Inglés

The first American in space

Sylvia Chafuen — Sat, 05 May 2012 17:52:36 +0000

May 5, 1961

From Cape Canaveral, Florida, Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. is launched into space aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule, becoming the first American astronaut to travel into space. The suborbital flight, which lasted 15 minutes and reached a height of 116 miles into the atmosphere, was a major triumph for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

NASA was established in 1958 to keep U.S. space efforts abreast of recent Soviet achievements, such as the launching of the world’s first artificial satellite–Sputnik 1–in 1957. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the two superpowers raced to become the first country to put a man in space and return him to Earth. On April 12, 1961, the Soviet space program won the race when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched into space, put in orbit around the planet, and safely returned to Earth. One month later, Shepard’s suborbital flight restored faith in the U.S. space program.

NASA continued to trail the Soviets closely until the late 1960s and the successes of the Apollo lunar program. In July 1969, the Americans took a giant leap forward with Apollo 11, a three-stage spacecraft that took U.S. astronauts to the surface of the moon and returned them to Earth. On February 5, 1971, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, became the fifth astronaut to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 14 lunar landing mission.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-first-american-in-space?et_cid=41044300&et_rid=705809896&linkid=http%3a%2f%2fwww.history.com%2fthis-day-in-history%2fthe-first-american-in-space

How children perceive their Grandparents

Sylvia Chafuen — Sat, 05 May 2012 17:03:20 +0000

1. S he was in the bathroom, putting on her makeup, under the watchful eyes of her young granddaughter, as she’d done many times before. After she applied her lipstick and started to leave, the little one said, “But Grandma, you forgot to kiss the toilet paper good-bye!” I will probably never put lipstick on again without thinking about kissing the toilet paper good-bye….

2. My young grandson called the other day to wish me Happy Birthday. He asked me how old I was, and I told him, 62. My grandson was quiet for a moment, and then he asked, “Did you start at 1?”

3. After putting her grandchildren to bed, a grandmother changed into old slacks and a droopy blouse and proceeded to wash her hair. As she heard the children getting more and more rambunctious, her patience grew thin. Finally, she threw a towel around her head and stormed into their room, putting them back to bed with stern warnings. As she left the room, she heard the three-year-old say with a trembling voice,

“Who was THAT?”

4. A grandmother was telling her little granddaughter what her own childhood was like. “We used to skate outside on a pond. I had a swing made from a tire; it hung from a tree in our front yard. We rode our pony. We picked wild raspberries in the woods.”

The little girl was wide-eyed, taking this all in. At last she said, “I sure wish I’d gotten to know you sooner!”

5. My grandson was visiting one day when he asked, “Grandma, do you know how you and God are alike?” I mentally polished my halo and I said, “No, how are we alike?” “You’re both old,” he replied.

6. A little girl was diligently pounding away on her grandfather’s word processor. She told him she was writing a story.

“What’s it about?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I can’t read.”

7. I didn’t know if my granddaughter had learned her colors yet, so I decided to test her. I would point out something and ask what color it was. She would tell me and was always correct. It was fun for me, so I continued. At last, she headed for the door, saying, “Grandma, I think you should try to figure out some of these colors yourself!”

8. When my grandson Billy and I entered our vacation cabin, we kept the lights off until we were inside to keep from attracting pesky insects. Still, a few fireflies followed us in. Noticing them before I did, Billy whispered, “It’s no use Grandpa. Now the mosquitoes are coming after us with flashlights.”

9. When my grandson asked me how old I was, I teasingly replied, “I’m not sure.” “Look in your underwear, Grandpa,” he advised “Mine says I’m 4 to 6.”

10. A second grader came home from school and said to her grandmother, “Grandma, guess what? We learned how to make babies today.” The grandmother, more than a little surprised, tried to keep her cool. “That’s interesting.” she said. “How do you make babies?”

“It’s simple,” replied the girl. “You just change ‘y’ to ‘i’ and add ‘es’.”

11. Children’s Logic: “Give me a sentence about a public servant,” said a teacher. The small boy wrote: “The fireman came down the ladder pregnant.” The teacher took the lad aside to correct him. “Don’t you know what pregnant means?” she asked.

“Sure,” said the young boy confidently. ‘It means carrying a child.”

12. A grandfather was delivering his grandchildren to their home one day when a fire truck zoomed past. Sitting in the front seat of the fire truck was a Dalmatian dog. The children started discussing the dog’s duties.

“They use him to keep crowds back,” said one child.

“No,” said another. “He’s just for good luck.”

A third child brought the argument to a close.”They use the dogs,” she said firmly, “to find the fire hydrants.”

13. A 6-year-old was asked where his grandma lived. “Oh,” he said, “she lives at the airport, and when we want her, we just go get her. Then, when we’re done having her visit, we take her back to the airport.”

14. Grandpa is the smartest man on earth! He teaches me good things, but I don’t get to see him enough to get as smart as him!

15. My Grandparents are funny, when they bend over, you hear gas leaks and they blame their dog.

Word of the day – AGREEMENT (upper intermediate level) + WEEKLY TEST

Sylvia Chafuen — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:01:50 +0000

AGREEMENT

Here are two examples of potential use:

Ex 1.: We’ve signed the cooperation agreement with one of the biggest corporations in the world.
Ex 2.: The company renewed the agreement with its supplier, because the management was very satisfied with their cooperation.

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Word of the day – DEADLINE (upper intermediate level)

Sylvia Chafuen — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:59:43 +0000

DEADLINE

Here are two examples of potential use:

Ex 1.: He’s missed the deadline for application again. He will never find a job if he’s so careless!
Ex 2.: We are working even 12 hours a day on this project. The deadline is near.

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Word of the day – AMBITION (upper intermediate level)

Sylvia Chafuen — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:57:27 +0000

AMBITION

Here are two examples of potential use:

Ex 1.: His main ambition is to become wealthy in a short period of time.
Ex 2.: After she got pregnant, she abandoned her ambition of becoming the executive officer.

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Why Bilinguals Are Smarter

Sylvia Chafuen — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 18:12:27 +0000

By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE

Published: March 17, 2012SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.

This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.

They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.

Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle.

In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.

The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.

Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.

The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.

The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life).

In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not.

Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.

Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint?

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a staff writer at Science.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 20, 2012

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a university in Spain. It is Pompeu Fabra, not Pompea Fabra.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 18, 2012, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Bilinguals Are Smarter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html?_r=1&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-0321-L26&nl=el

Word of the day – BRIBE (upper intermediate level)

Sylvia Chafuen — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 16:19:04 +0000

BRIBE

Here are two examples of potential use:

Ex 1.: Our last boss was convicted for 5 years’ imprisonment for accepting bribes.
Ex 2.: Doctors are believed to take bribes from drug companies.

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Word of the day – MANUFACTURER (upper intermediate level)

Sylvia Chafuen — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:13:58 +0000

MANUFACTURER

Here are two examples of potential use:

Ex 1.: Nokia is major manufacturer of mobile phones.
Ex 2.: My printer was damaged, so I sent it back to the manufacturer.

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Word of the day – BRAND MANAGER (upper intermediate level)

Sylvia Chafuen — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:10:44 +0000

BRAND MANAGER

Here are two examples of potential use:

Ex 1.: One of the most important tasks of a brand manager is to create a good brand image among consumers.
Ex 2.: A good brand manager knows how to increase brand awarness among people, not only by simple advertising.

Try to find what the meaning of this word is using these examples.

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Word of the day – EFFICIENT (upper intermediate level)

Sylvia Chafuen — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 17:26:00 +0000

EFFICIENT

Here are two examples of potential use:

Ex 1.: Since we have new supervisory staff, our company is definitely more efficient.
Ex 2.: Many companies provide their workers with free entrances to fitness centres and swimming pools, as they believe that such kind of relax makes them more efficient at work.

Try to find what the meaning of this word is using these examples.

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