阅读与填词look · mind · sense

1Lin Hao had booked the window seat weeks earlier. The last hour of the train trip to Qingdao ran along the coast, and he wanted the best view of the sea. On the morning of the trip, the train departed twenty minutes late.

2An old man sat down across the aisle. Again and again he turned toward the window on Lin Hao's side, although there was nothing to see but the grey wall of the station.

3When the train finally left the city, the old man began to talk. He was on his way to his old captain's eightieth birthday party. “I worked on his fishing boat for forty years,” he said. “Now I live inland with my daughter. I haven't seen the sea for years.”

4Lin Hao looked at his window, then at the old man. He stood up. “Would you mind swapping seats with me?” he asked. “I feel a bit sick when I sit by the window.” It was not true, but the man agreed immediately.

5Twenty minutes later, the sea came into view. The old man put his hand on the glass and said nothing. From the aisle seat, Lin Hao could see only a small part of the water.

6In Qingdao, the old man took a small shell out of his pocket and pressed it into Lin Hao's hand. “For the boy who gave me the sea,” he said.

1Love adventure stories, science or sport? This summer, Riverside Library invites students aged 12 to 18 to participate in our Summer Reading Challenge. It is free, and you can read at your own pace.

How to join

2Sign up online or at the front desk before July 5, and you will get a reading log. Read any six books from July 6 to August 15. Novels, graphic novels and true stories all count, but magazines do not. After each book, write its title in your log and list three new words you learned from it. When you finish all six, choose your favourite. Write a review of it, about 50 words long, on the last page.

What you can win

3Finish three books and you will get a Riverside canvas bag. Finish all six and you will get a certificate and a place in our Book Quiz on August 20.

4Reading with a partner? If you and a friend both finish six books, you will each get a bonus: a free ticket to the Riverside Summer Film Night.

Important

5The deadline for reading logs is 6 p.m. on August 15. Late logs will not be accepted. Lost your log? Ask at the front desk for a new one. You won't need to write everything again. Just tell a librarian a little about each book you have already read.

1You are doing your homework in your bedroom when you realize you need a ruler. You walk into the living room, stop in the middle of the floor and think, “Wait, what did I come in here for?” If this has happened to you, you are not alone. Some people call it the “doorway effect”.

2Gabriel Radvansky, a psychologist at the University of Notre Dame, tested the idea in a series of experiments. In one, students moved through rooms on a computer screen. They picked up an object from one table, carried it to another table and swapped it for a different one. Some of the students had to pass through a doorway on the way. Others walked the same distance inside one large room. When the students were asked what they were carrying, those who had gone through a doorway forgot more often.

3The same thing happened when the experiment moved from the screen to real rooms. In another test, students walked back into the room where they had started, but that did not help them remember. It seemed that passing through the doorway itself was the problem, not simply being in a different place.

4Why would a doorway matter? Radvansky's explanation is that the mind breaks our experience into separate events. Think of them as the levels of a computer game: a doorway marks the end of one level and the start of the next. As you enter a new room, your brain files away what happened in the old one, and the plan you made there becomes harder to reach.

5Of course, a doorway probably only partly explains why we forget. A busy day or a message that interrupts us on the way can cause the same problem. But if you want to hold on to a simple plan, try picturing the ruler on the living-room table before you stand up.

1When Grandma decided to buy a new rice cooker, she asked me to help her shop online. I found one in three minutes. “Look, Grandma,” I said, pointing at the screen. “It has five thousand reviews, and almost all of them give it five stars. It's probably the best one you can buy.”

2Grandma put on her glasses and moved closer. “Show me the one-star reviews,” she said.

3I couldn't see why. Why read the angry comments when so many people were happy? But I clicked anyway, and found only a few dozen of them. One woman wrote that the lid broke after two months. Another said the cooker was fine for rice but burned porridge every time. A third complained that nobody ever answered the customer service phone.

4Grandma read every one of them slowly. “We cook porridge every morning,” she said. “Find me another one.” The second cooker I found had far fewer reviews. Its five-star comments were short: “Good.” “Nice.” “Fast delivery.” Its one-star reviews were mostly about the colour, or about the box arriving a little damaged, which had nothing to do with the cooker itself.

5“This one,” Grandma said. “Happy people write one word. Unhappy people tell you exactly what went wrong. If the worst thing they can say is that the box was damaged, the cooker itself is probably fine.”

6The second cooker arrived four days later, and it soon proved her right. It has cooked our porridge every morning and our rice every evening for a year without a single problem. I still look at the stars when I shop online. But these days, I always read the one-star reviews first.

1For about 500 years, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines had been quiet. Forests covered its sides, and few of the people living nearby thought of it as a volcano at all. An energy company had drilled three deep wells into it, looking for underground heat to make electricity, before giving up in 1990. Then, in the spring of 1991, small earthquakes began to shake the mountain, and steam burst from its upper slopes.

2Scientists from the Philippines and the United States hurried to the mountain. They could not see inside it, so they did the next best thing: they listened. Sensitive instruments placed around the volcano detected even tiny earthquakes, while tiltmeters measured whether the ground was rising as magma pushed up from below. Other equipment measured the sulphur dioxide gas escaping from the mountain.

3No single reading could tell them exactly when Pinatubo would erupt. Instead, the team looked for patterns. In the second half of May, the amount of gas coming out rose tenfold. Then, in early June, it suddenly fell by more than 90 per cent, even as the earthquakes became more frequent and moved closer to the surface, and part of the volcano's upper slope began to swell. The team suspected that thick magma was now blocking the gas's way out. To the scientists, these signs meant that a major eruption was probable within days.

4Warning the public was not simple. If the scientists called for people to leave too early and nothing happened, people might stop trusting their warnings. If they waited too long, thousands could die. On June 10, about 15,000 people were moved out of Clark Air Base, an American base only 14 kilometres from the volcano, and tens of thousands of local residents also left their homes.

5The main eruption came on June 15. It was one of the largest of the 20th century. Ash fell like grey snow, and a typhoon passing at the same time made the ash so wet and heavy that thousands of roofs fell in. Even so, the scientists' forecast is believed to have saved more than 5,000 lives.

6Today, similar instruments keep watch on active volcanoes around the world, from Indonesia to Iceland, listening for the same warning signs.

1Think about the last time you had nothing to do. How long did it take before you reached for your phone? For many of us, the honest answer is “a few seconds”. The phone has become an easy means of escape, and thanks to social media we never have to be bored again. I think that is a loss.

2Boredom has a bad name. We treat it as a problem to be solved, a feeling with no purpose. But boredom is also a signal. It tells the mind that what it is doing is not enough, and it pushes us to look for something more meaningful. If we fill every empty minute with short videos, we never hear that signal.

3There is some evidence that boredom can even make us more creative. In one British study, volunteers spent fifteen minutes copying numbers out of a phone book, a task chosen to be as dull as possible. Afterwards, they were asked to think of as many uses as they could for a pair of plastic cups. They came up with more ideas than people who had not done the boring task first. The researchers believe that a bored mind starts to wander, and that wandering thoughts can lead to new connections. In a second test, people who only read the numbers, without copying them, came up with even more ideas: writing, it seems, gave their minds less room to wander.

4Opponents of this view will say that boredom is simply unpleasant and does nobody any good. They have a point. Not all boredom is useful. Being stuck in a meaningless job for years is very different from being bored for ten minutes on a train.

5But I am not proposing that we look for long hours of boredom. I am proposing something much smaller: that we stop running away from the first few minutes of it. Last term I tried this on the bus to school. I had no brilliant ideas, but I began to notice things I had passed for years: a tiny bakery, an old man feeding the same three pigeons every morning. Next time you are waiting in a queue, leave your phone in your pocket and let your mind wander. You may be surprised by where it goes.