Stress is worry and anxiety in your life. Stress stops you from relaxing. It is the most common cause of heart disease and it can lead to cancer. Stress can cause poor concentration , can affect judgement and can result in accidents. Stress can be the cause of family break-ups, violence and even suicide. So what are the main causes of stress in a typical modern lifestyle?
A study has identified between 50 and 60 possible causes of stress. The most common cause of stress is having financial problems. People cannot do the things they want to do because they lack money. Debts are growing because mortgage repayments are increasing and credit card bills need to be paid. The cost of living is rising, and it all adds up to worry. Pressure and worry at work is another cause of stress. People worry that there is change and people worry when there is no change. They may feel that their boss does not understand them or that he makes life difficult for them.
People have found ways to deal with stress. Some do yoga or other forms of relaxation exercise to prevent them from becoming over-anxious, while others claim that taking part in hard physical activity helps them to work off stress. Everyone should make sure that they spend some time every day doing what makes them happy. Stress is a killer.

Wherever you are, you're likely to be surrounded by objects made of some kind of plastic material. There are (39)________ types of plastic, each one suitable for a particular use. Thin, flexible plastic is good for making objects such as bags, whereas thick, hard plastic is a useful material for making (40)________objects, and has been used to make very attractive pieces of furniture. (41)________ plastic has a reputation for being cheap and disposable, in the hands of a good designer, it can be used to make objects of great beauty. As well as offering extremely high quality at a low price, plastic can take almost any shape, colour or consistency.
Plastic can also be seen as an environmentally friendly choice of material. It can be used in place of wood and other materials (42)________ are in short supply in their natural state, and it is also very hard- wearing.
A good plastic chair, for example, could (43)________ you a lifetime and when you no longer wanted it, then it would probably be possible to recycle material.

Are there gender differences in the way boys and girls learn? This is a question that parents, teachers and educational psychologists have asked themselves for many years. For some time, people thought that some differences between boys and girls result from differences in the way they are raised. For example, parents often give young boys trucks to play with, while young girls get to play with dolls. But cross-cultural studies have shown that giving toy trucks to girls and dolls to boys didn't change essential differences in their personalities. Many researchers agree that there are natural male-female differences, including differences in learning styles.
A high school choir director tells a significant story about learning style differences. With the girls, he'll begin teaching a new song by sharing a story about why the composer wrote the song or who it was written for. "Giving the girls some context, telling them a story about the piece, gets them interested. The boys are just the opposite," he said. "If you start talking like that with the boys, they'll start looking at their watches, and they will start getting restless. Then one of them will say, ‘Can we please just learn the song?’"
Another difference in learning styles is the way boys and girls relate to teachers. Most girls want to study hard so that they can please their teachers. Girls are usually more interested than boys in trying to please adults. Pleasing adults is not a strong motivation for most boys, however. Boys are usually less interested in studying unless the material they are studying is really interesting to them.
Girls and boys also react differently to abortive learning experiences. Girls tend to think that if they fail in something, they have disappointed their teachers and parents. When boys fail a test or a class, however, they don't see their failures as having any wider implications. They failed the test; they failed the class. That's all it means for them.
In studies of students' report-card grades, researchers found that girls generally do better than boys in all subjects and in all age groups. But interestingly, this does not make girls more self-confident than boys. Girls tend to have higher standards for themselves and to judge their performance more critically than boys do. And boys tend to have unrealistically high estimations of their own academic abilities and accomplishments.