Many people think of guys as being carefree when it comes to their appearance. But in fact, a lot of guys spend plenty of time in front of the mirror. They care just as much as girls do about their body image.

    Body image is a person's opinions and feelings about his or her own body and physical appearance. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}You appreciate your body for its capabilities and accept its imperfections.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}Here are some ideas.

    Recognize your strengths. Different body types are good for different things. What does your body do well? Maybe your speed, strength, or coordination makes you better than others at a certain sport. That may be basketball, table tennis, mountain biking, dancing, or even running. Or perhaps you have non-sports skills, like drawing, painting, singing, playing a musical instrument, writing, or acting. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    Exercise regularly. Exercise can help you look well and feel good about yourself. Good physiques (体形) don't just happen. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} A healthy habit can be as simple as exercising 20 minutes to 1 hour three days a week. Working out can also lift your spirits.

    Respect your body! Practicing good habits regular showering; taking care of your teeth, hair, and skin; wearing clean clothes, and so on can help you build a positive body image.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} Your body is just one part of who you are. Your talent for comedy, a quick wit (智慧) and all the other things make you unique. So try not to let small imperfections take over.

    In the last few years the popularity of eBooks has exploded．The advantages are clear：You can carry as many books with you as you want．You can simply download every book you like and instantly start reading instead of having to wait for the book to arrive by mail．

    However，one thing hadn't changed．If you wanted to rent a book you were still forced to use hardcopy books．Until now that is, Amazon．com recently announced the start of a new program where you can rent eBooks．

Where to rent eBooks？

    As mentioned before，Amazon．com is the first and currently the only retailer (零售商) that has a program in place for renting eBooks． Luckily，Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world and their eBook assortment (分类) is massive．They are also the producer of the Kindle，the most popular Reader，which means you can be sure that the eBooks you rent will work．

You can currently only rent Textbooks．But this is likely to change as soon as word gets out that you can save money by renting eBooks.

Why rent eBooks at Amazon?

* Save money：Save up to 80% of the normal price of the eBook．

* Decide how long you rent：From 30 days to 360 days，you decide how long you want it．You can extend the time by as little as a day．Or simply buy the eBook if you want to keep it after all．

*Use any device：If you rent an eBook from Amazon，you can read it on your PC，Mac，iPad，iPhone，Android device，Windows Phone 7．Blackberry．or Kindle．

* Keep your notes：Do you like to keep annotations (注释) and highlights in your eBooks？Don't worry．You can always revisit your notes and highlights through Amazon．com．

How to rent eBooks？

    Simply search for the eBook you want to rent on Amazon．com and select the "Rent eBooks" option. After that，a new page will open where you can select how long you'd like to rent the eBook．You can read eBooks for a period of 30 to 360 days．

    You decide how long you need the eBook．If you later find out you need it for longer, you can simply extend the time．Or buy it for the normal price whenever you want.

    Once you've chosen the time you want to rent the eBook，you simply go to checkout．Or you can use the "Rent now" button．

    How do the world's only flying mammals communicate? Researchers have observed young bats adopting new “dialects” simply by hearing them repeatedly, making them one of the few animals known to have a capacity for vocal (声音的) learning. “These bats may help us clarify the evolution of speech acquisition (习得) skills,” says Yosef Prat, a PhD at Tel Aviv University (TAU).

    For one year, researchers raised 14 Egyptian fruit bat pups with their mothers in controlled area, exposing each young bat to two different vocalizations: the natural call of its mother and a separate recording that varied in pitch (音高) or frequency. They found that the pups in each group developed a dialect like the recording. “The general assumption in this field is that most animals develop their born vocalizations regardless of what they hear, and that human vocal learning abilities have developed during evolution,” says Mr Prat. “The finding that bats learn the common dialect in their rest place was unusual.”

    Scientists know little about the origin of spoken language, which is believed to have appeared in humans within the past 500,000 years. Dozens of theories attempt to explain the complexity of this skill, but none have done so conclusively.

    “Studying vocal communication and vocal learning in animal models is a very useful way to approach the problem,” says Olga Feher, an assistant professor at the University of Warwick in England.

    But animal vocalizations and human speech are very different things, says Jamin Pelkey, a professor at Ryerson University. “All species communicate. Unlike other animals, though, human beings are able to use sound patterns for functions that are far stranger—functions that are imaginative, theoretical, and critical. When speech is involved in these stranger functions, that is what we mean by spoken ‘language'.”

    When you go to the doctor, you like to come away with a prescription．It makes you feel better to know you will get some medicine. But the doctor knows that medicine is not always needed. Sometimes all a sick person needs is some reassurance that all will be well. In such cases the doctor may prescribe a placebo.

    A placebo is a sugar pill, a harmless shot, or ail empty capsule. Even though they have no medicine in them, these things seem to make people well. The patient thinks it is medicine and begins to get better. How does this happen?

    The study of the placebo opens up new knowledge about the way the human body can heal itself. It is as if there was a doctor in each of us. The doctor will heal the body for us if we let it. But it is not yet known just how the placebo works to heal the body. Some people say it works because the human mind fools itself. These people say that if the mind is fooled into thinking it got medicine, then it will act as if it did, and the body will feel better.

    Placebos do not always work. The success of this treatment seems to rest a lot with the relationship between the patient and the doctor. If the patient has a lot of trust in the doctor and if the doctor really wants to help the patient, then the placebo is more likely to work. So in a way, the doctor is the most powerful placebo of all.

    A placebo can also have bad effects. If patients expect a bad reaction to medicine, then they will also show a bad reaction to the placebo. This would seem to show that a lot of how you react to medicine is in your mind rather than in your body. Some doctors still think that if the placebo can have bad effects it should never be used. They think there is still not enough known about it.

    The strange power of the placebo does seem to suggest that the human mind is stronger than we think it is. There are people who say you can heal your body by using your mind. And the interesting thing is that even people who swear this is not possible have been healed by a placebo．

    Give yourself a test. Which way is the wind blowing? How many kinds of wildflowers can be seen from your front door? If your awareness is as sharp as it could be, you'll have no trouble answering these questions.

    Most of us observed much more as children than we do as adults. A child's day is filled with fascination, newness and wonder. Curiosity gave us all a natural awareness. But distinctions that were sharp to us as children become unclear; we are numb(麻木的）to new stimulation(刺激), new ideas. Relearning the art of seeing the world around us is quite simple, although it takes practice and requires breaking some bad habits.

    The first step in awakening senses is to stop predicting what we are going to see and feel before it occurs. This blocks awareness. One chilly night when I was hiking in the Rocky Mountains with some students, I mentioned that we were going to cross a mountain stream. The students began complaining about how cold it would be. We reached the stream, and they unwillingly walked ahead. They were almost knee-deep when they realized it was a hot spring. Later they all admitted they'd felt cold water at first.

    Another block to awareness is the obsession(痴迷) many of us have with naming things. I saw bird watchers who spotted a bird, immediately looked it up in field guides, and said, a "ruby-crowned kinglet" and checked it off. They no longer paid attention to the bird and never learned what it was doing.

    The pressures of "time" and "destination" are further blocks to awareness. I encountered many hikers who were headed to a distant camp-ground with just enough time to get there before dark. It seldom occurred to them to wander a bit, to take a moment to see what's around them. I asked them what they'd seen. "Oh, a few birds," they said. They seemed bent on their destinations.

    Nature seems to unfold to people who watch and wait. Next time you take a walk, no matter where it is, take in all the sights, sounds and sensations. Wander in this frame of mind and you will open a new dimension to your life.

By now you've probably heard about the "you're not special" speech, when English teacher David McCullough told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School: "Do not get the idea you're anything special, because you're not." Mothers and fathers present at the ceremony — and a whole lot of other parents across the Internet — took issue with McCullough's ego-puncturing words. But lost in the uproar was something we really should be taking to heart: our young people actually have no idea whether they're particularly talented or accomplished or not. In our eagerness to elevate their self-esteem, we forgot to teach them how to realistically assess their own abilities, a crucial requirement for getting better at anything from math to music to sports. In fact, it's not just privileged high-school students: we all tend to view ourselves as above average.

Such inflated self-judgments have been found in study after study, and it's often exactly when we're least competent at a given task that we rate our performance most generously. In a 2006 study published in the journal Medical Education, for example, medical students who scored the lowest on an essay test were the most charitable in their self-evaluations, while high-scoring students judged themselves much more strictly. Poor students, the authors note, "lack insight" into their own inadequacy. Why should this be? Another study, led by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning, offers an enlightening explanation. People who are incompetent, he writes with coauthor Justin Kruger, suffer from a "dual burden": they're not good at what they do, and their very incapability prevents them from recognizing how bad they are.

In Dunning and Kruger's study, subjects scoring at the bottom of the heap on tests of logic, grammar and humor "extremely overestimated" their talents. What these individuals lacked (in addition to clear logic, proper grammar and a sense of humor) was "metacognitive skill": the capacity to monitor how well they're performing. In the absence of that capacity, the subjects arrived at an overly hopeful view of their own abilities. There's a paradox here, the authors note: "The skills that lead to competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain." In other words, to get better at judging how well we're doing at an activity, we have to get better at the activity itself.

There are a couple of ways out of this double bind. First, we can learn to make honest comparisons with others. Train yourself to recognize excellence, even when you yourself don't possess it, and compare what you can do against what truly excellent individuals are able to accomplish. Second, seek out feedback that is frequent, accurate and specific. Find a critic who will tell you not only how poorly you're doing, but just what it is that you're doing wrong. As Dunning and Kruger note, success indicates to us that everything went right, but failure is more ambiguous: any number of things could have gone wrong. Use this external feedback to figure out exactly where and when you screwed up.

If we adopt these strategies — and most importantly, teach them to our children — they won't need parents, or a commencement (毕业典礼) speaker, to tell them that they're special. They'll already know that they are, or have a plan to get that way.