Study Styles

You know whether you’re a morning person or a night owl. You know whether you’re a picky eater of a human garbage pail. But do you know if you learn better by reading or by hearing?…if you’ve survived school so far, you already have some sort of study routine—for better or for worse. We asked students all over the country for the lowdown on their methods of operations, and also collected some hard-won advice. See if you can recognize your own personal study method in the list below and learn how to study effectively.

The Dreamer

You may say you’re studying. You may even look like you’re studying. But your mind is in the clouds. Your test performance seldom reflects those long hours you spent at your desk, almost studying; Kim, from Montreal, says,” When I got to the library, I end up sitting there and people-watching. “Cindy, from Lafayette, Pennsylvania, says: “Personally, I tend to write everything down on flash cards so I can quiz myself later. Everyone else thinks that I’ll ace(成绩为A) the exam, but sometimes I find myself spending so much time writing down every little detail that I don’t have time to actually study.”

Warning: ff you spend all day pretend studying, you’ll pay all night cramming for real.(What a waste of socializing time!) This year’s resolution: Stay on target by setting goals(Like four chapters by Wednesday) and asking your friends to test you. Also, tune in to your interests: If you find yourself drawing elaborate doodles in the margins when you’re supposed to be analyzing Shakespeare, take drawing classes and snap out of your day dream.

The Grind

One look at your sock drawer, meticulously(非常细心地) arranged in rainbow order, suggests control-freak tendencies. You never fail to do a fixed amount of studying each evening—and your good grades show it. You cautiously plot a course to conquer an unruly assignment, and you rarely break your routine. Gretchen, from Chicago, describes her hard-core method: “I completely organize all of my notes. Then, before I do anything else, I plan out exactly how many hours I’m going to study and how long I am going to take breaks. This way, I always stay on task. I read through my notes and then highlight the things I don’t know well, to commit them to memory. “But she’s not done yet] “Then I read my assignments again and take notes and study these notes the same way I studied my class notes.” Whew, Sarah, from Scarsdale, New York, also considers herself a worker bee. “I plan my work so that there’s something I have to do every night of the week. But when there’s a test, I’ll do all my assignments before trying to do an overview. Studying comes last because I’ll wait until the last minute to even try to concentrating on something with so little structure.”

Warning: While your self-discipline will serve you well in college (or the military), you might want to add more inspiration to your perspiration. No amount of memorization, or colorcoding your notebooks will help you write an original, opinionated essay—and you’ll be writing plenty. This year’s resolution: Vary your routine and think about your own insights more. After reading an assignment, try closing your eyes and recalling what you found interesting before buckling down with your impeccable notes. And if you’ve got a half hour to spare in your study schedule, try something messy and creative, like writing a poem.

The Social Studier

You’re the kind who learns out loud. You yak your way to enlightenment, so study buddies are a must. In school, you remember more from hearing the lectures than from doing the reading. Roberta, from Princeton, New Jersey, says: “I went to a study counselor to find out that I learn best by listening. It’s true: Until I hear some- thing out loud, it’s not really real to me. When I’m studying and I don’t understand something in our textbook, I’ll call my friends to get the scoop. “Amy, from East Lansing, Michigan, says:” Sometimes a bunch of us go to the library’ after school. It’s a lot more fun in a group, and when… it’s fun, it helps me stay on track. If I’m too bored, chances are I won’t learn anything.”

Warning: Set ground rules fro your study party so you don’t use your friends as excuses not to study. Limit your group to friends who know this is more than a chatfest. (Your slacker pals will be more fun to party with post-exam than to struggle with pre-test.)

The Crammer

You slack off for weeks, until the night before the exam. Then you still find reasons to dawdle: Gotta brew a pot of coffee, and—Wait! You favorite mug is missing! Finally the adrenaline starts pumping. Time to study triple-time. When you’re startled awake at 4 a.m. with textbook crease(皱折) marks on your face, you resolve to do it differently next time. But next time rolls around, and you’re in the same lame situation. Sara, form Hammonton, New Jersey, is a classic crammer: “My study habits are terrible! I usually start studying about 11 p. m. and go until my eyes are sealed shut. Then I wake up panicked and whip out my notebook again on the bus. “Christina, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, says:” I’ll always wait until the last minute to study. It’s like I need to get myself into panic mode to buckle(扣住) down. Otherwise I stare into space with my book in my lap. But as soon as I start studying, I realize that I could have done really well, if only had more time…” Too late.

Warning: The hours after midnight aren’t enough time to get all your work done or study a semester’s worth of stuff. And getting ready for “Reserve” readings, where you and the whole class have to share one book on hold at the library. You won’t have the option of doing it ALAP (as late as possible). This year’s resolution: Improve your grades by adding casual study sessions before you hit high-stress mode. Bring your books outside or to your favorite cafe and skim the material. You may still get the most done when the pressure’s on, but at least you’ll know where to turn to make your cramming more efficient.

The Grade-Grubber(孜孜不倦的人)

Have you no dignity? Don’t you hear the snickers behind your back every time you ask,” But will it be on the test?” Maybe your fear of failing is stronger than your love of learning, and that’s why you try to psych out the teacher or downright cheat. Katie, from Cold Spring Harbor, New York, says: “I knew plenty of kids who relied on old exams from people who’d taken that class before. Not to incriminate myself, but once i made photocopies of the teacher’s answer when he was absent. The test was taken-borne, so I shared the answer key with the whole class, and we each changed on or two answers to make it a little less suspicious. I don’t know what I was thinking. Had I been caught, It could have been grounds for dismissal.”

Warning: College classes are not the place to grade-grub. You’ll waste your time if you’re focused on pleasing the professor, not learning the stuff. Besides, your college instructors will want to hear you brilliantly expound on the material, not parrot her words back. This year’s resolution: Grow out of it. Put your common sense to work and decide what’s the most important material. That’s probably what’s on the test.

A happy marriage apparently is good medicine, but hostile spouses may be harmful to one another’s health. Couples in (36)______ marriages take longer than the happily married to heal from all kinds of wounds, from minor scrapes or (37)______ injuries to major surgery, suggests a study over the weekend. And the health toll taken by a stressful job seems to be (38)______ when the worker has a pleasurable home life. This new research, reported at an American Psychosomatic Society meeting, adds to growing evidence that marriage has an (39)______ on health. In the wound healing study, 42 couples agreed to let researchers use a suction (40)______ to create several minor blister wounds on their skin in two (41)______ about two months apart. The first time, couples were told to discuss a (42)______ topic; the next time they were given half an hour to (43)______ an issue or two on which they disagreed. Their discussions were monitored. Researchers also (44)_________. The outcome: “Even a simple discussion of a disagreement slows wound healing,” says psychologist Janice Kiecolt Glaser, who did the study with co-author Ronald Glaser of Ohio State University College of Medicine. Overall, (45)______. Hostile couples—peppering both discussions with criticism, sarcasm and put-downs—healed the slowest. It took them 40% longer, or two more days, to heal, and they also produced less of the proteins linked to healing. (46)_________. Kiecolt Glaser adds. “Such stress before surgery matters greatly,” she says, and the effect could apply to healing from any injury.

A study reveals that the brain areas that respond when fear is learned through personal experience are also triggered when we see someone else in distress.

In the study, participants watched a short video of a person conditioned to fear a so-called neutral stimulus—something people normally wouldn’t fear—paired with something they find naturally aversive(令人讨厌的), in this case an electrical shock. The person in the video watched colored squares on a computer screen: When a blue square appeared, the person received a mild shock; when a yellow square appeared, there was no shock. The participant in the video responded with distress when the blue square appeared—he would blink hard, tense his cheek muscles and move his hand. “So it’s clear that he’s uncomfortable, he’s in distress,” said study team member Andreas Olsson of Columbia University. “And he’s already in distress before he receives the shock, you see him anticipate receiving the shock.” By contrast the participant in the video appeared relaxed when the yellow square popped up.

Participants were told they would take part in a similar experiment, and when presented with the blue square, they responded with fear, anticipating a shock, though they were never actually shocked. “Just by watching, they learn themselves,” Olsson explained.

This second learning was reflected in the brain. In previous classical conditioning experiments where a fear is learned firsthand, a part of the brain called the amygdala(扁桃体结构) has been shown to be critical to the development and expression of fears. The scientists monitored the brain activity of each participant during the experiment. Imaging showed that the amygdala responded both when the subjects watched the video of someone else receiving shocks and when they were presented with the blue squares themselves.

“We found that the amygdala is involved both when you’re watching somebody receiving shocks, and when you’re expecting to receive shocks later on yourself,” Olsson said. So it seems that similar processes in the brain are triggered both when fears are experienced first-hand and when they are observed in others.

In the real world, the finding could explain why some people are afraid of things despite little contact with them. “You learn by observing other people’s emotional expressions, and what we are showing is that that can be as effective as having those direct experiences yourself,” Olsson said. “That’s probably one of the reasons why a lot people are having phobias(恐怖症)of certain kinds of stimuli, such as snakes and spiders.”

Genetically-modified foodstuffs are here to stay. That’s not to say that food produced by conventional agriculture will disappear, but simply that food-buying patterns will polarize: there will be a niche market(瞄准机会的市场) for conventional foodstuffs just as there is for organic food. It may even be that GM food will become the food of preference because consumers come to appreciate the health benefits of reduced pesticide use.

Currently there are some 20,000 chemicals in use, but the scientists only have detailed information on around 1,000 of them. To see the advantages of GM food you have only to consider the recent press revelation that the average lettuce(莴苣) receives eleven pesticide applications before it reaches the supermarket shelf. I’m sure chemicals and their role in disease will become a big issue in the next century, as the population of the developed world worries increasingly about its health.

The reason GM food will not go away is that we need a three-fold increase in food production by the year 2050 to keep pace with the world’s predicted population growth to ten or eleven billion. It’s not just a question of more mouths to feed either. What is often forgotten is that all these extra people will take up space, reducing the overall land available for agriculture.

The world has 800 million hungry people. Until now, food supplies have been increased by improved varieties, pesticides and artificial fertilizers: the green revolution. Now we’re on the edge of a new revolution: a genetic one.

It may well be that in the long term it is the developing world that benefits most from GM foods. It’s true that for the next ten years or so GM crops may be too expensive. But the lesson of personal computers is applicable here—once the technology has been developed for money—spinning crops, like maize(玉米) and cotton, it will filter down and become affordable for all. This doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that famines will disappear, but severity and duration will be helped by an improved ability to produce and distribute food.

The Web has become such a force in commerce and culture that a group of leading university researchers now deems it worthy of its own field of study. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in Britain plan to announce that they are starting a joint research program in Web science.

Web science, the researchers say, has social and engineering dimensions. It extends well beyond traditional computer science, they say, to include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the Web. And Web science, they add, shifts the center of gravity in engineering research from how a single computer works to how huge decentralized(分散的) Web systems work.

“The Web isn’t about what you can do with computers,” Mr. Berners-Lee, a senior researcher at M.I.T., said. “It’s people and, yes, they are connected by computers. But computer science, as the study of what happens in a computer, doesn’t tell you about what happens on the Web.”

The Web science program is an academic effort, but corporate technology executives and computer scientists said the research could greatly influence Web-based businesses. They pointed in particular to research by Mr. Berners-Lee and others to build more” intelligence” into the Web-moving toward what is known as the Semantic Web-as an area of study that could yield a big payoff.

Web science is related to another emerging interdisciplinary(各学科间的) field called services science. This is the study of how to use computing, collaborative networks and knowledge in disciplines ranging from economics to anthropology to lift productivity and develop new products in the services sector, which represents about three-fourths of the United States economy. Services science research is being supported by technology companies like IBM, Accenture and Hewlett-Packard, and by the National Science Foundation.

Web science research, said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a technology strategist at IBM and visiting professor at MIT, is “a prerequisite(先决条件) to designing and building the kinds of complex human-oriented systems that we are after in services science.” Mr. Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the M.I.T. have had preliminary discussions with government agencies in the United States and Europe that finance scientific research, as well as with leading technology companies. But Mr. Berners-Lee said his group had decided to publicly circulate their ideas about Web science before trying to attract government, foundation and corporate funding.

A study of art history might be a good way to learn more about

a culture than is possible to learn in generally history classes. Most S1.______

typical history courses concentrate on politics, economics and war.

And art history focuses on much more than this because art reflects S2.______

not only the political values of people, but also religious beliefs,

emotions and psychology. In addition, information about the daily

actions of our ancestors—or of people very different from our own— S3.______

can be provided by art. In short, art expresses the essential qualities

of time and a place, and a study of it clearly offered us a deeperun- S4.______

derstanding than can be found in most history books. S5.______

In historical books, objective information about the political life S6.______

of a country is presented; that is, facts about politics are given, but

opinions are not expressed. Art, on the other hand, is quite subjected: S7.______

It reflects emotions and opinions. In his well-known painting, the

Third of May (1808), the great Spanish painter Francisco Goya criticized

the government for its misuse of power about people. Over a S8.______

hundred years later, symbolic images were used in Pablo Picasso’s

Guemica to express the horror of war.

At the same way, art can reflect a culture’s religious beliefs. For S9.______

hundreds of years in Europe, religious art was almost the only type of

art that existed. Churches and other religious buildings were filled

with paintings that depicted people and stories from the Bible. By

contrast, one of the main character of art in the Middle East was(and S10.______

still is) its absence of human and animal images. This reflects the

Islamic(伊斯兰的) belief that statues are unholy.