When Eugenie George first heard that her friend passed the accountant exam, her heart sank. She’d failed that test weeks earlier, and needed the certificate to advance her own career. “My inner child got upset,” recalls George. But then, she called her friend. “I told her I failed and admitted I was envious,” she says. Being frank shifted her attitude, and she was surprised to realize she could share her friend’s happiness and experience her own, in tum. “I congratulated my friend and told her she inspired me,” George says.

This is what scientists called freudenfreude, meaning finding pleasure in another person’s success, even if it doesn’t directly involve us. Freudenfreude is like social glue, says Catherine Chambliss, a professor of psychology at Ursinus College. It makes relationships “close and more enjoyable.” A study in 2021 examined freudenfreude’s role in daily life and found that it could improve life satisfaction and even help people co-operate during a conflict.

While the benefits of freudenfreude are plentiful, it doesn’t always come easily. If you were raised in a family that paired winning with self-worth, Chambliss says, you might misread someone else’s victory as your own personal shortcoming. Besides, mental health can also affect your ability to participate in someone else’s joy. Negative emotions like anger or dislike may lead to the opposite of freudenfreude.

Luckily, the ability of freudenfreude can be exercised. To help people strengthen joy-sharing muscles, Chambliss and his colleagues developed a programme called Freudenfreude Enhancement Training practices. They found that depressed students who used the practices for two weeks had an easier time expressing freudenfreude, which enhanced their relationships and improved their moods. Given that, having freudenfreude is beneficial and it is worthwhile to explore ways to encourage the feeling.

Freudenfreude doesn’t always come easily, and it is affected by your family environment and physical health.

Chopsticks(筷子)come in many different shapes and styles, and have been around since 1200 B.C.E. The utensils(器具)earned their place at the Chinese dinner table around 400 B.C.E. More than 20 percent of the world’s population relies on chopsticks for eating. China alone uses 45 billion disposable(一次性的)pairs per year. 【小题1】

China was the first to experiment with chopsticks nearly 3000 years ago. 【小题2】 The Chinese used them for cooking since they could dip them into boiling pots of water. Then China’s population boomed. Cooks were forced to conserve resources, which meant chopping foods into tiny bites that used less fuel to cook. Bite sized foods, paired with Chinese philosopher and vegetarian Confucius’ anti-knife beliefs, set up the utensils for widespread adoption beyond China.

【小题3】 Chinese chopsticks, for instance, are long and thick “to facilitate dining around the table,” Ruixi Hu, founder of Lost Plate Food Tours, says. Hu grew up in Chengdu, China, where she first used chopsticks at age 2. She now goes on food tours throughout Asia and she’s found many chopstick varieties.

In Japan, where bamboo chopsticks were adopted in 500 C.E., chopsticks have evolved over time. They’re now particularly fine-tuned for one of Japan’s main foods: fish. “Japanese chopsticks are short and sharp, mainly because the Japanese are good at eating fish, and it is easy to remove fish bones with sharp chopsticks,” Hu says. 【小题4】 That’s why their chopsticks don’t need to be as long.

Head over to South Korea where chopsticks look a bit different. 【小题5】 That’s because South Koreans love barbecue. The metal chopsticks won’t burn when diners are barbecuing their meat.

Genetically Modified (GM) food is unfortunately becoming more popular among farmers and food processors. Crops are being genetically modified to resist insects, plant diseases, insecticides(杀虫剂). Plants are also modified to look bigger and better. Unfortunately the end goal isn’t providing nutrition for people, it’s to increase profit margins and to make food look better. In fact many modern fruits and vegetables are twice the size of what they used to be while having far less vitamins, and not tasting good either. Now research is showing that genetically modified food might even be bad for you.

GM organisms are organisms that have genes inserted into their DNA in order to offer certain characteristics. In this way you can make it better, or make it last longer.

Jeffrey M. Smith has published a study about the dangers of GM food. It was discovered that when GM soy was fed to female rats they found that all their young died within 3 weeks compared to a natural 10% death rate. Their young were also born smaller and they later had problems becoming pregnant. A study of pigs found that they also became infertile(不育) after eating GM corn.

Many people are eating GM food without even realizing it. The solution to this problem is simple. Human beings existed in their current form for hundreds of thousands of years. For most of that time we ate a diet consisting of meat, fruit, vegetable, fish, eggs and nuts. This is our optimal diet which leads us to live a healthy and long life. But over the last 30 years North America has experienced diabetes, cancer and heart disease. All due to the misinformation provided by groups who work on behalf of the manufacturers of GM food. The way to avoid obesity, heart disease and cancer is by eating like our stone-age ancestors.