about lifelong learning there is the famous proverb in chinese: never too old to learn. confucius the famous educator in ancient china also said: if i learn the classical literature "yi" from the age of 50 i would never make so many mistakes.

to sum up necessity of lifelong learning is mainly based on the following reasons: first of all the knowledge of modern society changes so quickly if not to learn new knowledge in time you will soon fall behind the times. for example using the mobile internet technology we can using a mobile phone to book a taxi pay various fees buy all kinds of goods etc. if a person may not grasp the knowledge especially senior people they will not use the convenience brought by internet.

secondly diligent in thinking can effectively prevent the occurrence of alzheimer's disease. this conclusion has been verified in medicine. finally a person who maintains the habit of lifelong learning can have a stronger advantage in occupation choice. this is not only good for the person but also for the country and the society. some people complain that they have too much work and have no time to read a book usually. but in fact lifelong learning is not only reading or having a class we can browse the web read e-books receiving distance courses through the internet conveniently. we can learn not only knowledge but also skills.

age cannot be a barrier to our lifelong learning. chu shijian once the king of china's tobacco industry had suffered a great setback before retirement. he was even put into prison. but at the age of 75 he began to study orange planting technology seriously and finally have a huge success in this area ten years late. harland sandoz of america began learning the fast-food lethal at his age of 83. when he was 88 years old his fast food chain often kentucky had distributed each corner of the world.

therefore lifelong learning is never too late to start let's start our plan today. thank you.

英语ted演讲稿篇2

the problem with these stories is that they show what the data shows: women systematically underestimate their own abilities. if you test men and women, and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like gpas, men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low. women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce. a study in the last two years of people entering the workforce out of college showed that 57 percent of boys entering, or men, i guess, are negotiating their first salary, and only seven percent of women. and most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, and women attribute it to other external factors. if you ask men why they did a good job,they'll say, "i'm awesome. obviously. why are you even asking?" if you ask women why they did a good job, what they'll say is someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard.

英语ted演讲稿篇3

my subject today is learning. and in that spirit, i want to spring on you all a pop quiz. ready? when does learning begin? now as you ponder that question, maybe you're thinking about the first day of preschool or kindergarten, the first time that kids are in a classroom with a teacher. or maybe you've called to mind the toddler phase when children are learning how to walk and talk and use a fork. maybe you've encountered the zero-to-three movement, which asserts that the most important years for learning are the earliest ones. and so your answer to my question would be: learning begins at birth.

well today i want to present to you an idea that may be surprising and may even seem implausible, but which is supported by the latest evidence from psychology and biology. and that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before we're born, while we're still in the womb. now i'm a science reporter. i write books and magazine articles. and i'm also a mother. and those two roles came together for me in a book that i wrote called "origins." "origins" is a report from the front lines of an exciting new field called fetal origins. fetal origins is a scientific discipline that emerged just about two decades ago, and it's based on the theory that our health and well-being throughout our lives is crucially affected by the nine months we spend in the womb. now this theory was of more than just intellectual interest to me. i was myself pregnant while i was doing the research for the book. and one of the most fascinating insights i took from this work is that we're all learning about the world even before we enter it.

when we hold our babies for the first time, we might imagine that they're clean slates, unmarked by life, when in fact, they've already been shaped by us and by the particular world we live in. today i want to share with you some of the amazing things that scientists are discovering about what fetuses learn while they're still in their mothers' bellies.

first of all, they learn the sound of their mothers' voices. because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother's abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus, the voices fetuses hear, starting around the fourth month of gestation, are muted and muffled. one researcher says that they probably sound a lot like the the voice of charlie brown's teacher in the old "peanuts" cartoon. but the pregnant woman's own voice reverberates through her body, reaching the fetus much more readily. and because the fetus is with her all the time, it hears her voice a lot. once the baby's born, it recognizes her voice and it prefers listening to her voice over anyone else's.

how can we know this? newborn babies can't do much, but one thing they're really good at is sucking. researchers take advantage of this fact by rigging up two rubber nipples, so that if a baby sucks on one, it hears a recording of its mother's voice on a pair of headphones, and if it sucks on the other nipple, it hears a recording of a female stranger's voice. babies quickly show their preference by choosing the first one. scientists also take advantage of the fact that babies will slow down their sucking when something interests them and resume their fast sucking when they get bored. this is how researchers discovered that, after women repeatedly read aloud a section of dr. seuss' "the cat in the hat" while they were pregnant, their newborn babies recognized that passage when they hear it outside the womb. my favorite experiment of this kind is the one that showed that the babies of women who watched a certain soap opera every day during pregnancy recognized the theme song of that show once they were born. so fetuses are even learning about the particular language that's spoken in the world that they'll be born into.

a study published last year found that from birth, from the moment of birth, babies cry in the accent of their mother's native language. french babies cry on a rising note while german babies end on a falling note, imitating the melodic contours of those languages. now why would this kind of fetal learning be useful? it may have evolved to aid the baby's survival. from the moment of birth, the baby responds most to the voice of the person who is most likely to care for it -- its mother. it even makes its cries sound like the mother's language, which may further endear the baby to the mother, and which may give the baby a head start in the critical task of learning how to understand and speak its native language.

but it's not just sounds that fetuses are learning about in utero. it's also tastes and smells. by seven months of gestation, the fetus' taste buds are fully developed, and its olfactory receptors, which allow it to smell, are functioning. the flavors of the food a pregnant woman eats find their way into the amniotic fluid, which is continuously swallowed by the fetus. babies seem to remember and prefer these tastes once they're out in the world. in one experiment, a group of pregnant women was asked to drink a lot of carrot juice during their third trimester of pregnancy, while another group of pregnant women drank only water. six months later, the women's infants were offered cereal mixed with carrot juice, and their facial expressions were observed while they ate it. the offspring of the carrot juice drinking women ate more carrot-flavored cereal, and from the looks of it, they seemed to enjoy it more.

a sort of french version of this experiment was carried out in dijon, france where researchers found that mothers who consumed food and drink flavored with licorice-flavored anise during pregnancy showed a preference for anise on their first day of life, and again, when they were tested later, on their fourth day of life. babies whose mothers did not eat anise during pregnancy showed a reaction that translated roughly as "yuck." what this means is that fetuses are effectively being taught by their mothers about what is safe and good to eat. fetuses are also being taught about the particular culture that they'll be joining through one of culture's most powerful expressions, which is food. they're being introduced to the characteristic flavors and spices of their culture's cuisine even before birth.

now it turns out that fetuses are learning even bigger lessons. but before i get to that, i want to address something that you may be wondering about. the notion of fetal learning may conjure up for you attempts to enrich the fetus -- like playing mozart through headphones placed on a pregnant belly. but actually, the nine-month-long process of molding and shaping that goes on in the womb is a lot more visceral and consequential than that. much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life -- the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she's exposed to, even the emotions she feels -- are shared in some fashion with her fetus. they make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself. the fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood. and often it does something more. it treats these maternal contributions as information, as what i like to call biological postcards from the world outside.

so what a fetus is learning about in utero is not mozart's "magic flute" but answers to questions much more critical to its survival. will it be born into a world of abundance or scarcity? will it be safe and protected, or will it face constant dangers and threats? will it live a long, fruitful life or a short, harried one? the pregnant woman's diet and stress level in particular provide important clues to prevailing conditions like a finger lifted to the wind. the resulting tuning and tweaking of a fetus' brain and other organs are part of what give us humans our enormous flexibility, our ability to thrive in a huge variety of environments, from the country to the city, from the tundra to the desert.

to conclude, i want to tell you two stories about how mothers teach their children about the world even before they're born. in the autumn of 1944, the darkest days of world war ii, german troops blockaded western holland, turning away all shipments of food. the opening of the nazi's siege was followed by one of the harshest winters in decades -- so cold the water in the canals froze solid. soon food became scarce, with many dutch surviving on just 500 calories a day -- a quarter of what they consumed before the war. as weeks of deprivation stretched into months, some resorted to eating tulip bulbs. by the beginning of may, the nation's carefully rationed food reserve was completely exhausted. the specter of mass starvation loomed. and then on may 5th, 1945, the siege came to a sudden end when holland was liberated by the allies.

the "hunger winter," as it came to be known, killed some 10,000 people and weakened thousands more. but there was another population that was affected -- the 40,000 fetuses in utero during the siege. some of the effects of malnutrition during pregnancy were immediately apparent in higher rates of stillbirths, birth defects, low birth weights and infant mortality. but others wouldn't be discovered for many years. decades after the "hunger winter," researchers documented that people whose mothers were pregnant during the siege have more obesity, more diabetes and more heart disease in later life than individuals who were gestated under normal conditions. these individuals' prenatal experience of starvation seems to have changed their bodies in myriad ways. they have higher blood pressure, poorer cholesterol profiles and reduced glucose tolerance -- a precursor of diabetes.

why would undernutrition in the womb result in disease later? one explanation is that fetuses are making the best of a bad situation. when food is scarce, they divert nutrients towards the really critical organ, the brain, and away from other organs like the heart and liver. this keeps the fetus alive in the short-term, but the bill comes due later on in life when those other organs, deprived early on, become more susceptible to disease.

but that may not be all that's going on. it seems that fetuses are taking cues from the intrauterine environment and tailoring their physiology accordingly. they're preparing themselves for the kind of world they will encounter on the other side of the womb. the fetus adjusts its metabolism and other physiological processes in anticipation of the environment that awaits it. and the basis of the fetus' prediction is what its mother eats. the meals a pregnant woman consumes constitute a kind of story, a fairy tale of abundance or a grim chronicle of deprivation. this story imparts information that the fetus uses to organize its body and its systems -- an adaptation to prevailing circumstances that facilitates its future survival. faced with severely limited resources, a smaller-sized child with reduced energy requirements will, in fact, have a better chance of living to adulthood.

the real trouble comes when pregnant women are, in a sense, unreliable narrators, when fetuses are led to expect a world of scarcity and are born instead into a world of plenty. this is what happened to the children of the dutch "hunger winter." and their higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are the result. bodies that were built to hang onto every calorie found themselves swimming in the superfluous calories of the post-war western diet. the world they had learned about while in utero was not the same as the world into which they were born.

here's another story. at 8:46 a.m. on september 11th, 2019, there were tens of thousands of people in the vicinity of the world trade center in new york -- commuters spilling off trains, waitresses setting tables for the morning rush, brokers already working the phones on wall street. 1,700 of these people were pregnant women. when the planes struck and the towers collapsed, many of these women experienced the same horrors inflicted on other survivors of the disaster -- the overwhelming chaos and confusion, the rolling clouds of potentially toxic dust and debris, the heart-pounding fear for their lives.

about a year after 9/11, researchers examined a group of women who were pregnant when they were exposed to the world trade center attack. in the babies of those women who developed post-traumatic stress syndrome, or ptsd, following their ordeal, researchers discovered a biological marker of susceptibility to ptsd -- an effect that was most pronounced in infants whose mothers experienced the catastrophe in their third trimester. in other words, the mothers with post-traumatic stress syndrome had passed on a vulnerability to the condition to their children while they were still in utero.

now consider this: post-traumatic stress syndrome appears to be a reaction to stress gone very wrong, causing its victims tremendous unnecessary suffering. but there's another way of thinking about ptsd. what looks like pathology to us may actually be a useful adaptation in some circumstances. in a particularly dangerous environment, the characteristic manifestations of ptsd -- a hyper-awareness of one's surroundings, a quick-trigger response to danger -- could save someone's life. the notion that the prenatal transmission of ptsd risk is adaptive is still speculative, but i find it rather poignant. it would mean that, even before birth, mothers are warning their children that it's a wild world out there, telling them, "be careful."

let me be clear. fetal origins research is not about blaming women for what happens during pregnancy. it's about discovering how best to promote the health and well-being of the next generation. that important effort must include a focus on what fetuses learn during the nine months they spend in the womb. learning is one of life's most essential activities, and it begins much earlier than we ever imagined.

thank you.

英语ted演讲稿篇4

this is tim ferriss circa 1979 a.d. age two. you can tell by the power squat, i was a very confident boy -- and not without reason. i had a very charming routine at the time, which was to wait until late in the evening when my parents were decompressing from a hard day's work, doing their crossword puzzles, watching television. i would run into the living room, jump up on the couch, rip the cushions off, throw them on the floor, scream at the top of my lungs and run out because i was the incredible hulk. (laughter) obviously, you see the resemblance. and this routine went on for some time.

when i was seven i went to summer camp. my parents found it necessary for peace of mind. and at noon each day the campers would go to a pond, where they had floating docks. you could jump off the end into the deep end. i was born premature. i was always very small. my left lung had collapsed when i was born. and i've always had buoyancy problems. so water was something that scared me to begin with. but i would go in on occasion. and on one particular day, the campers were jumping through inner tubes, they were diving through inner tubes. and i thought this would be great fun. so i dove through the inner tube, and the bully of the camp grabbed my ankles. and i tried to come up for air, and my lower back hit the bottom of the inner tube. and i went wild eyed and thought i was going to die. a camp counselor fortunately came over and separated us. from that point onward i was terrified of swimming. that is something that i did not get over. my inability to swim has been one of my greatest humiliations and embarrassments. that is when i realized that i was not the incredible hulk.

but there is a happy ending to this story. at age 31 -- that's my age now -- in august i took two weeks to re-examine swimming, and question all the of the obvious aspects of swimming. and went from swimming one lap -- so 20 yards -- like a drowning monkey, at about 200 beats per minute heart rate -- i measured it -- to going to montauk on long island, close to where i grew up, and jumping into the ocean and swimming one kilometer in open water, getting out and feeling better than when i went in. and i came out, in my speedos, european style, feeling like the incredible hulk.

and that's what i want everyone in here to feel like, the incredible hulk, at the end of this presentation. more specifically, i want you to feel like you're capable of becoming an excellent long-distance swimmer, a world-class language learner, and a tango champion. and i would like to share my art. if i have an art, it's deconstructing things that really scare the living hell out of me. so, moving onward.

swimming, first principles. first principles, this is very important. i find that the best results in life are often held back by false constructs and untested assumptions. and the turnaround in swimming came when a friend of mine said, "i will go a year without any stimulants" -- this is a six-double-espresso-per-day type of guy -- "if you can complete a one kilometer open water race." so the clock started ticking. i started seeking out triathletes because i found that lifelong swimmers often couldn't teach what they did. i tried kickboards. my feet would slice through the water like razors, i wouldn't even move. i would leave demoralized, staring at my feet. hand paddles, everything. even did lessons with olympians -- nothing helped. and then chris sacca, who is now a dear friend mine, had completed an iron man with 103 degree temperature, said, "i have the answer to your prayers." and he introduced me to the work of a man named terry laughlin who is the founder of total immersion swimming. that set me on the road to examining biomechanics.

so here are the new rules of swimming, if any of you are afraid of swimming, or not good at it. the first is, forget about kicking. very counterintuitive. so it turns out that propulsion isn't really the problem. kicking harder doesn't solve the problem because the average swimmer only transfers about three percent of their energy expenditure into forward motion. the problem is hydrodynamics. so what you want to focus on instead is allowing your lower body to draft behind your upper body, much like a small car behind a big car on the highway. and you do that by maintaining a horizontal body position. the only way you can do that is to not swim on top of the water. the body is denser than water. 95 percent of it would be, at least, submerged naturally.

so you end up, number three, not swimming, in the case of freestyle, on your stomach, as many people think, reaching on top of the water. but actually rotating from streamlined right to streamlined left, maintaining that fuselage position as long as possible. so let's look at some examples. this is terry. and you can see that he's extending his right arm below his head and far in front. and so his entire body really is underwater. the arm is extended below the head. the head is held in line with the spine, so that you use strategic water pressure to raise your legs up -- very important, especially for people with lower body fat. here is an example of the stroke. so you don't kick. but you do use a small flick. you can see this is the left extension. then you see his left leg. small flick, and the only purpose of that is to rotate his hips so he can get to the opposite side. and the entry point for his right hand -- notice this, he's not reaching in front and catching the water. rather, he is entering the water at a 45-degree angle with his forearm, and then propelling himself by streamlining -- very important. incorrect, above, which is what almost every swimming coach will teach you. not their fault, honestly. and i'll get to implicit versus explicit in a moment. below is what most swimmers will find enables them to do what i did, which is going from 21 strokes per 20-yard length to 11 strokes in two workouts with no coach, no video monitoring. and now i love swimming. i can't wait to go swimming. i'll be doing a swimming lesson later, for myself, if anyone wants to join me.

last thing, breathing. a problem a lot of us have, certainly, when you're swimming. in freestyle, easiest way to remedy this is to turn with body roll, and just to look at your recovery hand as it enters the water. and that will get you very far. that's it. that's really all you need to know.

languages. material versus method. i, like many people, came to the conclusion that i was terrible at languages. i suffered through spanish for junior high, first year of high school, and the sum total of my knowledge was pretty much, "donde esta el bano?" and i wouldn't even catch the response. a sad state of affairs. then i transferred to a different school sophomore year, and i had a choice of other languages. most of my friends were taking japanese. so i thought why not punish myself? i'll do japanese. six months later i had the chance to go to japan. my teachers assured me, they said, "don't worry. you'll have japanese language classes every day to help you cope. it will be an amazing experience." my first overseas experience in fact. so my parents encouraged me to do it. i left.

i arrived in tokyo. amazing. i couldn't believe i was on the other side of the world. i met my host family. things went quite well i think, all things considered. my first evening, before my first day of school, i said to my mother, very politely, "please wake me up at eight a.m." so, (japanese) but i didn't say (japanese). i said, (japanese). pretty close. but i said, "please rape me at eight a.m." (laughter) you've never seen a more confused japanese woman. (laughter)

i walked in to school. and a teacher came up to me and handed me a piece of paper. i couldn't read any of it -- hieroglyphics, it could have been -- because it was kanji, chinese characters adapted into the japanese language. asked him what this said. and he goes, "ahh, okay okay, eehto, world history, ehh, calculus, traditional japanese." and so on. and so it came to me in waves. there had been something lost in translation. the japanese classes were not japanese instruction classes, per se. they were the normal high school curriculum for japanese students -- the other 4,999 students in the school, who were japanese, besides the american. and that's pretty much my response. (laughter)

and that set me on this panic driven search for the perfect language method. i tried everything. i went to kinokuniya. i tried every possible book, every possible cd. nothing worked until i found this. this is the joyo kanji. this is a tablet rather, or a poster of the 1,945 common-use characters as determined by the ministry of education in 1981. many of the publications in japan limit themselves to these characters, to facilitate literacy -- some are required to. and this became my holy grail, my rosetta stone.

as soon as i focused on this material, i took off. i ended up being able to read asahi shinbu, asahi newspaper, about six months later -- so a total of 11 months later -- and went from japanese i to japanese vi. ended up doing translation work at age 16 when i returned to the u.s., and have continued to apply this material over method approach to close to a dozen languages now. someone who was terrible at languages, and at any given time, speak, read and write five or six. this brings us to the point, which is, it's oftentimes what you do, not how you do it, that is the determining factor. this is the difference between being effective -- doing the right things -- and being efficient -- doing things well whether or not they're important.

you can also do this with grammar. i came up with these six sentences after much experimentation. having a native speaker allow you to deconstruct their grammar, by translating these sentences into past, present, future, will show you subject, object, verb, placement of indirect, direct objects, gender and so forth. from that point, you can then, if you want to, acquire multiple languages, alternate them so there is no interference. we can talk about that if anyone in interested. and now i love languages.

so ballroom dancing, implicit versus explicit -- very important. you might look at me and say, "that guy must be a ballroom dancer." but no, you'd be wrong because my body is very poorly designed for most things -- pretty well designed for lifting heavy rocks perhaps. i used to be much bigger, much more muscular. and so i ended up walking like this. i looked a lot like an orangutan, our close cousins, or the incredible hulk. not very good for ballroom dancing.

i found myself in argentina in 2005, decided to watch a tango class -- had no intention of participating. went in, paid my ten pesos, walked up -- 10 women two guys, usually a good ratio. the instructor says, "you are participating." immediately: death sweat. (laughter) fight-or-flight fear sweat, because i tried ballroom dancing in college -- stepped on the girl's foot with my heel. she screamed. i was so concerned with her perception of what i was doing, that it exploded in my face, never to return to the ballroom dancing club. she comes up, and this was her approach, the teacher. "okay, come on, grab me." gorgeous assistant instructor. she was very pissed off that i had pulled her from her advanced practice. so i did my best. i didn't know where to put my hands. and she pulled back, threw down her arms, put them on her hips, turned around and yelled across the room, "this guy is built like a god-damned mountain of muscle, and he's grabbing me like a frenchman," (laughter) which i found encouraging. (laughter) everyone burst into laughter. i was humiliated. she came back. she goes, "come on. i don't have all day." as someone who wrestled since age eight, i proceeded to crush her, "of mice and men" style. and she looked up and said, "now that's better." so i bought a month's worth of classes. (laughter)

and proceeded to look at -- i wanted to set competition so i'd have a deadline -- parkinson's law, the perceived complexity of a task will expand to fill the time you allot it. so i had a very short deadline for a competition. i got a female instructor first, to teach me the female role, the follow, because i wanted to understand the sensitivities and abilities that the follow needed to develop, so i wouldn't have a repeat of college. and then i took an inventory of the characteristics, along with her, of the of the capabilities and elements of different dancers who'd won championships. i interviewed these people because they all taught in buenos aires. i compared the two lists, and what you find is that there is explicitly, expertise they recommended, certain training methods. then there were implicit commonalities that none of them seemed to be practicing. now the protectionism of argentine dance teachers aside, i found this very interesting. so i decided to focus on three of those commonalities. long steps. so a lot of milongueros -- the tango dancers will use very short steps. i found that longer steps were much more elegant. so you can have -- and you can do it in a very small space in fact. secondly, different types of pivots. thirdly, variation in tempo. these seemed to be the three areas that i could exploit to compete if i wanted to comptete against people who'd been practicing for 20 to 30 years.

that photo is of the semi-finals of the buenos aires championships, four months later. then one month later, went to the world championships, made it to the semi-final. and then set a world record, following that, two weeks later. i want you to see part of what i practiced. i'm going to jump forward here. this is the instructor that alicia and i chose for the male lead. his name is gabriel misse. one of the most elegant dancers of his generation, known for his long steps, and his tempo changes and his pivots. alicia, in her own right, very famous. so i think you'll agree, they look quite good together. now what i like about this video is it's actually a video of the first time they ever danced together because of his lead. he had a strong lead. he didn't lead with his chest, which requires you lean forward. i couldn't develop the attributes in my toes, the strength in my feet, to do that. so he uses a lead that focuses on his shoulder girdle and his arm. so he can lift the woman to break her, for example. that's just one benefit of that. so then we broke it down. this would be an example of one pivot. this is a back step pivot. there are many different types. i have hundreds of hours of footage -- all categorized, much like george carlin categorized his comedy. so using my arch-nemesis, spanish, no less, to learn tango.

so fear is your friend. fear is an indicator. sometimes it shows you what you shouldn't do. more often than not it shows you exactly what you should do. and the best results that i've had in life, the most enjoyable times, have all been from asking a simple question: what's the worst that can happen? especially with fears you gained when you were a child. take the analytical frameworks, the capabilities you have, apply them to old fears. apply them to very big dreams.

and when i think of what i fear now, it's very simple. when i imagine my life, what my life would have been like without the educational opportunities that i had, it makes me wonder. i've spent the last two years trying to deconstruct the american public school system, to either fix it or replace it. and have done experiments with about 50,000 students thus far -- built, i'd say, about a half dozen schools, my readers, at this point. and if any of you are interested in that, i would love to speak with you. i know nothing. i'm a beginner. but i ask a lot of questions, and i would love your advice. thank you very much. (applause)

英语ted演讲稿篇5

i can't even notice that the men's hands are still raised, and the women's hands are still raised, how good are we as managers of our companies and our organizations at seeing that the men are reaching for opportunitiesmore than women?" we've got to get women to sit at the number two: make your partner a real partner. i've become convinced that we've made more progress in the workforce than we have in the home. the data shows this very clearly. if a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does. so she's got three jobs or two jobs, and he's got one. who do you think drops out when someone needs to be home more? the causes of this are really complicated, and i don't have time to go into them. and i don't think sunday football-watching and general laziness is the cause.

英语ted演讲稿篇6

three mirrors reflect the way i learn english after i came back from the “21st century-ericsson cup”7th national english speaking competition with the award of the “most promising speaker”, people kept asking me the same question over and over again. “how did you learn english, especially as a non-english major?” actually i believe that a hundred people would have a hundred of ways to learn english well. however, i would like to share my personal experience of english learning with those who have the enthusiasm for improve their english. since i have set up three mirrors in my prepared speech in hoping that they would guide our young generation on the way to globalization, i would like to maintain three mirrors here to reflect how i learned english.

the first mirror, i assume, should reflect a steady foundation. this involves my first few years of english learning, which i consider as the key factor of all my achievements in the years to follow. at that time i entered the middle school attached to xi’an jiaoton university, i could only say my abcs while others in my class could at least communicate in simple english. all the tales about the frightfulness of learning english then popped up in my mind and made me feel scared. fortunately my first english teacher was very experienced in enlightening her students on english learning. she was a kind woman with a charming smile. but her homework assignments were not easy task: they required us to read after the tape for 20 times and recite the whole text. so it was quite natural that most of my classmates only recited the short essay within a short time and then went to play. but my fear of not being able to say a single word, made me sit down and immerse myself in what the teacher had asked me to do.

英语ted演讲稿篇7

in the modern society study english is becoming more important and popular. but when i was young, i didn’t know of this and prefer to play outside rather than learn english. but my mother said :“english is the necessary tools to talk with foreigners, so you should study in an english class. believe yourself, you can certainly study english well!”finally i agreed my mom’s opinion and began to study ladder english when i was five.

at the beginning i was happy to study, because it was fun in the english class. we played games, and only studied five words, sentence a time. we also learned to sing a lot of english songs. in this studying environment, i was interested in english for the first time.

when i was in grade two, my mother thought that i should study english formally, so she let me study in the class of teacher ye of young palace of beijing. in her class i began to learn the new concept english and touched the grammar for the first time. teacher ye let us practice the oral english, listening and writing. although i should remember much more words than before and had to practice listening and writing every day, and must take the crowded bus to school for two hours every week, i was very happy because i could learn much knowledge that not taught in school.

with my mother and teacher’s encouragement and teaching, i studied very hard and won many prize in the competition. when i was in grade four, i passed pets 1 with the score of 88 of writing, and 5 of oral english, and i passed pets 2 in grade five. i was very happy and excited because i had the experience of talking with foreigners, and even used english to help some people when they met the communication problem. i was also very proud when the foreign

up till now, i have been studied english for about 6 years. i deeply realize the importance of learning english. i will continue to study in the future, and i really appreciate my mother and my english teacher,too. this year beijing will host the xx olympic games, i believe that master english well will certain help me to do some useful work for this olympics.

英语ted演讲稿篇8

what i'd like to do today is talk about one of my favorite subjects, and that is the neuroscience of sleep.

now, there is a sound -- (alarm clock) -- aah, it worked -- a sound that is desperately, desperately familiar to most of us, and of course it's the sound of the alarm clock. and what that truly ghastly, awful sound does is stop the single most important behavioral experience that we have, and that's sleep. if you're an average sort of person, 36 percent of your life will be spent asleep, which means that if you live to 90, then 32 years will have been spent entirely asleep.

now what that 32 years is telling us is that sleep at some level is important. and yet, for most of us, we don't give sleep a second thought. we throw it away. we really just don't think about sleep. and so what i'd like to do today is change your views, change your ideas and your thoughts about sleep. and the journey that i want to take you on, we need to start by going back in time.

"enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber." any ideas who said that? shakespeare's julius caesar. yes, let me give you a few more quotes. "o sleep, o gentle sleep, nature's soft nurse, how have i frighted thee?" shakespeare again, from -- i won't say it -- the scottish play. [correction: henry iv, part 2] (laughter) from the same time: "sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together." extremely prophetic, by thomas dekker, another elizabethan dramatist.

but if we jump forward 400 years, the tone about sleep changes somewhat. this is from thomas edison, from the beginning of the 20th century. "sleep is a criminal waste of time and a heritage from our cave days." bang. (laughter) and if we also jump into the 1980s, some of you may remember that margaret thatcher was reported to have said, "sleep is for wimps." and of course the infamous -- what was his name? -- the infamous gordon gekko from "wall street" said, "money never sleeps."

what do we do in the 20th century about sleep? well, of course, we use thomas edison's light bulb to invade the night, and we occupied the dark, and in the process of this occupation, we've treated sleep as an illness, almost. we've treated it as an enemy. at most now, i suppose, we tolerate the need for sleep, and at worst perhaps many of us think of sleep as an illness that needs some sort of a cure. and our ignorance about sleep is really quite profound.

why is it? why do we abandon sleep in our thoughts? well, it's because you don't do anything much while you're asleep, it seems. you don't eat. you don't drink. and you don't have sex. well, most of us anyway. and so therefore it's -- sorry. it's a complete waste of time, right? wrong. actually, sleep is an incredibly important part of our biology, and neuroscientists are beginning to explain why it's so very important. so let's move to the brain.

now, here we have a brain. this is donated by a social scientist, and they said they didn't know what it was, or indeed how to use it, so -- (laughter) sorry. so i borrowed it. i don't think they noticed. okay. (laughter)

the point i'm trying to make is that when you're asleep, this thing doesn't shut down. in fact, some areas of the brain are actually more active during the sleep state than during the wake state. the other thing that's really important about sleep is that it doesn't arise from a single structure within the brain, but is to some extent a network property, and if we flip the brain on its back -- i love this little bit of spinal cord here -- this bit here is the hypothalamus, and right under there is a whole raft of interesting structures, not least the biological clock. the biological clock tells us when it's good to be up, when it's good to be asleep, and what that structure does is interact with a whole raft of other areas within the hypothalamus, the lateral hypothalamus, the ventrolateral preoptic nuclei. all of those combine, and they send projections down to the brain stem here. the brain stem then projects forward and bathes the cortex, this wonderfully wrinkly bit over here, with neurotransmitters that keep us awake and essentially provide us with our consciousness. so sleep arises from a whole raft of different interactions within the brain, and essentially, sleep is turned on and off as a result of a range of

okay. so where have we got to? we've said that sleep is complicated and it takes 32 years of our life. but what i haven't explained is what sleep is about. so why do we sleep? and it won't surprise any of you that, of course, the scientists, we don't have a consensus. there are dozens of different ideas about why we sleep, and i'm going to outline three of those.

the first is sort of the restoration idea, and it's somewhat intuitive. essentially, all the stuff we've burned up during the day, we restore, we replace, we rebuild during the night. and indeed, as an explanation, it goes back to aristotle, so that's, what, 2,300 years ago. it's gone in and out of fashion. it's fashionable at the moment because what's been shown is that within the brain, a whole raft of genes have been shown to be turned on only during sleep, and those genes are associated with restoration and metabolic pathways. so there's good evidence for the whole restoration hypothesis.

what about energy conservation? again, perhaps intuitive. you essentially sleep to save calories. now, when you do the sums, though, it doesn't really pan out. if you compare an individual who has slept at night, or stayed awake and hasn't moved very much, the energy saving of sleeping is about 110 calories a night. now, that's the equivalent of a hot dog bun. now, i would say that a hot dog bun is kind of a meager return for such a complicated and demanding behavior as sleep. so i'm less convinced by the energy conservation idea.

but the third idea i'm quite attracted to, which is brain processing and memory consolidation. what we know is that, if after you've tried to learn a task, and you sleep-deprive individuals, the ability to learn that task is smashed. it's really hugely attenuated. so sleep and memory consolidation is also very important. however, it's not just the laying down of memory and recalling it. what's turned out to be really exciting is that our ability to come up with novel solutions to complex problems is hugely enhanced by a night of sleep. in fact, it's been estimated to give us a threefold advantage. sleeping at night enhances our creativity. and what seems to be going on is that, in the brain, those neural connections that are important, those synaptic connections that are important, are linked and strengthened, while those that are less important tend to fade away and be less important.

okay. so we've had three explanations for why we might sleep, and i think the important thing to realize is that the details will vary, and it's probable we sleep for multiple different reasons. but sleep is not an indulgence. it's not some sort of thing that we can take on board rather casually. i think that sleep was once likened to an upgrade from economy to business class, you know, the equiavlent of. it's not even an upgrade from economy to first class. the critical thing to realize is that if you don't sleep, you don't fly. essentially, you never get there, and what's extraordinary about much of our society these days is that we are desperately sleep-deprived.

so let's now look at sleep deprivation. huge sectors of society are sleep-deprived, and let's look at our sleep-o-meter. so in the 1950s, good data suggests that most of us were getting around about eight hours of sleep a night. nowadays, we sleep one and a half to two hours less every night, so we're in the six-and-a-half-hours-every-night league. for teenagers, it's worse, much worse. they need nine hours for full brain performance, and many of them, on a school night, are only getting five hours of sleep. it's simply not enough. if we think about other sectors of society, the aged, if you are aged, then your ability to sleep in a single block is somewhat disrupted, and many sleep, again, less than five hours a night. shift work. shift work is extraordinary, perhaps 20 percent of the working population, and the body clock does not shift to the demands of working at night. it's locked onto the same light-dark cycle as the rest of us. so when the poor old shift worker is going home to try and sleep during the day, desperately tired, the body clock is saying, "wake up. this is the time to be awake." so the quality of sleep that you get as a night shift worker is usually very poor, again in that sort of five-hour region. and then, of course, tens of millions of people suffer from jet lag. so who here has jet lag? well, my goodness gracious. well, thank you very much indeed for not falling asleep, because that's what your brain is craving.

one of the things that the brain does is indulge in micro-sleeps, this involuntary falling asleep, and you have essentially no control over it. now, micro-sleeps can be sort of somewhat embarrassing, but they can also be deadly. it's been estimated that 31 percent of drivers will fall asleep at the wheel at least once in their life, and in the u.s., the statistics are pretty good: 100,000 accidents on the freeway have been associated with tiredness, loss of vigilance, and falling asleep. a hundred thousand a year. it's extraordinary. at another level of terror, we dip into the tragic accidents at chernobyl and indeed the space shuttle challenger, which was so tragically lost. and in the investigations that followed those disasters, poor judgment as a result of extended shift work and loss of vigilance and tiredness was attributed to a big chunk of those disasters.

so when you're tired, and you lack sleep, you have poor memory, you have poor creativity, you have increased impulsiveness, and you have overall poor judgment. but my friends, it's so much worse than that.

(laughter)

if you are a tired brain, the brain is craving things to wake it up. so drugs, stimulants. caffeine represents the stimulant of choice across much of the western world. much of the day is fueled by caffeine, and if you're a really naughty tired brain, nicotine. and of course, you're fueling the waking state with these stimulants, and then of course it gets to 11 o'clock at night, and the brain says to itself, "ah, well actually, i need to be asleep fairly shortly. what do we do about that when i'm feeling completely wired?" well, of course, you then resort to alcohol. now alcohol, short-term, you know, once or twice, to use to mildly sedate you, can be very useful. it can actually ease the sleep transition. but what you must be so aware of is that alcohol doesn't provide sleep, a biological mimic for sleep. it sedates you. so it actually harms some of the neural proccessing that's going on during memory consolidation and memory recall. so it's a short-term acute measure, but for goodness sake, don't become addicted to alcohol as a way of getting to sleep every night.

another connection between loss of sleep is weight gain. if you sleep around about five hours or less every night, then you have a 50 percent likelihood of being obese. what's the connection here? well, sleep loss seems to give rise to the release of the hormone ghrelin, the hunger hormone. ghrelin is released. it gets to the brain. the brain says, "i need carbohydrates," and what it does is seek out carbohydrates and particularly sugars. so there's a link between tiredness and the metabolic predisposition for weight gain.

stress. tired people are massively stressed. and one of the things of stress, of course, is loss of memory, which is what i sort of just then had a little lapse of. but stress is so much more. so if you're acutely stressed, not a great problem, but it's sustained stress associated with sleep loss that's the problem. so sustained stress leads to suppressed immunity, and so tired people tend to have higher rates of overall infection, and there's some very good studies showing that shift workers, for example, have higher rates of cancer. increased levels of stress throw glucose into the circulation. glucose becomes a dominant part of the vasculature and essentially you become glucose intolerant. therefore, diabetes 2. stress increases cardiovascular disease as a result of raising blood pressure. so there's a whole raft of things associated with sleep loss that are more than just a mildly impaired brain, which is where i think most people think that sleep loss resides.

so at this point in the talk, this is a nice time to think, well, do you think on the whole i'm getting enough sleep? so a quick show of hands. who feels that they're getting enough sleep here? oh. well, that's pretty impressive. good. we'll talk more about that later, about what are your tips.

so most of us, of course, ask the question, "well, how do i know whether i'm getting enough sleep?" well, it's not rocket science. if you need an alarm clock to get you out of bed in the morning, if you are taking a long time to get up, if you need lots of stimulants, if you're grumpy, if you're irritable, if you're told by your work colleagues that you're looking tired and irritable, chances are you are sleep-deprived. listen to them. listen to yourself.

what do you do? well -- and this is slightly offensive -- sleep for dummies: make your bedroom a haven for sleep. the first critical thing is make it as dark as you possibly can, and also make it slightly cool. very important. actually, reduce your amount of light exposure at least half an hour before you go to bed. light increases levels of alertness and will delay sleep. what's the last thing that most of us do before we go to bed? we stand in a massively lit bathroom looking into the mirror cleaning our teeth. it's the worst thing we can possibly do before we went to sleep. turn off those mobile phones. turn off those computers. turn off all of those things that are also going to excite the brain. try not to drink caffeine too late in the day, ideally not after lunch. now, we've set about reducing light exposure before you go to bed, but light exposure in the morning is very good at setting the biological clock to the light-dark cycle. so seek out morning light. basically, listen to yourself. wind down. do those sorts of things that you know are going to ease you off into the honey-heavy dew of slumber.

okay. that's some facts. what about some myths?

teenagers are lazy. no. poor things. they have a biological predisposition to go to bed late and get up late, so give them a break.

we need eight hours of sleep a night. that's an average. some people need more. some people need less. and what you need to do is listen to your body. do you need that much or do you need more? simple as that.

old people need less sleep. not true. the sleep demands of the aged do not go down. essentially, sleep fragments and becomes less robust, but sleep requirements do not go down.

and the fourth myth is, early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. well that's wrong at so many different levels. (laughter) there is no, no evidence that getting up early and going to bed early gives you more wealth at all. there's no difference in socioeconomic status. in my experience, the only difference between morning people and evening people is that those people that get up in the morning early are just horribly smug.

(laughter) (applause)

okay. so for the last part, the last few minutes, what i want to do is change gears and talk about some really new, breaking areas of neuroscience, which is the association between mental health, mental illness and sleep disruption. we've known for 130 years that in severe mental illness, there is always, always sleep disruption, but it's been largely ignored. in the 1970s, when people started to think about this again, they said, "yes, well, of course you have sleep disruption in schizophrenia because they're on anti-psychotics. it's the anti-psychotics causing the sleep problems," ignoring the fact that for a hundred years previously, sleep disruption had been reported before anti-psychotics.

so what's going on? lots of groups, several groups are studying conditions like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar, and what's going on in terms of sleep disruption. we have a big study which we published last year on schizophrenia, and the data were quite extraordinary. in those individuals with schizophrenia, much of the time, they were awake during the night phase and then they were asleep during the day. other groups showed no 24-hour patterns whatsoever. their sleep was absolutely smashed. and some had no ability to regulate their sleep by the light-dark cycle. they were getting up later and later and later and later each night. it was smashed.

so what's going on? and the really exciting news is that mental illness and sleep are not simply associated but they are physically linked within the brain. the neural networks that predispose you to normal sleep, give you normal sleep, and those that give you normal mental health are overlapping. and what's the evidence for that? well, genes that have been shown to be very important in the generation of normal sleep, when mutated, when changed, also predispose individuals to mental health problems. and last year, we published a study which showed that a gene that's been linked to schizophrenia, which, when mutated, also smashes the sleep. so we have evidence of a genuine mechanistic overlap between these two important systems.

other work flowed from these studies. the first was that sleep disruption actually precedes certain types of mental illness, and we've shown that in those young individuals who are at high risk of developing bipolar disorder, they already have a sleep abnormality prior to any clinical diagnosis of bipolar. the other bit of data was that sleep disruption may actually exacerbate, make worse the mental illness state. my colleague dan freeman has used a range of agents which have stabilized sleep and reduced levels of paranoia in those individuals by 50 percent.

so what have we got? we've got, in these connections, some really exciting things. in terms of the neuroscience, by understanding the neuroscience of these two systems, we're really beginning to understand how both sleep and mental illness are generated and regulated within the brain. the second area is that if we can use sleep and sleep disruption as an early warning signal, then we have the chance of going in. if we know that these individuals are vulnerable, early intervention then becomes possible. and the third, which i think is the most exciting, is that we can think of the sleep centers within the brain as a new therapeutic target. stabilize sleep in those individuals who are vulnerable, we can certainly make them healthier, but also alleviate some of the appalling symptoms of mental illness.

so let me just finish. what i started by saying is take sleep seriously. our attitudes toward sleep are so very different from a pre-industrial age, when we were almost wrapped in a duvet. we used to understand intuitively the importance of sleep. and this isn't some sort of crystal-waving nonsense. this is a pragmatic response to good health. if you have good sleep, it increases your concentration, attention, decision-making, creativity, social skills, health. if you get sleep, it reduces your mood changes, your stress, your levels of anger, your impulsivity, and your tendency to drink and take drugs. and we finished by saying that an understanding of the neuroscience of sleep is really informing the way we think about some of the causes of mental illness, and indeed is providing us new ways to treat these incredibly debilitating conditions.

jim butcher, the fantasy writer, said, "sleep is god. go worship." and i can only recommend that you do the same.

thank you for your attention.

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