The main hall of a 135-year old temple in Shanghai will be moved 30 meters to its north in order to create more space for visitors. Thousands of people gather and see the moving of the temple that started on Saturday.

    The Mahavira Hall, of Shanghai's Jade Buddha Temple, was built in 1882. The temple in downtown Shanghai attracts more than two million visitors a year. Daily visitors can reach as high as 100,000.

    A major renovation project started in 2014. The moving of the temple started on Saturday and is set to be finished in two weeks. The main hall of the temple will be relocated 30.66 meters northward within the temple and elevated 1.05 meters.

    Master Jue Xing, abbot of the Jade Buddha Temple and vice president of the Buddhist Association of China, said moving the hall will create more space between buildings and reduce the risks of a stampede as the temple is usually tightly packed.

    Buddhist statues and relics in the hall will also be moved together with the hall, he said.

    Workers pumped cement into the foundation of the hall because the old building's foundation was rather soft, he said.

    Statues and other relics in the building were stabilized and protected with frames to avoid damage, he said.

    The moving will be carried out with the help of relic preservation experts from the Shanghai Museum, he said.

    Shanghai has had several successful projects to move old buildings, including a school in 2009 and a concert hall in 2002. On Aug. 31^st, Shanghai Concert Hall began to move 66.46 meters northward after the last concert was held in the previous location and reopened to audience two years later. The moving was recognized as a wonder of construction protection and inspired the experts of the moving of the the Mahavira Hall.

    Any foreigner who has tried to learn Chinese can tell how hard it is to master the tones required to speak and understand. And anyone who has tried to learn to play the violin or other instruments can report similar challenges.

    Now researchers have found that people with musical training have an easier time learning Chinese. Writing in the online edition of Nature Neuroscience，researchers from Northwestern University say that both skills draw on the same parts of the brain that help people discover changes in pitch(音调).

    One of the study's authors，Nina Kraus，said the findings suggested that studying music "actually tunes our sensory system" .This means that schools that want children to do well in languages should hesitate before cutting music programs，Dr. Kraus said. She said music training might also help children with language problems.

    Mandarin(普通话)speakers have been shown to have a more complex encoding(编码) of pitch patterns in their brains than English speakers do. This is because in Mandarin and other Asian languages，pitch plays a central role. A single­syllable word can have several meanings depending on how it is intoned.

    For this study，the researchers looked at 20 non­Chinese speaking volunteers，half with no musical background and half who have studied an instrument for at least six years.

    As they were shown a movie，the volunteers also heard an audio tape of the Mandarin word “mi” in three of its meanings: squint，bewilder and rice. The researchers recorded activities in their brain stems to see how well they were processing the sounds. Those with a music background showed much more brain activities in response to the Chinese sounds.

    The lead author of the study，Patrick C.M. Wong，said it might work both ways. It appears that native speakers of tonal languages may do better at learning instruments.

    It's 5:00 in the morning when the alarm(闹钟)rings in my ears. I roll out of bed and walk blindly through the dark into the bathroom. I turn on the light and put on my glasses. The house is still as I walk downstairs while my husband and three kids sleep peacefully. Usually I go for a long run, but today I choose my favorite exercise DVD, Insanity. Sweat pours down my face and into my eyes. My heart races as I force my body to finish each movement. As I near the end of the exercise, I feel extremely tired, but a smile is on my face. It's not a smile because the DVD is over, but a smile of success from pushing my body to its extreme limit.

    Some people enjoy shopping, smoking, food, work, or even chocolate. But I need exercise to get through each day. Some shake heads when they see me run through the town. Others get hurt when I refuse to try just one bite of their grandmother's chocolate cake. They raise their eyebrows, surprised by my "no thank you", or by my choice to have a salad. Over the years, I have learned it's okay to just say "no". I shouldn't feel sorry for refusing food that I don't want to eat.

    So what drives me to roll out of bed at 5:00 a.m.? What gives me the reason to just say no to ice cream? Commitment. A commitment to change my life with a way that reduces daily anxiety, increases self-confidence and energy, extends life and above all improves my body shape. This is the point where a smile appears on my face as I look at myself in the mirror or try on my favorite pair of jeans that now fit just right. It's through commitment and sweat that I can make a difference within myself inside and out.

    There are plenty of mindless activities to keep a child busy in this information age. Yet despite the competition, my 8-year-old daughter Alice wants to spend her leisure time writing short stories. She wants to enter one of her stories into a writing contest, a competition which she won last year.

    As a writer, I know about winning contests—and about losing them. I know what it is like to work hard on a story only to receive a rejection letter from the publisher. I also know the pressure of trying to live up to a reputation created by previous victories. What if she doesn't win the contest again? That's the strange thing about being a parent. So many of our own past scars and destroyed hopes can resurface in our children.

    A revelation (启示) came last week when I asked her, "Don't you want to win again?" "No," she replied. "I just want to tell the story of an angel going to first grade."

    I had just spent weeks correcting her stories as she spontaneously (自发地) told them. Telling myself that I was an experienced writer guiding the young writer across the hall, I offered suggestions for characters, conflicts and endings for her tales. The story about a fearful angel starting first grade was quickly "guided" by me into the tale of a little girl with a wild imagination taking her first music lesson. I had turned her contest into my contest without even realizing it.

    Staying back and giving kids space to grow is not as easy as it looks. Because I know very little about farm animals who use tools or angels who go to first grade, I had to accept the fact that I was co-opting (借鉴) my daughter's experience.

    While stepping back was difficult for me, it was certainly a good first step that I will quickly follow with more steps, putting myself far enough away to give her room but close enough to help if asked. All the while I will be reminding myself that children need room to experiment, grow and find their own voices.

In life, once on a path, we tend to follow it, for better or worse. What's sad is that even if it's the latter, we often accept it anyway because we are so used to the way things are that we don't even recognize that they could be different. This is a phenomenon psychologist call functional fixedness.

This classic experiment will give you an idea of how it works and a sense of whether you may have fallen into the same trap: People are given a box of tacks (大头钉) and some matches and asked to find a way to attach a candle to a wall so that it burns properly.

Typically, the subjects try tacking the candle to the wall or lighting it to fix it with melted wax. The psychologists had, of course, arranged it so that neither of these obvious approaches would work. The tacks are too short, and the paraffin (石蜡) doesn't stick to the wall. So how can you complete the task? The successful technique is to use the tack box as a candle-holder. You empty it, tack it to the wall. and stand the candle inside it. To think of that, you have to look beyond the box's usual role as a receptacle just for tacks and re-imagine it serving an entirely new purpose. That is difficult because we all suffer to one degree or another from functional fixedness.

The inability to think in new ways affects people in every corner of society. The political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase" frozen thoughts" to describe deeply held ideas that we no longer question but should. In Arendt's eyes, the self- content reliance on such accepted "truths" also made people blind to ideas that didn't fit their worldview, even when there was plenty of evidence for them.

Frozen thinking has nothing to do with intelligence. She said," It can be found in highly intelligent people."

There's a useful concept from psychology that helps explain why good people do things that harm the environment: the false consensus effect. That's where we overvalue how acceptable and prevalent（普遍的） our own behavior is in society. Put simply, if you're doing something （even if you secretly know you probably shouldn't）, you're more likely to think plenty of other people do it too. What's more, you likely overestimate how much other people think that behavior is broadly OK.

This bias（偏见） allows people to justify socially unacceptable or illegal behaviors. Researchers have observed the false consensus effect in drug use and illegal hunting. More recently, conservationists are beginning to reveal how this effect contributes to environmental damage.

In Australia, people who admitted to poaching（偷猎） thought it was much more prevalent in society than it really was, and had higher estimates than fishers who obeyed the law. They also believed others viewed poaching as socially acceptable; however, in reality, more than 90% of fishers held the opposite view. The false consensus effect has also shown up in studies examining support for nuclear energy and offshore wind farms.

Just as concepts from psychology can help explain some forms of environmental damage, so too can they help address it. For example, research shows people are more likely to litter in areas where there's already a-lot of trash scattered around; so making sure the ground around a bin is not covered in rubbish may help.

Factual information on how other people think and behave can be very powerful. Energy companies have substantially reduced energy consumption simply by showing people how their electricity use compares to their neighbors. Encouragingly, stimulating people's natural desire for status has also been successful in getting people to "go green to be seen", or to publicly buy eco-friendly products.

As the research evidence shows, social norms can be a powerful force in encouraging and popularizing environmentally friendly behaviors. Perhaps you can do your bit by sharing this article!