The age of 18 is when a person legally reaches adulthood. But does this truly stand for our maturity? The very word “ADULT” can be broken into 5 parts containing qualities necessary for your personal development. 【小题1】

A-ACCOUNTABLE (负责任的)

【小题2】 But no matter what, our parents would come and take care of us and wouldn’t hold us accountable for these acts. However, as an adult, we are totally in control of our life, including all our decisions and actions.

D-DETACHMENT FROM EGO (脱离自我)

EGO — A small 3-letter word that has the power to damage a big 12-letter word — RELATIONSHIP. Getting attached to one’s ego has a harmful effect similar to holding a beautiful red rose firmly. 【小题3】 So it is time for us to get rooted to the ground and set our ego on fire.

U-UNDERSTANDING

In a world population of about 8 billion, each of us is 100% unique. We communicate with different kinds of people on a daily basis. Collective decisions for various issues involve interacting with people to reach an agreement. It is necessary to understand and respect each other’s beliefs.

L-LISTEN

When we listen to others, thoughts and ideas from them are directly transmitted (传达) to us. 【小题4】Listening effectively with the intention to understand and not to reply is the need of the hour.

T-TAKE A STAND

We collect data in the form of parents’ suggestions on careers, friends’ advice on relationships or content that we read on social media. This data should be analyzed and questioned before reaching our own conclusions. 【小题5】

So you think you are an A-D-U-L-T?

We can achieve knowledge either actively or passively. We achieve it actively by direct experience, by testing and proving an idea, or by reasoning.

We achieve knowledge passively by being told by someone else. Most of the learning that takes place in the classroom and the kind that happens when we watch TV or read newspapers or magazines is passive. Conditioned as we are to passive learning, it's not surprising that we depend on it in our everyday communication with friends and co-workers.

Unfortunately, passive learning has a serious problem. It makes us tend to accept what we are told even when it is little more than hearsay (传间) and rumor.

Did you ever play the game Rumor? It begins when one person writes down a message but doesn't show it to anyone. Then the person whispers it, word for word, to another person. That person, in turn, whispers it to still another, and so on, through all the people playing the game. The last person writes down the message word for word as he or she hears it. Then the two written statements are compared. Typically, the original message has changed.

That's what happens in daily life. The simple fact that people repeat a story in their own words changes the story. Then, too, most people listen imperfectly. And many enjoy adding their own creative touch to a story, trying to improve on it, stamping it with their own personal style. Yet those who hear it think they know.

This process is also found among scholars and authors: a statement of opinions by one writer may be restated as the fact by another, who may in turn be quoted by yet another; and this process may continue, unless it occurs to someone to question the facts on which the original writer based his opinion or to challenge the interpretation he placed upon those facts.

“At almost any given age，most of us are getting better at some things and worse at others，”Joshua Hartshorne，an MIT cognitive(认知的) science researcher and the lead author of a study looking at how intelligence changes as we age，told Business Insider.His team quizzed thousands of people aged 10－90 on their ability to do things like remembering lists of words，recognizing faces，learning names，and doing math.Their results suggest that no matter your age，there’s almost always a new peak on the horizon.

The human brain has a remarkable capacity to recognize and identify faces，and scientists are just beginning to learn why.On average，we know that our ability to learn and remember new faces appears to peak shortly after our 30th birthday.

Having trouble focusing? The study suggests that our ability to maintain attention improves with age，reaching its peak around age 43.While younger adults may excel in the speed and flexibility of information processing，adults approaching their mid­years may have the greatest capacity to remain focused.

Dating is tough.One of the reasons could be that we’re generally bad at reading other people’s emotions until we reach our late 40s.That’s according to one component of Hartshorne’s study，which involved showing thousands of people images of faces cropped tightly around the eye area.Participants were asked to describe the emotion the person in the photo was feeling.Performance peaked for people aged around 48.

Many people believe that their math skills decline after they leave school and stop practicing arithmetic.But the next time you try to split up a check，keep this in mind：your ability to do basic subtraction and division doesn’t reach its apex until your 50th birthday.

Ever wonder why you always lose at Scrabble? Good news：Your best days may be ahead.According to people’s scores on multiple­choice vocabulary tests，most of us don’t reach our peak wordsmithing abilities until we’re in our late 60s or early 70s.