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.

{#blank#}5{#/blank#}

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

Health Mistakes to Avoid Making When Traveling

    Everyone is talking about amazing travel experiences. However, there is always the other side of the coin. If you want to add more wonderful travel experiences to your life, make sure you avoid these health mistakes during your next trip.

Refusing injections

    At times you are asked to have an injection in order to avoid a certain disease before traveling to your destination. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} In many cases, mosquito bites lead to malaria(疟疾） and there are many other health risks that you may face during your trip. Refusing injections is the worst thing you can do to your health.

Eating out in the street

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}. Yes, it is cheaper and tastier than restaurant meals. However, when visiting a country where clean food and dishes arc not priority (优先)，your stomach may not survive this experiment. Just because locals eat street food and feel healthy does not mean you will feel the same.

Drinking tap water

    Staying hydrated(吸入水分）is necessary, so is the water choice. Even if locals tell you that their tap water is safe to drink, it is best to choose bottled water. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}. it is at least clean. It is always better to be safe than sorry.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#}. Google maps make our travel experiences easier since you can check out the place you are going to visit before you even book the ticket. Unfortunately, not all tourists take advantage of them. This is a successful way to really relax and enjoy the trip.

    Even an expert traveler is guilty of making most of these health mistakes. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}, you will probably not commit any of them during the trip, will you?

    Goals are the guides all through our life. We all have goals that we are moving towards and making a great effort to achieve. This is a good thing. Or can it be bad? How many of us never reach our goals and yet we have tried so hard and really thought about nothing else? I believe the mistake most of us make is that we do not focus on our present situation.

    Let me explain. Most of us see our present situation as a stepping stone that we use simply as a means of reaching our final destination. We don't take time to truly appreciate where we are today and all the great things we already have in our lives. We should focus our attention on the journey and not on the destination, or we will miss the beautiful scenery along the way.

    Let's use our job as an example. Now most of us want a promotion. We have plans to become the manager or general manager in our companies. Unfortunately, most of us will never reach the goal, but will watch others achieve our goal instead.

    What we should be doing is focusing on the job we are currently in now. Forget where we want to get to and just focus on the present. You see, what we can control is our performance in our current job. We can decide to be the best we possibly can in our current job. Now this may mean further education to have the skills we currently do not have. It may mean working harder to produce better results than our colleagues. It could simply be a change of attitude, such as stopping complaining and becoming a more devoted and supportive employee. By doing our current job to the best of our abilities, we in fact give ourselves the best chance of promotion.

    So the best thing for all of us to do to achieve our goals is to just focus on what we have and where we are now. Do the best and be the best we possibly can in our current situations, and we will give ourselves the very best chance of reaching our goals in the future. We have heard the old sayings and they are true: “Rome wasn't built in a day.”, “Patience is a virtue”, and so on.

Have patience, have appreciation of what we already have, and take time to help ourselves be the very best we can. Do these things and we will all reach our goals, but more importantly, we will enjoy our life every day.

    Nowhere To Hide: What Machines Can Tell From Your Face

    The human face is a remarkable piece of work.{#blank#}1{#/blank#} So is the face's ability to send emotional signals, whether through the unconscious shame or the trick of a false smile. People spend much of their waking lives, in the office and the courtroom as well as the bar and the bedroom, reading faces, for signs of attraction, hostility, trust and deceit. They also spend plenty of time trying to hide their feelings, intentions or nature.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#} In America facial recognition is used by churches to track worshippers' attendance; in Britain, by retailers to spot past shoplifters. This year Welsh police used it to arrest a suspect outside a football game. In China it confirms the identities of ride-hailing drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple's new iPhone is expected to use it to unlock the homescreen

    Set against human skills, such applications might seem enhancive. Some breakthroughs, such as flight or the internet, obviously transform human abilities. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Although faces are peculiar to individuals, they are also public, so technology does not, at first sight, intrude on something that is private. And yet the ability to record, store and analyse images of faces cheaply, quickly and on a vast scale promises one day to bring about fundamental changes to notions of privacy, fairness and trust.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#} Masking true feelings helps fix the wheels of daily life. If your partner can spot every prohibited yawn, and your boss every hint of annoyance, marriages and working relationships will be more truthful, but less harmonious. The basis of social interactions might change, too, from a set of commitments founded on trust to calculations of risk and reward derived from the information a computer attaches to someone's face. Relationships might become more reasonable, but also transactional.

A. However, facial recognition seems merely to encode them.

B. Research show that artificial intelligence can reconstruct the facial structures of people.

C. Anyone with a phone can take a picture for facial-recognition programs to use.

D. Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces.

E. Continuous facial recording that paints computerized data onto the real world might change the texture of social interactions.

F. The astonishing variety of facial features helps people recognize each other and is crucial to the formation of complex societies.

    Venice Carnival is one of Italy's most fascinating yearly events. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} A confusion of color, historical costumes, mysterious masks, and a week of live concerts, street parties and entertainment attract millions of tourists each year. Here's everything you need to know before you go.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    Traditionally held around Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, at the start of Lent (40 days before Easter), Venice Carnival ( Carnevale del Veneto ) celebrations can last up to two weeks. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} However, the biggest events, including the official parades and masked balls, are held over the final weekend.

    What to Do?

    Join one of the parades or street parties, and taste traditional Carnival foods such as frittelle, a traditional dessert made only during the festivities. Carnival is the ideal time to experience Venetian culture and traditions. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}You can also take part in a mask-making workshop, tour Venice's cicchetti bars for a bite to eat, sail up and down the Grand Canal on a romantic Venice boat ride, or attend an evening Carnival concert or dinner theater performance.

Things to Know

    St. Mark's Square (Piazza San Marco) is the center of Carnival celebrations with daily parades, performances and other activities. Most Carnival events, except for the masked balls and gala dinners, are free to attend.{#blank#}5{#/blank#} So prepare for cold weather and possible rain, with an average high of 46℉(8℃) in February.

A. When to Go

B. Where to Stay

C. Carnival falls during winter in Venice.

D. Most visitors choose to arrive on the final weekend.

E. It is also one of the oldest festivals celebrated in the city.

F. There's a busy schedule of both free and ticketed events throughout the time.

G. Get into the carnival spirit by buying or renting a traditional costume or Venetian mask.

    Parents often say that they don't mind what their children do in life just as long as they are happy. Happiness and pleasure are almost universally seen as among the most precious human goods.{#blank#}1{#/blank#}Philosopher Jeremy Bentham believed that all sources of pleasure are of equal quality, but John Stuart Mill disagreed. Mill argued for a difference between higher and lower pleasure.{#blank#}2{#/blank#}Lower pleasure, in contrast, requires mere (仅仅的；纯粹的) senses.

    The entire debate assumes a clear divide between the physical and the mental.{#blank#}3{#/blank#}What will it mean for our ideas about pleasure?

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#}Food is usually considered to be the lower pleasure. All animals eat, using the senses of smell and taste. It doesn't require any complex cognition (认知) to conclude that something is delicious. However, these people failed to appreciate something that the French food writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin captured. That is, "Animals feed; man eats; only the man of intellect(才智) knows how to eat."

    Eating shows that the difference between higher pleasure and lower pleasure is not what you enjoy but how you enjoy it.{#blank#}5{#/blank#}Preparing it using the powers of reflection and attention turns it into a higher pleasure.

A. The dining table is a good place to start.

B. Wolfing down your food is a lower kind of pleasure.

C. What's the real difference between high and low pleasure?

D. What happens if the physical and the mental cannot be separated?

E. All philosophers believed that cookery could never be a form of art.

F. Higher pleasure depends on human abilities such as self-awareness or language use.

G. However, disagreements will be caused about whether some forms of pleasure are better than others.