好文分享：一項花了75年研究的實驗：What It Takes To Live A Happy Life？

一項花了75年研究的實驗：What It Takes To Live A Happy Life？

酗酒竟然是離婚最大的主因？！
政治態度保守的人比較沒有性生活？！

看看吧！或許能找到通往幸福的捷徑喔！

 

完整文章按此 

Men who had “warm” childhood relationships with their mothers earned an average of $87,000 more a year than men whose mothers were uncaring.

小時候媽媽的溫暖竟然能讓小孩子出社會後比別人多賺好幾桶金？
母親節快到了別忘了念托福之餘感謝一下媽媽喔！

高機率機經閱讀--Mesoamerican art and architecture

Mesoamerica

 

Mesoameirca中美洲涵蓋範圍： is a region and cultural area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica.

提到中美洲大家第一個想到的文明是Maya, 不過他的mother culture是 Olmec.

Mesoamerican civilization began with the Olmec culture, which provided the cultural foundation upon which all subsequent Mesoamerican civilizations were constructed. Consequently, the Olmec are known as the mother culture of Mesoamerica. A basic familiarity with Olmec art thus serves as a basic familiarity with Mesoamerican art generally.  

Mesoamrican art:

講到此地的藝術作品一定會提到他們的大頭像: colossal heads.

The most famous Olmec works are the colossal heads: enormous stone busts （半身像） which stand over six feet high.

Colossal heads

Architecture:

階梯式金字塔

 

The stepped pyramid is the primary form of large-scale Mesoamerican architecture. Like the ziggurats (古代亞述及巴比倫之寶塔式建築)of Mesopotamia, the Mesoamerican pyramid served mainly as a platform for a temple; chambers within the pyramid itself were small, if present at all. While early Mesoamerican pyramids were made of earth (or a combination of earth and stone), stone became the standard construction material. Consequently, Mesoamerican pyramids have weathered the centuries far better than their ziggurat cousins (which were made of brick).  

Mesopotamia ziggurat

Chichen Itza

世界七大奇景之一：齊琴伊察
While most Mayan architecture was constructed in a purely Mayan style, the most famous Mayan structure features a hybrid Maya-Toltec style. This structure is El Castillo (the castle), the great central pyramid in the Mayan city of Chichen Itza, Mexico.



 

高機率機經聽力-- 北美樹蛙

5/11 高機率機經聽力提到蜜蜂再冬天會不動，為了省力，

這邊要提到的是TPO出現過的North American wood frog,

在冬天的時候也會不動，不過特別的是，他會把自己冷凍起來，直到天氣便暖和了又自己會解凍！

TPO有提到的部份＋額外補充： 

1. 天氣變冷時，血液裡的蛋白質使得血液裡的水份開始結冰，凝固形成的冰再吸收細胞的水份。

Special proteins in their blood, called nucleating proteins, cause the water in the blood to freeze first. This ice, in turn, sucks most of the water out of the frog's cells. 

2.  不過同時青蛙的肝臟開始製造葡萄糖，這些葡萄糖可防止重要器官像心臟裡的水份結冰。 

At the same time the frog's liver starts making large amounts of glucose—a type of sugar—which packs into cells and props them up. 

進入假死狀態：

The frogs enter a state of suspended animation. Inside the cells there's thick sugary syrup, while outside the cells all the water is frozen.

The concentrated sugar solution helps prevent additional water from being pulled out of the frog's cells, which can destroy them.

 

3. 當春天來了氣溫開始變暖後，北美樹蛙會從內部器官開始解凍一直到最外層皮膚。

The peculiar thing is even though the sun is warming the frog up on the outside, its inside thaw out first, the heart and brain and everything. But somehow it all just happens that way every spring.

 

Facebook timeline剛出現時惹惱了不少人，甚至還有多人連署回復到原本樣式，
但是利用timeline或許是了解Art History的最快方式喔, 一次搞懂近代主要的幾個藝術畫派吧！

完整timeline請看：
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/art-history-timeline.html

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Art Periods/ Movements	Characteristics	Chief Artists and Major Works	Historical Events
Baroque (1600–1750)	Splendor and flourish for God; art as a weapon in the religious wars	Reubens, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Palace of Versailles	Thirty Years' War between Catholics and Protestants (1618–1648)
Dutch Art(1620-1670)	still lifes, portraits, landscapes, interiors and genre painting	Rembrandt, Vermeer
Neoclassical (1750–1850)	Art that recaptures Greco-Roman grace and grandeur * Emulated the sculptural and architectural forms of ancient Greece and Rome. Neo-classical art was severe, unemotional, rigid.	David, Ingres, Greuze, Canova	Enlightenment (18th century); Industrial Revolution (1760–1850)
Art Nouveau (1890-1910)	Depict living things, plants.	Aubrey Beardsley, Victor Horta
Romanticism (1780–1850)	The triumph of imagination and individuality	Caspar Friedrich, Gericault, Delacroix, Turner, Benjamin West	American Revolution (1775–1783); French Revolution (1789–1799); Napoleon crowned emperor of France (1803)
Realism (1848–1900)	Celebrating working class and peasants; en plein air rustic painting	Corot, Courbet, Daumier, Millet	European democratic revolutions of 1848
Impressionism (1865–1885)	Capturing fleeting effects of natural light	Monet, Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cassatt, Morisot, Degas	Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871); Unification of Germany (1871)
Post-Impressionism (1885–1910)	A soft revolt against Impressionism	Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Seurat	Belle Époque (late-19th-century Golden Age); Japan defeats Russia (1905)

幾個重點跟大家分享一下：

1. Art Nouveu:

1890s, 此時正值  the early years of industrialization.
西方社會改變的速度遠大於從前，
時下的藝術家想 break free from these past conventions. They wanted to make art that was more appropriate to modern life, to the world they lived in. 
當時流行的藝術風格是Neoclassical, 但是它severe, unemotional, and rigid.
Art Nouveau  想改變此風格，他們繪畫的主題多半是大自然，像 a flower, vines with graceful curling lines等等。

2. Impressionism

印象派這個字其實來自Monet 的 Impression: Sunrise
The name of the style derives from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satirical review published in the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari.

特色：
借助光與色的變幻來表現畫家在瞬間之際所捕捉到的印象
Impressionist painting characteristics include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles 

高機率機經聽力--Johannes Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earring

高機率機經聽力--Johannes Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earring

欣賞畫作複習機經！

先介紹大家一個好網站：
http://ppt.cc/dDmF

該網站會細部解析這幅畫每個細微部分的重點，
今天要分享的是幾個托福考點，
有興趣的同學可以再點進去仔細品味喔！

1. 整幅畫以珍珠耳環為焦點，素有北方的蒙娜麗莎或荷蘭蒙娜麗莎之稱。
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The painting Girl with a Pearl Earring (Dutch: Het Meisje met de Parel) is one of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer's masterworks and, as the name implies, uses a pearl earring for a focal point. Today the painting is kept in the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague. It is sometimes referred to as "the Mona Lisa of the North" or "the Dutch Mona Lisa".

2. Tronie: （荷蘭當時最流行的繪畫主題：人像）

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is a common type, or group of types, of works of Dutch Golden Age painting and Flemish Baroque painting that shows an exaggerated facial expression or a stock character in costume.

3. 全黑的背景：
現在館藏的作品背景是全黑的，但是這不是它本來的顏色，原本的一層綠色亮光漆經年累月已經退色了。

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The background of the Girl with a Pearl Earring does not appear as it does when it came off the Vermeer's easel some 340 years ago. Recent analysis demonstrates that the artist had painted a transparent "glaze"亮光漆 of green paint over the dark underpainting. Originally, the background must have appeared as a smooth, glossy, hard and deep translucent green. This tone set against the warm flesh tone probably produced a more vibrant optical effect than the one which can be observed today. The green glaze was composed of three pigments (see left): indigo (a natural dye from the indigo plant) and weld (a natural dye from the yellow flowers of the woud plant widely used to dye clothes in Vermeer's day).

4.  Turban 女用頭巾：

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為了保持整幅畫簡潔，特地去掉了頭巾上的皺折。

In respects to the paint-handling of other interior fine paintings of the time, the broad brushwork of the turban is astounding. The object is reduced to two flat shapes of blue. The complicated folds and tucks, which would have certainly be visible, have been entirely eliminated for the sake of simplicity.

The blue part of the turban was painted with natural ultramarine, an extremely costly pigment made of crushed lapis lazuli (青金石) that Vermeer's contemporaries rarely used. The chromatic (彩色的) brilliance of this pigment can be clearly appreciated where it has been applied unadulterated (with lead white) in the rendering of the bright blue part of the girl's turban. Since Vermeer continued to employ without reserve this pigment even in the last few years of his life when he faced a dramatically deteriorating financial situation due to the war with France, it may be that his rich Delft patron Pieter van Ruijven covered the cost.

5. 鼻子細節透漏了可能使用暗箱作畫（重要考點！）：

Vermeer writers have frequently noted that no line defines the profile of the left-hand side of the girl's nose. The bridge is given precisely the color and tone of the adjacent cheek. The lines of the right side of her nose and nostril are lost in shadow as well. Moreover, the blue section of the turban has been reduced to two essential tones of ultramarine blue, one lighter and one darker.

These and other characteristics have lead more than one scholar to believe that Vermeer had created the Girl with a Pearl Earring with the aid of camera obscura, a sort of precursor of the modern photographic camera. The imperfect lens of the period camera tends to eliminate line and reduce the tonal range of lights and darks.

圖：Camera Obscura

費城很多mural（壁畫）也是利用這種技巧把圖像投射到牆壁，進而在牆壁完成的喔！

最後放幾張Mural供大家欣賞：

4/20高機率機經閱讀--Meerkat

圖片敘述是用mere cat跟 meerkat （狐獴) 諧音的conundrum/ pun (雙關語）

"他們還是沒發現我只是(mere)一隻貓。"

相信有看過甫二度拿下奧斯卡最佳導演李安的"Life of Pi"的同學對這照片上這一群直立立( stand on their rear legs) 的動物一定不陌生， 有影評說他們生活的這個島其實是Pi的媽媽的屍體，這群可愛的meerkat其實是屍體上的蛆，象徵Pi為了活下去只好吃自己母親的肉。

好了扯遠了，今天沒有要教GRE單字，也沒有要講電影（還沒看過的同學不好意思爆雷了），

主要是要講這在托福很可能考出的meerkat的習性：

1. Basic Info:

生長環境：南非平原

They often stand on their rear legs and gaze alertly over the southern African plains where they live.   

群居動物(gregarious animals)：一群約20-50隻不等

A meerkat clan often contains about 20 meerkats, but some super-families have 50 or more members.

2. Altruism 利他主義：

提到meerkat一定會提到他們的altruistic behavior, 他們輪流站哨(stand sentry)，其他meerkats就可以趁這機會趕快去找食物。

Meerkats demonstrate altruistic behavior within their colonies; one or more meerkats stand sentry while others are foraging or playing, to warn them of approaching dangers. When a predator is spotted, （birds of prey, such as hawks and eagles, that can snatch them from the ground） the meerkat performing as sentry gives a warning bark (or a sharp, shrill call) , and other members of the gang will run and hide in one of the many bolt holes they have spread across their territory. The sentry meerkat is the first to reappear from the burrow and search for predators, constantly barking to keep the others underground. If there is no threat, the sentry meerkat stops signaling and the others feel safe to emerge.

Meerkats also babysit the young in the group. Females that have never produced offspring of their own often lactate（produce milk) to feed the alpha pair's young, while the alpha female is away with the rest of the group. They also protect the young from threats, often endangering their own lives. On warning of danger, the babysitter takes the young underground to safety and is prepared to defend them if the danger follows. If retreating underground is not possible, she collects all young together and lies on top of them.

*題外話補充：乳糖不耐症 (lactose intolerance)

3. 通風良好的洞穴

Meerkat groups utilize several different burrows and move from one to another. Each burrow is an extensive tunnel-and-room system that remains cool even under the broiling African sun. Females give birth to two to four young each year in one of the group's burrows. Fathers and siblings help to raise meerkat young, teaching them to play and forage and alerting them to the ever present danger from above. Young meerkats are so fearful of predatory birds that even airplanes will send them diving for cover.