#58passages
Part A. Elementary Level
Lesson 1. Human Brain
Passage 1. How does food affect your brain?
The foods you eat supply your body with energy.
Your body needs energy to move, breathe, and even to sleep. One part of your body uses a surprising amount of energy. It’s surprising because this part of your body is small, only 2–3% of your total weight, but it uses 20–30% of the energy from your food. Can you guess what it is? It’s your brain.
No doubt you know that drugs affect the brain, but did you know that food affects it too? Different types of food affect the brain in different ways.
Sometimes we can feel the changes that food makes in our brains. For example, most people can feel a change almost immediately after drinking coffee. The caffeine in coffee makes people feel mentally sharper and more awake. After a cup of coffee, a person can think and make decisions more quickly.
Other foods affect the brain in ways that we cannot feel, so we aren’t aware of the effects. We do not realize how these foods influence us.
However, everything we eat matters. Our food affects how smart we are, how well we remember things, and how long we can concentrate. For example, researchers have found that eating breakfast makes students do better on tests.
Spinach, berries, and other colorful fruits and vegetables help keep older brains from slowing down. Eating large amounts of animal fat in meat and cheese, for example, makes learning more difficult.
Fish really is brain food. Many people have long believed that eating fish was good for the brain, and now scientists are finding that this is true. For millions of years, the brains of early human beings stayed the same size. They weighed only about one pound, 400 to 500 grams.
Then, during the last million years or so, there was a big increase in brain size, with the human brain growing to about three pounds on average. This increase in brain size meant an increase in brain power. With bigger, more powerful, more advanced brains, human beings became smart enough to build boats and invent written languages.They developed forms of music and began to create works of art.
Some scientists say that the big change in the size of the human brain happened after people started to eat fish and other kinds of seafood. Seafood contains a certain kind of fat known as omega-3 fat. According to these scientists, omega-3 fat caused the increase in brain size. Today, brain scientists in general agree. This fat is still important for healthy brains, and most of us are not getting enough of it.
Did you realize that your brain is always changing, no matter how old you are? The foods you eat affect how your brain grows, how well you learn, and how well you remember things. Maybe you have never thought about how you feed your brain. Luckily, it’s never too late to start feeding it well.
Passage 2. How Does Your Memory Work?
You have two basic types of memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. Things you see or hear first enter your short-term memory. Very little of this information then passes on into your long-term memory.
Does this mean you have a bad memory? Not at all. Your short-term memory has a certain job to do. Its job is to store information for a few seconds only.
You use your short-term memory when you look up a phone number, call it, and then forget it. You remember the number just long enough to use it, and then it disappears from your memory. That’s really a good thing.
Imagine if your memory held every number, face, and word you ever knew. Your brain would hold a mountain of trivia. Of course, we need to remember some information longer, so it has to pass from short-term to long-term memory.
Sometimes, we tell ourselves to remember. Okay, don’t forget, 555–1212, 555–1212. But usually, we don’t even think about it.
Our brain makes the decision for us. It decides to store the information or let it go.
The brain seems to make the decision by asking two questions. Does the new information affect our emotions? Does it make us happy, sad, angry, or excited? Does the new information concern something we already know, so our brain can store it with information that is already there? An answer of YES to one or both of these questions sends the new information into long-term memory. That means the brain creates new connections among brain cells. These connections form in a region of the brain called the cerebral cortex.
It’s the largest part of the brain. After a piece of information enters your long-term memory, how do you get it back? Sometimes, your brain may seem like a deep, dark closet. You open the door to look for something. You are sure it’s in there somewhere, but you cannot find it. Maybe the information is no longer there.
Information disappears when connections among brain cells become weak. They get weak if time passes and the connections are not used. That is why it’s good to review your notes from a lecture soon after the class. Do not wait too long to look in the closet.
To keep the memory of something strong, think of it often. For example, look at those lecture notes the next day and the day after that, too. Then wait a few days and review them again. Every time you think about something, the connections in the brain get stronger. Then it’s easier to remember the information when you need it.
Unfortunately, this advice applies only to certain kinds of things that you try to remember. It won’t help when you are trying to remember a name that’s on the tip of your tongue. A tip-of-the-tongue experience is the feeling that you’re about to remember a word, but it just won’t come out. These experiences are common among older adults, but everyone has them.
College students, on average, have one or two a week. This advice also won’t help you remember something that just never made it from short-term to long-term memory. No matter how hard you try, you won’t find it in your memory.
So, you’ll need some other strategy to help you figure out where you left your keys.
Passage 3. What happens in your brain as you sleep?
Human beings, like all mammals, need sleep. Adults need an average of 7.5 hours a night.
However, the average amount of sleep might not be right for you, just as the average size shoe might not be right for your foot. The usual sleep schedule, that is, doing all your sleeping at night, might not be right for you either. Getting some sleep during the day may be exactly what your brain needs.
We may not all need the same amount of sleep or the same sleep schedule, but everyone needs the same two types of sleep. Our sleep is divided between REM sleep and NREM sleep. You can pronounce NREM or non-REM.
REM comes from the words rapid eye movement. During this type of sleep, your eyes move quickly. This eye movement shows that your brain is very active and you’re dreaming. You spend about 20% of the night in REM sleep.
NREM means non-REM or no eye movement. This type of sleep has four stages.
When you fall asleep, you enter stage one of NREM sleep. This is a light sleep, so a noise could easily wake you up. After several minutes, you enter stage two.
It’s not so easy to wake you up from this type of sleep. Stages three and four are periods of deep sleep. You breathe slowly. Your muscles relax. Your heart rate slows and your brain becomes less active. You experience both REM and NREM sleep when you go through a sleep cycle.
A cycle is a group of events that happens again and again, like the cycle of seasons that happens each year. A sleep cycle takes you from light sleep to deep sleep and back again. It includes the four stages of NREM sleep, then a short period of REM sleep, and finally a return to light NREM sleep.
At night, most people go through a series of four to six sleep cycles. It’s good to understand sleep cycles and the stages of NREM sleep if you ever take naps during the day.
A nap of 20 to 45 minutes will mean getting mostly stage two sleep. It will mean sharper motor skills and a better ability to focus your mind and pay attention. That is exactly what most people hope for when they take a nap.
A longer nap may not do you as much good. It may mean that you enter the deep sleep of stage three or four. If your alarm wakes you during deep sleep, you will wake up unable to think clearly. You will probably feel more tired than you did before your nap, and it can take 30 minutes or more to get over this feeling.
However, a longer nap can do you good if it covers a full sleep cycle. That takes 90 to 120 minutes. If your alarm wakes you up at the end of a full sleep cycle, you will be coming out of a light sleep, and your brain will have all the advantages of a good rest.
Those good effects can last for up to 10 hours. If you live a busy life, you probably do not always get a full night’s sleep. Not getting enough sleep can mean you forget words, you have trouble learning, and you react more slowly.
You can probably think of other effects of too little sleep. So consider taking a nap for the good of your brain, and think about sleep stages if you set an alarm.
Passage 4. Research on Dreaming
Bruno Beckham has a good job.
He also has a new job offer. He has to make a decision right away, but he’s not sure whether he should accept the offer. He is sure, however, that he’s not going to make up his mind tonight.
“I’ll know what to do in the morning,” he says. How will he know? What does he think will happen overnight? “I don’t know,” he says, “but whenever I have a big decision to make, I have to sleep on it.”
When you face a big decision, do your friends tell you to “sleep on it”? People in Italy say, “Dormi ci su.” It means the same thing. In France they say, “La nuit porte conseil,” meaning “the night brings advice.” People in many cultures believe that something useful happens during sleep.
But what happens, and why? Maybe the answer can be found in our dreams. Many people believe that dreams help us in our daily lives.
The American boxer Floyd Patterson believed this. He used to dream of new ways to move in a fight, and he claimed that these moves helped him surprise other boxers. Srinivasa Ramanujan, an important mathematician from India, said that all his discoveries came to him in dreams.
Artists, scientists, and writers report getting ideas from dreams, too. The English writer Mary Shelley did. She said that the story of Frankenstein came to her in a dream. Paul McCartney of the Beatles woke up one morning from a dream in which he was listening to music. He immediately went to the piano and played the music, which became “Yesterday,” one of the Beatles’ most famous songs.
Scientists do not agree on what dreams mean or why people dream. Some doubt that dreams have any important purpose. They say that dreams show activity in the brain, but it’s like the activity of a car going in circles with no driver. It does nothing useful.
On the other hand, many scientists claim that dreams are helpful. They say that dreams are good for learning new skills and developing strong memories. Some researchers hope to learn more about the dreams of people by studying the dreams of animals.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, scientists have studied the dreams of rats. In one study, the rats were learning to run through a maze, and the scientists would record the activity in the rats’ brains. Later, during REM sleep, the rats’ brains showed exactly the same activity. The rats were going through the maze again in their dreams.
Researchers could tell if the dreaming rats were running or standing still. In fact, one researcher reported that they could pinpoint where the rats would be in the maze if they were awake. Were the rats practicing for the next day? Does dreaming somehow help them learn and remember? Do human brains work this way? The researchers at MIT are searching for answers to these questions.
Right now, there is no explanation for dreams that everyone accepts. There is a great deal we still do not know about the sleeping brain, but maybe one day, we will know all its secrets.
Lesson 2. Food
Passage 1. Chocolate Maker
How do you feel about chocolate? If you like it, you are far from alone. The question is, why are so many people so crazy about it?
Jacques Torres has always loved chocolate. When he was a child in France, his family could not afford to buy it very often. They used to have chocolates only once a year, at Christmas. Jacques remembers how he used to take some and go hide under the table with the tablecloth all around him. He didn’t want his mother to see how many chocolates he was eating. He says that when he bit into one of his favorites, that was heaven.
When he grew up, Jacques became a professional chef. For years, he worked at famous restaurants in France and the United States. Then he left restaurant work to start his own business. Today, he owns nine chocolate shops in New York City, one with a chocolate factory next door. It feels to him like a dream come true. “Everybody loves chocolate,” says Jacques, "but it’s such a mystery to them.
How does this magic happen?" At the factory, visitors get to watch how it happens through eleven-foot-tall windows. Jacques offers visitors the chance to see how dusty brown cocoa beans are turned into beautiful chocolates. It’s clear that many people share Jacques’ love of chocolate.
His shops sell millions of dollars worth of chocolate each year. However, no one thinks of New York City as the world capital of chocolate. That would be Switzerland, a country rich in chocolate factories.
The average person there eats about twenty-two pounds of chocolate a year. Next in line after the Swiss are the chocolate-loving British. There are chocolate lovers across all of Europe, North and South America, and Australia, too.
Now chocolate makers are looking to Asia for new customers, especially India and China. Why do people love chocolate so much? Many researchers have asked this question, and they have studied what chocolate does to the human brain. Scientists have found that chocolate has more than three hundred different chemicals in it.
Which ones give us the good feelings we get when chocolate melts in the mouth? That has been difficult to figure out. We do now know that chocolate can be good for you, especially dark chocolate. So if you wish, you can say that you eat it for your health.
Jacques Torres suggests a different way to think about chocolate. “You know, chocolate is like romance,” he says. “It makes your eyes close, your mouth water. It makes you playful.”
That seems a fine reason to enjoy a little chocolate.
Passage 2. History of the Tomato
Ah, the tomato, so well-loved by foodies everywhere.
The French used to call it “la pomme d’amore,” the love apple. Today, cooks around the world do wonderful things with it. There are more than 4,000 types of tomatoes and no doubt even more ways to eat them.
Without the tomato, we would have no Mexican salsa or Italian pizza. Many wonderful Indian dishes would not be the same. After the potato, it’s the most popular vegetable in the world.
But wait, is it a vegetable? You may be thinking, “who cares?” But this question was once important enough that it had to be decided by the highest court in the United States.
It happened back in 1893. At that time, there was a tax on vegetables brought into the country, but no tax on imported fruit. Naturally, importers of tomatoes called them fruit so as not to pay the tax. Not everyone agreed, and the question went all the way to the Supreme Court.
The justices knew that the tomato really is a fruit. That’s because it’s the part of the plant holding the seeds. To be more specific, the tomato is a berry. However, most people considered it a vegetable. They usually cooked and ate tomatoes more like vegetables than like fruit. That was the basis for the court’s decision in the case. The justices said that the tomato should be called and taxed as a vegetable.
The story of the tomato really begins much earlier. It starts in South America, where tomatoes grew wild. The first people to grow them were the Maya people of Central America.
In the 1500s, the Spanish took tomatoes from Mexico to Spain. From there, tomatoes went to France, Italy, and other areas around the Mediterranean Sea. Those first tomatoes were small and yellow. Their color gave the tomato its Italian name, pomodoro, golden apple.
Europeans did not fall in love with tomatoes quickly. For a long time, they were afraid to eat them. The tomato plant looks like a plant called deadly nightshade or belladonna and is part of the same family. The roots, leaves, and berries of the deadly nightshade are highly poisonous. So it took a while for Europeans to accept the tomato.
A cookbook with tomato recipes did not become available to the public until 1692. By the late 1700s, Europeans were happily eating tomatoes. However, in the United States, most people did not yet trust them.
President Thomas Jefferson, 1743 to 1826, helped to change their minds. He grew tomatoes in his gardens and served them at dinners in the White House.
Today, tomatoes are so popular in the U.S. that 85% of home gardeners grow them. As every one of those gardeners would no doubt tell you, there’s nothing like a fresh, home-grown tomato.
Passage 3. Comfort Food
It’s natural for people to eat when they’re hungry, but people eat for other reasons, too. Do you ever eat because you’re with friends and everyone else is eating? Do you ever eat because you feel tired or because you’re under stress? Many people do.
Maybe they have too much to do or they’re having problems in a relationship. So they eat to feel better. But they don’t eat just anything. They want a specific kind of food. They want food that helps them relax. They want comfort food.
What is comfort food? For most people, it’s food that is easy to prepare and easy to eat. Eating it gives them a warm feeling. It’s often a type of food that they loved as children. Maybe they used to eat it at specific times or places. Maybe it’s food their mother or father used to make. Comfort food makes people feel, “somebody’s taking care of me.”
Researchers at the University of Illinois did a survey on comfort food in the U.S. They asked over 1,000 people about it. They wanted to know two things. What comfort foods did people want, and when did they want them? The results of the survey were rather surprising.
The researchers expected people’s favorite comfort food to be soft and warm, like, for example, the most popular comfort foods in Japan, miso soup and soba noodles. But the number one U.S. comfort food was not soft or warm. It turned out to be potato chips. Another favorite was ice cream, especially among people ages 18 to 34.
Not all comfort foods are snack foods, however. Nearly half of the comfort foods that people described were healthy homemade foods, like chicken soup and mashed potatoes. The survey showed that people of different ages want different comfort foods. It also showed that men and women make different choices.
In general, women choose sweet comfort foods. Those who took part in the survey mentioned ice cream most often. Seventy-four percent of them put it on their list. Then chocolate, 69 percent, and cookies, 66 percent.
Ice cream was very popular with the men, too. Seventy-seven percent of the men in the survey mentioned it. However, men do not choose sweet foods as often as women do. Men often want hot and salty comfort foods, such as soup, 73 percent, and pizza or pasta, 72 percent.
The researchers also figured out when the people in the study wanted comfort food most. You may think that comfort food is usually for times of stress or when someone feels bored or lonely. However, the researchers say that the opposite is true. Yes, people do eat to feel better, but more often they eat comfort foods when they already feel happy.
They eat them to celebrate or to reward themselves.
Passage 4. Slow Food
Italians know and love good food. It’s at the heart of their culture. So is taking the time to enjoy their food. They do not like to rush through meals. As a result, many of them think that fast food is a terrible idea.
In 1986, the first American fast food restaurant, a McDonald’s, opened in Rome. Many Italians were surprised and angry. They saw it as an attack on Italian culture.
One man, Carlo Petrini, decided to fight back. “Fast food is the enemy,” he said, and he started a group called Slow Food. Today, over 100,000 people in 160 countries belong to the group.
More people join every day. The members of Slow Food share many of the same ideas about problems with food today.
One of those problems is fast food. Slow Food members consider it unhealthy. They also do not like that fast food is the same everywhere. That’s boring, they say. What is better are healthy, local food traditions with all their wonderful variety.
Slow Food members worry about a second problem, too. For a variety of reasons, some types of plants and animals are becoming very rare. Some have become so rare that the world is in danger of losing them completely. Some examples are several kinds of dates that grow only in the area around Siwa, Egypt. The blue-egg chickens of Temuka, Chile, who produce eggs only when they live outside. The wild coffee plants of the Harina Forest in Ethiopia, the only place in the world where you can find coffee plants in the wild. And the piraruca, a fish in the Amazon River that can weigh more than 500 pounds, as much as 250 kilograms. Slow Food does not want to let these plants and animals disappear, so the organization is working with local groups to stop that from happening. Slow Food wants to protect biodiversity, the wide variety of types of plants and animals we have on Earth.
There is a third problem that worries Slow Food members. Much of our food today is produced by big companies. These companies sell their products in distant places, so they want products that can travel well. Big growers want the kinds of fruit and vegetables that look good after a long trip. But how do their apples, lettuce, and tomatoes taste when they finally arrive? That is less important to them.
So now we have more trouble finding good-tasting fresh fruit and vegetables. Today, it has become common to eat foods from far away. Foods eaten in the United States travel an average of 1,300 miles to reach the dinner table.
In the past, people got most of their food from farms in their local area. Slow Food members say, people should be buying more local food. It’s fresh, and it’s part of our culture.
One man in the United States, Gary Nubbin, decided to try this. For one year, all his food came from plants and animals near his home in Arizona. One local animal there is the rattlesnake. Nubbin ate that, too. In his book, Coming Home to Eat, he says it tastes just like chicken.
Fast food is reaching more and more parts of the world. But Slow Food is getting its message to more and more people, too.
Lesson 3. Communication
Passage 1. The Ways That Animals Communicate
Who is better at communicating, people or animals? If you think about human inventions such as the telephone and the Internet, the answer seems perfectly clear. Human beings are the great communicators.
However, think about your own personal communication skills. If you compare your skills with what animals can do, the answer is not so simple. Animals can communicate in ways that people cannot.
Most of us depend on our voices for much of our communication. We use words and sounds to pass information to the people around us. However, the sound of the human voice cannot travel very far. Even the voice of an opera singer with years of training cannot travel as far as many animal voices.
Think of the elephant, for example. Because of its great size, its voice has the power to be heard for miles. Elephants can also make very low sounds, too deep for any human to hear, which let them communicate over even greater distances. These sounds travel in sound waves both through the air and through the ground.
How do elephants receive the messages? No one knows. Maybe they hear them with their ears, or maybe they sense them in some other way. It’s possible that the sound waves pass from the ground through the elephants’ toenails into their bones and then to their brains.
Let’s also consider communication through movement. Professional dancers use dance to share ideas and emotions. When we watch them, we may be able to understand what they are saying with their bodies.
But even a great dancer’s ability to speak through movement cannot match the average honey bee’s. Bees do a dance that tells other bees where to find food. The dance tells the other bees which way to go so they can fly to the food in a straight line. It also tells them exactly how far to go. It clearly describes both the direction and the distance to a specific place. The sense of smell offers another way to communicate.
People can get information through their sense of smell, as when your nose tells you something good is cooking in the kitchen. In general, however, we don’t use smells to send messages the way that animals do. For example, certain animals produce smells to tell others, “this is my place, get out.”
A smell can also give an invitation. Often a female animal will produce a smell to attract a male. It tells him, “here I am, come find me.”
Animals are also better than humans at understanding the messages in smells. We certainly cannot compete with dogs. The canine sense of smell is up to one million times better than ours.
Our noses are not the best, our voices are not the strongest, and our dancing may not say anything at all. But people are the only ones with words and written languages. So maybe we can still call ourselves the great communicators.
Passage 2. How do we communicate with laughter?
People have many ways to express themselves, that is, to show how they feel or what they think. One way that feels especially good is laughter. We all laugh when we see or hear something funny. We also laugh when we see other people laughing, which is why we say laughter is contagious.
Laughter clearly has a role to play in human communication, but what are we saying when we laugh?
A team of psychologists studied the laughter of 120 students at a U.S. university by having the students watch funny movies. Sometimes the students were alone, and sometimes they were in pairs. The psychologists recorded the students’ laughter, and they noticed that the students made a wide variety of laughing sounds. They also noticed differences in how many times each student laughed and how the student laughed. For the students in pairs, both these things depended on the student’s partner. Was the other person the same sex or the opposite sex? And what was the relationship between the two? Was the person a friend or a stranger?
Here are some of the researchers’ findings. Men laughed much more during the movies when they were with a friend. It did not matter whether the friend was male or female. Men laughed much less when their partner was a stranger or when they were alone. Women laughed most when they were with male friends. With male strangers, women laughed in a higher voice.
There were three basic types of laughs. High, song-like laughs, laughs with the sounds coming mostly through the nose, and low, grunting laughs. The researchers then carried out another study, in which they asked people to listen to these three types of laughter.
To find out which kind of laughter people liked best, they asked questions like, “Does the person laughing sound friendly? Do you think he or she sounds attractive? Would you like to meet this person?” Most people preferred the high, song-like sounds and were attracted to people who laughed this way. The researchers believe that laughter is a tool we use, usually without thinking about it, to influence the emotions and behavior of other people. They say we often use laughter to show that we want to be friends.
In fact, in spite of what you may think, most laughter during conversation is not because someone is reacting to something funny. Researcher Robert Provine, author of “Laughter: a Scientific Investigation,” says that in conversation, the people who are listening actually laugh less than the ones who are speaking. A speaker’s laughter has a social purpose, says Provine. He calls laughter “the oil in the social machine.” In other words, it helps relationships between people work smoothly.
Did you know that human beings are not the only ones who laugh? Dogs do it, too. Canine laughter sounds something like, “h-h-h,” and it seems to express the idea, “let’s play.”
Another researcher, Jacques Punksep, reports that rats laugh, too. The white rats he works with in his lab laugh when he tickles them. But please do not go out and try this. Punksep warns, “you have to know the rat.”
Passage 3. Who Invented the Telephone
If you cannot imagine how you would get along without your phone, then say a word of thanks to its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell.
Bell was born in Scotland in 1847. All through his life, he had a strong interest in communication, partly because of his family. His grandfather was an actor and a famous speech teacher, and his father developed the first international phonetic alphabet.
His mother’s influence was rather different. Communication was hard for her because she was almost completely deaf. She usually held a tube to her ear in order to hear people. Her son, Alexander, discovered another way to communicate with her when he was a little boy. He used to press his mouth against her forehead and speak in a low voice. The sound waves traveled to her ears through the bones of her head. This was among the first of his many discoveries about sound.
As a teenager, Bell taught music and public speaking at a boys’ school. In his free time, he had fun working on various inventions with an older brother, inventions that included a useful machine for farm work.
Then both of Bell’s brothers got sick and died. He came down with the same terrible sickness, tuberculosis, leading his parents to move the family to Canada. There, his health returned.
Bell moved to the United States when he was 24. He went to Boston to teach at a school for deaf children. In Boston, he fell in love with Mabel Hubbard, a student of his who later became his wife.
During this period of his life, Bell was a very busy man. In addition to teaching, he was working on several inventions. Bell’s main goal was to make machines to help deaf people hear.
He was also trying to improve on the telegraph. In those days, the telegraph was the only way to send information quickly over a long distance. Telegraph messages traveled over wires and were sent in Morse code, which used long and short sounds for the letters of the alphabet.
Bell was trying to find a way to send the human voice along a wire. However, almost no one believed in this idea. People kept telling him, “You’re wasting your time. You should try to invent a better telegraph. That’s where the money is.”
Bell understood a great deal about sound and electricity, but he was actually not very good at building things. Luckily, he met someone who was, a man named Thomas Watson. Watson turned out to be a great help to Bell.
One day, it was March 10, 1876, the two men were working in separate rooms. They were getting ready to test a new invention, which had a wire going from one of the rooms to the other. Something went wrong, and Bell shouted, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” His voice traveled along the wire, and Watson heard it coming from the new machine. It was the world’s first telephone call. Bell may or may not have realized it at the time, but he was on his way to becoming a very rich man.
Soon afterward, Bell wrote to his father, “The day is coming when telegraph wires will go to houses just like water or gas, and friends will converse with each other without leaving home.” Maybe his father laughed to hear this idea.
At the time, most people expected the phone to be just a business tool, not something that anyone would ever have at home. Bell could see a greater future for it, but even he could probably never have imagined what phones are like today.
Passage 4. Speaking with Your Eyes
When we think about communicating with other people, we usually think about talking or writing. That is, we think about using words.
However, much of the communication that takes place in person happens without words. It happens through nonverbal communication. We send nonverbal messages in many ways, including with our face, our hands, and the way we stand, move, and use the space around us.
We get messages from others in the same way. Our eyes play an especially important role. Researchers who study this role use the term eye behavior. It refers to both the things we do with our eyes without realizing it and the things we do on purpose.
One area of eye behavior is eye contact. Imagine yourself walking along a busy city sidewalk. What are your eyes doing? Do you focus on anything, or are your eyes moving all the time? What are other people’s eyes doing? If you are in a U.S. city, there are probably few people making eye contact. If your eyes meet a stranger’s, chances are that he or she will quickly look away. If the stranger does not look away but maintains eye contact, it may be a sign of attraction.
Eye contact shows that we are paying attention. It may mean nothing more than we are being polite, or it may mean something else. We often use our eyes to express interest in someone.
Because it is natural to look at things we find attractive, keeping our eyes on someone can be like paying the person a compliment. Looking at something attractive actually brings about a change in our eyes. It makes our pupils, those small round black areas in the middle of our eyes, grow larger. Large pupils then make our eyes more attractive.
Research has shown that eye contact can also influence whether someone finds another person attractive. In a study at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, Dr. Claire Conway asked participants to look at photos of faces.
There were photos of people smiling and looking directly at the viewer, and there were photos of those same people smiling but looking away. Dr. Conway said, “faces that were looking directly at the viewer were considered more attractive. This was especially true for faces of the opposite sex.”
Dr. Conway suggests that something in the human brain makes us prefer the faces of people who make eye contact with us. When they are looking at us, they seem to like us. If they like us, that makes them more attractive to us.
Of course, a face in a photo is one thing, and a real person looking at you is something else. How do you feel when someone makes eye contact with you and keeps on looking? Does it make them seem attractive, or does it make you feel uncomfortable or even afraid? How we read people’s eye behavior depends in part on our culture.
In some cultures, making and keeping eye contact is a sign of respect. In others, it has the opposite effect. As we grow up, we learn the rules of our culture for nonverbal communication in general, and eye contact in particular. We learn what we are expected to do, and what we are allowed to do.
But even as an adult, you may find there is still more to learn about the language of the eyes.
Lesson 4. Changes in Life
Passage 1. An International Love Story
Aruna was in her last year of college near her home in Malaysia. It was the first day of a new course, and she was in class.
Suddenly, she says, “I had this awful feeling of being watched.” She looked across the room and found that someone was staring at her, an exchange student from Europe. He continued looking at her all through the class. He did it the next day, too, and the next. Finally, she told herself, “Enough. I’m going to talk to him. That will stop him." So she went and sat down next to him. She discovered that his name was Hervé, and he was French.
“As soon as we started talking, it was magic, and he was perfect.” Aruna and Hervé fell in love, but after a few months, he had to return to France. Soon after that, Aruna graduated and faced the biggest decision of her life.
Hervé wanted her to come to Paris. Should she go, or should she try to forget him? Aruna remembers, “My parents were in total shock, but the best thing was that they never said no. It was always my choice and my responsibility. This is what they always taught me, to make my own decisions.”
It was hard for Aruna to think of leaving family, friends, and home. Living in France would be a challenge, too. For one thing, she did not speak French. “And it was difficult for me,” she says, “because I wasn’t really sure what to expect. When I met Hervé, he was a student, and almost like a tourist. He was happy in Malaysia, and he felt comfortable there, but that wasn’t real life for him. I was about to meet another Hervé, whom I didn’t know, the Hervé who was no longer a student, but a man with a serious job, and a Frenchman in his own country.”
Aruna decided to go.
“I had to take the chance. Although there were many differences between us, we were so much alike. I knew that he was the one for me.”
For Aruna and Hervé, it was the right decision, and now they are happily married. Marriage is not easy, and it’s even harder when two people have to deal with differences in language, religion, and culture. Aruna says the cultural differences were enormous.
“I come from an Islamic country, although my family is Christian, and many things in France shocked me.” The hardest thing, she says, is to understand the way that French people think. Smaller differences in their everyday life caused problems, too.
Aruna laughs. “We are like night and day. I eat rice three times a day, and I don’t wear shoes in the house. Also, I want to take care of my husband, like my mother and her mother before her. But that makes Hervé uncomfortable.”
Even with all the challenges, after thirteen years and one child together, they are still very much in love.
Passage 2. Life is Full of Surprises
Mahmoud Irani teaches at a small U.S. college. He did not expect to end up in the United States, and he did not expect to teach. He grew up in Iran, and he planned to become a doctor.
However, as people say, “life is full of surprises.” Mahmoud was born in Iran near the city of Tehran. In high school, he was an excellent student, the best in his class, and he was planning on a career in medicine.
First, he had to take the National University entrance exam. He needed to do well on the exam to be accepted by a medical school. Out of 50,000 high school students taking the test, only 1,000 would get the chance to study medicine.
Mahmoud missed the score he needed by a few points, which his teachers found very surprising. He took the test again, and again he had to deal with bad news. “I was disappointed,” he remembers, “but I said, ‘that is my fate.’”
Mahmoud had to make a new plan for his future, so he chose to study English. After college in Tehran, he decided to go to the United States for an advanced degree in English. A few months later, he arrived in Buffalo, New York.
He entered an English as a Second Language, ESL, program at the state university there. Mahmoud was one of about 500,000 international students who entered the United States to study that year, but he managed to do something that few others could do. In less than two years, he went from studying ESL to teaching it at the same school.
While on a visit home, Mahmoud had an interview at a university in Tehran. They offered him a teaching job, and he accepted it. Officials at the university made an agreement with him. Mahmoud would return to Buffalo to finish his degree, and they would give him financial support. After he finished, he would come back to teach. So Mahmoud went back to New York feeling great, believing that his future was secure.
Things did not turn out as he expected, however. There was a revolution in Iran, which caused great changes in the country. Soon Mahmoud received a letter from his university in Tehran. It said, “we don’t need any English teachers.” Suddenly, his support was gone, and his future was unclear. It was a shock.
Mahmoud decided not to give up. He continued studying for his degree, and after much hard work, he reached his goal. Soon he had a good job teaching at St. Michael’s College in Vermont.
Things have turned out well for Mahmoud. His students at St. Michael’s report that he is a great teacher. He is married, and he and his wife, Roya, have two children.
Roya, who is also from Iran, is a doctor. Mahmoud has always been interested in medicine. “I could go to medical school now,” he says, “if I had the patience.”
He says that he does not plan to make a career change at this stage in his life. However, he adds, “I know that life is full of surprises.”
Passage 3. To Live As An Artist
In 1981, the artist Vitek Kruta escaped from his country. He left with just one little bag. “One little bag with basic things like a toothbrush and underwear,” he remembers. He was 19 years old at the time.
Vitek’s home was in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He loved his country, but he could not stay there because the communist government wanted to put him in jail. “The government wanted total control of all art and music,” he explains. “We had to have art shows in secret. My kind of painting was against the law. The rock music that my band played was against the law. There was no future for me there.” So Vitek escaped to Germany. The rest of his family was still in Prague, and after he left, the police made a lot of trouble for his father.
In Germany, Vitek first had to learn the language. He spoke Czech and Russian, but not German, so he spent eight months taking lessons at a language school. Vitek remembers that it was easy for him to understand and read German, but he could not speak it. Then one night, he had a dream. In his dream, he was skiing in the mountains. He met another skier and started talking with him in German. The following day, he discovered that he could speak much better.
Next, Vitek got back to his studies in art. He learned to restore old buildings, such as churches and castles. He spent ten years doing this kind of work, and then he faced another big change in his life. He got a job offer in the United States.
Vitek knew hardly any English, but he did not let that stop him. After all, he had a great deal of experience learning new languages. So he and his wife Lucy decided to make the move.
Today, Vitek is a painter, an architect, and much more. He is a man with a lot of energy. He works in his studio, he teaches art classes, and he helps manage an art school. Vitek also likes to get people with different talents and abilities together to do big art projects.
Sometimes he has a group work on restoring a building. Sometimes they cover a room with murals, large pictures painted on the walls. Vitek likes to do projects in public places, at schools, or in city buildings, or in churches, so that anyone can see and enjoy them.
He says that projects like these bring art back to the people. Vitek believes that art plays an important role in the world. “Art lets people be creative, and the world needs creative people.”
Vitek explains, “if we are not free to be creative, and I’m talking about scientists and mathematicians too, not just artists, then human beings can only copy the past. We cannot move forward.”
Passage 4. An Amazing Woman
Ruth Simmons was born into a very poor family, but she grew up to become the president of a famous university. How did she do it? Hers is an amazing story.
The story begins on a farm in Grapeland, Texas, in 1945, the year that Ruth was born. Her parents were farm workers, and she was the youngest of their twelve children. They could not give their children many things, and Ruth never had any toys to play with. For Christmas, she did not receive any presents at all, except a shoebox with an apple, an orange, and some nuts. However, in Grapeland, Ruth was not really aware of being poor.
No one else had much either.
Then the family moved into the city, to Houston, where people had more money, and being poor was much harder for Ruth. In school, other children laughed at the way she spoke and dressed. Ruth’s mother kept the family together. “She had no education, but she was very wise,” Ruth remembers. “She taught us about the real value of being a human being, what mattered and what didn’t matter.”
Ruth’s mother did not have big dreams. She just wanted to see her children grow up. This was not a simple wish. At that time, there was segregation in the United States, and life was dangerous for African Americans, especially in the South. Ruth remembers living in fear. “If you looked at someone the wrong way, you could be killed.”
At age five, Ruth fell in love with school. She was lucky to have some excellent teachers. No one in Ruth’s family had much education, but her teachers encouraged her to go to college. They gave her money and even a coat to wear. Ruth knew that college was going to be difficult, but she was brave enough to give it a try.
At first, Ruth studied theater. But what kind of career in theater could a young African American woman hope for? She says, “Remember, I grew up in the South. I couldn’t even go to theaters.” So she studied languages instead.
Later, she married, had two children, began a teaching career, and became a college administrator. Soon, people began to notice her and respect her abilities. In 1995, Ruth became president of Smith College, a famous U.S. college for women. Ruth was the first African American to lead such a famous college. Suddenly, her story was on TV and in newspapers all over the country.
Six years later, she accepted another challenge. She became the president of Brown University and was the first woman in that role.
Ruth believes in the power of education. She once said, “Learning can be the same for a poor farm kid like me as it is for the richest child in the country. It’s all about cultivating one’s mind, and anybody can do that. So it doesn’t matter what color your skin is. It doesn’t matter how much money your father has. It doesn’t matter what kind of house you live in. Every learner can experience the same thing.”
As Ruth Simmons will tell you, education can change your life.
Lesson 5. The Ocean
Passage 1. Dealing with Plastic in the Sea
The Pacific Ocean contains more than half the water on the planet. It also holds a lot of trash, much of it plastic.
There are plastic bottles, plastic bags, food wrappers, and many other kinds of packaging. Many of them were used only once before becoming trash and ending up in the ocean. Trillions of pieces of plastic are floating in the Pacific, and more go into its waters each year. All this trash is an ugly mess.
It’s an expensive problem, too. It costs billions of dollars each year to the fishing, shipping, and tourism industries. More than that, it’s dangerous.
Every year, at least one million seabirds and many thousands of other animals die because of plastic pollution. People’s health is also affected because the plastic is full of toxic chemicals. Fish eat the plastic, and people eat the fish.
Some of the trash ends up on beaches. The United States spends about $500 million a year to clean up its West Coast beaches alone. Around the world, people are working to clean up the beaches in their own countries.
Since 1986, hundreds of thousands of volunteers have joined the International Coastal Cleanup. On the day of the 2014 cleanup, volunteers picked up more than 16 million pounds of trash.
Other people are trying to figure out how to get the plastic out of the ocean. This is what Boyan Slat is working on. At age 16, he started studying the problem. He soon invented a system for catching plastic floating on or near the surface.
At 19, Boyan left his university in the Netherlands to start a foundation, the Ocean Cleanup. He now leads a large team of scientists and engineers. They are developing the technology to clean millions of pounds of plastic from the sea.
Their goal is to clean up the largest garbage patch in the Pacific. They expect the job will take years. For his efforts, Boyan received the United Nations’ highest environmental award. The UN named him a “Champion of the Earth.”
Boyan and his team are in a hurry to get plastic out of the ocean. Right now, most of it is in large pieces. However, sunlight is turning it into microplastics, very tiny pieces. Those are even more dangerous. They’re also harder to collect.
Boyan does not believe that the system he invented will end the problem of garbage patches in the sea. He asks, “how are we now going to make sure no more plastic enters the oceans in the first place?” About 8 million tons of plastic go into the sea every year. More and more plastic bags, bottles, and food wrappers. More and more plastic cups, forks, knives, and spoons.
What can we do? People fighting the problem say one answer is to change laws. They want to make the producers of plastic take more responsibility for it.
They say another way is for people to make small changes in how they live. Some people are trying to make a difference by taking their own bags to the store instead of accepting plastic bags. Buying products that can be reused. Recycling plastic and buying recycled products, and volunteering to clean up their own part of the planet.
Passage 2. What does the ocean mean to us?
Some people have no trouble explaining how the ocean is important in their lives. They live near it and depend on it for food. It gives them the work that supports their families.
For people who live far from the ocean, the ways they are connected to it may not be so clear. However, if you know a few facts about the ocean, it’s easy to see how important it is for all life on Earth.
Did you know that the ocean covers 72% of the Earth’s surface? It helps regulate the climate by holding heat from the sun. It also supplies half of the oxygen in the air we breathe. The oxygen is produced by phytoplankton, tiny ocean plants that live just below the surface. These facts have led people to call the ocean Earth’s life-support system.
Did you know that eight of the world’s ten largest cities are near the ocean? History explains why this is so. Cities began and grew on the coast, especially at the mouths of rivers, because the ocean was so important for food and transport.
Today, almost half the people in the world live near the ocean. While facts like these explain why the ocean matters, they do not answer another question. How does the ocean make us feel?
The ocean has a strong effect on people’s emotions. It can cause fear of what we cannot see and do not know, of things that live in the ocean, or of big storms like hurricanes and typhoons. It makes sense to be afraid of those.
But the ocean can also make us feel calm and relaxed. How does it do that? Why do so many vacationers want to be at the ocean? Why do people pay so much to live where they can see it? What is it that draws us to the ocean? Many of us are drawn to it to have fun. We want to swim in it or go out in boats. Think of all the ways people have invented to play in and on the water. Others just want to be near the ocean. Perhaps it’s because of the great open space where we can see miles of open water and sky. Some say the space makes them feel free and full of hope. Others love the ever-changing colors of the sea. Still others are drawn by its sounds. The crash of waves against rocks is exciting, while the gentle sound of small waves on the beach is calming and comforting.
Perhaps what draws people to the ocean is even more basic. Did you know that our brains are about 73% water? The answer to the question of what draws us to the sea may lie in the mysteries of the human body. Many of us choose to be near the ocean when we can.
We love seeing the ocean, hearing it, smelling it, playing in it, walking or sitting by it. We may not know why we feel the way we do about it. However, we do know how every person on Earth is connected to the ocean and how important that relationship is.
Passage 3. The Crab
Introduction
Someone with an interest in sea creatures could easily spend their entire life studying crabs. The crab is one of the oldest living types of animals, and there are about 4,500 kinds of them. Among all these crabs, there are many differences, but there are certain things that all crabs have in common.
Ways that all crabs are alike
All crabs are invertebrates. That means they have no backbone. Did you know that invertebrates make up about 95% of all known animals? All crabs have a hard shell, called an exoskeleton.
They have ten legs, with five on each side, and they have an unusual way of walking. Crabs can go forward or back, but usually move sideways. The first or front pair of a crab’s legs are its claws.
Some differences among crabs
Not all crabs are sea creatures. Some types of crabs do live underwater, but others live on land, and some can live in either environment. Some manage to survive in the hot water near underwater volcanoes, while others live under the ice in Antarctica.
Crabs are often the same color as their environment. The most common colors are gray, brown, and white. However, some crabs are beautiful reds, blues, and purples.
Some crabs are herbivores, plant eaters. Others are carnivores, meat eaters. And others are omnivores, plant and meat eaters.
Did you know?
Christmas Island red crabs must put their eggs into the ocean so that the baby crabs can hatch, come out of the egg. The adult crabs cannot swim or breathe underwater. That makes it a dangerous business to be a mother.
The largest crab in the world, the Japanese spider crab, can be up to four meters across, about thirteen feet. The smallest is the pea crab. It’s about the size of, can you guess?
The largest land crab is the robber crab, or coconut crab. It can climb trees to pick coconuts. Its claws are strong and sharp enough that it can open the coconuts, too. The Japanese blue crab is the kind of crab most often eaten.
An especially helpful crab
The tiny trapezoid crab, only one centimeter long, or one-third of an inch, helps keep coral reefs alive. It cleans dirt from the reefs, letting the coral get the sunlight it needs to live. Today, much of the coral in the ocean is dying, so we should be glad for any help it can get.
The last word on crabs.
If someone calls you “crabby,” they are not paying you a compliment. A person who is crabby seems unhappy and often complains. They might always be like that, or they might get that way only at certain times. Some of us get crabby when we are tired or hungry or have too much work to do. It may not be fair to the poor crab to use its name this way, but English speakers have been doing it since the 1700s, and will probably go on doing it. So the crab will just have to put up with it.
Passage 4. Underwater Wonderland
The Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia draws people from all over the world. It’s a beautiful place to swim, go boating, and relax on the beach.
However, what is most special about the Great Barrier Reef is what you can see underwater. The Great Barrier Reef is 1,400 miles long, over 2,200 kilometers. It’s made up of almost 1,000 islands and nearly 3,000 coral reefs, making it the world’s largest coral reef system.
It’s the only living thing on the planet that can be seen from space. The reefs were built over thousands of years by billions of tiny sea creatures called coral polyps.
It may be difficult to think of coral polyps as animals. They do not swim or move themselves across the ocean floor. They do not have eyes, ears, a heart, or a brain. A coral polyp is basically a tiny, soft body with a mouth and a stomach. It also has tentacles that help it protect itself and catch food.
Some coral polyps live alone, but most live in groups called colonies. Each differently shaped part of a reef is its own colony.
A colony has a single species or type of coral. In the Great Barrier Reef, there are about 400 species of coral in all. Most of the 400 are hard coral species, the type that builds reefs. They produce calcium carbonate, the same thing shells are made of, at the base of their bodies. They use it to attach themselves to a rock or the seafloor. Then it becomes hard, like a shell.
Reefs are built over time, as coral produce more and more calcium carbonate. Reefs then attract many other types of sea creatures and plants. Exactly how many, no one can say.
Counting just the fish, the Great Barrier Reef is home to more than 1,500 species. In 1975, the Australian government established the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The point was to protect the reefs.
However, these reefs, like coral reefs everywhere, are in danger. A great deal of the coral has already died. Researchers studying the situation found that between 1985 and 2012, the Great Barrier Reef had lost half its coral cover.
Violent storms called cyclones destroyed many of the reefs. The researchers say storms caused about half the damage to the coral. Climate change could cause storms like these to hit more often. If they do, the coral cover won’t have enough time between storms to grow back.
The second largest problem was a growing number of crown-of-thorns starfish. They eat coral polyps. Between 1985 and 2012, they ate them faster than the coral cover could grow back.
Coral everywhere face the problem of higher ocean temperatures caused by climate change. Some coral species cannot deal with the warmer waters.
Then there is ocean pollution. No species deals well with that.
In the past few years, many countries have established new Marine Protected Areas, MPAs. That’s great news. These are parts of the ocean that are like national parks on land. In an MPA, human activities, especially commercial fishing, are controlled to protect the plants and animals. More MPAs are needed. Right now, only 1% of the ocean is protected in this way. However, even in MPAs, as in the Great Barrier Reef, nature is not safe from pollution or climate change.
Notes 
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