Source of image: TED.com

Listening practice

Lecturer: Sean Stephenson

Reading practice

Never call yourself names.

Calling yourself a name is reducing yourself from a human to a single element of yourself that you do not like.
Saying “I am such a failure” after getting fired from a job is inaccurate and unfair to you. Instead, make the useful comment, “I lost my job, but I can use this experience to find and keep a new job.”
Saying “I am so stupid” is also likely untrue and reductive. If you feel stupid, it’s more likely that you have a lack of knowledge about something. Instead, think, “I don’t know how to do this basic home maintenance. Perhaps I could take a class and learn to do this in the future.”

Source: https://www.wikihow.com/

Block negative thoughts

When something’s bothering you, you know that getting your mind off of it is easier said than done. In fact, research shows that when people are instructed not to think about a specific topic, it makes it even harder to get that topic out of their minds. But rehashing negative thoughts over and over in your head, also known as rumination, can be unpleasant and counterproductive—and in some cases, it can even lead to chronic depression.

“It’s like a needle in a groove,” says Guy Winch, Ph.D., psychologist and author of Emotional First Aid: Practical Strategies for Treating Failure, Rejection, Guilt and Other Everyday Psychological Injuries. “As the groove gets deeper and deeper, the needle has a harder time getting out of the groove.” What’s more, rumination can actually make you more angry or upset than you were originally, because the issue becomes magnified in your mind.

Source: https://www.happify.com

Try to motive yourself

Who needs Tony Robbins when you can motivate yourself? Overcoming the emotional hurdle to get stuff done when you’d rather sit on the couch isn’t always easy. But unless calling in sick and waking up at noon have no consequences for you, it’s often a must.

For those of you who never procrastinate, distract yourself or drag your feet when you should be doing something important, well done so far! But for the rest of you, it’s good to have a library of motivational boosters to move along.

Despite your best efforts, passion, habits and a flow-producing environment can fail. In that case, it’s time to find whatever emotional pump-up you can use to get started.

Source: https://www.lifehack.org/

Live a healthy life

Living healthy is the most practical way to empower yourself. You must maintain excellent health physically as well as mentally. You can become the fittest version of yourself by going to workout classes. Not to mention, you must also eat organic and healthy food. As they say, you are what you eat! So you must carefully choose what goes into your body as it affects your ability to think. When you want to create the change in the world, eating food in the mode of goodness indeed helps you achieve your goals.

Source: https://thriveglobal.com/

Source: https://www.wikihow.com

Repeat your affirmation daily for at least 5 minutes.

Take at least 5 minutes every day to say your affirmation to yourself over and over. If you can, look at yourself directly in the mirror and say your affirmation out loud during this time. It’s going to feel uncomfortable at first, but affirmations only work through repetition. Sometimes you just have to adopt a “fake it ’til you make it” mentality.

Set your desired goal or outcome.

Your affirmation will work best when it targets a specific goal or outcome. Your goal may be ongoing, such as being more confident or getting ahead in your career. It could also have a set deadline, such as finishing a project on time or being ready for a big event.

Use your affirmations as a guide for change.

Affirmations can be a powerful self-help tool, but just saying them is only part of the process. Affirmations need to be coupled with action in order to be truly effective. Use your affirmation as a guide for the change you want to bring about in your life. Then, take actions to pursue that change.

Write out your affirmations in addition to saying them.

In addition to saying your affirmations every day, write them out when you have a moment. This provides different mental feedback than saying your affirmations, which may help to further reinforce your goals and strengths. It’s also a good way to use your affirmation at places like work or school when you need it, but don’t want others to hear it.

Meditate on your affirmations.

Close your eyes, breathe deeply, try to shut out the rest of the world, and think about your affirmations. Slowly and calmly repeat the words, thinking about what each one means to you. Visualize the positive feelings you want to create or the goals you want to achieve each time you say your affirmation.

Post your affirmation in important places.

Use note cards, sticky notes, a cute poster or printout, or any other system you like to write out your affirmation. Leave these notes in places where you will not only see them, but need to be reminded of your affirmation. Try to think of places where you frequently experience stress or self-doubt, and put a copy of your affirmation there.

Lecturer, author or publisher: Alex Gendler on TED-Ed YouTube Channel

Video of Living on the Moon

Reading practice on living on the moon

You roll out of bed and leap eight meters across your underground habitat. The gray water from your sink drains into a small greenhouse where your vegetables grow. After suiting up, you head through a transport chute to inspect the generator. Outside, it’s pitch-black – just as it’s been for the last 12 days.

This isn’t some post-apocalyptic scenario; it’s just another day of life on the moon, and with the European Space Agency’s idea to establish a functioning moon camp by the 2020s, that day may be closer than we think.

Of course, living on the moon won’t be easy. The camp envisioned is not so much of the village as an inhabited research base, similar to those in places like Antarctica, but there are far greater obstacles to living on the moon than just cold weather. The biggest is cosmic radiation. Unlike the Earth, the moon has no atmosphere and no magnetic field. A person on its surface can receive over 400 times the maximum safe dosage of heavy ion radiation; enough to be fatal within 10 hours, even in a spacesuit.

The first step would likely involve robots and 3D printers constructing covered habitats from lunar soil, or building shelters inside caves formed by lava tubes from the moon’s volcanic past. But what would the inhabitants live on?

Supplies would need to be transported from Earth at first. Growing plants require greenhouse soil and air rich in carbon dioxide, a gas that’s rare on the moon, but could be synthesized from recycled materials. A water treatment plant could be supplied by ice mined from the polar regions using a specialized drill that can bore 2 meters beneath the surface.

Friendly bacteria and viruses necessary to the human microbiome and immune system would also have to be imported or synthesized on site, and lunar inhabitants would have to exercise four hours a day to maintain bone and muscle mass. That’s because the moon’s gravity is just one-sixth that of the Earth, and the everyday strain of working against gravity is part of what keeps our bodies healthy.

It might seem strange to go to all this trouble to build a base on a dead rock we’ve already visited but NASA’s Apollo missions only explored small portions of the moon. We’ve made many discoveries since then, such as ice near the poles and particles of solar wind gases that date back billions of years. They collectively show that the moon has much more to teach us about the history of our solar system.

A radio telescope on its far side could observe the cosmos shielded from the Earth’s electromagnetic interference, and the lunar surface is rich in minerals, like silicon, aluminum and magnesium, creating great economic potential for mining, but the biggest benefit of the moon camp may not lie on the moon but beyond it.

With the nearest possibly habitable world light-years away, and the International Space Station to be retired in about a decade, a moon base will be our first foothold towards becoming an interplanetary species, and proposals such as the Deep Space Gateway envision launching future missions from lunar orbit. The smaller gravitational pull would require less fuel to overcome, allowing for larger ships and more cargo.

Meanwhile, the base on the surface could serve as a testing ground for future space operations, a refueling station, a supply depot, all in one.

With Europe, Russia, China and the US expressing interest in the project, the moon camp may come to involve the space agencies of all major nations as well as private companies. Within a few decades, the moon may be bustling with mining operations, research stations and tourists routes alongside a construction yard under an orbiting space port.

We may have already visited the moon, but now we’re closer than ever to making it part of humanity’s home.

Brain Energy IELTS Listening Reading Practice

Lecturer, author or publisher: Richard E. Cytowic on TED-Ed

Brain Energy IELTS Reading Practice

Brain energy

An enduring myth says we use only 10% of our brain, the other 90% standing idly by for spare capacity. Hucksters promised to unlock that hidden potential with methods based on neuroscience, but all they really unlock is your wallet. Two-thirds of the public and nearly half of science teachers mistakenly believe the 10% myth.

The 10% Myth

In the 1890s, William James, the father of American psychology, said, “most of us do not meet our mental potential.” James meant this as a challenge, not an indictment of scant brain usage. But the misunderstanding stock, also scientists couldn’t figure out for a long time the purpose of our massive frontal lobe, or broad areas of the parietal lobe. Damage didn’t cause motor or sensory deficits. So, authorities concluded they didn’t do anything.

The Silent Areas of the Brain

For decades, these parts were called silent areas, their functions elusive. we’ve since learned that they underscore executive and integrative ability without which we would hardly be human. They’re crucial to abstract reasoning, planning, weighing decisions and flexibly adapting to circumstances.

Brain Energy Usage

The idea that nine-tenths of your brain sits idly by in your skull looks silly when we calculate how the brain uses energy. Rodent and canine brains consume 5% of total body energy. Monkey brains use 10%; an adult human brain, which accounts for only 2% of the body’s mass, consumers 20% of daily glucose burned. In children, that figure is 50%, and in infants, 60%.

This is far more than expected for their relative brain sizes, which scale in proportion to body size. Human ones weigh 1.5 kilograms; elephant brains 5 kg; and whale brains 9 kg. Yet on a per weight basis, humans pack in more neurons than any other species. This dense packing is what makes us so smart. There is a trade-off between body size and the number of neurons a primate, including us, can sustain. A 25-kg ape has to eat 8 hours a day to uphold the brain with 53 billion neurons.

The Effect of Cooking on Brain Energy

The Invention of cooking, one and a half million years ago, gave us a huge advantage. Cooked food is rendered soft and predigested outside of the body. Our guts more easily absorb its energy. Cooking frees up time and provides more energy than if we ate food stuffs raw, and so, we can sustain brains with 86 billion densely packed neurons, 40% more than the ape. Here’s how it works.

Half the calories a brain burns go towards simply keeping the structure intact by pumping sodium and potassium ions across membranes to maintain an electrical charge. To do this, the brain has to be an energy hog. It consumes an astounding 3.4 times 10 to the 21st power ATP molecules per minute. ATP being the coal of the body’s furnace.

The high cost of maintaining resting potentials in all 86 billion neurons means that little energy is left to propel signals down axons and across synapses, the nerve discharges that actually get things done. Even if only a tiny percentage of neurons fired in a given region at any one time, the energy burden of generating spikes over the entire brain would be unsustainable. Here’s where energy efficiency comes in.

The Mechanics of Brain Energy Efficiency

Letting just a small proportion of cells signal at any one time, known as sparse coding, uses the least energy but carries the most information because the small number of signals have thousands of possible paths by which to distribute themselves. A drawback of sparse coding within a huge number of neurons is its cost. Worse, if a big proportion of cells never fire, then they are superfluous and evolution should have jettisoned them long ago.

The solution is to find the optimum proportion of cells that the brain can have active at once. For maximum efficiency, between 1% and 16% of cells should be active at any given moment. This is the energy limit we have to live with in order to be conscious at all. The need to conserve resources is the reason most of the brain’s operations must happen outside of consciousness.

Why is multitasking inefficient?

It’s why multitasking is a fool’s errand. We simply lack the energy to do two things at once, let alone three or five. When we try, we do each task less well than if we had given it our full attention. The numbers are against us.

Your brain is already smart and powerful. So powerful that it needs a lot of power to stay powerful and so smart that it has built in an energy efficiency plan. So, don’t let a fraudulent myth make you guilty about your supposedly lazy brain. Guilt would be a waste of energy. After all this, don’t you realize it’s dumb to waste mental energy? You have billions of power-hungry neurons to maintain. So, hop to it.

Listening practice on how to stay calm

Lecturer, author or publisher: Noa Kageyama and Pen-Pen Chen on TED-Ed YouTube Channel

Reading practice on how to stay calm

Your favorite athlete closes in for a victorious win. The crowd hold its breath, and at the crucial moment, she misses the shot. That competitor just experienced the phenomenon known as “choking” where despite months, even years of practice, a person fails right when it matters most.

What is choking?

Choking is common in sports where performance often occurs under intense pressure and depends on key moments, and yet, performance anxiety also haunts public speakers, contestants in spelling bees, and even world-famous musicians. Most people intuitively blame it on their nerves, but why does being nervous undermine expert performance?

What causes choking?

There are two sets of theories which both say that primarily choking under pressure boils down to focus. First, there are the distraction theories. These suggest that performance suffers when the mind is preoccupied with worries, doubts and fears, instead of focusing its attention on performing the task at hand. When relevant and irrelevant thoughts compete for the same attention, something has to give. The brain can only process so much information at once. Tasks that challenge working memory, the “mental scratchpad” we use to temporarily store phone numbers and grocery list, are especially vulnerable to pressure.

The Effect of Anxiety on Working memory

In a 2004 study, a group of university students were asked to perform math problems, some easy, others more complex, and memory-intensive. Half the students completed both problem types with nothing at stake, while the others completed them when calm and under pressure. While everyone did well on the easy problems, those who were stressed, performed worse on the more difficult, memory-intensive tasks.

Explicit monitoring theories make up the second group of explanations for choking under pressure. They’re concerned with how pressure can cause people to overanalyze the task at hand. Here the logic goes that once a skill becomes automatic, thinking about its precise mechanics interferes with your ability to do it. Tasks we do unconsciously seem to be most vulnerable to this kind of choking.

A study on competitive golfers compared the performance when instructed to simply focus on putting as accurately as possible versus when they were primed to be acutely aware of the mechanics of their putting stroke. Golfers usually perform this action subconsciously. So those who suddenly turned into the precise details of their own moves also became worse at making accurate shots.

How to Avoid Choking?

Choking may not be inevitable for everyone though. Research suggests that some are more susceptible than others, especially those who are self-conscious, anxious, and afraid of being judged negatively by others. So, how can we avoid choking when it really counts? First, it helps to practice under stressful conditions.

In a study on expert dart players, researchers found that those who hadn’t practiced under stress, performed worse when anxious, compared to those who had become accustomed to pressure. Secondly, many performers extol the virtues of a pre-performance routines, whether it’s taking a few deep breaths, repeating a cue word, or doing a rhythmic sequence of movements. Studies on golfing, bowling and water polo find that short rituals can lead to more consistent and accurate performance under pressure.

And thirdly, researchers have shown that having an external focus on the ultimate goal works better than an internal focus where someone is turned into the mechanics of what they’re doing. A study of experienced golfers revealed that those who hit chip shots while focused on the flight of the ball performed significantly better than those who focused on the motion of their arms.

So, perhaps we can modify the age-old saying: practice, under pressure, with focus, and with that glorious end goal in sight makes perfect.

Social Skills IELTS Listening Reading Practice

Lecturer, author or publisher: The School of Life

Social Skills IELTS Reading Practice

What are social skills?

It can be easy to imagine that we possess reasonable social skills because we know how to maintain conversation with strangers, and every now and then, manage to make a whole table laugh, but here’s a test far sterner than this, surprising in its ability to trip us up: the challenge of having a pleasant time with a child we don’t know.

How to Communicate with Children?

Theoretically speaking this should be so easy. We were all once kids; we know a great deal more than they do and, as far as they’re concerned, we hold all the cards. if we felt like it, we could buy 26 packets of biscuits and go to bed whenever we wanted. Yet, in reality, it’s strangely hard to be at ease around children we’re not already close to.

Imagine being invited around your boss’s house for lunch and being left alone at the kitchen island with her moody 10-year-old son, or being introduced into a playroom with two shy 5-year-old girls, the children of a friend. we may swiftly grow bewilderingly tongue-tied and inept.

Young Children’s Communication Skills

The reason is that children are unable to do any of the normal things that ease social encounters between adult strangers. They don’t ask polite questions about what we’ve been up to. They have no feeling for our lives or what might be important to us. They don’t do the news or the weather; and they can’t usually tell us much about themselves and their enthusiasms. If we ask them why they like a toy or a film, they tend to look blank and say they just like it; that’s all. So, for all their sweetness, children present formidable and fascinating barriers to social fluidity, which is also why they are the greatest tests of one’s mastery of the art of charm and kindness.

Some Notable Examples of Successful Communicators with Children

We have a cross-cultural history, a few moving examples of accomplished adults getting on well with children. Montaigne remarked that he found “nothing more notable” in the life of Socrates (the man who more or less began Western philosophy) than that he was exceptionally gifted at playing with children and would — especially in his later years —  spend many hours playing games and giving them piggybacks, and it suited him well, added Montaigne “for all actions, says philosophy, equally become and equally honor a wise man”.

Henri IV, king of France from 1589 to 1610, is remembered as one of the most benign French monarchs who also happened to be very sweet around children. On one occasion, famously painted by Ingres, the Spanish ambassador came to see the King and found him pretending to be a horse for his children to ride on. Rather than interrupt the game immediately, Henri kept the ambassador waiting a little while sending out a strong signal of where he felt sensible adult priorities should sometimes lie.

What’s touching in these cases is that the adults didn’t insist on using their obvious socially endorsed strength around children. Socrates did not opt to deliver lectures about metaphysics. Henri IV didn’t sit impassively on a golden throne discussing how to rule a kingdom. They put aside their well-known virtues and prestige in order to make themselves vulnerable as one must whenever friendship is at stake. They dared to lay themselves open to attack by those who might have described them as “silly” or “undignified” implicitly understanding that friendship can only emerge when we let the fragile unadorned parts of us meet — without artifice — the fragile, unadorned parts of others.

Furthermore, these two grand men knew how to find common ground with creatures who were — in so many respects — entirely alien to them. Cosmopolitans of the mind, they imaginatively searched for what unites rather than what divides people and were able to locate — somewhere within their characters — the joys and excitement of someone who has only been on earth a few years.

The socially adept know that we contain (even if only in trace, embryonic forms) all human possibilities within us, which they draw upon to feel their way into the needs and points of view of strangers. So even if they happen to be confident, they will know how to be in touch with a more timid version of themselves. Even if they are financially secure, they can mobilize their own experience of anxiety to enter into the inner world of someone beset by money worries; and even if their careers have not gone well, they can — without bitterness — find a part of themselves that would love to prosper and use this to engage warmly with someone whose professional life has gone very well indeed.

The moves that these grand people made with kids are ones we should all learn how to make with anyone, of whatever age, whom we want to bond with, but it’s particularly useful that these were grand people who made neighing sounds for what’s so often holds us back around others and makes us cold when we deep down long to be close is a fear of a loss of dignity. Friendship begins and loneliness can end when we cease trying to impress, have the courage to step outside of our safety zone, and can dare, for a time, to look a little ridiculous.

Lecturer, author or publisher: David Dunning on TED-Ed

Confidence IELTS Reading Practice

What is confidence?

Are you as good at things as you think you are? How good are you at managing money? What about reading people’s emotions? How healthy are you compared to other people you know? Are you better than average at grammar? Knowing how competent we are and how our skills stack up against other people’s is more than a self-esteem boost. It helps us figure out when we can forge ahead on our own decisions and instincts and when we need, instead, to seek out advice. But psychological research suggests that we’re not very good at evaluating ourselves accurately. In fact, we frequently overestimate our own abilities. Researchers have a name for this phenomenon, the Dunning-Kruger effect.

What is the Dunning-Kruger effect?

This effect explains why more than a hundred studies have shown that people display illusory superiority. We judge ourselves as better than others to a degree that violates the laws of math. When software engineers at two companies were asked to rate their performance, 32% of the engineers at one company and 42% at the other put themselves in the top 5%. In another study, 88% of American drivers described themselves as having above-average driving skills. These aren’t isolated findings. On average, people tend to rate themselves better than most in disciplines ranging from health, leadership skills, ethics, and beyond.

An Interesting Point about the Dunning-Kruger Effect

What’s particularly interesting is that those with the least ability are often the most likely to overrate their skills to the greatest extent. People are measurably poor at logical reasoning, math, financial knowledge, emotional intelligence running medical lab tests and chess. All tend to rate their expertise almost as favorably as actual experts do.

Who suffer most from the Dunning-Kruger effect?

So who’s most vulnerable to this delusion? Sadly all of us. Because we all have pockets of incompetence we don’t recognize. But why? When psychologists, Dunning and Kruger, first described the effect in 1999, they argued that people lacking knowledge and skill in particular areas suffer a double curse. First, they make mistakes and reach poor decisions, but second, those same knowledge gaps also prevent them from catching their errors.

In other words, poor performers lack the very expertise needed to recognize how badly they’re doing. For example, when the researchers studied participants in a college debate tournament, the bottom 25% of teams in preliminary rounds lost nearly 4 out of every five matches, but they thought they were winning almost 60%. Without a strong grasp of the rules of debate, the students simply couldn’t recognize when or how often their arguments broke down.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect isn’t a question of ego blinding us to our weaknesses. People usually do admit their deficits once they can spot them. In one study, students who had initially done badly on a logic quiz, and then took a mini course on logic, were quite willing to label their original performances as awful. That may be why people with a moderate amount of experience or expertise often have less confidence in their abilities. They know enough to know that there’s a lot they don’t know.

Meanwhile, experts tend to be aware of just how knowledgeable they are, but they often make a different mistake; they assume that everyone else is knowledgeable, too. The result is that people, whether they’re inept or highly-skilled, are often caught in a bubble of inaccurate self-perception. When they’re unskilled, they can’t see their own faults. When they’re exceptionally confident, they don’t perceive how unusual their abilities are.

How to measure your genuine abilities?

So if the Dunning-Kruger effect is invisible to those experiencing it, what can you do to find out how good you actually are at various things?

First, ask for feedback from other people and consider it even if it’s hard to hear. Second and more important, keep learning. The more knowledgeable we become, the less likely we are to have invisible holes in our competence. Perhaps it all boils down to that old proverb: When arguing with a fool, first make sure the other person isn’t doing the same thing.