When human beings take in excess energy in the form of food at a given meal or snack, the extra calories tend to reduce hunger at the next meal or snack. But this mechanism doesn't seem to be fully functional when excess calories are consumed in the form of liquids. If, for example, you begin taking in an extra 200 calories a day by eating a sandwich, you'll tend to reduce your caloric intake by the same amount at the next meal or over the course of the day. On the other hand, if you take in an extra 200 calories by drinking a soft drink, your body won't activate the same mechanism, and you probably won't end up reducing your daily caloric intake at all. In the long run, you'll end up gaining weight.

One afternoon, as I wandered around the shops near my hotel, I saw a poor gypsy woman sitting on the sidewalk outside the subway station. She looked tired and lonely, and her eyes were fixed firmly on the ground. A young toddler played at her feet merrily, not knowing her mother's sadness. Then, a young woman who worked at a nearby tourist shop came out of the shop, holding some food. She went over to the gypsy woman, smiled at the child and handed over the food. While the shop assistant was happily responding to the toddler's playful touches, I saw a smile flashing across the gypsy woman's face. It was a heartwarming moment. That day I learned a lesson in human kindness.

Emotions usually get a bad reputation. They are often seen as something to be regulated or managed. People even think emotions are harmful if they get out of control. However, all emotions have a point. They played an important part in our evolutionary history and helped us survive. For example, by seeing disgust on someone's face when presented with moldy food, we were able to avoid eating something dangerous. By communicating happiness, we were able to develop beneficial social interactions. Even anger was an important emotion to our ancestors, motivating us to seek food when we were hungry, to fight off predators and to compete for scarce resources.

No Stone Age ten-year-old would have been living on tender foods like modern potato chips, hamburgers, and pasta. Their meals would have required far more chewing than is ever demanded of a modern child. Insufficient use of jaw muscles in the early years of modern life may result in their underdevelopment and in weaker and smaller bone structure. The growth of human teeth requires a jaw structure of a certain size and shape, one that might not be produced if usage during development is inadequate. Crowded and misplaced incisors and imperfect wisdom teeth may be diseases of civilization. Perhaps many dental problems would be prevented if more biting were encouraged for children.

You might be surprised to learn that most kids would rather have parents that are a little too strict than not strict enough. When they make rules about your behavior, your parents are showing you they really care about the things you do. Learning about life is a little like learning to fly an airplane. Once you get in the air it's exciting, but first you need to know which buttons to press and which ones to leave alone. If your flight instructor puts you in a plane and says, Figure out the rules yourself. Good luck! you know you're in trouble. It's the same with parents.

If you watch airline attendants when flight safety instructions are being given, you'll notice that they hold the life jacket, oxygen mask, and other demonstration materials like pieces of art being auctioned at Christie's. Why? Because it draws attention to those items and conveys their importance. According to a large restaurant owner, his servers are taught to present trays of food to customers with both hands and with respect. Doing so leaves others with a more favorable impression of the server and the restaurant. The same principle applies to anything you hold while speaking in public. Whether it is a piece of paper, a workbook, or a product, if you want to let your audience know what you are holding is important, handle the item with respect and care.

Pocket gophers include several species that range across the western half of the United States. They prefer habitats where the earth is soft and easy to dig in, and they spend most of their time underground. As many as seven young are born in the spring. As soon as they are weaned, they dig burrows of their own and begin life alone. Mature gophers are 6-13 inches long and weigh up to a pound. Their bodies are fur covered except for a short thick tail. Gophers eat roots and other parts of plants they encounter while digging underground.

The above graph shows the U.S. market shares of fruit imports by type in 1999 and 2010. Overall, the market shares of all types of fruit imports increased between 1999 and 2010. In 1999, the market share of imported fresh fruit was three times as much as that of imported dried fruit. Between 1999 and 2010, the market share of imported frozen fruit showed the largest growth among the five types. In both 1999 and 2010, imported dried fruit had the smallest market share among the five types. The market shares of imported canned fruit and fruit juice were above 30 percent in 2010.

《Sprout Library Volunteer Program》 Volunteering at the Sprout Library is a rewarding and valuable experience. Minimum Requirements: - Applicants under 18 years of age must have a parent sign the volunteer application. - Volunteers must work from April to June. (A three-month commitment is required.) Selection Process & Volunteer Training: - The selection process takes 3-5 days. - The chosen volunteers will participate in a 2-day training session run by the Volunteer Coordinator before beginning the assignment. Applications can be downloaded from the library's website at www.sproutlibrary.org.

《Chopin Music Academy's Piano Camp》 Our piano camp introduces the piano in a fun and positive environment. Programs are intended for those with little or no experience. Both camps run Monday-Friday from 9:00 to noon with a camp celebration performance on Friday. Camp Dates & Groups: June 8-12: age 7-10, small groups of 4-5 students June 15-19: age 11-14, small groups of 5-7 students $120 Tuition Includes: • 10 hours of piano lessons • Songs taught in a variety of styles • Arts and crafts • Healthy snacks Fees paid in full at the time of registration will receive a $5 discount. For more information, visit www.chopinmusic.com.

Some researchers assumed early human beings ate mainly the muscle flesh of animals, as we do today. By meat, they meant the muscle of the animal. Yet focusing on the muscle appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon. In every history on the subject, the evidence suggests that early human populations preferred the fat and organ meat of the animal over its muscle meat. Vihjalmur Stefansson, an arctic explorer, found that the Inuit were careful to save fatty meat and organs for human consumption while giving muscle meat to the dogs. In this way, humans ate as other large, meat-eating mammals eat. Lions and tigers, for instance, first eat the blood, hearts, livers, and brains of the animals they kill, often leaving the muscle meat for eagles. These organs tend to be much higher in fat.

When my daughter, Isabella, was five years old, we were living in Washington, D.C. One day, we were volunteering at Children of Mine, a center for children in need. The day before, we had celebrated her fifth birthday with a cake, presents, balloons, and a birthday party. By chance, at the center that day there was a little girl also having her fifth birthday. Her entire birthday celebration consisted of a chocolate chip cookie with a candle. I remember watching my daughter from across the room, her eyes welling with tears. Something clicked for her, something that I could not have taught her. When we returned home, Isabella rushed to her room, collected all the presents she had got for her birthday, and told me that she wanted to take them to the little girl. Now it's not as if Isabella was suddenly transformed into Mother Teresa ― she has had many moments of selfishness since then. But it was a profound moment, whose impact will always be with her.

Most of us play it safe by putting our needs aside when faced with the possibility of feeling guilty or disappointing others. At work you may allow a complaining coworker to keep stealing your energy to avoid conflict ― ending up hating your job. At home you may say yes to family members who give you a hard time to avoid their emotional rejection, only to feel frustrated by the lack of quality time that you have for yourself. We work hard to manage the perceptions of others, ignoring our own needs, and in the end we give up the very thing that will enable us to live meaningful lives.

Compared with farmers, hunter-gatherers led a more leisurely life. Modern anthropologists who have spent time with surviving hunter-gatherer groups report that gathering food only accounts for a small proportion of their time ― far less than would be required to produce the same quantity of food via farming. The !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari, for example, typically spend twelve to nineteen hours a week collecting food, and the Hazda nomads of Tanzania spend less than fourteen hours. That leaves a lot of time free for leisure activities, socializing, and so on. When asked by an anthropologist why his people had not adopted farming, one Bushman replied, Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world? In effect, hunter-gatherers work two days a week and have five-day weekends.

A human system of regulating flow is almost always more responsive than a mechanical one. Have you ever had to wait in a car at a red light when there was a lot of traffic on your street and none on the cross street? A policeman would immediately see the situation and adjust the directional flow to meet the momentary need. The same applies to rigid rules in a meeting. It is hard to get a constructive dialogue going when the participants are only allowed to speak in a fixed order. A human system ― a sensitive moderator ― could adjust to the moment-by-moment needs of the individuals in the group without letting anyone dominate the meeting for long. Clearly, every meeting of more than four or five people needs a leader who will keep a balanced conversational flow.

Jacqueline Novogratz, the founder of the Acumen Fund, tells a story that demonstrates how connected we all are. Her story centers on a blue sweater. It was given to her by her uncle Ed when she was twelve. I loved that soft wool sweater with its striped sleeves and two zebras in the front, she says. She even wrote her name on the tag. But the sweater got too tight for her as she grew older. So in her freshman year of high school she donated it to a charity. Eleven years later, she was jogging in Kigali, Rwanda, where she was working to set up an aid program for poor women. Suddenly, she spotted a little boy wearing a similar sweater. Could it be? She ran over to him and checked out the tag. Yes, there was her name. It was enough to remind Jacqueline ― and the rest of us ― of the threads of our connection to one another.

When it comes to salt and sweets, there's little a parent can do to change a child's inborn desire for them, which begins early in infancy. However, there is some evidence that early diet can at least change the circumstances in which children will seek out sweet and salty flavors. As early as six months of age, babies who have been exposed more often to salted food show a stronger preference for salted cereal than babies with less salt experience. Similarly, six-month-old babies who have been fed sugar water tend to drink more of it than babies not previously exposed to it. This effect lasts a surprisingly long time, because even if the parents stop giving their baby sugar water by six months of age, she will continue to show a greater preference for it at age two.

Human beings have always had the capacity to think spatially ― this is here, that is there ― even though not everybody chooses to express this understanding in mapmaking. The capacity to form mental maps must have been essential for the early humans. Hunter-gatherers, for instance, recognized the routes of the migratory animals and the best places to hunt them down even without a physical map. Wandering tribesmen needed to know how they could cross deserts safely without dying of thirst. All these people would have carried a map of their land in their head.

A Greek historian Herodotus wrote of cinnamon which he had learned about from the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians had claimed that cinnamon sticks were brought to Arabia by large birds that carried them to their nests on mountain cliffs. In order to get the cinnamon, Arabians cut up the bodies of large animals and placed them on the ground near the nests. When the birds picked up the food and returned to their nest, the weight of the meat broke the nest and the cinnamon fell down the mountain, where the Arabians ran to pick it up. The spice was then exported to other countries. This story is perhaps unlikely. For those who traded this spice to people from far-off lands, however, such an exaggerated tale of hardship may have increased a product's value to the consumer.

When you purchase an item, you are paying not just for the item, but the costs to get that item to you. Let's say you visit a farm and buy a tomato. It might cost the farmer very little to grow a tomato, so the farmer might be able to sell you a tomato for much less than it would cost in the supermarket and still make a nice profit. When you buy that tomato at a supermarket, however, there are a number of costs that result in you paying much more than you would pay the farmer. That tomato has to be transported to the store; the store must pay rent, electric bills, and employee wages; and the store advertises tomatoes in its weekly newspaper ad.

Even an extinct language can be brought back to life, if conditions are right. There must be people who want the language back. Also, there must be written or audio-recorded material of the language in some form. This has happened with an Aboriginal language of South Australia called Kaurna. Its last native speaker died in 1929, but in the 1980s a group of people decided that they wanted their language back. The language isn't dead, the leader of the group said, it's only sleeping. Fortunately, material survived from the nineteenth century, so that a linguist was able to make a fresh description and help the Kaurna people start learning the language again. It's taught in schools now, and some day, perhaps, some children will start learning it as their mother tongue.

There has been a huge rise in popularity of male grooming products. Men all over the world are spending billions of dollars on everything from cosmetics to plastic surgery. As to the reason for men's grooming, experts say that men consider their appearance as an important factor for social success. Experts further searched the history of men's grooming for such cases in various countries. Dying hair blond, for instance, was a common practice among ancient Roman men, as it was believed that blond hair provided a more youthful appearance. Similarly, ancient Egyptian men regularly shaved their body hair and applied various cosmetics to their skin. We could say appearance was important to men in the past and it certainly is to men in the present.

Sometimes children may want to do more than they are capable of doing. For example, the five-year-old son of a friend of ours went on a hike with his father. At one point the boy asked his father to let him carry a heavy backpack the way the big people do. Without saying a word, the father took his backpack off and handed it to his son, who immediately discovered that it was too heavy for him to carry. The boy simply exclaimed, Dad, it's too heavy for me. He then went happily on his way up the trail. In a safe way the father had allowed his son to discover experientially that he was, indeed, too small. He had also avoided a potential argument with his son.

Noise pollution can take many forms. In writing, one of the major sources of unwelcome noise actually doesn't make a sound, but it can become deafening. You may have often heard that typing an e-mail or other writings in all capital letters shouts your message to your readers. Perhaps this is so, because the mere size alone of every letter emphasizes its importance. But bigger is not necessarily better and the same applies to writing. The true problem with trying to read all capital letters is just that: It's difficult. A line or two, perhaps even a short paragraph, is fine when you want to emphasize an idea or express a warning. However, if you write a whole essay in all capital letters, it annoys the reader. In elementary school, we learned to read in upper- and lowercase. As adults we continue this practice, and so do the major newspapers, textbooks, journals, and magazines we read. Even the dialogue of some comic books is printed in upper- and lowercase. Also, typing words in all capital letters makes primary information indistinguishable from the rest of the text, supporting and secondary details. What's of major importance? What's not? Typing in all capital letters often indicates that the writer disregards the reader.

It was a beautiful September morning. In fact, it was much too nice a day to remain indoors. So Mr. Brooks decided to spend time in the outside yard. Once outside, he noticed Michelle, Jimmy, and Dwight moving toward the sandpit, and he joined them. While the bright sun warmed the back of his neck, he began nodding beside the sandpit. Suddenly, Mr. Brooks heard a loud shout and turned to see one of the kids, Michelle, on the climbing bars. She was shouting and pointing over the back fence of the yard. She shouted: It's him! It's him! Mr. Brooks got curious. As he got up to go look, Jimmy and Dwight abandoned their toys and ran past him to the bars. Just as Mr. Brooks reached the bars, all of them, including Michelle, began shouting: Garbage man! Garbage man! He moved beyond the bars, peered out over the fence, and saw a garbage man. In fact, there were two garbage men out there, along with a large garbage truck. One of them sat behind the wheel of the truck. The other man had moved to the rear of the truck and seemed to be attaching the dumpster to a lift. He then yelled, Ready, to his partner, and the dumpster began to rise from the ground accompanied by a loud whirring. The kids were very excited and were imitating the noise of the truck lift: Whirr! Whirr! Whirr! As the dumpster reached its peak and the trash fell into the truck, the kids seemed to reach their own peak of excitement. They waved and whirred nearly at the same time. At exactly this point, the garbage man outside the truck waved back to his admirers. The kids continued waving and shouting Garbage man! on the bars as the truck went down the street, far beyond their sight.