When children start kindergarten, evident gaps in science knowledge already exist between Whites and minorities and between youngsters from upper-income and low-income families. And they often deepen into significant achievement gaps by the end of eighth grade if they are not dealt with during elementary school.

    The findings suggest that, in order for the United States to maintain(维持) long-term scientific and economic competitiveness in the world, policymakers need to renew efforts to ensure access(n.使用或见到的机会，权利) to high-quality, early learning experiences in childcare settings, preschools and elementary schools.

    The researchers' study tracked 7,757 children from their start in kindergarten to the end of eighth grade. Researchers found that, among kindergarteners with low levels of general knowledge, 62 percent were struggling in science by the time they reached third grade and 54 percent were struggling in that subject in eighth grade. And general knowledge gaps between minorities and Whites were already large at the time when students began kindergarten.

    “Children growing up in low-income families typically experience comparatively fewer early opportunities to learn about the natural and social sciences,” the authors wrote. “Their parents often have lower educational levels and therefore less science knowledge themselves as well as fewer resources available to direct the children's academic growth. Children raised in poverty often attend poorly resourced schools that futher limit their academic opportunities.”

    Morgan said that, within families, parents who regularly talk and interact with toddlers(学步的儿童) can point out and explain physical, natural and social events occurring around them daily. This might help youngsters learn facts and concepts that will prepare them to take better advantage of science instruction they receive during elementary and middle school.

    The question of what children learn, and how they should learn it, is continually being debated and redebated. Nobody dares any longer to defend the old system, the parrot-fashion（way of learning by repeating what others say）of learning lessons, the grammar-with-a-whip（鞭子）system, which was good enough for our grandparents. The theories of modern psychology have stepped in to argue that we must understand the needs of our children. Children are not just small adults; they are children who must be respected as such.

    Well, you may say, this is as it should be, and a good idea. But think further. What happens? “Education” becomes the responsibility not of teachers, but of psychologists. What happens then? Teachers worry too much about the psychological implications（暗示） of their lessons, and forget about the subjects themselves. If a child dislikes a lesson, the teacher feels that it is his fault, not the child's. So teachers worry whether history is “relevant” to modern young children. And do they dare to recount stories about violent battles? Or will this make the children themselves violent? Can they tell their classes about children of different races, or will this encourage racial hatred? Why teach children to write grammatical sentences? Oral expression is better. Sums? Arithmetic? No; real-life mathematical situations are more understandable.

    You see, you can go too far. Influenced by educational theorists, who have nothing better to do than write books about their ideas, teachers leave their teaching-training colleges filled with grand, psychological ideas about children and their needs. They make complicated preparations and try out their “modern methods” on the long-suffering children. Since one “modern method” rapidly replaces another, the poor kids will have well been fed up by the time they leave school. Frequently the modern methods are so complicated that they fail to be understood by the teachers, let alone the children; even more often, the relaxed discipline so necessary for the “informal” feeling the class must have, prevents all but a handful of children from learning anything.

Events

Long March exhibit

    The Shanghai History Museum is putting on an exhibition to mark the 60^th anniversary of the Long March. On show are more than 220 photos and 40 items that explain with pictures how the communist Red Army drew back from its besieged(被围困的) bases in Jiangxi Province and fought its way to northern Shanxi province in the mid-1930s. Explanations are all in Chinese. The show will end on November 20.

Time: 10:00 am—4:00 pm.

Address: 1286 Hongqiao Road

Admission: 8 Yuan for Chinese/ 15 Yuan for foreigners

Thai elephants

    Eight elephants from Thailand are entertaining visitors at Changfeng Park by riding bikes, playing basketball, balancing on a beam, dancing and blowing a mouth-organ. People are encouraged to have a tug-of-war(拔河比赛) with the animals or lie on the ground and have the elephants walk over them. The elephants give three shows a day at 9:30 am, 3:30 pm and 8:00 pm and there is an additional show at 1:30 pm at weekends. The show will end on November 15.

Address: 189 Daduhe Road

Admission: 30-40 Yuan

Dancing dolphins

    Dolphins jumping from the water to touch a ball, swaying their bodies to music, kissing people and doing math by tapping their tails have made the dolphinarium in Peace Park an attraction for children. Seals and sea lions also perform.

Hours: 10:30 am, 4:00 pm, and 7:30 pm

Admission: 20 Yuan for adults and 10 Yuan for children.

    The loud continuous noise of the cars or the sound of a plane can force its way into the deepest forest, yet it's not only humans that ere bothered by the noise.

    Bioacoustician Bernie Krause has been studying the effect of noise pollution on wildlife, and has come across some interesting behaviors, especially among animals that communicate by vocalization（发声）, like humans. Birds use sound to communicate, but in noisy places, these animals have to shout over the natural noise to be heard.

    Krause mentions a study of nightingales to clarify what he means. The birds responded to traffic noise by singing louder and louder until they actually went beyond noise pollution standards in the city. To belt out (sing loudly) their songs, they increased their lung pressure fivefold, but scientists state that this is not dangerous for the birds themselves.

    Studies show that sudden noise can cause certain birds to leave their nests, exposing the young to their enemies. One study also showed that songbirds that nested close to busy motorways were much less productive than those that nested farther away. Mammals（哺乳动物）too are affected. A recent study showed that nursing caribou responded to plane noise by not producing enough milk to feed their young.

    In some cases noise pollution can actually help some animals while harming others. Toads（蟾蜍）and frogs are known to vocalize in synchrony（同步；同步方式）so that no predator (their enemies) can zero in on them. Krause found that when planes flew overhead and disturbed the toad's song, they lost their synchronicity, and it took them 45 minutes to get it back again. That gave their natural enemies plenty of time to find and catch individual toads by sound.

    According to Kruse, “Not only will noise pollution bother wildlife, but it won't help our lives either.”

    Email has brought the art of letter writing back to life, but some experts think the resulting spread of bad English does more harm than good.

    Email is a form of communication that is changing, for the worse, the way we write and use language, say some communication researchers. It is also changing the way we interact(交流) and build relationship. These are a few of recently recognized features of email, say experts, that should cause individual and organizations to rethink the way they use email.

    "Email has increased the spread of careless writing habits, "says Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University. She says the poor spelling, grammar, punctuation(标点符号) and sentence structure of emails reflect a growing unconcern to the way we write.

    Baron argues that we should not forgive and forget the poor writing often shown in emails. "The more we use email and its tasteless writing, the more it becomes the normal way of writing," the professor says.

    Others say that despite its poor prose(文字), email has finished what several generations of English teachers couldn't: it has made writing fashionable again.

    "Email is a critical new communication technology," says Ian Lancashire, a University of Toronto professor of English." It fills the gap between spoken language and the formal methods of writing that existed before email. It is the purest form of written speech."

    Lancashire says email has the mysterious ability to get people who are scared by writing to get their thoughts flowing easily onto a blank screen. He says this is because of email's close similarity to speech." It's like a circle of four or five people around a campfire," he says.

    Still, he accepts that this new found freedom to express themselves often gets people into trouble. "Almost everyday I get emails that apologies of previous emails," he reports.

    In the US, the number of emails sent in a day exceeds(超过) the number of letters mailed in a year. But more people are recognizing the content of a typical email message is not often exact.

    Did you know that if you attach a weighed stick to the back of a chicken, it walks like a dinosaur?

    No, you did not know(or care to know) such things, but now you do! Thanks to this year's winners of the 12 Noel Prize! Now in is 251h year, the lg Nobel is the goofy younger cousin of the honored Nobel Prize. It applauds achievements in the fields of medicine, biology, physics, economies.literature.etc. Every September at Harvard University, awards are presented in 10 categories that change year to year, depending on - according to the organization - what makes the judges "laugh, then think".

    The ceremony officially begins when audience members launch paper airplanes at an assigned human target on the stage, then speakers only have 60 seconds to present their research. In previous year, the one-minute rule was imposed by a young girl - nicknamed Miss Sweetie Poo -who would go up to the platform and repeat the words: "Please stop, I'm bored." in a sharp tone until the speaker left the stage.

    Fortunately for candidates though, the Ig Informal Lectures are held afterwards on Saturday to give presenters more time to explain the crazy things they're working on.

    The research can seem more like the brainchildren of teenage boys than of respectable adults. Justin Schmidt won the physiology Ig for creating the "Sting(蛰) Pain Index," which rates the pain people fell after getting stung by insects. Smith pressed bees against 25 different parts of his body until they stung him. Five stings a day for 38 days, Smith concluded that the most painful sting locations were the nose and the upper lip. Ouch.

    As silly as they sound, not all of the Ig awards lack scientific applicability, A group of scientists from 12 different counties won in the medicine category for accurately diagnosing patients with appendicitis (阑尾炎) based on an unusual measurement: speed bumps(减速带) . They found that patients are more likely to have appendicitis if they report pain during bumpy car rides.

    All these weird experiments have just one thing in common. They're improbable. It can be tempting to assume that "improbable" implies more than that--implies bad or good, worthless or valuable, trivial or important. Something improbable can be any of those, or none of them, or all of them, in different ways. And what you don't expect can be a powerful force for not only entertaining science, but also for the boundary-pushing science we call innovation.