Apps (short for applications) are becoming increasingly popular nowadays, and with good reason.They can help you out in just about every area of your life, whether it's keeping fit, communicating with others, or even learning a language.【小题1】 Here is what you should think about before downloading an app for language learning.

Learn from different sources (not just apps).

Any experienced language learners will tell you that the beauty of mastering a foreign language is the world which it opens up to you. This is a world of different sources of information, from newspapers and books to radio, TV, the Internet, and even real people. Would you limit yourself to one medium in your native language? 【小题2】

Establish your purpose and plan your habits.

Do you want to be fluent in weeks or do you use apps for goal setting and habit forming? Good apps are designed to help you fit your studies into your timetable. 【小题3】 These apps encourage habit building, because the successful formation of a habit ensures your stable and regular return.

【小题4】

I don’t mean posting your progress online. I mean social for real. I owe the speed of progress I made in Italian to the support of Jim, my partner in study time. Find a friend to accompany you. Take an evening class. Borrow a book. Buy a book. Book a week away and attend a language school. Just don't forget your phone!

Frankly speaking, the combination of apps, a language school, Jim’s support, evening classes and a chosen book or two proved extremely effective. 【小题5】

ELECTRICITY was once generated where it was used; now it comes from the grid （供电网）. So it is with computing power, once the province of mainframes and personal computers, and now moving into the “cloud” –networks of data centres that use the internet to supply all kinds of services, from e-mail and social networks to data storage and analysis.

The rise of cloud computing is rapid and causing huge disruption（扰乱）in the tech industry. The old guard is suffering: this week’s $67 billion merger between Dell and EMC, makers of computer and storage devices respectively, was a marriage forced by the rise of cloud. Disruptive newcomers are blooming： if Amazon’s cloud-computing unit were a stand-alone public company, it would probably be worth almost as much as Dell and EMC combined.

The gains for customers have been equally dramatic. Compared with older IT systems, cloud computing is often much cheaper. It adds tremendous flexibility: firms that need more computing capacity no longer have to spend weeds adding new servers and installing software. In the cloud they can get hold of it in minutes. Their applications can be updated continually rather than just every few mouths. Individual users can reach their e-mails, files and photos from any device, and cloud services also tend to be more secure, since providers know better than their customers how to protect their computing systems against hackers（黑客）.

But cloud computing makes one enduring problem worse : in the old IT world, once a firm or a consumer had decided on an operating system or database, it was difficult and costly to switch to another, in the cloud this “lock in “ is even worse. Cloud providers go to great lengths to make it easy to upload data. They accumulate huge amounts of complex information, which cannot easily be moved to an alternative provider.

Cloud firms also create a world of interconnected services, software and devices, which is convenient but only for as long as you don’t venture outside their universe. Being locked in to a provider is risky: firms can start to turn up the heat by increasing prices; and if a cloud provider goes bankrupt, its customers may have trouble getting their data back.

These risks have already let to a debate about whether the cloud needs stricter regulation. Some European politicians want to force cloud providers to ensure that data can be moved between them. That is too heavy-handed, not least because firm rules will hold back innovation in wat is still a young industry. The history of computing suggests that common standards may well emerge naturally in response to customers’ demands---just as in personal computers, where it is now much easier to use the same files on different systems.

You’re doing homework online for a science class. A question appears: Do newborn babies see the world in black and white? You don’t know the answer. Do you google it?

Searching online for the answer may get you a better grade on the homework. But it won’t necessarily help you learn. Researchers note that students who usually receive higher marks on the homework but lower test grades are much more likely to use the Internet for answers while completing their homework. With these findings in mind, the researchers are questioning the validity of homework as a useful learning tool.

Glass, a psychologist (心理学家), discovered this from analyzing homework and the grades on tests that he gave college students who took his courses from 2008 to 2017. He gave his students a series of online homework tasks. In 2008, only around 3 out of 20 students performed better on their homework than on the exam. By 2017, more than half of the students performed this way.

Glass wondered what caused this result. So he thought about what had changed over the 10 years. One big thing was the rise of smartphones. They existed in 2008, but were not common. Now almost everyone carries one. So it would be easier today to quickly go online and find the answer to almost any homework question. But students can’t use phones during an exam. And that might explain why they aren’t doing that well on the tests.

To test this, Glass and a co-author Kang asked students in 2017 and 2018 whether they came up with their homework answers themselves or looked them up. Students who tended to look up answers also tended to do better on homework than their exams.