I have been using the Internet since I was five years old, when my dad first sat me down in front of a computer and connected me to the World Wide Web.

I’ve always felt like a master of the Internet world. AOL Instant Messaging, MSN, Gmail, Facebook, Myspace—I’ve got them all under control. I thought there was nothing more to it besides checking my email and wasting my time, until I was introduced to e-commerce: business on the Internet.

My friends often said they got cheap textbooks off Amazon.com, or had a good deal on Steve Madden boots that were on sale at SteveMadden.com. Unfortunately for me, I continued my “e-commerce-less” Web-surfing, unaware of all the deals I was missing out on.

That is, of course, until my sister finally sold the idea to me.

“Why are all these packages arriving in the mail for you, Katy?” I asked her one day. Strange envelopes had been put on our doorstep for weeks now, each one always addressed to my sister.

“Oh, it’s the stuff I ordered online!” she answered. I watched in surprise as she opened item after item. There was no way our parents were letting her spend that much money—online or off!

“How much did all of this cost?”

“Oh, only about $15 in all!” She said excitedly. “Everything on eBay is on sale! It’s better than going to the mall.”

I felt as if in my entire life, there had been a store right in my backyard that I had never walked into! That week, I ordered a used Spanish textbook for my summer course online for 10 percent of the publishing price. A few days later, I bought an iPod protector and a book or two via the wonderful eBay.com.

Students perform less well in final exams if smartphones are allowed in class, for non-academic (非学业的) purposes in lectures, a new study in Educational Psychology finds. Students who don’t use smartphones themselves but attend lectures where their use is acceptable also do worse, suggesting that smartphone use damages the group learning environment.

Researchers from Rutgers University in the US performed an in-class experiment to test whether dividing attention between smartphones and the lecturer during the class affected students’ performance in within-lecture tests and a final exam. 118 students at Rutgers University took part in the experiment during one term of their course. Smartphones were not allowed in half of the lectures and allowed in the other half. When smartphones were allowed, students were asked to record whether they had used them for non-academic purposes during the lecture.

The study found that having a smartphone didn’t lower students’ scores in comprehension tests within lectures, but it did lower scores in the final exam by at least 5%, or half a grade. This finding shows for the first time that the main effect of divided attention in the classroom is on the length of time in keeping memory, with fewer things of a study task later remembered. In addition, when the use of smartphones was allowed in class, performance was also poorer for students who did not use them as well as for those who did.

The study’s lead author, Professor Arnold Glass, added: “These findings should alarm students and teachers that dividing attention is having a not obvious but harmful effect that is damaging their exam performance and final grade. To help manage the use of smartphones in the classroom, teachers should explain to students the alarming effect—not only for themselves, but for the whole class.”

This is the first-ever study in an actual classroom showing a relationship between losing attention from smartphones and exam performance. However, more researches are required to see how students are affected by using smartphones after school.

People will tell you the only way to really learn a language is to completely immerse(浸入)yourself in a country where that language is spoken. Not all language learners, of course, will have the opportunity to spend some time in an immersion environment. But if you can't actually fly across the world to learn a new language, you can always create an immersion environment where you can talk to native speakers.

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