Four apps for students to learn English

    Quizlet

    Quizlet is a learning app—a computer program you use on your mobile device. It can help users build and test their knowledge of English words and terms. Quizlet has word sets for millions of subjects. And, it is quickly becoming a useful mobile tool for language learners.

    Socrative

    In Socrative, teachers can create timed learning games. In class, students compete individually or as part of a team against classmates. One game students love is called space Race. In this game, if a team answers a question correctly, their rocket moves forward. This team whose rocket gets to the end first wins. Also, teachers can use Socrative as an “exit ticket, ”a question they can ask students about what they learned in that day's class. Students write their answers on their mobile devices. Then, the teacher can show the answers on a shared video screen.

    QR Codes

    AQRCodeisakindofsignthatasmartphonecanreadwithitscamera. When your phone camera reads a QR code, it takes you to a website, image, video or anything you want to share. For example, one will take you to the VOA Learning English website.

    Evernote

    Evernote lets users store and share notes, images and recordings in one place. Teachers can also use Evernote to give homework.

    Cheating is nothing new. But it's becoming a lot more sophisticated. Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin was caught out once. A photo taken after the speech she'd given on a "return to conservative principles" showed her left hand covered with crib notes. These included the words "energy, budget cuts, tax" and "lift Americans' spirits". The word "budget" had been crossed out. Video footage also showed her reading from her hand when asked what top three things a conservative-led congress should do. Writing notes on your hand is one way to cheat in an exam. But these days, it's a lot easier ... especially with the Internet.

    Anyone who wants to cheat in an exam can probably find the answers online. There are hundreds of sites offering solutions to all sorts of tests. And it's a lucrative business. One operator in Oregon made $700,000 in about nine months before his arrest. The owner of a website in Ohio pocketed more than $300,000. And a famous overseas site is estimated to sell about 146,000 sets of answers and take in about $10 million per year. Actually, getting hold of the exam answers isn't that hard. Some do the exam themselves and use button cameras or document-scanning pens to copy the tests. Others organize for a group to take tests repeatedly until they can memorize the entire exam between them. Others simply bribe exam administrators.

    At the moment, such business is booming. More and more companies now require their employees to take professional exams. And hundreds of businesses and trade organizations have introduced formal certification programs to measure employee skills. In the US alone, at least 2 million exams are taken every year for information technology certification. But employees also have to take exams for all sorts of professions from crane operators to court reporters to school bus drivers and financial planners. Test officials estimate that hundreds of thousands of test-takers have used the Internet to buy answers for professional tests. And a recent survey found that 28 percent of test centres had at least one cheating incident over the last five years. In one incident, tens of thousands of soldiers obtained answers to tests in a range of military skills.

    Many see this as a cause for concern. Many tests are for work in sensitive areas such as defence installations and hospitals. Now, how would you feel if you knew that the people in charge of the computers controlling nuclear weapons might have cheated in their tests, and may not really know what they're doing?

    This is not a diet. It's a simple way to lose weight. You don't have to give up the food you love or join a gym. You just follow some habits thin people have. Keep them, and you'll become thin.

    Wake-up

    When you wake up in the morning, sit up slowly without using your hands. With legs straight out, lean forward(前俯) until you feel sore(酸痛的) in your back. It will use up 10 calories.

    Start with soup

    Order a clear soup, and have it before the main food. In this way, you'll feel fuller, so you'll eat less when the main food comes.

    An apple or more a day

    Apples are full of fiber(纤维) and water, so your stomach will want less. Studies show that people who eat at least three apples or pears a day may lose weight.

    Talk it up

    Every time you use the cell phone, stand up and walk around. Heavy people sit on average two and a half hours more each day than thin people. This skill is very important as standing up and walking around will burn up 50 or more calories. Use these skills, and you will have a big weight loss.

    FROM dogs and cats to pandas and penguins, lists of adorable animals can be very varied. However, when it comes to scary animals, the answers are often more or less the same­snakes and spiders are among the most dreadful ones for the majority of us.

    However, most of us have never been bitten by a snake or a spider. So does this mean we are born with a fear of certain things?

    Scientists have been actively looking into it for a long time. For example, studies have suggested that babies find live animals much more interesting than stuffed （毛绒填充的） ones. This interest continues even if those animals are snakes and spiders.

    A study published in Psychological Science in 2008seemed to show that snakes did have a different impact on babies. When scientists presented babies with animal videos along with random sounds of happy or frightened human voices, hey found that babies looked at snakes for longer than any other animal however the voices sounded.

    Now, a team from Rutgers University in New Jersey, US has tried to challenge the idea that babies are born with a fear of snakes and spiders. According to the BBC, the researchers measured babies' physiological （生理的） responses as they watched videos of snakes and elephants paired with both fearful and happy voices.

    Scientists then set out to surprise the babies to see how they would react. They presented them with an unexpected bright flash of light as they watched a video. As the BBC explained, a surprise like this would be more intense （强烈的） if the babies were already scared, just like when we watch scary films and jump more if we are already scared.

    However, according to their findings, published recently in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, babies 'surprised responses were not bigger when watching a video of a snake, even when it was shown with a fearful voice. Their heart response was also lower, which also made it seem that babies were not scared.

    "Children do not have an innate fear of snakes," concluded the study. Even if previous studies had suggested that babies have different responses to snakes, it isn't necessarily related to fear. "It's possible that paying more attention to something might make fear learning easier later on. It leads to fear learning," said research co­author Vanessa LoBue. She further explained that it was a good thing that humans didn't have an inborn fear of snakes because it would make a young infant's desire to explore new things less strong.

    Instead, we have evolved to quickly learn to be afraid of something if it turns out to be dangerous.

    Humans are social animals. They live in groups all over the world. As these groups of people live apart from other groups, over the years and centuries they develop their own habits and ideas, which are different from other cultures. One important particular side of every culture is how its people deal with time.

    Time is not very important in nonindustrial (非工业的) societies. The Nuer people of East Africa, for example, do not even have a word TIME that is in agreement with the abstract thing we call time. The daily lives of the people of such nonindustrial societies are likely to be patterned around their physical needs and natural events rather than around a time schedule (时间表) based on the clock. They cook and eat when they are hungry and sleep when the sun goes down. They plant crops during the growing seasons and harvest them when the crops are ripe. They measure time not by a clock or calendar, but by saying that an event takes place before or after some other event. Frequently such a society measures days in terms of "sleeps" or longer periods in terms of "moons". Some cultures, such as the Eskimos of Greenland measure seasons according to the migration of certain animals.

    Some cultures which do not have a written language or keep written records have developed interesting ways of "telling time". For example, when several Australian aborigines want to plan an event for a future time, one of them places a stone on a cliff or in a tree. Each day the angle of the sun changes slightly. In a few days, the rays of the sun strike the stone in a certain way. When this happens, the people see that the agreed-upon time has arrived and the event can take place.

    In contrast (成对比), exactly correct measurement of time is very important in modern, industrialized societies.

    This is because industrialized societies require the helpful efforts of many people in order to work. For a factory to work efficiently (well, quickly and without waste), for example, all of the workers must work at the same time. Therefore, they must know what time to start work in the morning and what time they may go home in the afternoon. Passengers must know the exact time that an airplane will arrive or depart. Students and teachers need to know when a class starts and ends. Stores must open on time in order to serve their customers. Complicated (复杂的) societies need clocks and calendars. Thus, we can see that if each person worked according to his or her own schedule, a complicated society could hardly work at all.

Anew study suggests that Medicare could spend billions of dollars on screening (拍片检查) smokers for lung cancer that would be better spent on helping them quit and keeping others from starting.

The new study indicated that screening more often supported smokers' beliefs that they could safely continue to smoke. Most participants remained smoking because they believed screening could catch cancer early before it would threaten their lives.

"They compared how hard it was to quit smoking with how easy it was to be screened," said Steven B. Zeliadt, the lead author of the study." They engaged in magical thinking that now there's this wonderful painless external test that can save lives."

He and seven colleagues conducted the study of 37 current smokers who were offered lung cancer screening at Department of Veteran Affairs. After being screened and told the results, they were interviewed about their smoking-related heath beliefs. For about half of those, cancer was not found." Screening lowered their motivation for quitting," the team reported in July in JAMA Internal Medicine. The participants focused only on lung cancer, ignoring other potential harm of smoking.

A national study published four years ago found that annual CT screening for lung cancer three years in a row could reduce deaths among heavy smokers by about 20 percent. In an interview, Dr. Russell P. Harris, a preventive medicine specialist at the UNC-Chapel Hill, noted that" Screening is being believed by people as an alternative to stopping smoking. But stopping smoking would have huge benefits for the individual and society." Furthermore, smoking causes many other cancers.

Dr. Harris agreed that rather than screening, money is better spent on smoking prevention. He suggested providing free stop-smoking aids, sponsoring anti-smoking advertising and raising taxes on tobacco products and the age at which people are allowed to buy them.