Baby rattles (拨浪鼓) are simple toys designed for babies. They are made of wood, plastic, and other things. 【小题1】 So parents usually put rattles near their babies and let babies play with them.

Rattles are more than simple toys when it comes to child development. A newborn baby’s vision (视力) is still underdeveloped and poor in the first few months. 【小题2】 When babies meet rattles for the first time, they may not even see the toys clearly. The sound and touch of the rattles let them begin to learn a world that does truly exist outside of them.

【小题3】 When holding a baby rattle and shaking it, a child will soon know that there’s a direct relationship between his actions and results. He’ll find the sound when he shakes the rattle. And he’ll find that the sound stops when he doesn’t shake it. Then he learns that shaking rattles can lead to the sound.

Baby rattles must be safe for babies. Factories should produce rattles through materials that are not harmful. As for parents, they should clean the surface of rattles before babies play with them. It’s because babies often taste things given to them. 【小题4】

Baby rattles are usually thrown away as a baby develops into a toddler (刚学步的儿童). Toddlers may still enjoy toys that produce noise. 【小题5】 So parents may need to prepare other toys to help their kids learn and grow.

Ernest Hemingway famously said that writers should “write hard and clear about what hurts”. Although Hemingway may not have known it at the time, research has now shown that writing about “what hurts” can help improve our mental health.

There are more than 200 studies that show the positive effect of writing on mental health. But while the psychological benefits are true for many people, researchers don’t completely agree on why or how writing helps. One opinion suggests that hiding feelings can lead to psychological pain. It stands to reason that writing might improve mental health because it offers a safe and free way to express feelings that were once hidden. However, recent studies have begun to show how an increase in self-awareness, rather than simply expressing feelings, could be the key to these improvements in mental health.

As a matter of fact, self-awareness is being able to turn your attention inward. By turning our attention inward, we can become more aware of our behavior, feelings, beliefs, and values. Research suggests that becoming more self-aware can increase our confidence and encourage us to be more willing to accept others. It can also help us to exercise more self-control and make better decisions.

Writing might be really helpful in increasing self-awareness because it can be practiced daily. There are three types of writing which can improve your self-awareness and, in turn, your mental health: expressive writing, reflective writing, and creative writing. Expressive writing is often used in therapeutic settings where people are asked to write about their thoughts and feelings related to a stressful life event. Reflective writing is regularly used in professional settings, often as a way to help nurses, doctors, teachers, psychologists, and social workers become better at their jobs. Poems, short stories, and novels are all considered forms of creative writing. Writing creatively offers a unique way to explore thoughts, feelings, ideas, and beliefs. For example, you could write a novel that shows your concerns about climate change or a children’s story that speaks about your beliefs about friendship. Writing creatively about challenging experiences, like sadness, can also offer a way to communicate to others something that you feel is too difficult to say directly.

So why not take some time to write down your feelings about a stressful event that has happened during the pandemic? Or write about a difficult work situation and consider what you have learned from it? If you prefer to do something more creative, then try writing a poem or story. Each of these pieces of writing will give you a chance to reflect on this past year, ask yourself important questions,and make creative choices. Spending just 15 minutes doing this may give you an opportunity to become more self-aware, which could lead to improvements in your mental health.

Air travel can be annoying. But research now suggests global warming could make it much worse. To get off the ground in really hot weather, planes may be forced to carry fewer passengers. That might mean a little more space, which would be good. However, it also would make the passengers pay more.

Average air temperatures around the world are rising because people are polluting the air with an increasing number of greenhouse gases, which, such as carbon dioxide, are a byproduct (副产品) of burning fuels. Those warmer temperatures can influence an airplane’s ability to fly because air molecules (分子) spread out more as the air warms. This produces less lift under a plane’s wings, so a plane must be lighter to take off in hot weather than on cooler days.

It can even prove too dangerous for some planes to attempt a take-off. A record of June heat wave in the American Southwest, for instance, caused flight cancellations in Phoenix, Ariz. One airline’s planes were cleared to operate only up to 47.8 degree Celsius. On June 20, Phoenix reached 48.3°C!

Radley Horton is a climate scientist at Columbia University. Two years ago, he and his graduate student Ethan David Coffel studied the impact of warming at four U.S. airports and found that warming of track could triple(使成三倍) the number of days when planes face weight restrictions. Later, they explored the impact of rising temperatures on live types of commercial planes flying out of 19 of the world’s busiest airports. In the coming decades, as many as one to three out of every 10 flights that take off during the hottest time of day could face weight. That would be equal to taking a dozen people off the plane, the researchers calculated.