Next time you raise an eyebrow at the views of your friend, brother, sister or colleague, remember they could be helping to make you smarter. New research shows that intelligence is not fixed but can be improved throughout adulthood by family members, bright mates and intellectually challenging careers. The study challenges the commonly held belief that intelligence is fixed by the age of about 18.

    Scientific consensus (共识) suggests intelligence is controlled by genes, with environmental factors such as schooling and nutrition playing a part up to this age. After this point, IQ scores become steady. But James Flynn, professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand, argues that people can "upgrade" their intelligence throughout their lives. He believes intellectual stimulation (刺激) from other people is important as the "brain seems to be rather like a muscle—the more you use it, the stronger it gets". However, the opposite is also true—so people who share a home or workplace with the intellectually challenged risk seeing their IQ levels nosedive as a result.

    Professor Flynn analyzed US intelligence tests from the last 65 years and created new IQ "age tables". He found a bright ten-year-old with brothers and sisters of average intelligence will suffer a five to ten point IQ disadvantage compared to a similar child with equally bright brothers and sisters. However, children with a low IQ could gain six to eight points by having brighter brothers and sisters and special educational treatment to help pull them up.

    Professor Flynn concluded that although genetics and early life experiences determine about 80% of intelligence, the remaining 20% is linked to lifestyle. This means people can raise their IQ, or allow it to fall, by ten points or more. He suggests the best way to improve IQ levels is to socialize with bright friends, and find an intellectually challenging job.

  Reading is very important to help you learn English. To learn as much as you can from reading, you need to read different kinds of English. This book provides not only different kinds of English but also a good way to check your reading ability. 

     There are four parts in the book: 

     Part 1 is Messages: In this part somebody wants to send information in writing to somebody else. There is a test on timetable and a test on text messages. 

     Part 2 is People: In this part all the tests are about people. For example, there is an informal letter between friends. There is formal English in biography (传记). There is a job application as a model to help with your writing, as well as testing your reading. 

     You can do these tests in any order you like, or you can do all the tests with a formal or informal text. 

 I enjoyed writing this book and I hope you enjoy using it.

A technology company is developing a lie detector app for smart phones that could be used by parents, teachers—and even Internet daters.   The app measures blood flow in the face to assess whether or not you are telling the truth. Its developers say that it could be used for daters wanting to see if somebody really is interested in them. Parents could use it on their children to see if they are lying and teachers could work out which of their pupils are honest.   The app is being developed by Toronto startup NuraLogix and the software is called Transdermal Optical Imaging. The idea is that different human emotions create different facial blood flow patterns that we have no control over. These patterns change if we are telling the truth or telling a lie.

     Using the footage(拍摄的片段)from the smart phone camera, the software will see the changes in skin colors and compare them to standardized results. A study from last year found that anger was associated with more blood flow and redness while sadness was associated with less of both.

     Developmental neuroscientist (神经病学家) Kang Lee, who has been researching the field for 20 years, said. "It could be very useful, for example, for teachers. A lot of our students have math anxiety but they do not want to tell us. because thatˈs embarrassing." Lee remarked that the technology would not replace lie detectors used in a court of law. He said, "They want the accuracy to be extremely high, like genetic tests, so a one-in-a-million error rate. Our technique wonˈt be able to achieve an extremely high accuracy level, so because of that I donˈt think itˈs useful for the courts." He added that it would be a few years before the app is available to consumers.

Walk through the Amazon rainforest today and you will find it is steamy, warm, damp and thick. But if you had been around 15 000 years ago,during the last ice age,would it have been the same? For more than 30 years, scientists have been arguing about how rainforests like the Amazon might have reacted to the cold, dry climates of the ice ages, but until now, no one has reached a satisfying answer.

 Rainforests like the Amazon are important for mopping up CO₂ from the atmosphere and helping to slow global warming. Currently the trees in the Amazon take in around 500 million tones of CO₂ each year, equal to the total amount of CO₂ giving off in the UK each year. But how will the Amazon react to future climate change? If it gets drier, will it still survive and continue to draw down CO₂? Scientists hope that they will be able to learn in advance how the rainforest will manage in the future by understanding how rainforests reacted to climate change in the past.  

Unfortunately, getting into the Amazon rainforest and collecting information are very difficult.To study past climate, scientists need to look at fossilized pollen, kept in lake mud.Going back to the last ice age means drilling deep down into lake sediments(沉淀物), which requires specialized equipment and heavy machinery.There are very few roads and paths, or places to land helicopters and airplanes. Rivers tend to be the easiest way to enter the forest, but this still leaves vast areas between the rivers completely unsampled(未取样)．So far, only a handful of cores have been drilled that go back to the last ice age and none of them provide enough information to prove how the Amazon rainforest reacts to climate change.

Walk through the Amazon rainforest today and you will find it is steamy, warm, damp and thick. But if you had been around 15 000 years ago,during the last ice age,would it have been the same? For more than 30 years, scientists have been arguing about how rainforests like the Amazon might have reacted to the cold, dry climates of the ice ages, but until now, no one has reached a satisfying answer.

 Rainforests like the Amazon are important for mopping up CO₂ from the atmosphere and helping to slow global warming. Currently the trees in the Amazon take in around 500 million tones of CO₂ each year, equal to the total amount of CO₂ giving off in the UK each year. But how will the Amazon react to future climate change? If it gets drier, will it still survive and continue to draw down CO₂? Scientists hope that they will be able to learn in advance how the rainforest will manage in the future by understanding how rainforests reacted to climate change in the past.  

Unfortunately, getting into the Amazon rainforest and collecting information are very difficult.To study past climate, scientists need to look at fossilized pollen, kept in lake mud.Going back to the last ice age means drilling deep down into lake sediments(沉淀物), which requires specialized equipment and heavy machinery.There are very few roads and paths, or places to land helicopters and airplanes. Rivers tend to be the easiest way to enter the forest, but this still leaves vast areas between the rivers completely unsampled(未取样)．So far, only a handful of cores have been drilled that go back to the last ice age and none of them provide enough information to prove how the Amazon rainforest reacts to climate change.

Here are a few tips we’ve put together to help you learn English well.

Speak, speak, speak

Practise speaking as often as you can—even speaking to yourself is good practice.

Try recording yourself whenever you can. Compare your pronunciation with the master version, see how you can do better and have another go. If you do this several times, you will find that each version is better than the last.

Why not learn with someone else?

It helps if you can learn with someone else. If you can persuade a friend or a family member to study with you, it will make you keep working.

Don’t get stuck by a word you don’t know.

Practise improvising (即兴的) ways of getting your meaning across when speaking spontaneously (本能地) , even if you don’t know the exact words or phrases. Think of things you might want to say whenever you have spare time. Use facial expressions, hand movements, anything to get your meaning across.

Language learning is also about intuition.

Guesswork is an important way to learn a new language. When listening to recorded material, you aren’t expected to understand everything first round. If you play the same piece several times, you will most probably understand something new each time.

Build up your vocabulary.

A wide vocabulary is the key to successful language learning but don’t try to learn too much at once. It’s best to study frequently, for short periods of time. Take at most six or seven items of vocabulary and learn them. Put them into sentences to fix them in your mind, then come back to them later.

And above all, have fun!   

We are enrolled in the full-time school called “life”. Every day in this school, we have opportunities to learn new lessons. No matter whether we like these lessons or not, we have to take them, because they are our lessons.

Why are we here in this world? What is the purpose of life? Humans have tried to discover the meaning of life for thousands of years, but failed to get the answer, because the meaning of life is different from person to person.

Each one of us has his or her special purpose and path, unique and different. As we travel on our life path, we will learn many great lessons in order to fulfill that purpose. Learning our lessons well is the key to discovering the real meaning of our own life.

As we travel through our lifetime, we may be taught hard lessons that others don’t have to face, while others spend years struggling with problems we don’t need to deal with. We may never know why we love English, not physics, which indicates that our path is different. While traveling on our own path, sometimes alone, we should, first of all, take a basic lesson in openness.

Openness means being receptive. Life will present us with so many lessons, none of which are useful to us unless we can recognize them and are open to their values. These lessons are not easy to learn, but we should regard them as gifts. But how can we recognize these lessons? It is a matter of what “glasses” we are wearing at the time. It is not difficult to spot them if we take them as opportunities. So when we are not open to learning our lessons, failing a weekly English test might be like a disaster rather than an opportunity to us. Of course, the hard lessons may not be fun, but they can actually be the biggest gifts we receive from life.

More than a decade ago, cognitive（认知的）scientists John Bransfgord and Daniel Schwartz, both then at Vanderbilt University, found that knowledge was not the ability to retain facts or apply previous knowledge to a new situation but a quality they called “preparation for future learning.” The researches asked fifth graders and college students to create a recovery plan to protect bald eagles from extinction. Shockingly, the two groups came up with plans of similar quality (though the college students had better spelling skills). From the standpoint of a traditional educator, this outcome indicated that schooling had failed to help students think about ecosystems and extinction, major scientific ideas.

　　The researches decided to go deeper, however. They asked both groups to generate questions about important issues needed to create recovery plans. On this task, they found large differences. College students focused on critical issues. The college students had cultivated the ability to ask questions, the foundation of critical thinking. They had learned how to learn.

Museums and other institutions of informal learning may be more suitable to teach this skill than elementary and secondly schools. At the Exploratorium in San Francisco, we recently studied how learning to ask good questions can affect the quality of people’s scientific inquiry. We found that when we taught participants to ask “What if?” and “How can?” questions that nobody present would know the answer to and that would spark exploration, they engaged in better inquiry at the next exhibit-asking more questions, performing more experiments and making better interpretations of their results. Specially, their questions became more comprehensive at the new exhibit.

This type of learning is not limited to museums of institutional settings. Informal learning environment tolerate failure better than schools. Perhaps many teachers have too little time to allow students to form and pursue their own questions and too much ground to cover in the curriculum. But people must acquire this skill somewhere. Our society depend on them being able to make critical decisions about their own medical treatment, says, or what we must do about global energy needs and demands. For that, we have a robust（健全的）informal system that gives no grades, takes all comers, and is available even on holidays and weekends.

C

Whether rich or poor, parents who have books in the home increase the level of education their children will attain, according to a 20-year study led by Mariah Evans.

For years, educators have thought the strongest predictor of attaining high levels of education was having parents who were highly educated. But, the study showed that the difference between being raised in a bookless home compared to being raised in a home with a 500-book library has as great an effect on the level of education a child will attain as the difference between having parents who are barely literate (有文化的) and having parents who have a university education.  

Being a sociologist, Evans was particularly interested to find that children of lesser-educated parents benefit the most from having books in the home. What kinds of investments should we make to help these kids get ahead? The results of this study indicate that getting some books into their homes is an inexpensive way that we can help these children succeed. Evans said, "Even a little bit goes a long way. Having as few as 20 books in the home still has a significant impact on motivating a child to a higher level of education, and the more books you add, the greater benefit the children get.”

The researchers were struck by the strong effect having books in the home had on children's educational attainment even above and beyond such factors as education level of the parents, the father's occupation or the economic level of the country.

Having books in the home is twice as important as the father's education level, and more important than whether a child was brought up in a developing country or a developed country. Surprisingly, the difference in educational attainment for children born in developed country and children born in developing country was just 2 years, less than two-thirds of the effect that having 500 or more books in the home had on children.