In English, the word for the sniffing appendage on our face is nose. Japanese also happens to use the consonant n in this word (hand) and so does Turkish (burun). Since the 1900s, linguists have argued that these associations between speech sounds and meanings are purely arbitrary. Yet a new study calls this into question.

Together with his colleagues, Damian Blasi of the University of Zurich analyzed lists of words from 4,298 different languages. In doing so, they discovered that unrelated languages often use the same sounds to refer to the same meaning.【G1】____________________

The idea is not new. Previous studies have suggested that sound-meaning associations may not be entirely arbitrary, but these studies were limited by small sample sizes and highly restricted lists of words.【G2】_______________

The method of the study involved two key parts. The first step was to estimate how frequently the word for a given concept uses a particular sound by assigning binary values of 0 or 1 to associations in individual languages.【G3】_______________Aggregating these numbers across the thousands of languages studied yields the overall probability that any word for red in any language will contain r—in this case, 0.35.

【G4】_____________

So how do we know that the association between red and r is special? To address this question, the authors performed a second step, this time calculating the probability that any randomly selected word uses r. By comparing the two probabilities, they were able to show that across languages, r is more than twice as likely to occur in words for red than in other words. With this method, the researchers reported 74 robust associations between word sounds and meanings, including I and leaf, and n and nose.

The study raises some big-picture questions. Why, for example, should it be the case that culturally and geographically diverse groups of humans link the same sounds with the same meanings?

【G5】____________________

So the answer to this question remains elusive. Although it’s easy to imagine that the n-sound in nose reflects nasality, this is a guess and no such relationship can explain other associations.

Another tough question concerns the relatively small number of associations. Why do a handful of words like red, small and leaf form non-arbitrary links to their speech sounds, while thousands of other words—such as soup and dog—do not? Simon Kirby, professor at the Center for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh, thinks this may be the heart of the matter. “The puzzle is really why this is such a marginal phenomenon,” says Kirby.

[A] Blasi and colleagues used statistical analyses to rule out the possibility that people happened to borrow words like red from neighboring languages, or that such words descended from the same ancient protolanguage.

[B] For example in English, the word for red uses the consonant r and therefore is scored a 1, while in Japanese, oka does not contain r and therefore receives a 0.

[C] Blasi and colleagues have shown that non-arbitrary associations are possible—the deeper puzzle about language is why it is nevertheless largely arbitrary.

[D] For example, the consonant r is often used in words for red—think of French rouge, Spanish rojo, and German rot, but also Turkish krmz, Hungarian piros, and Maori kura.

[E] On its own, however, this calculation is not enough. There are thousands of words that use r—road, mural, and waiter, to name only a few English examples.

[F] Different from them, Blasi’s study—published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA—is notable because it included almost two thirds of the world’s languages and used lists of diverse words, including pronouns, body parts, verbs, natural phenomena, and adjectives— such as we, tongue, drink, star and small, respectively.

[G] One limitation of the study is the relatively small number of meanings that were included in the analysis, points out Eric Holman, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

It’s a truism of business-book thinking that a company’s brand is its “most important asset,” more valuable than technology or patents or manufacturing prowess. But brands have never been more fragile.

The reason is simple: consumers are supremely well informed and far more likely to investigate the real value of products than to rely on logos. “Absolute Value,” a new book by Itamar Simonson, a marketing professor at Stanford, and Emanuel Rosen, a former software executive, shows that, historically, the rise of brands was a response to an information-poor environment.【G1】___________It was hard to figure out if a new product from an unfamiliar company was reliable or not, so brand loyalty was a way of reducing risk.

Today, consumers can read reams of research about whatever they want to buy. This started back with Consumer Reports, which did objective studies of products, and with J. D. Power’s quality rankings, which revealed what ordinary customers thought of the cars they’d bought.【G2】______

A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that eighty per cent of consumers look at online re-views before making major purchases, and a host of studies have logged the strong influence those re-views have on the decisions people make. The rise of social media has accelerated the trend to an astonishing degree: a dud product can become a laughingstock in a matter of hours.【G3】________________

For established brands, this is a nightmare. You can never coast on past performance—the percent-age of brand-loyal car buyers has plummeted in the past twenty years—and the price premium that a recognized brand can charge has shrunk. If you’re making a better product, you can still charge more, but, if your product is much like that of your competitors, your price needs to be similar, too. That’s the clearest indication that the economic value of brands—traditionally assessed by the premium a company could charge—is waning.【G4】____________But even here the information deluge is transformative; luxury travel, for instance, has been profoundly affected by sites like TripAdvisor.

For consumers this is ideal: they’re making better choices, and heightened competition has raised quality and held down prices. And they’re not the only beneficiaries; upstarts now find it easier to compete with the big boys. If you build a better mousetrap, people will soon know about it. For much of the twentieth century, consumer markets were stable.【G5】______________

[A] However, most consumers figure out how to find what they are looking for without spending huge amounts of time online and this has made customer loyalty pretty much a thing of the past.

[B] Today, they are tumultuous, and you’re only as good as your last product. For brands like Lululemon, there’s only one consolation: make something really great and your past sins will be forgotten.

[C] When consumers had to rely on advertisements and their past experience with a company, brands served as proxies for quality; if a car was made by G.M., or a ketchup by Heinz, you assumed that it was pretty good.

[D] In the old days, you might buy a Sony television set because you’d owned one before, or because you trusted the brand. Today, such considerations matter much less than reviews on Amazon and Engadget and CNET.

[E] But what’s really weakened the power of brands is the Internet, which has given ordinary consumers easy access to expert reviews, user reviews, and detailed product data, in an array of categories.

[F] This isn’t true across the board: brands retain value where the brand association is integral to the experience of a product (Coca-Cola, say), or where they confer status, as with luxury goods.

[G] In a world where consumers are oftentimes overwhelmed with information, the role a brand plays in people’s lives has become all the more important.

American schools aren’t exactly frozen in time, but considering the pace of change in other areas of life, our public schools tend to feel like throwbacks. Kids spend much of the day as their great-grandparents once did: sitting in rows, listening to teachers lecture, scribbling notes by hand, reading from textbooks that are out of date by the time they are printed.

For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the “achievement gap” between social classes. This is not a story about that conversation.【G1】____________________

This week the conversation will burst onto the front page, when the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a high-powered, bipartisan assembly of Education Secretaries, business leaders and a former Governor releases a blueprint for rethinking American education to better prepare students to thrive in the global economy. While that report includes some controversial proposals, there is nonetheless a remarkable consensus among educators and business and policy leaders on one key conclusion: we need to bring what we teach and how we teach into the 21st century. Right now we’re aiming too low. Competency in reading and math is the meager minimum. Scientific and technical skills are, likewise, utterly necessary but insufficient.【G2】______________Here’s what they are: Knowing more about the world.【G3】______________Mike Eskew, CEO of UPS, talks about needing workers who are “global trade literate, sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant in different languages”—not exactly strong points in the U.S., where fewer than half of high school students are enrolled in a foreign-language class and where the social-studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. history.

Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economy—the ones that won’t get outsourced or automated—”put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos,” says Marc Tucker, a lead author of the skills-commission report. That’s a problem for U.S. schools.【G4】_________________________________

Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what’s coming at them and distinguish between what’s reliable and what isn’t.【G5】___________________________________

Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today’s workplace. “Most innovations today involve large teams of people,” says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. “We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures.”

[A] Kids are global citizens now, whether they know it or not, and they need to behave that way.

[B] “It’s important that students know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it,” says Dell executive Karen Bruett, who serves on the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a group of corporate and education leaders focused on upgrading American education.

[C] Today’s economy demands not only a high-level competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also what might be called 21st century skills.

[D] This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get “left behind” but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can’t think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English.

[E] Can our public schools, originally designed to educate workers for agrarian life and industrial-age factories, make the necessary shifts?

[F] But without waiting for such a revolution, enterprising administrators around the country have begun to update their schools, often with ideas and support from local businesses.

[G] Kids also must learn to think across disciplines, since that’s where most new breakthroughs are made. It’s interdisciplinary combinations—design and technology, mathematics and art—”that produce YouTube and Google,” says Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of The World Is Flat.

[A] Evaluate your system

[B] Develop a system of your own

[C] Mix business with pleasure

[D] Never forget your responsibilities

[E] Review your long-term objectives

[F] Decide on your mission

[G] Put right things on your desk

To spread his productivity gospel, David Allen is writing a third book on how to get things in order, or the GTD system (Get-Things-Done System). The advantage of the GTD system, or others like it, Allen says, is that once you’ve written everything down and gotten it off your brain, your mind can relax and your imagination can soar. Here are some of his top tips, whether you’re an executive or an artist-in-the-making.

【G1】_______________________________________________________

Most people keep separate lists of things they have to do at home and their professional or school tasks. That’s a mistake, Allen says. You’re the same person at home and at the office (or school). It’s more effective to maintain a unified list of all of your tasks. Keep it on paper, not in your overloaded head. Organize tasks by context rather than according to whether they’re professional or personal. In other words, if you have calls to make, whether to work colleagues or to the babysitter or cable guy, tag them in your to-do list as things to do when you’ve got a few minutes and a phone handy.【G2】_______________________________________________

When your schedule is packed with meetings and tasks, it’s easy to lose sight of your broader goals and responsibilities. Break away once a week and take stock of the projects you’re working on. That will ensure that important items on the distant horizon don’t fall by the wayside. The “weekly review” is the most important element, according to devotees. It’s easy to avoid and hard to commit to, but Allen says building it into your routine helps systemize effective planning.

【G3】_______________________________________________

Whether you’re a scraps-of-paper person or a Filofax fanatic, chances are you’ve developed your own way of organizing your calendar, tasks and contacts. Most of us, though, have holes in our organizational buckets. Things routinely fall out. And while your system might be comfortable, it should get a tune-up from time to time.

【G4】__________________________________________

Keep tabs on your working space just as you manage your mental space. “The things that belong are supplies, reference material, decoration and equipment,” Allen says. “Everything else is in process.” In other words, if random chotchkes are gradually taking over your desk despite being neither functional nor sentimental, observe that and do something about it. But once you’ve recognized that something is out of place, do something about it to improve your peace of mind.

【G5】_______________________________________________

At some point, too many tasks and projects may mess you up, and you do not know which one should be done first and which one accounts for the most significant part of you position. Even if you don’t yet know what that is, set aside some time to think about it once in a while so that you could arrange your time and tasks appropriately and then decide what’s the next thing to do.

David Allen, the productivity authority, likes to think of himself as a “researcher, educator and an evangelist,” who helps people weave order into their complex lives. According to Allen, his tips would help people gain control of their frazzled lives and figure out new ways to further develop their careers.

[A] Walmart is fighting back. It is spending billions in the hope of growing even larger. It is offering more goods to more customers, in stores and online. With its legendary attention to detail, it is making its operations even more efficient. For instance, it will save more than 35 truckloads of buttercream icing this year, after spotting that its bakers were leaving too much icing in the bottom of their tubs. By using 27 different boxes rather than 12 to deliver online goods, the firm reckons it can save 7.2m cubic feet of cardboard boxes a year. Last month sunny results sent up its share price by 10%. Yet far from offering comfort to other retailers hoping to knit together physical and online businesses, Walmart’s fightback shows how hard it will be for them to repel Amazon.

[B] Amazon is also offering something different. Whereas Walmart has strived to help Americans save money, Amazon is obsessed with helping them save time. Amazon has become a new kind of big-box retailer, with warehouses placed strategically around America to speed deliveries to customers. Innovations such as Dash, which lets you press a button in your kitchen to order soap or coffee, could turn Amazon from an online store into something like a utility.

[C] The source of the commotion is online shopping, specifically online shopping at Amazon. E-commerce accounted for $1 in every $10 that American shoppers spent last year, up by 15% from the year before that. Amazon’s North American sales grew at about twice that rate. Walmart’s share of America’s retail sales, which stands at 10.6%, is still more than twice Amazon’s, but it peaked seven years ago at nearly 12%. In January Walmart said it would close 154 American stores. It may need to shut more. Walmart’s “supercentres” once offered an unmatched combination of squeezed prices and expansive choice, but this formula is losing its magic. Discounters and other competitors are rivalling Walmart’s low prices at the same time as Amazon’s warehouses can beat its range.

[D] For smaller, worse-managed firms selling clothing, shoes and so on, the prognosis is bleaker. Since April 1st shares in some of America’s most famous retailers, including Macy’s, Gap and J.C. Penney, have plunged by more than 25%, in part because of the march of online firms. In the age of Amazon, only those that offer better service, greater convenience or an experience that is hard to mimic online will do well. TJX, which offers brand-name goods at a discount, is thriving, because customers prefer hunting for treasures that are physically there in front of them. Customers come to Nike’s shops not just for trainers but for running clubs. Walmart is betting that it has the brawn and the brains to be in this group. However, others have less cause for hope.

[E] For decades, a titan has towered over America’s shopping landscape. Walmart is not just the world’s biggest retailer but the biggest private employer and, by sales, the biggest company. Last year, its tills rang up takings of $482 billion, about twice Apple’s revenue. But now the beast of Bentonville must cope with an unfamiliar sensation. After ruling as the undisputed disrupter of American retailing, Walmart finds itself being disrupted.

[F] Other retailers cannot rival Walmart’s size—still its most potent weapon. Nine out of ten Americans live within ten miles of a store owned by Walmart. That gives it a unique advantage in e-commerce, because it can both ship from its stores and let consumers pick up baskets of goods that they ordered online. Its vast grocery business, which is harder to move online than non-perishable goods, provides further protection. Although investments have squeezed Walmart’s profits, the firm can afford to invest more than any other in information technology.

【G1】→【G2】→【G3】→【G4】→F→【G5】

[A] People who deceive themselves also tend to be happier than people who do not. There are social profits, too: Studies have shown that people who lie frequently are viewed as friendlier and more amiable than their more truthful counterparts. Still, lying is generally regarded as immoral and unpleasant. “No one likes being lied to,” says former FBI agent and lying expert Joe Navarro. “We feel betrayed. When is it that they are telling the truth?” And people do really want to know the truth. A new Fox drama, Lie to Me, which features a steely British deception expert, has become one of the most popular shows on television.

[B] It has never been easy for people to sort out fact from fiction. Studies have shown that people can identify lies only about 50 percent of the time, or about the same as chance. To be sure, researchers have been able to figure out some clues to uncover deception. When people tell a significant lie, for instance, they typically gesture less and their arms may appear stiff. People telling lies also might have dilated pupils because they feel nervous about spinning an untruth.

[C] Researchers have been studying deception for decades, figuring out we tell lies for all sorts of reasons. We might want to gain a raise or a reward, for example, or to protect friends or a lover. Such constant lies might be a necessary social evil, and researchers have recently discovered that some small unimportant lies might actually be good for you. “We use lies to grease the wheels of social discourse,” says psychologist Robert Feldman. “It’s socially useful to tell lies.”

[D] Don’t feel bad. You’re in good, dishonest company. A research shows that people lie constantly, that deception is existing everywhere in everyday life. One study found that people tell two to three lies every 10 minutes, and even conservative estimates indicate that we lie at least once a day. Our capacity for deceit appears nearly endless, from adding untrue details to stories to wearing fake eyelashes to asking “How are you?” when we don’t actually care. We even lie to ourselves about how much food we eat and how often we visit the gym, but why do we spin facts and make up fictions?

[E] Small decorations can have positive psychological effects, experts say. Researchers found that college students who exaggerated their GPA in interviews later showed improvement in their grades. Their fiction, in other words, became self-fulfilling. “Exaggerators tend to be more confident and have higher goals for achievement,” explains Richard Gramzow, a psychologist at the University of Southampton. “Positive biases about the self can be beneficial.”

[F] Admit it: You’ve lied. You told a friend that his shirt looked stylish when you actually thought it was shabby. Or maybe you said to your boss that her presentations were fascinating when in fact they were mindless. Or perhaps you told your landlord that the rent check was in the mail.

[G] Even with these findings, there’s no surefire way to catch a liar. But someone with a known track record of lying is likely to pay a price. “Lies add up,” says Feldman. “The more you know that someone is not telling you the truth, the less trustworthy they are. They’re just telling you stuff you want to hear, and you won’t listen to them anymore.”

【G1】→【G2】→【G3】→E→【G4】→【G5】→G