Author: ShirinaC

Say you see your father smoking a cigarette. You know that smoking is bad for his health and you want to convince him to stop. But what is the best way to do that? Most likely, you would warn him that he could die from some sort of disease. But, evidence shows that warnings don’t work too well to convince someone to change their behavior. This is because the most common reactions to threats is either to freeze or flee, not fight. When something scares us, we tend to get rid of the negative feelings by using rationalizations. This creates a boomerang effect and causes us to become more resilient with the behavior we want to change.

Then how do you get motivated to change your behavior? There are three important principles to motivation of behavior change, Social incentives, immediate rewards, and progress monitoring. We are motivated by other people’s opinion, what they are doing, and what you can do better. Rewards also get us fired up to do it, even something as simple as a praise. You should reward yourself now, so you can reach a goal in the future. For example, you should stop smoking now, so you can run more and win your next race. Also, we need to have something that monitors your progress. When we see he progress and positive outcomes of our behaviors, it will motivate you to keep doing it.

So, instead of telling your father that he will die if he does not stop smoking, you should show him pictures of other people stopping that bad habit and promise to treat him to dinner at an expensive restaurant if he stops as well. Also, put up a board and mark down how many days he does not smoke and praise him for not smoking for long periods of time. That will probably convince him to stop more that all of the threats and warnings you were thinking to use.

In the short story “Seventh Grade” by Gary Soto, Victor, the protagonist, has a major crush on a girl called Teresa. Just so he could be in the same class as her, he signs up for French class, even though he already knows Spanish.

It is the first day of school and he looks for her in the hallways to try and catch her attention. His friend Micheal told him that scowling will make him handsome and therefore catch the attention of girls. He tries it out and keeps on practicing once he sees a girl looking at him.

He is also constantly daydreaming about Teresa. Once, when his English teacher calls on him to give an example of a noun, he immediately says Teresa!

During lunch, he fakes reading a math textbook and looks for Teresa. When he spots her, he moves to a table next her and daydreams about taking her to the movies. After lunch, he follows Teresa to her next class, French class.

During French class, he even lies that he knows French, when he really doesn’t, to try and impress her. Fortunately for him, Victor’s French teacher had once used up all of his money borrowing cars in order to drive a different one each day to make a girl think he was rich. Because of that similar experience, Victor’s teacher did not reveal that Victor did not know French. Teresa actually believed that Victor knew French and wanted him to help her with French. He is so happy to get the chance and studies French textbooks so he could help her later on.

One of the hardest jobs on earth is searching for new viruses in animals such as bats. To get ready to work, researchers have to get dressed in protective clothing like bodysuits, googles, gloves, and boots that cover them from head to toe to protect them from getting infected. Then, they would have to go a cave and set up nets to catch the bats and use tarps to collect their droppings. Then, they would have droppings from more than a hundred bats to do tests on.

While studying these bat droppings, researchers from Smithsonian’s Global Health Program discovered six new coronaviruses from the same family of viruses as the one that caused COVID-19. Thankfully, the researchers do not believe that the new viruses are harmful to humans.

The leading person of the Global Health Program, Marc Valitutto, says that their goal is to find new viruses before they infect humans and prevent them from causing many deaths. Zoonotic pathogens, which can spread between humans and other animals, have caused almost three quarters of all infectious diseases in humans this past century. Most of these infectious diseases come from bats. This is because bats have strong immune systems that allow them to house viruses without being infected themselves. The fact that they travel far distances increases the possibility of them transferring a zoonotic disease to us. Sometimes, they carry coronaviruses, which are viruses that can cause infections relating to lungs and stomachs of birds and mammals. Research even shows that bats were the original hosts of SARS and MERS, which were both coronavirus that affected the respiratory system and killed many people. It is likely that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused COVID-19, also originated in bats. Bats can carry other diseases like filoviruses, like Marburg and Ebola.

Zoonotic diseases can also transfer from humans to bats, which can cause the bat populations to decrease and further spread the disease. Some organizations want researchers to stop working with bats to prevent this. But, researchers continued to do tests on bats by taking swabs and droppings from the bats. They collected 759 samples and found six new coronaviruses and one that we already discovered.

In the short story The Lottery, roles are different for the two different genders. The eldest man is the one who picks out the slip for the whole family during the drawing of slips for the lottery. If it can be helped, women should not be the one to take the slip. Only if there are no more males over the age of sixteen, can the eldest woman get the slip. Additionally, the family name is inherited from the male parent, but that it also what happens in modern society.

Among the kids, boys are usually the ones to play with the rocks and mess around. Girls would stand to the side and talk amongst each other. The man of the family would come first, then the woman shortly after. The women would gossip around with each other for a little, and then join their husbands standing off to the side. Then the children would have to stop their play and go to their parents. Young women who recently married would be in the same family group as their husbands and leave their siblings and parents.