, and tell them they're only allowed to look these words up in a dictionary. This helps them to recognize words that are actually getting in the way of their understanding of the text and words that they don't know but actually don't impact their whole understanding of the text.

    This is a useful activity that can be done with a printed text, in a Google Doc, on RealtimeBoard, or set as a homework task for some independent study.

    Nowadays, especially in China, everything seems to favor social intercourse, such as gatherings of friends, KTV, group travel, dining togethter, playing cards and Mahjong, plus the Chinese-style “street-crossing group.” Back home, discussions can still be boisterously carried on within the “circle of friends” of WeChat.

      However, these scenes cannot always ease a sense of loneliness. Zhu Ziqing, a well-known professor of Tsinghua University, signed with emotion: “My loneliness increases as scene becomes much busier.” One popular song today is also called “A lonely man in crowds.” Actually, engaging in social intercourse requires ability, while being alone involves the whole character.

    These days, it is not easy to calm down totally and return to one's true self. Willpower, intellect and discipline are required. Einstein said: “It is not your working time but your spare time that determines the possibility of whether you will be successful or not.” The “spare time” he referred to could be taken as “spending time by yourself.”

    Lonely life could be either dull, boring and tasteless or abundant, interesting and colorful, depending on one's quality, ambition and inspiration.

    Just as the body constantly requires energy, the mind and soul also demand unceasing inputs. However, information, to processed and integrated(融入)into knowledge, thoughts and feelings, instead of bustle(忙碌)seems to be the right condition. Successful careers in all walks of life worldwide have proved that “the soul grows in peace and talent is nurtured in loneliness”. In a sense, it may be reasonable to say that “Happiness tends to be shallow while loneliness involves profundity”.

    Man, in fact, needs loneliness more than happy time, and only abundant loneliness can produce quality happiness.

    The national environmental watchdog has declared that boosting efforts to cut air pollution in northern China, especially winter smog from the burning of coal, is a mission for this year.

    Burning coal for winter heating has been listed as one of the primary causes of air pollution, Chen Jining, minister of environmental protection, said on Monday at the annual meeting on environmental protection in Beijing.“As much as 60 percent of smog content is caused by coal burning in the starting phase of each smog”, said Fang Li, an official with Beijing's Environmental Protection Bureau. Therefore, Beijing has declared that it will wipe out coal use in its most rural areas by 2020.

    To start with, Beijing will replace coal-fired heating stoves with those powered by electricity or gas in 400 villages this year, before taking the campaign to the districts of Chaoyang, Haidian, Fengtai and Shijingshan by 2017,said Guo Zihua, a municipal rural development official. Beijing's downtown districts of Dongcheng and Xicheng eliminated coal burning last year, officials said.

    The capital and other places in northern China experienced several smog alerts in November and December, when peak readings were many times higher than the national safety level. Obviously, the situation is deteriorating, and will become a norm. So the government came up with a “smog subsidy (津贴)” for those who work outdoors, and 95 percent of the respondents to a survey support it.

    The Trade Union in Zhengzhou City surveyed subscribers to its official WeChat account and found that 88 percent of nearly 400 respondents said priority should be given to outdoor workers on smoggy days But 9 percent said air pollution affects everyone so it would be unfair to only address the concerns of people who work outdoors.

    Over half of the respondents think the extra subsidy, if applied, could come in the form of protective tools or cash. Twenty-two percent said money is the easiest way. To finance the proposed subsidy, 53 percent think the government and companies should jointly pay the bill, while 44 percent said central and regional governments should be responsible.

Both humans and animals have enemies. It is easy for us to know the difference between our friends and our enemies. But can other animals do the same? Elephants can! They can use their sense of vision and smell to tell the difference between people who mean a threat and those who do not. In Kenya, researchers find that elephants react differently to clothing worn by men of the Maasai and Kamba ethnic groups. Young Maasai men hunt animals and thus mean a threat to elephants; Kamba men are mainly farmers and are not a danger to elephants.

In an experiment conducted by animal scientists, elephants were first presented with clean clothing or clothing that had been worn for five days by either a Maasai or a Kamba man. When the elephants noticed the smell of clothing worn by a Maasai man, they moved away from the smell faster and took longer to relax than when they noticed the smells of either clean clothing or clothing worn by a Kamba man.

Clothing color also plays a role. In the same study, when the elephants saw red clothing not worn before, they reacted angrily, as red is typically worn by Maasai men. Rather than running away as they did with the smell, the elephants acted angrily toward the red clothing.

The researchers believe that the elephants' emotional reactions are due to their different senses of smell and sight. Smelling a possible danger means that a threat is nearby and the best thing to do is run away and hide. Seeing a potential threat without its smell means that risk is low. Therefore, instead of showing fear and running away, the elephants express their anger and become aggressive.

    The "Give It Up for Earth Day" encourages people to commit to giving up actions that are harmful to the environment, such as using poisonous cleaners.

    Throughout the month of April, Canadians are being asked to "Give It Up for Earth Day!" Earth Day has been celebrated every year on April 22 since 1970. Earth Day Canada president Jed Goldberg says that as people become more environmentally aware, they want to find ways to reduce their environmental influence, not just celebrate one special event.

    "Earth Day is a great launching pad for thinking about environmental action every day," said Goldberg. "Choosing healthier options, even for the short term, can lead to thinking about the influence of our decisions for a lifetime."

    That's the reason behind the "Give It Up for Earth Day" campaign. It's designed to encourage healthy habits that benefit people and the planet. It challenges everyone to help create a healthier world by making changes in their daily routine.

    "We wanted to plan an action—targeted campaign that will give people a chance to act on their concern for the environment in a positive way," said Goldberg.

    The campaign has identified four daily actions that can add up to huge environmental savings. They include pledging (保证) to turn off the TV, give up the use of poisonous cleaners, reduce consumption of consumer products and cut out meat.

    At the end of April, all of the pledges will be recorded and converted (转化) into the number of TV hours not watched, dollars not spent on unnecessary items, electricity saved, greenhouse gas emissions (排放) avoided by cutting out meat, and poisonous chemicals produced from homes and landfills.

    "What we're trying to achieve this year for Earth Day is to give people a chance to do something that is meaningful and measurable," said Goldberg.