We all believe we listen well and yet many times we feel others are not listening to us. However, listening goes in both directions—you may believe you are listening well, but how often have you completely forgotten what was said to you? {#blank#}1{#/blank#}

Make eye contact.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#} when People talk, they put out visual clues that add to the conversation and meaning of their words.

Stop talking.

    You can't listen, talk and at the same time completely receive the meaning of the other person's words. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}

React without words.

    Let the other person know you are listening through physical reactions, such as head nods, smiles, frowns and eye movement.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}

Concentrate.

    Concentrate on what the other person is saying. Clear your mind of other thoughts and emotions and focus on the conversation at hand. Be in the moment of that conversation, and don't think about what you want to say back.

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    Behave as an effective listener. The more you continue to behave as a listener, the more you will be an effective listener.

"Mum, what does it mean when someone tells you that they have a skeleton(骨骼) in the closet?" Jessica asked. "A skeleton in the closet?" her mother paused thoughtfully. "Well, it's something that you would rather not have anyone else know about. For example, if in the past, someone in Dad's family had been arrested for stealing a horse, it would be 'a skeleton in his family's closet'. He really wouldn't want any neighbor to know about it."

"Why pick on my family?" Jessica's father said with anger. "Your family history isn't so good. you know. Wasn't your great-great-grandfather a prisoner who was transported to Australia for his crimes?" "Yes, but people these days say that you are not a real Australian unless your ancestors arrived as prisoners ." "Gosh, sorry I asked, I think I understand now," Jessica cut in before things grew worse.

    After dinner, the house was very quiet. Jessica's parents were still quite angry with each other. Her mother was ironing clothes and every now and then she glared at her husband, who hid behind his newspaper pretending to read. When she finished, she gathered the freshly pressed clothes in her arms and walked to Jessica's closet. Just as she opened the door and reached in to hang a skirt, a bony arm stuck out from the dark depths and a bundle of white bones fell to the floor. Jessica's mother sank into a faint(晕倒), waking only when Jessica put a cold, wet cloth on her forehead.  She looked up to see the worried faces of her husband and daughter.

"What happened？Where am I?" she asked. "You just destroyed the school's skeleton, Mum," explained Jessica. "I brought it home to help me with my health project, I meant to tell you, but it seemed that as soon as I mentioned skeletons and closets, it caused a problem between you and Dad." Jessica looked in amazement as her parents began to laugh madly. "they're both crazy," she thought.

    (NEW YORK) A French tourist highly praised for rescuing a two-year-old girl in Manhattan said he didn't think twice before jumping into the cold East River.

    Tuesday's Daily News said 29-year-old Duret from France is the man who left the spot(现场) quickly after the rescue last Saturday.

    He lifted the little girl out of the water after she fell off the bank at the South Street Scaport museum. He handed the girl to her father, David Anderson, who had jumped into the water after him.

    “I didn't think at all,” Duret told the Daily News. “It happened very fast. I reacted very fast.”

    Duret, an engineer on holiday, was walking with his girlfriend along the pier ( 码头 ) when he saw something falling into the water. He thought it was a doll, but realized it was a child when he approached the river. He jumped into the water at once.

    When he reached the girl, she appeared lifeless, he said. Fortunately, when she was out of the water, she opened her eyes.

    Anderson said his daughter slipped off the bank when he was adjusting his camera. An ambulance came later. Duret caught a train with his girlfriend shortly after.

    Duret said he didn't realize his tale of heroism had greatly moved New York until he was leaving the next morning. “I don't really think I'm a hero,” said Duret. “Anyone would do the same thing.”

    Are you a procrastinator（拖拉者）? It's a common problem. And it can be harmful, as previous research has shown that people who procrastinate have higher levels of stress and lower well-being, reported the Association for Psychological Science in the US. But a new study has found a way to deal with this problem: Be more connected to your future self.

    Psychologists think that each person believes that they are really two people: “Present Me” and “Future Me”. “People act as if they prefer their current selves' needs and desires to those of their future selves,” wrote psychologists Neil Lewis and Daphna Oyserman.

    Oyserman and Lewis decided to try to find a way to make “Present Me” imagine exactly how “Future Me” would feel the night before a big paper was due, though “Present Me” hadn't started yet. They made “Present Me” think about a far-off event as a number of days away, not months or years.

    Thinking about events in this way meant that something like a friend's wedding seemed 16.3 days sooner when considered in days rather than months and 11.4 months sooner when considered in months rather than years.

    The researchers also tried to find out whether people would take action sooner if they were told a certain event was happening in X days rather than years.  For example, participants imagined they had a newborn child, and that the child would need to go to college in either 18 years or 6,570 days. The researchers found those in the “days” condition planned to start saving four times sooner than those in the “years” condition.

    So if you think of your life in days instead of years, you may get things done quicker.

    Will it matter if you don't take your breakfast? A short time ago, a test was given in the United States. People of different ages, from 12 to 83, were asked to have a test. During the test, these people were given all kinds of breakfast, and sometimes they got no breakfast at all. Scientists wanted to see how well their bodies worked when they had eaten different kinds of breakfast.

    The results show that if a person eats a right breakfast, he or she will work better than if he or she has no breakfast. If a student has fruit, egg, bread and milk before going to school, he or she will learn more quickly and listen more carefully.

    The result is opposite to what some people think. Having no breakfast will not help you lose weight. This is because people become so hungry at noon that they eat too much for lunch. They will gain weight (增加体重) instead of losing it. You will lose more weight if you decrease your other meals.

Perhaps you know them as "taters", "spuds", or "Kennebees", or as "chips", "Idahoes", or even "shoestrings". No matter, a potato by any other name is still a potato — the world's most widely grown vegetable. As a matter of fact, if you are an average potato eater, you will put away at least 100 pounds of them each year. 

That's only a tiny amount grown every year, however. Worldwide, the annual potato harvest is over 6 billion bags. Each bag contains 100 pounds of potatoes, some of them as large as four pounds each. Here in the United States, farmers fill about 400 million bags a year. That may seem like a lot of "taters", but it leaves the United States a distant third among world potato growers. Polish farmers dig up just over 800 million bags a year, while the Russians lead the world with nearly 1.5 billion bags. 

People eat potatoes in many ways-baked, mashed, and roasted, to name just three. However, in the United States most potatoes are devoured in the form of French fries. One fast-food chain alone sells more than $1 billion worth of fries each year. No wonder, then, that the company pays particular attention to the way its fries are prepared. 

Before any fry makes it to the people who eat at these popular restaurants, it must pass many separate tests. Fail any one of these tests and the potato is rejected. For example, only Russet Burbank potatoes are used. These Idaho potatoes have less water content than other kinds, which can have as much as 80 percent water. Once cut into "shoestrings" shapes, the potatoes are partly fried in a secret blend of oils, sprayed with liquid sugar to brown them, steam dried at high heat, then flash frozen for shipment to individual restaurants. 

So, now that you realize the enormous size and value of the potato crop, you can understand why most people agree that this part of the food industry is no "small potatoes".