Having a negative attitude on life and yourself is harmful to you and to the people around you. 【小题1】 But if you are willing to change the way that you view the world and yourself, then there are several things that you can do.

【小题2】

If you believe the world is a bad place, you will probably tend to have a negative attitude. As such, if you can work on changing your beliefs about the world, your attitude will likely follow suit. So try to look for evidence that is contrary to the belief that you hold.

Examine your ideas about the world.

Your negative ideas about the world may cause you to act a certain way and this can determine the result of some situations. 【小题3】And each time one of your predictions comes true, your negative views are reinforced. For example, if you think that the world is a cold, mean place and so you are cold and mean to people. As a result, people may be cold and mean to you in return.

Take responsibility for your attitude.

You have a lot of control over the way you think about the world. Try to keep that in mind and use it to your advantage. 【小题4】 Remember that although you may not be able to change your situation sometimes, you can still change how you react to them by adopting one kind of attitude over another.

Re-frame your focus.

In some sense, much of reality is personal, such as whether you enjoy what you are doing or not. This largely depends on the thoughts that you emphasize and focus on. For example, if you do not much enjoy your job, you might think with a bad attitude “This really sucks”. 【小题5】

Some people will do just about anything to save money. And I am one of hem. Take my family’s last vacation. It was my six-year-old son’s winter break from school, and we were heading home from Fort Lauderdale after a week long trip. The flight was overbooked, and Delta, the airline, offered us $400 per person in credits to give up our seats and leave the next day. I had meetings in New York, So I had to get back. But that didn’t mean my husband and my son couldn’t stay. I took my nine-month-old and took off for home.

The next day, my husband and son were offered more credits to take an even later flight. Yes, I encouraged—okay, ordered—them to wait at the airport, to “earn” more Delta Dollars. Our total take: $1,600. Not bad, huh?

Now some people may think I’m a bad mother and not such a great wife either. But as a big-time bargain hunter, I know the value of a dollar, And these days, a good deal is something few of us can afford to pass up.

I’ve made a living looking for the best deals and exposing (揭露) the worst tricks. I have been the consumer reporter of NBC’s Today show for over a decade. I have written a couple of books including one titled Tricks of the Trade: A Consumer Survival Guide. And I really do what I believe in.

I tell you this because there is no shame in getting your money’s worth, I’m also tightfisted when it comes to shoes, clothes for my children, and expensive restaurants. But I wouldn’t hesitate to spend on a good haircut. It keeps its shape longer, and it’s the first thing people notice, And I will also spend on a classic piece of furniture. Quality lasts.

Can training Your Working Memory Make You Smarter?

We would all like to increase our cognitive(认知的)ability beyond the limits set by Mother Nature. So it’s no wonder that brain-training programmes—which typically focus on training our working memory—are a multibillion-dollar industry. But can this kind of training really make us smarter?

Cognitive training sees the brain as a kind of muscle that can be made stronger with the right kind of practice. It consists of tasks or games carried out on computers or smart phones. Despite much research, there has so far been no agreement about its effectiveness. Some think that cognitive training increases a broad range of cognitive abilities, while others less optimistic.

Yet we do know that some cognitive skills, such as working memory and intelligence, tend to go together and are predictors of real-life skills such as work performance. Thus, training one cognitive skill might lead to an improvement in many other cognitive and non-cognitive skills. That is exactly the underlying hypothesis(假设)on which working-memory training is based.

To test this hypothesis, we examined all the studies about working-memory training we could find with normally developing children: 26 experiments and 1,601 total participants. Children represent an ideal test group: during childhood, skills are still at the beginning of their development. Thus, cognitive training is more likely to succeed with children than adults.

The results were very clear. Working-memory training did not show any effect on children’s fluid intelligence, a person’s ability to solve new problems and adapt to new situations. It didn’t influence their academic achievement or other cognitive abilities, either. The only reliable effect was that children got better at what they trained to do. No more, no less. So performing working-memory tasks does seem to make you better at doing them. Nonetheless, the fact that participants got better at such tasks does not necessarily mean that their working-memory ability increased. They may just have learnt how to perform that particular type of task.

The results do indicate that the use of working-memory training programs as an educational tool is fruitless. More generally, together with other research, the results contribute to disproving cognitive training companies promises of a better brain.

The results have even more important implications theoretically. They question the hypothesis that training general cognitive mechanisms can affect other cognitive or real-life skills. Beyond working-memory training, other recent studies have shown the improving cognitive skills outside music-including academic skills.

However, these negative results must not discourage us from training our cognitive and non-cognitive skills. We just have to be aware of the actual limitations of such practice in areas outside what we are actually training. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it-the most efficient way to develop a skill is, after all, to train that skill.