选择知识点

When I first arrived in Taiwan to teach English, I had already taken several courses in university on Mandarin Chinese. I had done well in those courses and enjoyed them very much. I thought I would be able to have a conversation with Chinese speakers and improve my Chinese in the process.

However, as soon as I settled in Taiwan I became afraid to speak. Seeing all of the signs written in Chinese, constantly overhearing long streams of spoken Chinese, and seeing the effortless fluency of some foreigners who had been there for a while, I began to doubt my own ability to speak Chinese. It’s proved that things were different outside of the classroom.

What really happened to me was what happens every day to Chinese language learners. I became afraid and nervous at the foreignness of the language. Something happened a few weeks later. I tried to spend a lot of time in public, and the sound of spoken Chinese was becoming more ordinary to me. Despite the fact that I had not been practicing my Chinese and I had not consulted my vocabulary flashcards. I begin to notice some words that I recognized from my courses in university. At first, I heard only one word. “dianhua”- telephone. After that, I begin hearing other words. Sometimes, I would hear a couple of words in one sentence.

More and more words began to stand out to me. I started studying Chinese characters and began to be able to read small blocks of text in the advertisements. When I really began speaking in Chinese to Chinese people I met, I began to learn Chinese fast and the smiles that I received in return were a fantastic reward for the work that I had done in learning the language. It was a great feeling to order food from a restaurant in Chinese, or to make a comment about the weather to the lady who works at the bank.

Are people less happy or more happy the older they get ? A study found that people generally become happier and experience less worry after age 50. In fact, it found that by the age of 85, people are happier with their life than they were at 18 

The finding came from a Gallup survey of more than 340,000 adults in the United States in 2008. At that time, the people were between the age of 18 an 85 

Arthur Stone in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Stony Brook University in New York led the study. His team found that levels of stress were highest among adults between the ages of 22 and 25. Stress levels dropped sharply after people reached their fifties.

Happiness was highest among the youngest adults and those in their early seventies. But the people least likely to report feeling negative emotions(消极情绪) were those in their seventies and eighties. The survey also found that men and women had similar emotional patterns as they grow older. However, women at all ages reported more sadness, stress and worry than men did.

The researchers also considered possible influences like having young children, being unemployed or being single. But they found that influences like these did not affect the levels of happiness and well-being related to age.

So why would happiness increase with age ? One theory is that, as people get older, they become more thankful for what they have and have better control of their emotions. They also spend less time thinking about bad experiences.

The original(最初的) goal of the study was to confirm the popular belief that aging is connected with increased sleep problems. The survey did find an increase during middle age, especially in women. But except for that , people reported that they felt their sleep quality improved as they got older.