Art & History

Great Women You Should Know: Betty Skelton

In our series of Great Women You Should Know … here comes daredevil and adventurer Betty Skelton

When she was eight, Betty fell in love with aeroplanes. She watched them flying over her house every day, she devoured books about them, and she begged her parents to take her to airfields where she would persuade pilots to take her on rides above the clouds.

Betty must have been a very persuasive person, because she also talked a young Navy pilot into giving the whole family flying lessons. And when I say whole family, I mean it: Betty flew her first plane solo when she was just twelve years old. She might have been a tiny daredevil, but she was so scared her mother would scold her for doing it that she kept it a secret for a week!

Home, Health & Style, Popular

8 Supermarket Tricks to Make Your Parents Spend More

You might have noticed that many supermarkets have a similar layout. This is no coincidence. Researchers have spent many years working out how to set out the store in order to get customers to spend more! See how many of these supermarket tricks you recognise, the next time you go shopping with your parents!

Huge Trolleys

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Shopping trollies are deliberately MUCH larger than needed for a weekly shop, which encourages customers to buy more. In fact, they’ve been getting bigger and bigger in the past few years.

The Bakery at the Entrance

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That smell of freshly baked bread? Not only does it make you want to buy a yummy loaf, it also makes you hungry. It is well known that if you go shopping when you are hungry, you buy more!

Tempting Fruit and Veg

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After the bakery, comes the fruit and veg section. This often strikes me as a bit daft – by the time I get around to tins and packets of pasta, my salad is squashed at the bottom of the trolley! The bright colours tempt customers, and lots of supermarkets present fruit and veg in baskets or crates, to make it seem like they’ve come straight from the farm! Once you’ve filled your trolley with healthy produce, you’ll feel better about the packets of biscuits and crisps that come later!

Essentials Around the Store

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Just popping in with your parents to quickly to pick up some eggs, or milk? You might notice that these essentials, and others like sugar, salt and flour, are spread around the store. The supermarket planners want you to walk around the store as much as possible, passing all those tempting special offers at the end of the aisles.

End of Aisle Offers

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The shelves at the end of the aisles are the ones that we pay most attention to, and so supermarkets stack their special offers there, to persuade you to buy them. These are often things like fizzy drinks, that you might not normally purchase.

Loyalty Cards

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Supermarkets don’t just give their customers loyalty cards to encourage them to come back to their stores. They also use the data (information) collected to target their advertising better. If your parents have a loyalty card, have a look at the next letter they receive to see if they are giving discounts on products that your family often buy. Have a think about what the supermarket would know about your family – if you have a pet, when you have birthdays (e.g. if you buy a cake in the store), what toys you like, which interests you have (e.g. your parents bought a magazine about traveling to Italy).

Sweets at the Checkout

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Ok, hands up if you’ve ever asked your parents for sweets when you were at the checkout! In Germany, they have a word for this – Quengelware. The word is made up of “quengeln” which means “to whine” and “Ware”, which means products. Products that make kids whine or grump at their parents, who are fed up with the hassle of shopping and give in to their kids’ demands! Some supermarkets now advertise that they have lanes without sweets, so that parents can avoid this argument.

Kids’ Products at Your Eye Level

Talking of kids in supermarkets, did you ever notice that products aimed at kids are displayed at your eye level? The cheese strings are placed at that height in the hope that you will ask for them!

How many of these supermarket tricks did you recognise? Next time you go shopping, take a good look at how the store is laid out and see if you can find some more.

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Home, Health & Style, Written By You

Make Up For Girls – Is It Necessary? Written By You

At school today I was talking to a friend and he was telling me about the random thoughts that he sometimes thinks about. One of the many philosophical thoughts that were swooping round in his crowded head was; ‘why do girls wear make-up and boys don’t?’

Then that got me thinking. Boys have every right to wear make-up just as much as girls have the right not to. Both genders try to make the best of their bodies by doing exercise, being healthy and wearing nice clothes as well as many other things.

Home, Health & Style

What Makes a Family?

What does the word ‘family’ mean to you? It can mean many things in our society. Some define family as a mother, a father and one or more children. For others, there don’t need to be children in the home for there to be a family. Where there are children, about three quarters of the parents will be married to each other.

In 2013 the Office of National Statistics, which is a government body which takes surveys on all manner of topics to help the government make policy (rules under which we all live), found that there were 18.2 million people living in this type of family. Many more of us have families which have a different make-up. For the purpose of the survey, a family is defined as people living in the same household.

However, as many of you will know, there are other ways in which we describe our family. There are children who have two parents of the same gender, there are children who have only one parent with whom they live, other children have guardians and live with aunts, uncles or grandparents.

Science, Nature and Tech

Help A Hedgehog

Gretta is a freelance journalist who blogs at mumsdotravel.com. She and her family are worried how the local wildlife are coping with the lack of water. Strange as it may seem in a country that is famous for rain, there has not been enough of it in the past years in UK.

Read on to find out how to help hedgehogs and other wildlife.