<p>Twinkletoes: noise-canceling headphones usually work in one of two ways: active or passive</p>
<p>1) Active: it samples the environmental noise around you and generates a white noise in the background to cancel out the outside noise. Think of when you plug headphones into a computer but aren’t acutally playing any music. You can sort of hear that white noise. Headphones like Bose does that except ten times better. </p>
<p>2) Passive: this kind is purely physical, meaning you jam the headphones (usually canalphones) into your ear canal, achieve a vacuum seal, and block out the noise. </p>
<p>Having tried both (and owning a few pairs of canalphones myself), the first definitely works better, but the second isn’t far behind, and you can get a nice pair of canalphones from Sony for around $40. Of course, if you don’t like having something jammed into your ear canal, then you might need those Bose-type over the ear headphones.</p>
<p>As for the study habits from above, I definitely agree on most of them. Except I never put them into practice, simply because my dorm is too loud at 11pm and I can barely get all my work done on time, never mind reading ahead and outlining notes. I usually just read the book before the homework assignment then do the assignment while applying the concepts in the book that I’d just read. Come test time, I skim the book, flip the pages, remember what I read, then get a good night’s sleep. The downside to this is that I meticulously read the book and make sure I got everything down (since I’m usually bad at paying attention in class) and that takes a long time.</p>