社会现象类 知识点题库

阅读下列短文：从每题所给的 A、B、C、D 四个选项中，选出最佳选项，将正确的选项涂在答题卡上。
C
Enough “meaningless drivel”. That's the message from a group of members of the UK government who have been examining how social media firms like LinkedIn gather and use social media data.
The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee's report, released last week, has blamed firms for making people sign up to long incomprehensible legal contracts and calls for an international standard or kitemark (认证标记) to identify sites that have clear terms and conditions.
“The term and conditions statement that we all carelessly agree to is meaningless drivel to anyone,” says Andrew Miller, the chair of the committee. Instead, he says, firms should provide a plain-English version of their terms. The simplified version would be checked by a third party and awarded a kitemark if it is an accurate reflection of the original.
It is not yet clear who would administer the scheme, but the UK government is looking at introducing it on a voluntary basis. “we need to think through how we make that work in practice,” saysMiller.
Would we pay any more attention to a kitemark? “I think if you went and did the survey, people would like to thinkthey would,” says Nigel Shadbolt at the University of Southampton, UK, who studies open data. “We do know people worry a lot about the inappropriate use of their information.” But what would happen in practice is another matter, hesays.
Other organizations such as banks ask customers to sign long contracts they may not read or understand, but Miller believes social media requires special attention because it is so new. “We still don't know how significant the long-term impact is going to be of unwise things that kids put on social media that come back and bite them in 20 years’time,” he says.
Shadbolt, who gave evidence to the committee, says the problem is that we don't know how companies will use our data because their business models anduses of data are still evolving. Large collections of personal information havebecome valuable only recently, he says.
The shock and anger when a social media firm does something with data that people don't expect, even if users have apparently permission, show that the current situation isn't working. If properly administered, a kitemark on terms and conditions could help people know what exactly they are signing up to. Althoughthey would still have to actually read them.

阅读理解

    When Luke went to university he thought he would be on a new journey in life and getting his own place. In the UK, it's common to fly the nest at a fairly young age. Many choose a flat-share; others make plans to get on the property ladder.

    But the current economic situation forced Luke back to his mum's house at the age of 27. And he's not alone: a quarter of young adults in the UK now live with their parents. The Office for National Statistics said more than 3.3 million adults between the ages of 20 and 34 were living with their parents in 2013.

    Lack of jobs and the high cost of renting accommodation made Luke change his plans. He's upset. "There's something very difficult about being an adult living in an environment where you're still a child," he says. "It limits me socially; sometimes I feel it limits me professionally."

    Indeed, many young people have no choice but to stay at "the hotel of Mum and Dad".

    Krissy had to return home after a year away and now lives in rather terrible conditions, sharing the family's three-bedroom house with her sisters. She says they end up getting on each other's nerves when it's time to use the bathroom in the morning.

    Of course, living with your parents is not unusual in some countries. Economic conditions, culture, or family traditions mean many young people stay at home until they get married. Even then, it can be too expensive to rent or buy a house and the married couples continue to live at one of their parents' homes.

    But some parents seem to enjoy having their kids back at home. Janice's daughters are part of what's being called "the boomerang generation". She says, "I get to share their lives with them, and I've got to know them all as adults. We have the sort of conversations that good friends do."

    So for some it's a win-win situation — spending time with your families, and saving money.

根据短文理解，选择正确答案。

    Love it or hate it, there is no escape from Internet slang(俚语).

    This is especially true among young people in some English-speaking countries such as Australia, the UK and the US. These days, if they haven't caught up with the latest popular Internet slang, chances are that they often feel behind the times.

    Take these posts by The Washington Post for example: “David Bowie dying is totes tradge” and “When Cookie hugged Jamal, it made me totes emosh. ”

    What on earth do these mean? Well, “totes” is a short form of the adverb “totally”. Likewise, “tradge” means “tragic” and “emosh” means “emotional”.

    It seems that, for millennials (those born between the early 1980s and late 1990s), typing in this abbreviated form is not only time-saving but also in.

    Many millennial slang words are formed by what linguists(语言学家) call the practice of  “totesing” —the systematic abbreviation of words, according to a recent article in The Washington Post.

    Some people think that millennial slang affects the English language negatively. However, Melbourne University linguist Rosey Billington doesn't agree.

     “When you are able to use language in a creative way, you show you are linguistically knowledgeable because you know the language rules well enough to use words in a different way.” Billington told News.com.au.

    Her view is supported by two linguists, Lauren Spradlin and Taylor Jones, from the City University of New York and the University of Pennsylvania respectively. The two believe that totes-speak is a highly-organized system that can only be used by speakers who have mastered English pronunciation.

    The ability to break apart syllables(音节) and mix different sounds together is key. “Totesing is about sounds, and it follows the sometimes-complex sound system of English,” Jones told The Washington Post. “Totesing is considered random by some people, but it's not true. Instead, it has strict rules to follow. You need to be very fluent in the English language to be able to understand totes-speak. ”

阅读理解

    The First Rule of Finance is to live within your means by spending no more than 80% of your take-home pay．If you take home $ 100 per week, spend no more than $80．

    But ever look at what people spend their money on? I have relatives and friends deeply in debt, spending $ 12 for every $ 10 they earn instead of the $ 8 you know they should be spending．When I see them, they're proud of their new whatever．"What do you think of my new truck?" asked one from the driver's seat．"Do you like my new shoes?" asked another on high heels．"Check out my new big screen．" said a third while holding the remote in his living room．We've all heard people fishing for compliments on their new toys ．

    Every one of them was proud of what they'd financed．They seem to have bought it for the purpose of being proud, of showing off, of keeping up with the Joneses．"Look at my new …?"is everybody's favorite phrase, even when the object in question isn't theirs at all and won't be new when they've finally paid for it, if they ever do．

    They're proud of being stupid．They think it's cool to drive the financed car, wear the financed shoes, and watch the financed TV, but to smart people, whose opinions are the only ones we should respect, these people look dumb as rocks．

    The Joneses, nine times out of 10, are financially stupid．That's why they have all that stuff on borrowed money．Why try to copy them? Worse, why try to impress them? Copy and impress smart people, the ones who own their stuff．If you want to impress smart people, debt is the last way to go about it．Trying to impress a money-smart person by going into debt is like trying to impress Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps by drowning in a pool．Michael Phelps is impressed by good swimming and a money-smart person by good money management．

阅读理解

Research shows that isolation(隔绝，孤立)is bad for us and associated with certain diseases including depression, high blood pressure and heart disease. Yet teenagers seek isolation by using the device of our times—a screen, screens of all kinds. However, in whatever form, screens are addictive, and addictive from an early age. Research has shown that given the chance, six-month-old babies prefer screens to real human faces.

    Hand in hand with this addiction to screens, we are seeing an explosion of teenage mental health problems. Social media claims to be inclusive, keeping you connected. But it's not. It isolates you from real people. Screens have even been described as being poisonous for teenagers.

    Psychologist Jean Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University, believes today's teenagers are “on the edge” of a major mental health crisis and requestes, “do anything that doesn't involve a screen”. The problem is, she claims, children born between 1995 and 2012 have grown up with a smart phone in their hands, and it has “changed every aspect” of their lives. The number of teenagers who actually see their friends frequently has dropped by more than 40% since 2000. In 2015, only 56% of 17-year-old went on a date, down from 85%. Modern teenagers are slower to learn to drive, or earn money and spend more time at home. They're “on their phone, in their room, alone and often depressed”, she says.

    Some critics, however, say we should encourage our children to spend more time online. Robert Hannigan, former director of GCHQ, said in August that Britain is badly short of engineers and computer scientists, and urged children to develop cyber skill to compete in the digital economy.

    I' m not the first to say that social media is inferior to real human contact, and harms mental health. Studies show teens who spend three hours a day online are 35% more likely to suicide(自杀).

    The suicide rate among girls aged 12 to 14 has more than doubled in a decade.

请认真阅读下列短文，从短文后各题所给的A、B、C、D四个选项中，选出最佳选项。

C

    If you want to disturb the car industry, you'd better have a few billion dollars: Mom-and-pop carmakers are unlikely to beat the biggest car companies. But in agriculture, small farmers can get the best of the major players. By connecting directly with customers, and by responding quickly to changes in the markets as well as in the ecosystems(生态系统）, small farmers can keep one step ahead of the big guys. As the co-founder of the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC, 美国青年农会）and a family farmer myself. I have a front-row seat to the innovations among small farmers that are transforming the industry.

    For example, take the Quick Cut Greens Harvester, a tool developed just a couple of years ago by a young farmer, Jonathan Dysinger, in Tennessee, with a small loan from a local Slow Money group. It enables small-scale farmers to harvest 175 pounds of green vegetables per hour—a huge improvement over harvesting just a few dozen pounds by hand—suddenly making it possible for the little guys to compete with large farms of California. Before the tool came out, small farmers couldn't touch the price per pound offered by California farms. But now, with the combination of a better price point and a generally fresher product, they can stay in business.

    The sustainable success of small farmers, though, won't happen without fundamental changes to the industry. One crucial factor is secure access to land. Competition from investors, developers, and established large farmers makes owning one's own land unattainable for many new farmers. From 2004 to 2013, agricultural land values doubled, and they continue to rise in many regions.

    Another challenge for more than a million of the most qualified farm workers and managers is a non-existent path to citizenship — the greatest barrier to building a farm of their own. With farmers over the age of 65 outnumbering(多于）farmers younger than 35 by six to one, and with two-thirds of the nation's farmland in need of a new farmer, we must clear the path for talented people willing to grow the nation's food.

    There are solutions that could light a path toward a more sustainable and fair farm economy, but farmers can't clumsily put them together before us. We at the NYFC need broad support as we urge Congress to increase farmland conservation, as we push for immigration reform, and as we seek policies that will ensure the success of a diverse and ambitious next generation of farms from all backgrounds. With a new farm bill to be debated in Congress, consumers must take a stand with young farmers.

阅读理解

    American college students are becoming more adventuresome as they study abroad, showing less interests in English-speaking destinations such as Great Britain and Australia and more in such countries as China, India, Argentina and Brazil.

    Britain remained the most popular study destination in 2005, according to annual figures from the Institute of International Education, followed by Italy, Spain and France. But the number of American students studying in Britain and Australia descended a little, even as the number of American students abroad rose by 8%. The growth came in non-English speaking European countries and in Asia. China is now the eighth most popular destination for American students, attracting nearly 6,400 in 2005, up 35% from the number of the year before. Argentina and India saw increases of more than 50%.

    Allan Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education, said that a range of factors contributed to the trend, from growing awareness of globalization after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, to programs such as former President Bush's National Security Language Initiative, which trains soldiers, intelligence officers and diplomats in foreign languages. “What Americans are doing is waking up and discovering there's a world out there,” he said.

    Other figures showed the flow of students in the opposite direction, from foreign countries into American universities. The institute found that international enrollment (入学) in American higher education remained steady at about 565,000. The figures are of keen interest to universities, which depend on foreign students for teaching and research help, and to policy-makers, who consider it important, as future foreign leaders may be familiar with the United States. The year of 2005 saw big increases in students from South Korea, Mexico and Taiwan of China. India sends the most students and China is No.2. Other countries that show large percentage increases in the number of students sent to the US include Nepal and Vietnam, while Japan, Turkey and Malaysia saw declines. About 58% of international students in the US come from Asia.

阅读理解

    As for old people, some of the applications are hard to use because they didn't grow up with them. They don't have simple models of how they should work, what to do when something doesn't work or where to go for help. We make it as easy as possible to be used for people who are not familiar with the technology.

    I think there is huge potential (潜力) and we are designing it. The ability to connect to friends, who remember the same movies and news and music, is really important, especially as people get old. They end up in retirement homes and they aren't always close to their friends. Allowing the network to help them connect with friends and family is a really powerful thing.

    My mother is an enthusiastic user of the Internet, although it took me years to get her to use e-mail. She was born with normal hearing, but lost it when she was 3. She was totally deaf for many years, until age 53, when she got ear aids. They work really well. That is a big change for her. But before then, her friends couldn't call her on the phone, so they insisted she use e-mail to communicate with them.

    Young people don't even think of the Internet as technology. It's just there, and they use it. There's been a very interesting change in communications styles between old people and young people. There are some kids who are now in their teens and aren't willing to make phone calls. And they think of e-mail as old-fashioned and slow.

    The reason why teens don't make phone calls seems to be that they don't know what to say. When they call they often stop for a while and there's this silence. On the other hand, texting is considered proper, and it's okay if you don't answer. You might have been distracted. It's not considered rude. But it is considered strange if you're in this kind of voice conversation and simply stop talking.

阅读理解

    Nowadays, parents worry a lot because their children spend hours and hours in front of the TV screen. Because this doesn't happen to only one specific family, many experts warn us that there can be some serious effects of children watching violence on television.

    Children who become addicted(上瘾的) to TV sit down and turn on the TV as soon as they get home. Although they have lots of homework, they become absorbed in TV programs.

    Since they spend tons of time watching TV, they have less time to enjoy real life activities such as playing with friends, playing outdoor sports, or enjoying other kinds of entertainment.

    There are too many violent scenes on TV. Some experts say there are 25 acts of violence per hour on TV. In addition, there are many experiments by psychologists which show how TV violence influences children. Finally, people worry that children tend to imitate what they watch on TV and may start to behave more violently.

    What should be done? First of all, the government should regulate TV violence. It should also encourage people to invent and develop new technology which can block violent scenes from the programs children watch. For example, with a rating system(分级制度) and the V-chip, unfit scenes of violence and sex can be blocked out. Second, parents should monitor what their children watch. At the same time, they should make their children interested in real life activities. Then when the children start to spend more time playing with friends or reading books, parents can stop their monitoring.

    It is a fact that there is more violence on TV today than there was ten years ago. Moreover, violent incidents occur more frequently in real life. It's time to realize how harmful watching TV violence is, and it's time to keep our children from watching violence.

阅读理解

    If you live in Shanghai, Beijing or many other cities, you may see many orange bicycles on the streets these days.

    These bikes are owned by a company called Mobike. You can order a bike through an app on your phone. When you find a bike, you just scan a QR code （扫描二维码） on the bike so you can use it. You don't need to return the bike to a station- you can park it anywhere.

    China was known as "the kingdom of bicycles" about 30 years ago. But more people choose to drive cars and catch the subway these days. Bike rental（租凭的） services like Mobike are bringing bikes back.

    "Back then, I got the feeling that Chinese people were trying to be modern and push away the past. So they did not want to be linked with bicycles," said Ines Brunn, a German woman who runs a bike store in Beijing. "I do believe changes in people's tastes will shape new thinking about bikes."

    Online rental services are making biking more convenient, but it's still not easy to ride bikes in Chinese cities. Cars often take up bicycle lanes （道路）. Bikers have to ride next to cars in car lanes, which can be very dangerous.

    Beijing plans to build over 3,200km of new bike lanes. Drivers who drive in bike lanes will be punished. Traffic signs will be put up to better protect bikers.

阅读理解

    The greatest recent changes have been in the lives of women. During the twentieth century there was an unusual shortening of the time of a woman's life which was spent in caring for children. A woman marrying at the end of the 19th century would possibly have been in her middle twenties. They would be likely(可能) to have seven or eight children and four or five of them lived till they were five years old. By the time the youngest was fifteen, the mother would have been in her early fifties and would expect to live a further twenty years. During the twenty years, chances and health made it unusual for her to get paid work.   

    Today women marry younger and have fewer children. Usually a woman's youngest child will be fifteen when she is forty five and is likely to take paid work until they are sixty. Even while she has to take care of children, her work becomes easier by eating fast foods and using washing machines , cleaning robots and so on.

    This important change in women's way of life has only recently begun to play a role in their position.   Even a few years ago most girls left school at the first chance and most of them took a full- time job. However, when they married, they usually left work at once and never returned to it. Today the school -leaving age is sixteen. Many girls stay at school after that age, and though women are likely to marry younger, more married women stay at work at least until their first child is born. Many people return to full or part-time work after that. Such changes have caused a new relationship in the family, with both the husband and the wife accepting a great share of the duties and satisfactions of family life, and with both the husband and the wife sharing more equally in supporting the family, according to the abilities and interests of each of them.

阅读理解

    Recently, as the British doctor Robert Winston took a train from London to Manchester, he found himself having to listen to a loud conversation of a fellow passenger woman. Boiling with anger, Winston took her picture and sent it to his more than 40,000 followers on the Tweet. By the time the train reached the station in Manchester, some journalists were waiting for the woman. And when they showed her the doctor's messages, she used just one word to describe Winston's actions: rude.

    Winston's tale is a good example of increasing rudeness, fueled by social media in our age. Studies show that rudeness spreads quickly and virally, almost like the common cold. Just witnessing rudeness makes it far more likely that we, in turn, will be rude later on. Once infected, we are more aggressive, less creative and worse at our jobs. The only way out is to make a conscious decision to do so. We must have the courage to call it out, face to face. We must say, "Just stop." For Winston, that would have meant approaching the woman, telling her that her conversation was frustrating other passengers and politely asking her to speak more quietly or make the call at another time.

    The anger we feel at the rude behavior of a stranger can drive us to do out-of-place things. Research discovered that the acts of revenge (报复) people had taken ranged from the ridiculous to the disturbing. Winston did shine a spotlight on the woman's behavior—but in a way that shamed her.

    When we see rudeness occur in public places, we must step up and say something. And we can do it with grace, by handling it without a bit of aggression and without being rude ourselves. Because once rude people can see their actions through the eyes of others, they are far more likely to end the rudeness themselves. As this wave of rudeness rises, civilization needs civility (举止文明).

阅读理解

    Life for almost anyone is increasingly influenced by screens. Not only are screens themselves cheap to make, but they also make things cheaper. Any place that can fit a screen in can cut costs. And any activity that can happen on a screen becomes cheaper. The physical experience of learning, living and dying is becoming smooth glass. All of this has led to a curious new reality: Human contact is becoming a luxury good (奢侈品).

    "What we are seeing now is the luxury of human engagement," Milton Pedraza, the chief of the

    Luxury Institute, said. Expected spending on experiences such as enjoyable travel and dining is outpacing spending on goods, according to his company's research, and he sees it as a direct response to the rapid increase of screens.

    Screens exposure starts young. And children who spent more than two hours a day looking at screen got lower scores on thinking and language tests, according to early results of a landmark study supported by the National Institutes of Health. The study focuses on brain development of more than 11,000 children. Most disturbingly, the study is finding that the brains of children who spend much time on screens are different. For some kids, their cerebral cortex (大脑皮层) would become thinner before expected time. In adults, one study found an association between screen time and depression.

    There is also the reality that in our culture of increasing separation, in which so many of the traditional gathering places and social structures have disappeared, screens are filling a vital gap.

    For normal people, running away from the screen becomes impossible. It's not a luxury, and it's easy to get. It is normal for more people to need the network constantly. In addition, it has become an important part of social interaction.

阅读理解

    When Ariyah Georges was born 15 weeks early, she weighed only one pound, 12 ounces. Her mother, Jovan, knew how important breastfeeding was, especially for a premature (早产的) baby like Ariyah, so she began pumping milk to feed her through a tube. But two days later, Jovan felt dizzy and feverish — 104 Fahrenheit degrees, in fact. She had a blood disease and was close to full shock.

    She was separated from others for nearly two weeks at the regional Northern Virginia hospital where she'd delivered. During that time, she could still pump breast milk, but Ariyah couldn't consume it because of the risk of infection (感染). Without it, the newborn was particularly easily affected by diseases. There are many cases like this, which creates the need for the milk donation.

    Enter donor milk — breast milk purchased by hospitals for mothers who aren't able to produce enough milk on their own, due to health complications, stresses, or other factors. The milk comes from milk banks, organizations that collect and screen breast milk from those women willing to donate. Usually processed in intensive-care units, the milk is only available by prescription.

    In recent years, both milk banks and the use of donated human milk have risen swiftly in the United States. In 2011, 22 percent of NICUs used donor breast milk; four years later, that number doubled to nearly 40 percent, and went even higher for the most intensive NICUs — as much as 75 percent. There are 23 milk banks in the United States recognized by the Human Milk Banking Association of North America, or HMBANA, double the number that existed five years ago.

    But as the demand for donor milk rises, banks must find more charitable donors — a task made more complicated by informal networks of milk sharing that happens online. And many of the most vulnerable infants are still not being reached.

阅读理解

Megan Piontkowski, an artist and illustrator, was out of work due to the pandemic (流行病). She learned through a friend that a Brooklyn hospital needed fabric masks for workers. Piontkowski already had some fabric on hand and a sewing machine, so she got to work. She washed the fabric, sewed masks, washed them again, and hung them to dry. After that she drove them to the hospital. When she asked if the hospital would pay for the masks. she was told they had no money.

"I felt very mixed about it," she told VOX, a famous American TV station. She knew the hospital needed masks badly. But meanwhile, "I'm out of work and I 'm being asked to donate them." "The fact that she wasn't compensated (补偿) for sewing highly necessary items felt like a ease of traditional 'women's work' not being valued," Piontkowski said. While larger companies have begun massive cloth masks in recent weeks, much of the work of making the protective clothes, especially in the early stages of the pandemic, was done at home-often by women. That gender breakdown is continuing in some volunteer efforts-about 85 percent of the around 70 volunteers sewing masks for the New York City-based group Face Mask Aid, for example, are women.

And masks are only part of the story. The demands of daily life during the coronavirus pandemic are many, from shopping for food shortages and virus fears to caring for children when schools and day cares are closed. And in many cases, women are the ones figuring out how to meet those new demands. Some women are still working outside the home a essential workers but shouldering care responsibilities when they get home.

It doesn't have to be this way. With more men going into tasks like cooking and educating children, it is potential to reset gender norms. "The pandemic is potentially sparking new conversations about divisions of labor," Jill Yavorsky, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, told VOX.

阅读理解

Every kid has their own obsessions (着迷的事情). Dolls, dinosaurs, remote controls, cell phones—they might have a toy box with a wide range of playthings to keep them entertained, but there's a firm favorite they always reach for first.

Researchers call this phenomenon "extremely intense interests (Ells)", and have found that they start to emerge at around 18 months of age and are evident in around a third of preschool-aged children. For lots of children, this obsession revolves around (围绕) cars. And although the sex divide in the toy world remains, it's not only little boy who are drawn to all things with wheels. So what's the big deal about cars, trucks, trains, and buses?

From age 0-2, children are the sensorimotor stage of development. They are learning by absorbing everything through their senses—sight, touch, taste, smell, hear. Toys and real-life objects like cars are very sensorily engaging. Kids can interact with toy cars, trucks, etc. through spinning their wheels, watching them move in a variety of direction, or hearing the sounds they make.

Plus, kids are just naturally drawn to loud, moving objects. They see the lights on the cars, the rolling wheels, the sound of the engine. Kids will always be drawn to flashy and loud things because that is what engages their brain and sensory systems. Another appeal of toy vehicles is that they're typically small enough to fit in a child's hand. And because they can put their cars in their pocket or carry them around, they're easy to get attached to.

Every child is unique in how they engage with toys, and the reasons for their play style may be diverse and complex. However children often interact with materials in similar ways to how their families interact with them. If a child sees a sibling or parents modeling play with a car going fast down a track, they are likely going to interact with the toy that same way. Ultimately, how your kids play with their toy vehicles could be a little window into what excites them.

阅读理解

When almost everyone has a mobile phone, why are more than half of Australian homes still paying for a landline (座机)

These days you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in Australia over the age of 15 who doesn't own a mobile phone. In fact plenty of younger kids have one in their pocket. Practically everyone can make and receive calls anywhere, anytime.

Still, 55 percent of Australians have a landline phone at home and only just over a quarter （29%） rely only on their smartphones, according to a survey （调查）.Of those Australians who still have a landline, a third concede that it's not really necessary and they're keeping it as a security blanket —19 percent say they never use it while a further 13 percent keep it in case of emergencies. I think my home falls into that category.

More than half of Australian homes are still choosing to stick with their home phone. Age is naturally a factor （因素）-only 58 percent of Generation Ys still use landlines now and then, compared to 84 percent of Baby Boomers who've perhaps had the same home number for 50 years. Age isn't the only factor; I'd say it's also to do with the makeup of your household.

Generation Xers with young families, like my wife and I, can still find it convenient to have a home phone rather than providing a mobile phone for every family member. That said, to be honest the only people who ever ring our home phone are our Baby Boomers parents, to the point where we play a game and guess who is calling before we pick up the phone （using Caller ID would take the fun out of it）.

How attached are you to your landline? How long until they go the way of gas street lamps and morning milk deliveries?

阅读下列短文，从每题所给的A、B、C 和 D 四个选项中，选出最佳选项。

What is the first thing you notice when you walk into a shop? The products displayed at the entrance? Or the soft background music?

But have you ever noticed the smell? Unless it is bad, the answer is likely to be no. But while a shop's scent(香味) may not be outstanding compared with sights and sounds, it is certainly there. And it is proving to be an increasing powerful tool in encouraging people to purchase.

A brand store has become famous for its distinctive (独特的)scent which floats through the fairly dark hall and out to the entrance, by scent machines. A smell may be attractive but it may not just be used for freshening air. One sports goods company once reported that when it first introduced scent into its stores, customers' intention to purchase increased by 80 percent.

But while e-shops can only use sights and sounds, bricks-and-mortar stores (实体店) can offer a full experience from the minute customers step through the door to the moment they leave. Another brand store seeks to be much more than a shop, but rather a destination. And scent is just one way to achieve this.

Now a famous store uses complex man-made smell to make sure that the soft scent of baby powder floats through the kid department, and coconut(椰子) scent in the swimsuit section. A department store has even opened a new lab, inviting customers on a journey into the store's windows to smell books, pots and drawers, in search of their perfect scent.

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Men have long been puzzled by the amount women pack, when they go on holiday. They despair (绝望) as they watch their beloved spend much money on extra baggage charge. Nearly half of these women admitted to lying about the weight of their case to their partner before leaving for the airport, in fear of being made to unload some unnecessary items.

But it's a fact that women pack more than they need. On average, a woman needs around 57 items in suitcase for a two-week holiday, yet most women pack nearer to 150 items, ranging from skirts, tops, underwear and high heels. In addition, women pack more sun cream, make-up and hair appliances than they are likely to need. They all take up space in the suitcase, only a third of them will see the light of day once at the holiday place.

79 percent of women admitted to taking extra items with them, with the reason for this being "just in case". Women plan their holiday wardrobe months in advance. Packing enough clothes and other items to last a month is not enough for some women. They'd take a chance to shop for new items while holidaying abroad. So they'll return with even more luggage in their cases.

Professor Karen Pine said, "Women are tempted to take familiar items with them on holiday, often everything except the kitchen sink. Some people find traveling stressful, particularly when they're unsure about the home comforts available at their holiday place. They over- pack to help cope with those feelings of stress and reduce the uncertainty. "

This will come as no surprise to some men, who are used to trying to squeeze their partner's luggage into the boot of the car with their own, smaller case. On the other hand, men pack very lightly, with only an average of 40 items for a two-week holiday.

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I don't post recognizable pictures of my children on social media. I don't use their names. I don't put anything out there that will be really embarrassing for them in later life.

The reason for not posting pictures is that I feel a person's pictures should be his or her own. It's not good for me to push my kids out into the wilds of the Web before they're ready, and understand what it all means.

When the time comes, they're more than welcome to use social media. But for now, I'm happy to give them a degree of separation until they can make a choice for themselves.

This has meant extra efforts on our part when it comes to making sure that kids don't get accidentally caught up in the Internet, because the schools where they learn, like so many others up and down the country, post their pictures to social media.

However, my husband thought I was overanxious and asked me a question about its advantages. And having thought about it for while, I'm not 100 percent sure if there are any.

But I could list the disadvantages: the time it takes to manage an account, often by a teacher, meaning extra work; the unavoidable difficulties in safeguarding.

It's great to see the kids doing their things in schools but my worry is about the use of social media that doesn't give anything back to the kids, and in many ways, just turns them into another way to gain clicks. I want more than that for them.