On Monday 23/02/09
practice reading skill from Guardian newspaper and vocabulary
practice reading skill from Guardian newspaper and vocabulary
Original Data
Blue Monday? That's just too depressing
Ah yes, Dr Cliff Arnall's equation for the most depressing day of the year - the third Monday in January. This started life as a corporate puff for Sky Travel (end of January, perfect time to book a holiday). But now Blue Monday has slipped out of Sky's ownership and become part of the canon of pseudoscientific media myth. Most alarmingly, last year it was used by the Samaritans, and this year by the Mental Health Foundation. These people, apparently, think it's okay to use bullshit to promote awareness of mental health issues.The Sun said: "It is officially the most depressing point of the year. The misery of Blue Monday was worked out by psychologist Dr Cliff Arnall." The Express loved it. The Mirror too. "Experts have worked it out," said Channel 4. CBBC fed it to children: "Researchers say the third Monday in January is when people are more unhappy than at any other time."When I last criticised Arnall in 2006 (he also has a formula sponsored by Walls for the happiest day, which is in June), Cardiff University asked us to point out that he had only been a part-time tutor and had left. These efforts to distance themselves felt disingenuous since they were also, at the same time, quoting Arnall's ridiculous appearances in their monthly roundups.I hope they are disabusing everyone else this year, including the Daily Mail, of course: "Today - January 19, 2009 - is the most depressing day in HISTORY."Meanwhile Martin Hird, a senior lecturer in mental health and psychological therapies at Leeds Metropolitan University, told the Telegraph: "I would guess there is something in it based on the daylight hours and people's social circumstances." Right. You'd guess.And is there good evidence? Seasonal affective disorder is its own separate thing. If you look at the evidence on the population's mood, depression, and suicide changing over the seasons, you do, in fact, find a glorious mess.Back in 1838 Esquirol commented on the higher incidence of suicide in spring and early summer. Swinscow showed the same thing with all UK suicides from 1921-1948. So that's not winter blues.What about elsewhere? A 1974 study on all suicides in North Carolina (3,672) showed no seasonal variation. A 1976 Ontario study found peaks of suicide and admissions for depression in spring and autumn. Suicide is highest in summer, says a paper from Australia in 2003.Maybe you want data from the general population on mood. A study in 1986 looked at 806 males from Finland and found low mood more common in the summer. Some studies do find higher rates of depressive symptoms in the winter but some find the opposite results, like a peak in the spring (Nayham et al 1994) or summer (Ozaki et al 1995).I'm not claiming to have done a thorough review. I'm just saying it's possibly a bit more complicated than everyone getting depressed in winter. Making up stupid stuff about the most depressing day of the year doesn't help anyone, because bullshit presented as fact is simply disempowering.Please send your bad science to bad.science@guardian.co.uk
• This article was amended on Friday 30 January 2009. The French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol commented in 1838, not 1883, on the higher incidence of suicide in spring and early summer. He died in 1840. This has now been corrected
Ah yes, Dr Cliff Arnall's equation for the most depressing day of the year - the third Monday in January. This started life as a corporate puff for Sky Travel (end of January, perfect time to book a holiday). But now Blue Monday has slipped out of Sky's ownership and become part of the canon of pseudoscientific media myth. Most alarmingly, last year it was used by the Samaritans, and this year by the Mental Health Foundation. These people, apparently, think it's okay to use bullshit to promote awareness of mental health issues.The Sun said: "It is officially the most depressing point of the year. The misery of Blue Monday was worked out by psychologist Dr Cliff Arnall." The Express loved it. The Mirror too. "Experts have worked it out," said Channel 4. CBBC fed it to children: "Researchers say the third Monday in January is when people are more unhappy than at any other time."When I last criticised Arnall in 2006 (he also has a formula sponsored by Walls for the happiest day, which is in June), Cardiff University asked us to point out that he had only been a part-time tutor and had left. These efforts to distance themselves felt disingenuous since they were also, at the same time, quoting Arnall's ridiculous appearances in their monthly roundups.I hope they are disabusing everyone else this year, including the Daily Mail, of course: "Today - January 19, 2009 - is the most depressing day in HISTORY."Meanwhile Martin Hird, a senior lecturer in mental health and psychological therapies at Leeds Metropolitan University, told the Telegraph: "I would guess there is something in it based on the daylight hours and people's social circumstances." Right. You'd guess.And is there good evidence? Seasonal affective disorder is its own separate thing. If you look at the evidence on the population's mood, depression, and suicide changing over the seasons, you do, in fact, find a glorious mess.Back in 1838 Esquirol commented on the higher incidence of suicide in spring and early summer. Swinscow showed the same thing with all UK suicides from 1921-1948. So that's not winter blues.What about elsewhere? A 1974 study on all suicides in North Carolina (3,672) showed no seasonal variation. A 1976 Ontario study found peaks of suicide and admissions for depression in spring and autumn. Suicide is highest in summer, says a paper from Australia in 2003.Maybe you want data from the general population on mood. A study in 1986 looked at 806 males from Finland and found low mood more common in the summer. Some studies do find higher rates of depressive symptoms in the winter but some find the opposite results, like a peak in the spring (Nayham et al 1994) or summer (Ozaki et al 1995).I'm not claiming to have done a thorough review. I'm just saying it's possibly a bit more complicated than everyone getting depressed in winter. Making up stupid stuff about the most depressing day of the year doesn't help anyone, because bullshit presented as fact is simply disempowering.Please send your bad science to bad.science@guardian.co.uk
• This article was amended on Friday 30 January 2009. The French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol commented in 1838, not 1883, on the higher incidence of suicide in spring and early summer. He died in 1840. This has now been corrected
Vocabulary
Corporate - Formed into a corporation
puff - forceful discharge ,as of air or smoke
slipped - To move quietly and stealthily
canon - a law or code of laws established by a church
myth - a traditional story presenting supernatural
Alarmingly - frighteningly
misery - prolonged or extreme suffering
disingenuous – not straightforward
ridiculous - Deserving or inspiring
roundups - the gathering together of cattle on the range
disabuse - free from a falsehood or misconception
circumstance - one of the conditions or facts attending an event
glorious mess – having, deserving
incidence - the extent or frequency with which something occurs
admissions - the act or process of admitting or the condition of being allowed to enter
stuff - The matterial out of which something is made or formed
Amend - to correct ,rectify
Practice Lintening Skill
from www.bbclearningenglish.com the topic is Babieshttp://downloads.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/6minute/6minute_090218_barbie.pdf
Vocabulary from the programme
global brand - a product made by a particular company which sells successfully and is recognised all over the world Barbie is a global brand.
role model - a person or figure who is admired and whose behaviour others try to copy average - typical or usual
stereotype or stereotypical -a fixed idea that people have about what someone or something is like (which is often wrong)
image an idea or mental picture about how something or someone is
portraying representing or showing
skinny very thin body type - often used in a negative or disapproving way
politically correct or 'pc' the belief that language and actions which could be offensive to others, especially those relating to sex and race, should be avoided
Tuesday 24/02/09
Practice Reading Skill and Vocabulary
Painful memory? Forget it
Take a pill, re-invoke a bad memory and it disappears. Sounds great, but it's not a new idea
Wouldn't it be nice if we could get rid of unhappy or unsettling memories? A simple memory eraser that would delete the pain of having been mugged, or the sad end to a love affair? Or to erase the guilt of the soldier who kills or rapes civilians? How about going further, and with a simple drug enable the politician to forget that he promised to abolish boom and bust, or take us to war on a lie?
George Orwell's 1984 had its memory hole, in which past news was buried and false pasts created. But that involved armies of desk workers. More recently, in Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, erasing memories of a relationship gone sour involved clamping the sad lover's head into a helmet and passing a strong magnetic field across his skull. Actually that might even work, though it didn't in the film; love proved stronger than mere technology. But in the US the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency is more than mildly interested in trans-cranial brain stimulation (Darpa, for short, with its inadvertent echoes of Star Wars, has been funding this sort of stuff for decades).
Science fiction apart, one reason for wanting to erase memories could be the belief that people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) can have their symptoms relieved by reliving and coming to terms with their traumatic experience and an small army of professional grief and stress councillors has emerged, especially in the US. Now a group of Dutch researchers has hit the media with the suggestion that a commonly available pill, a blood pressure-lowering beta-blocker, might help do the trick. In fact, the idea isn't new. For some decades it has been known that emotional memories engage a region of the brain called the amygdala and a neurotransmitter related to the hormone adrenalin. Blocking the effects of adrenalin with a beta-blocker also impairs the emotional memory (I've even done experiments of this sort myself).
But why might one want to do such a thing? The idea is to give a person the drug and then re-invoke the painful memory, in the hope that the drug will erase it. While most memory research has focused on developing drugs that might improve memory – so-called cognitive enhancers – the thought that if one drug improved memory, another that blocked the effect of the first might impair it attracted a number of small start-up biotech companies interested in cashing on the potential PTSD market. But even before the current market collapse at least two such companies, well bankrolled and with scientific luminaries on their boards, went belly-up.
So is it even such a good idea? Some psychotherapists argue that it is better to enable people to come to terms with bad memories rather than erase them; others might urge suppression. But for sure, as long as the pharmaceutical industry keeps generating new drugs, some people – and some state agencies – are going to want to mess with the mind
Take a pill, re-invoke a bad memory and it disappears. Sounds great, but it's not a new idea
Wouldn't it be nice if we could get rid of unhappy or unsettling memories? A simple memory eraser that would delete the pain of having been mugged, or the sad end to a love affair? Or to erase the guilt of the soldier who kills or rapes civilians? How about going further, and with a simple drug enable the politician to forget that he promised to abolish boom and bust, or take us to war on a lie?
George Orwell's 1984 had its memory hole, in which past news was buried and false pasts created. But that involved armies of desk workers. More recently, in Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, erasing memories of a relationship gone sour involved clamping the sad lover's head into a helmet and passing a strong magnetic field across his skull. Actually that might even work, though it didn't in the film; love proved stronger than mere technology. But in the US the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency is more than mildly interested in trans-cranial brain stimulation (Darpa, for short, with its inadvertent echoes of Star Wars, has been funding this sort of stuff for decades).
Science fiction apart, one reason for wanting to erase memories could be the belief that people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) can have their symptoms relieved by reliving and coming to terms with their traumatic experience and an small army of professional grief and stress councillors has emerged, especially in the US. Now a group of Dutch researchers has hit the media with the suggestion that a commonly available pill, a blood pressure-lowering beta-blocker, might help do the trick. In fact, the idea isn't new. For some decades it has been known that emotional memories engage a region of the brain called the amygdala and a neurotransmitter related to the hormone adrenalin. Blocking the effects of adrenalin with a beta-blocker also impairs the emotional memory (I've even done experiments of this sort myself).
But why might one want to do such a thing? The idea is to give a person the drug and then re-invoke the painful memory, in the hope that the drug will erase it. While most memory research has focused on developing drugs that might improve memory – so-called cognitive enhancers – the thought that if one drug improved memory, another that blocked the effect of the first might impair it attracted a number of small start-up biotech companies interested in cashing on the potential PTSD market. But even before the current market collapse at least two such companies, well bankrolled and with scientific luminaries on their boards, went belly-up.
So is it even such a good idea? Some psychotherapists argue that it is better to enable people to come to terms with bad memories rather than erase them; others might urge suppression. But for sure, as long as the pharmaceutical industry keeps generating new drugs, some people – and some state agencies – are going to want to mess with the mind
Vocabulary
invoke - to call upon for help or inspiration
unsettle - to make unstable , disturb
erase - to remove by or as if by rubbing
mugged - to wayley and beat severely , usually with intent to rob
guilt - the fact of being responsible for a crime or wrongdoing
soldier - One who serves in an army
rapes - the crime of forcing a person to submit to sexual intercourse
civilians - one not serving in the armed forces
politician - one actively involved in politics, especially party politics.
Abolish - to do away with , put an end to
boom - to make a deep, resonant sound
bust - a sculpture of a person’s head and torso
bury - to place in the ground and cover with earth
clamp - a device used to join , grip, support ,or compress mechanical parts
helmet - a protective head covering of metal,leather,or plastic
skull - the bony framework of the head
inadvertent - Not duly attentive.accidental
relieved - to lessen or alleviate,ease
relive - undergo again
grief - deep sadness, as over a loss,sorrow
trick - a device or action designed to achieve an end by deceptive or fraudulent means
collapse - to fall down or inward
bankrolled - a roll of paper money
luminary - an object,as a celestial body ,that gives light
urge - to push or drive forward forcefully
suppress - to put an end to forcibly,subdue
mess - a disorderly mass or accumulation,jumbling
Listening Skill
I practice listening skill from http://www.bbclearningenglish/ .The topic is teacher http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/multimedia/the_teacher/
I learnt about 3 phase
1. I've got itchy feet
if you have a strong feeling that you'd like to travel
2. I got cold feet
if we make a plan, but then decide not to do it because we are too nervous
3. I shot myself in the foot
if you do something that ruins a situation for you
1. I've got itchy feet
if you have a strong feeling that you'd like to travel
2. I got cold feet
if we make a plan, but then decide not to do it because we are too nervous
3. I shot myself in the foot
if you do something that ruins a situation for you
