New lives for old phones

When a new mobile phone starts to be sold in stores, many people rush out to buy one. We all want the newest, latest thing. 【小题1】

Mike Townsend works at Total Recall, a mobile phone recycling company. “Don’t throw your old phone away. 【小题2】 If you throw it away, it goes with other rubbish to become landfill. In other words, it is put in a big hole in the ground — and it becomes a big problem,” he says.

Mobile phones contain some poisonous (有毒的) materials. If your phone goes to a landfill, these poisonous materials can get out and get into the water under the ground. That’s the water we need to drink or water that goes into rivers or the ocean. 【小题3】 That’s a lot of landfill and a lot of poisonous materials.

“At Total Recall, we separate the old phones into pieces. Most of the materials in a mobile phone can be recycled and used again. 【小题4】 For example, phone batteries (电池) contain nickel and cadmium. The nickel is used to make steel (钢), and the cadmium can be used to make new batteries,” explains Mike.

“【小题5】 You can usually just take it into a mobile phone shop and they’ll send it to us,” says Mike.

So, before you throw that old mobile phone away, use it one last time: search for a recycler near you and give them a call.

We all like to think that we are rational (理性的) thinkers, but poor decisions and choices are evident all around us: staying in bad relationships or boring jobs, taking up smoking, eating too much junk food; the list goes on. So why can’t we make better decisions? One reason appears to be what psychologists call “decision fatigue”: the idea that we all have a limited store of energy for making decisions and practising self-control. For example, if you are ground down by everyday struggles, you have less mental energy for good decisions.

However, studies point to the fact that deciding things early in the day is likely to lead to better outcomes. Most of us will have had the experience of going to bed with a seemingly unsolvable problem, only to wake up with a flash of inspiration the next morning. So decisions made when we feel least tired are more likely to be the right ones.

Another worthwhile strategy is to pretend that you are advising an imaginary friend, rather than relating decisions to your own life. This creates a distance between you and the issues in question, and can help you to think logically rather than emotionally.

People often advise making lists of advantages and disadvantages, and then prioritizing the items in each list. This can certainly be helpful, but we need to be careful not to over-think every decision. We may overestimate the value of information, and sometimes it is better simply to go with our gut instinct (直觉).

Perhaps the most important thing we can do to minimize the possibility of regret is to make sure that our decisions are in line with our life values; in other words, to have a life vision and be true to it. Instead of asking ourselves questions such as “Which option is safer?” or “Which option is best financially?”, it is far better to ask “How will I feel about this when I’m 70?”.

Having good conversations— with strangers or your friends— is an art. 【小题1】 Headlee, a podcast host, did a TED Talk about how to make a good conversation. Here’s her advice.

People think it means not looking at your email or texting during the conversation. It also means giving people your entire attention, ignoring anything unconnected. There is another thing. 【小题2】 Let’s think of listening like a river. We dam it up all the time when we stop listening to think about what we’re going to say next. Once that happens, you need to let such thoughts go out of your mind and return to the conversation.

Anything is OK. 【小题3】 “It is pleasurable to answer questions about yourself. So small talk is a way to let people do that,” Headlee explains. Remember Yes-or-No questions don’t lead the conversation far. For example, rather than asking, “Are you sitting down?” You might try, “What kind of chair would you like to sit in?”

If you’re getting too many details, it can be easy to lose focus on the big picture. Nobody cares about the exact date or somebody’s name or the movie you watched.

You have two options. One is to let it breathe. People say all sorts of things to fill a gap in the conversation— that can lead you down a new conversation. You can also address the awkward silence. “Admit it with a joke,” Headlee says. 【小题5】