选择知识点

Many facts suggest that children are overweight and the situation is getting worse, according to the doctors. I feel there are a number of reasons for this.

Some people blame the fact that we are surrounded by shops selling unhealthy, fatty foods, such as fried chicken and ice cream, at low prices. This has turned out a whole generation of grown-ups who seldom cook a meal for themselves. If there were fewer of these restaurants, then probably children would buy less take-away food.

There is another argument that blames parents for allowing their children to become overweight. I agree with this, because good eating habits begin early in life, long before children start to visit fast food shops. If children are given fried chicken and chocolate rather than healthy food, or are always allowed to choose what they eat, they will go for sweet and salty foods every time, and this will carry on throughout their lives.

There is a third reason for this situation. Children these days take very little exercise. They do not walk to school. When they get home, they sit in front of the television or their computers and play computer games. Not only is this an unhealthy pastime, it also gives them time to eat more unhealthy food. What they need is to go outside and play active games or sports.

The above are the main reasons for this problem, and therefore we have to encourage young people to be more active, as well as steer them away from fast food shops and bad eating habits.

A Shoe Pattern

　　Harry is eighteen years old now. He studies in a middle school. His parents like him very much and hope he can become a famous man. So they tell him to study hard and they do all for him. They call him at six in the morning. After breakfast his father takes him to school in a car and in the afternoon, as soon as the young man comes back, the supper is ready. Of course, he never washes his clothes or goes to buy something in the shops.

　　Once Harry’s father was sent to London on business. He would stay there for half a year. Before leaving, he told his wife to take good care of their son. The woman had to get up earlier and did all what her husband did before. And two months later she was so tired that she was ill in bed. Now the young man got into trouble. He couldn’t do any housework. He had to do as his mother told him. Even he didn’t know where to get on the bus!

　　Yesterday Harry’s mother found his shoes were worn out and told him to buy a new pair in the shop. But he didn’t know how to choose. The woman had a sigh and gave him a shoe pattern(鞋样)and told him to buy a pair of shoes himself. It’s Saturday today and Harry doesn’t go to school. With a policeman’s help, he found a shop. The shopkeeper was friendly to him. The man brought a lot of shoes and asked him to choose. When he was trying on a pair, suddenly he remembered something and took them off. The man was surprised and asked, “What’s the matter, young man?”

　　“I’m sorry. I’ve left the shoe pattern at home!”

The evidence for harmony(和谐) may not be obvious in some families. But it seems that four out of five young people now get on well with their parents, which is the opposite of the popularly held image(印象)of unhappy teenagers locked in their room after endless family quarrels.

An important new study into teenage attitudes surprisingly shows that their family life is more harmonious than it has ever been in the past. “We were surprised by just how positive today’s young people seem to be about their families,” said one member of the research team. “They’re expected to be rebellious(叛逆的) and selfish but actually they have other things on their minds; they want a car and material goods, and they worry about whether school is serving them well. There’s more negotiation(商议) and discussion between parents and children and children expect to take part in the family decision-making process. They don’t want to rock the boat.”

So it seems that this generation of parents is much more likely than parents of 30 years ago to treat their children as friends.” My parents are happy to discuss things with me and willing to listen to me,” says 17-years-old Daniel Lazall. “I always tell them when I’m going out clubbing. As long as they know what I’m doing, they’re fine with it.” Susan Crome, who is now 21, agrees. “Looking back on the last 10 years, there was a lot of what you could call negotiation. For example, as long as I’d done all my homework, I could go out on a Saturday night. But I think my grandparents were a lot stricter with my parents than that.”

Maybe this positive view of family life should not be unexpected. It is possible that the idea of teenager’s rebellion is not rooted in real facts. A researcher commented, “Our surprise that teenagers say they get along well with their parents comes because of a brief period in social history when teenagers were regarded as different beings. But that idea of rebelling and breaking away from their parents really only happened during that one time in the 1960s when everyone rebelled. The normal situation throughout history has been a smooth change from helping out with the family business to taking it over.”

Have you ever run into a careless cell phone user on the street? Perhaps they were busy talking, texting or checking updates on WeChat without looking at what was going on around them. As the number of this new “species”of human has kept rising, they have been given a new name —phubbers (低头族).

Recently, a cartoon created by students from China Central Academy of Fine Arts put this group of people under the spotlight. In the short film, phubbers with various social identities bury themselves in their phones. A doctor plays with his cell phone while letting his patient die, a pretty woman takes selfie in front of a car accident site, and a father loses his child without knowing about it while using his mobile phone. A chain of similar events eventually leads to the destruction of the world.

Although the ending sounds overstated, the damage phubbing can bring is real.

Your health is the first to bear the effect and result of it. “Constantly bending your head to check your cell phone could damage your neck,” Guangming Daily quoted doctors as saying, “the neck is like a rope that breaks after long-term stretching.” Also, staring at cell phones for long periods of time will damage your eyesight gradually, according to the report.

But that’s not all. Being a phubber could also damage your social skills and drive you away from your friends and family. At reunions with family or friends, many people tend to stick to their cell phones while others are chatting happily with each other and this creates a strange atmosphere, Beijing Evening News reported.

It can also cost you your life. There have been lots of reports on phubbers who fell to their death, suffered accidents, and were robbed of their cell phones in broad daylight.

Children feel like they get more out of their relationships with their pets than they do with their brothers and sisters, a new study suggests.

This research only factored in 77 children in the UK, so we can’t read too much into it just yet, but it adds to the growing body of evidence for the crucial role that pets play in our well-being and happiness.

First off, no one is suggesting that pets can replace the valuable role that siblings play in people’s lives. Instead, the researchers were looking to find out more about how having pets in the family can influence kids’ well-being and development as they grow up.

 “Anyone who has loved a childhood pet knows that we turn to them for companionship and disclosure, just like relationships between people,” said lead researcher Matt Cassells from the University of Cambridge in the UK. “We wanted to know how strong these relationships are with pets relative to other close family ties.”

To figure this out, the team surveyed 77 12-year-olds from different families in the UK. The participants included a mix of girls and boys, but all the kids had at least one pet at home, and one or more siblings.

To get an understanding of how well the children related to their pets, the researchers adopted something called the Network of Relationships Inventory — a well-established psychological tool that measures the quality of people’s relationships.

They found that children reported having stronger relationships with their pets than their siblings, as well as lower levels of conflict — these results were particularly seen in kids with dogs.

This test is by no means objective — as children, we often fight with our siblings, and at times feel like they barely understand us. So asking a 12-year-old how much satisfaction they get from their sibling relationships is filled with complications.

But at this early stage in the research, the team wasn’t looking for a definitive answer on the importance of relationships — instead they wanted to know how valuable kids felt their pets were to them. And the results suggest they play a big role in their lives.

The team also showed that girls reported having closer relationships with their pets than boys did — although both sexes were equally satisfied with their animals.

“While previous research has often found that boys report stronger relationships with their pets than girls do, we actually found the opposite,” said Cassells.

“While boys and girls were equally satisfied with their pets, girls reported more disclosure, companionship, and conflict with their pet than boys did, perhaps indicating that girls may interact with their pets in more different ways.”

There’s a lot more research that needs to be done into this space to figure out just how beneficial pets really are to families, but it’s not the only study looking into this question.

When a person lives in a poor family, a growing body of research suggests the limbic (边缘的) system is constantly sending fear and stress messages to the prefrontal cortex (前额皮层), which overloads (使超载) its ability to solve problems, set goals, and complete tasks. The overload can be caused by anything, including an extremely stressful day at work or a family emergency.

It is believed that brain capacity (容量) is relatively fixed. And the science is clear—when brain capacity is used up on these worries and fears, there simply isn’t as much room for other things. Elisabeth Babcock, the president and CEO of EMPath, said poor people tend to get stuck in the cycles where stress leads to bad decision-making, thus causing other problems and bringing about the idea that they can’t improve their own lives. Maybe we can help them earn more money, or establish a sense of control over their own lives.

It’s true that the constant stresses of poverty（贫困） actually changes people’s brains. Race, the Deputy Director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, says children who grow up in and remain in poverty are doubly affected. But the sections of the brain in question are also known to be particularly “plastic”, Race said, which means they can be strengthened and improved well into adulthood.

“It’s going to enable them to understand that they can make a change,” “that things don’t have to be in a certain way if they are not happy.” Poverty can’t help people develop this sense of control over one’s own life, but we can use an understanding of the human brain to bring about lasting change.

How to be a safe and smart searcher

Several keywords will help to find better results

Use more than one keyword when you are doing a search. If you want to find out about seagulls, for example, search for bird seagull and not just “ seagull” — because seagull might also be the name of just about anything else, from a hotel to a documentary film.

Avoid common words

Don’t use words like ‘a’ or the’ in a search. These aren’t always helpful and are usually unnecessary.

Remove unwanted results

Adding a minus symbol (-), for example, seagull-hotel-film, would leave out all references to hotels and films.

Check your spelling

Make sure that you spell every word in the search box correctly. The smallest typing mistakes can bring unwanted results — especially when the mistyped word exists.

Have a filter(过滤)

It’s a good idea to filter your online searches, especially when you are searching for pictures. Ask an adult to help you add a filtering system. There are lots of filtering software options available.

Experiment with different search engines

Keep trying until you find the one that’s best for you. Some search engines personalize the results, so check out the choice of using a search engine that doesn’t do this and you will get different results.

Reliability is very important when you are searching on the internet

Always ask yourself, “Is this reliable? Don’t make the mistake of believing everything you see. Some websites are unreliable and some information is false. Check your information on other websites before accepting it.

a. Ignore small spelling mistakes.                                       

b. Choose your search engine carefully.

c. Avoid terms like “a” or “the” in a search.

d. Use only one keyword in a single search.

e. Compare information from different sites.

We live in a digital world now, and a student’s technology needs have changed. For the early years, say when you are in primary school, you can get by with no technology at all. Even if you have a computer, it’s a good idea to be familiar with libraries. At this age, trips to the library are like family outings.

As you get closer to middle school, a computer with Internet access becomes more of a necessity. Teachers will often give assignments that require a student to use the Internet for research. After a computer, technology choices for students become more difficult to make， especially when it comes to cellphones. Kids will beg their parents for a cellphone, especially in middle school. For many parents, it’s a safety issue: They want to know that their kids can reach them quickly if necessary. For teachers, cellphones can be used to record lessons when students are absent. But many teachers dislike cellphones. Some kids send messages or have talks in class. Sending messages also raises the problem of cheating on exams. More and more schools are now forbidding the use of cellphones.

Many kids see iPods as necessary things to have. IPods are great for music, but do they do anything good for the children’s education? Maybe they do. That’s the opinion of Doug Johnson, an educator for 30 years. Johnson says that educators should accept all new forms of technology in the classroom, including iPods.“Some do more with their cellphones than we can do with our laptops,” he jokes.“I don’t think we should be afraid. The truth is that it’s easier to change the way we teach than to change the technology habits of an entire generation."