Traffic Light Reading is one of students’ favorites! And it’s so simple. Here’s what to do: Take three pens in different colors, most suitably red, orange and green. But it’s not too important as long as teachers and students are both clear on the color code they’re going to use.

Students read a text, not worrying too much about how much they understand. Teachers can ask them to reread when students are paying attention to vocabulary. Start by underlining the words that they understand completely (including names, numbers etc.) in green.

Then students reread the text and underline the words that look familiar—they maybe know them but aren’t too sure about them. You guessed i: in orange.

Finally, students read the text a third time underlining the words they clearly don’t understand in red. Sometimes, teachers might want to set students a limit for how many red words they underline, telling them only to underline the words that they believe are seriously blocking their understanding of the text as a whole. Generally, however, students are pleasantly surprised by how few words are red and how many are green. Seeing their ability laid out in a visual way really helps to increase confidence.

Once the whole text is underlined, teachers can give students a limit of 5, 10 or 15 words, depending on the length of the text, and tell them they're only allowed to look these words up in a dictionary. This helps them to recognize words that are actually getting in the way of their understanding of the text and words that they don’t know but actually don’t impact their whole understanding of the text.

This is a useful activity that can be done with a printed text, in a Google Doc, on Real time- Board, or set as a homework task for some independent study.

Researchers analyzed lyrics in best-selling songs from the 1950s to 2016 to find expressions of anger and sadness had increased, while words about joy had dropped.

The US study team looked at lyrics of more than 6,000 songs from Billboard Hot 100 m each year. These are the most popular songs in the US each year as chosen by music fans.

In the past songs were ranked mainly by record sales, radio and jukebox plays, but more recently it is based on other popularity indicators (指标) such as streaming and social media to reflect changes in music consumption. Tones expressed in each song were analyzed using ‘automatic quantitative sentiment (动量化情绪)’ which looked at each word or phrase in the song with a set of tones they express. The combination of the tones expressed by all words and phrases of the lyrics determines the sentiment of that song.

The sentiments of all Billboard Hot 100 songs in each year are averaged and the average of each year measured whether the expression of that sentiment increased, decreased or remained the same. The analysis showed the expression of anger in popular music lyrics has increased gradually over time. Study co-author Lior Shamir, of Lawrence Technological University in Michigan, said: ‘The change in lyrics sentiments does not necessarily reflect what the musicians and songwriters wanted to express, but is more related to what music consumers wanted to listen to in each year.’

Humans and elephants don’t always get along. In Africa and Asia, elephants damage equipment, farmers’ crops, and natural habitat for other species. If an elephant becomes a problem, humans may kill it. So local people and animal protectionists are trying to find better ways to keep elephants away from sensitive places. Now, researchers think they have a good tool to prevent elephants: honeybee pheromones (信息素).

“Elephants dislike being stung(叮咬) in the trunk, because it’s an extremely sensitive organ. Imagine being stung in your nose by a bee, and multiply that a few thousand times.” said Mark Wright, a professor at the University of Hawaii.

Kenyan farmers have long known that if they hang live beehives (蜂箱) around their farms, they will drive elephants away. The problem is how to manage hundreds of thousands of hives, if you have a huge area to protect. And then the idea came up to look at the alarm pheromones, which are chemicals that the bees release to launch an attack on something that’s damaging the hive.

So the researchers tested out an artificial mixture of chemicals that imitates (模仿) honey bees’ alarm pheromones. The researchers hung white socks treated with the artificial mixture as well as untreated control socks around an elephant watering hole, and then observed the animals’ behavior. “Elephants are really curious creatures. They’ll walk along and see something like a sock hanging on a branch. If it’s not treated with the alarm pheromones, they’ll pick it up, throw it around, and try to taste it, things like that. And in the case of the treated ones, they would show immediate signs of unease or uncertainty, and they’d eventually back off from them.”

In order to avoid the elephants more effectively, the researchers plan to make the pheromone mixture purer. That way, elephants will stay far away from wherever they should not be going-and both elephants and humans can coexist a bit more peacefully.