Nomadism

Directions: Read and print this article. Look up any words you don't know and come prepared to discuss the article and its vocabulary on Friday.

Nomadism

For the past two millennia, nomadic herders have grazed their animals in the steppe and Gobi regions of Central Asia. Today Mongolia remains the focus of a vibrant nomadic culture, whose traditional technologies, spiritual worldview and folk arts offer a significant contribution to the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

The Central Asian steppe and deserts have been continuously occupied by nomadic peoples for over two thousand years. A great number of Chinese sources make mention of the Hunnu (Xiong-nu), who established an empire extending throughout most of Central Asia that endured from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD. Believed to be the ancestors of the Mongols, the Hunnu are described as being a nomadic people who moved about in search of pasturage and did not practise agriculture. The Jujan people are described in almost identical terms; it is recorded that they moved nomadically following pasturage and water, and that they lived in felt yurts. The later Turks, Uighurs and Khitan are also known to have been nomadic pastoralists-although unfortunately, there is almost no documentary evidence demonstrating the specific husbandry techniques of these early peoples.

One of the most significant monuments attesting to the historical importance of these nomads is the Great Wall of China, erected and maintained principally as a defense against these peoples by the sedentary Chinese. In approximately 214 BC the Chinese Ch'in emperor ordered the construction of a "10-thousand li wall" to protect his state against the nomadic Hunnu, linking together several existing wall segments in the north of China; this wall was later reinforced to provide better protection against the Hunnu during the succeeding Han dynasty. Under the Toba (Northern Wei) state the Great Wall was further repaired and extended as a defense against the Jujan, while in the late 6th and early 7th centuries, the Great Wall was repaired on several occasions so as to improve protection against the Turks. During the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) the wall was rebuilt and maintained as a defense against the Mongols.

Traditional nomadic animal husbandry in Mongolia involves the herding of five types of animals, known as the tavan khoshuu mal ("five-snout livestock") - cattle (including yaks), sheep, goats, camels, and horses. The products obtained from these animals satisfy nearly all of the Mongolian family's basic needs: beef, mutton, and goat meat, supplemented by a wide variety of dairy products, constitute the Mongolian diet; sheep wool, processed into felt, is used to make clothing, bedding, and insulation for the ger (yurt); horses, camels, and yaks provide transportation; and animal hair and bones are even used to produce musical instruments and children's toys.

Nomadic movements of Mongol herders are not conducted randomly, but according to precisely-defincd traditions. Mongolian nomadic families move their animals into a different general area of pasturage for each of the four seasons, referrred to as uvuljuu (winter pasturage), khavarjaa (spring pasturage), zuslan (summer pasturage), and namarjaa (autunm pasturage). During winter and spring the herds are generally kept in a fixed location to conserve their strength, but in summer and autumn the family will move the herds several times within the larger area of pasturage, so as to give the animals more of a chance to fatten by grazing on fresh vegetation. In the wamer months the herding family leaves behind many of its possessions, travelling in a smaller and lighter yurt with minimal furniture. In forested-steppe regions, where precipitation is more abundant, families move between six and eight times a year, over an average distance of 15-20 kilometres; in mountainous and dry steppe regions families move farther and more frequently, travelling as far as 150 kilometres at a single time. Nomadic patterns in the Gobi are more directly influenced by weather and the location of springs; drought or extreme snowfall can force families to move great distances in search of adequate water and pasturage.

For the winter pasturage a sheltered area is chosen, and animals are kept in a roofed enclosure with an insulating bed of dried animal dung. In the spring, as the animals are at their weakest, the family moves to a pasturage which both has early vegetation and is free of rocky, boggy, or slippery areas that might tax the animals' strength. The herding family moves most frequently in the summer months, bringing the herds to open areas with abundant vegetation. In autumn, as the animals must fatten in preparation for the winter, the animals are taken to a quiet location - far from roads or settlements - where they can graze in peace.

Moving from one pasturage to the next is considered an important and ceremonial event. Before moving, the head of the family dresses in his finest clothing and rides out on his best horse to examine the new pasturage. Once he has chosen a suitable location he places three stones on the ground, symbolically in the form of a hearth, to mark the future site of each of the family's yurts. The family then chooses an auspicious day for moving and begins to pack the household objects in advance of the move. The move itself is subdued, as it is considered extremely unlucky for any argument or commotion to occur during the displacement or its preparations. On the moving day the family's gers are dismantled and all possessions put into oxcarts or a truck, with the most valuable items - the hearth and roof frame, chest, religious icons, head of the household's personal objects - being placed in the head cart. Families along the route followed by the movers invite the passeresby in for tea; and upon setting up their home in its new location, the family invite their new neighbours to visit.

http://www.culture.mn/mongolia.php?recordID=nomadism

Links for Monday 6/25

Timed Reading:

http://college.hmco.com/collegesurvival/watkins/learning_companion/1e/students/timed_reading.html

Do Exercise 6: Leisure. Write down your words per minute and your score on the quiz for your reference. This way, you can see how you improve after future timed readings!

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Idioms:

http://teacherjoe.us/Idioms01.html

With the person next to you, write a dialogue (be as creative as you would like!) using at least 10 of the 25 idioms explained on this site. When you're done, post your dialogue as a comment to this post (just one comment per pair, but please include both of your names).

Stem Cells

Directions: Read and print this article. Answer the questions below.

Stem Cell Basics

Research on stem cells is advancing knowledge about how an organism develops from a single cell and how healthy cells replace damaged cells in adult organisms. This promising area of science is also leading scientists to investigate the possibility of cell-based therapies to treat disease, which is often referred to as regenerative or reparative medicine.

Stem cells are one of the most fascinating areas of biology today. But like many expanding fields of scientific inquiry, research on stem cells raises scientific questions as rapidly as it generates new discoveries.

The NIH developed this primer to help readers understand the answers to questions such as: What are stem cells? What different types of stem cells are there and where do they come from? What is the potential for new medical treatments using stem cells? What research is needed to make such treatments a reality?

A. What are stem cells and why are they important?

Stem cells have two important characteristics that distinguish them from other types of cells. First, they are unspecialized cells that renew themselves for long periods through cell division. The second is that under certain physiologic or experimental conditions, they can be induced to become cells with special functions such as the beating cells of the heart muscle or the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas.

Scientists primarily work with two kinds of stem cells from animals and humans: embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells, which have different functions and characteristics that will be explained in this document. Scientists discovered ways to obtain or derive stem cells from early mouse embryos more than 20 years ago. Many years of detailed study of the biology of mouse stem cells led to the discovery, in 1998, of how to isolate stem cells from human embryos and grow the cells in the laboratory. These are called human embryonic stem cells. The embryos used in these studies were created for infertility purposes through in vitro fertilization procedures and when they were no longer needed for that purpose, they were donated for research with the informed consent of the donor.

Stem cells are important for living organisms for many reasons. In the 3- to 5-day-old embryo, called a blastocyst, stem cells in developing tissues give rise to the multiple specialized cell types that make up the heart, lung, skin, and other tissues. In some adult tissues, such as bone marrow, muscle, and brain, discrete populations of adult stem cells generate replacements for cells that are lost through normal wear and tear, injury, or disease.

It has been hypothesized by scientists that stem cells may, at some point in the future, become the basis for treating diseases such as Parkinson's disease, diabetes, and heart disease.

Scientists want to study stem cells in the laboratory so they can learn about their essential properties and what makes them different from specialized cell types. As scientists learn more about stem cells, it may become possible to use the cells not just in cell-based therapies, but also for screening new drugs and toxins and understanding birth defects. However, as mentioned above, human embryonic stem cells have only been studied since 1998. Therefore, in order to develop such treatments scientists are intensively studying the fundamental properties of stem cells, which include:

1. determining precisely how stem cells remain unspecialized and self renewing for many years; and

2. identifying the signals that cause stem cells to become specialized cells.


Questions:

1. What is regenerative/reparative medicine?

2. What is the NIH (you may have to search online to find this)?

3. What distinguishes stem cells from other types of cells? (Give an answer in words that you comfortably understand.)

4. What are the two types of stem cells with which scientists most often work?

5. What does the phrase "normal wear and tear" mean? ("Tear" here is like tearing a piece of paper, not a tear that you cry.)

6. For what do scientists eventually want to use stem cells?

Dream that Shook the World

Directions: Print out and read the two articles. Post a list of vocabulary words you don't know. Also, respond to the articles - what do you think about them? How are they different? What is the feeling/mood/tone of the articles?


Edward Samson was a news editor on the Boston Globe in the last part of the 19th century. The business news in those days was not as professional or efficient as it is today. Samson was a good writer, but he spent many evenings drinking with his friends. One night in August 1883, he got so drunk that he went to sleep on a shabby sofa in his office.
He did not have a peaceful night. He had a terrible nightmare. A volcano, erupting for several hours and then destroying a whole island, appeared in Samson's dream. When he awoke at three in the morning, still shaking, he put on the light. Then he started to write down the dream while it was still fresh in his mind.

It had been a very realistic dream. Samson saw a small island called Pralape. He did not know where it was, but it looked warm and tropical. There was a huge volcano in the middle of the island and in his dream it was erupting. Vast quantities of boiling lava were rushing down the steep sides of the volcano. Shooting high into the air, the flames turned the whole sky red. Terrified people were trying to escape from the great wave of lava, but the island was so small that they had to rush into the sea. Thousands drowned. Samson felt the heat and terror in his dream. At the end, he heard an enormous roar and the whole island exploded. All that was left was a flaming crater in the middle of the sea.

Samson finished writing his account of the dream, wrote IMPORTANT in the corner and left it on his desk. Then he went home to bed. Later that morning, his editor came in and found the story. Naturally, he thought that it was a news story that had come in by telegraph during the night. He put it on the front page with a banner headline. When they read it, other journalists around the world printed it too. It was an important item of news on 29 August 1883.

However, when they asked for more information, the journalists were surprised to find there was none. The island of Pralape could not be found on any map. The chief editor of the Boston Globe asked Samson to explain. Very ashamed of himself, he told the truth. It was just the story of his nightmare! Samson was fired.

A few days later, there were unnaturally high waves around the world. Captains of ships that reached ports near Indonesia told the world a strange story. The tiny island of Krakatoa had exploded. Krakatoa had begun erupting on 27 August and had blown itself to pieces the following day --- the day that Edward Samson had had his dream. But what about the name Pralape? The Dutch Historical Society solved that mystery. They found a map that was 150 years old. On it, Krakatoa was called by its ancient name --- Pralape.

http://www.stlouis.edu.hk/language.lab/Form_2_exercises/Book2BUnit7/Bk2BUnit7passage.htm

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A Dream that Shook the World.

It was Sunday night in Boston, where Byron Somes was sleeping off a binge in his office at the Boston Globe.

It was Monday morning in the Straits of Sunda, where the mightiest explosion in the history of man had just taken place.

In his dream, Byron Somes had seen the catastrophe as clearly as though he had been watching it from mid-air, although he was actually twelve thousand miles away! Two days before the Boston newsman's remarkable experience, nature had set the stage for catastrophe. The volcano of Krakatoa jutted up from an island in the Straits of Sunda, where an earthquake had torn the islands of Java and Sumatra apart in the year 1115. Krakatoa was noted for its rumblings and frequent eruptions. On August 25th,1883,it began deep underground mutterings which quickly reached the intensity of cannonading. By nightfall the volcano was showering the island with boulders. Bridges fell. Roads became impassable. Ships had to scurry out to sea to
elude the stones. Great undersea explosions churned the seas around the island and the temperature of the water rose sixty-five degrees overnight.

By noon on the 26th, the great volcano Maha-Meru, Java's largest, had joined the thunderous chorus. Then Gunung-guntur, and a few hours later the entire volcanic chain of the Kadangs was trumpeting in full volume.The sea boiled around the doomed island. The earth trembled. The nights were ruddy with the glow from the seething volcanoes--fifteen of them roaring in unison. Suddenly there was one explosion so vast that it defies description--the island of Krakatoa had disintegrated in one cataclysmic blast that sent earth shocks and air waves around the globe. The tidal waves killed tens of thousands of persons, some of them hundreds of miles from Krakatoa. There had been nothing like it in the annals of the human race.

In Boston, on that hot Sunday night in August of 1883, Byron Somes awakened from his troubled sleep and sat there for a while pondering the nightmare he had just experienced. He could still hear in his mind the screams of those doomed mortals on that little tropical island as they sought vainly to escape from the fiery fate that engulfed them. Somes jotted down the details of the dream while they were fresh in his mind, on the off chance that it might be usable as feature material some dull newsday. He marked the notes as 'important'--put them on his desk and went home. There was little news of the Krakatoa disaster next day, for communications to the stricken sector were sparse at best and the blast had virtually erased them. Somes did not report for work that day but someone evidently found his notes and misinterpreted them as a report on the seismological disturbances that was puzzling the experts. Something tremendous had happened--but where? Then came a fragmentary report from Batavia that located the disaster at Krakatoa--and the Boston Globe, on August 29th, ran an excellent story based on the details in the notes Somes had jotted down. Other papers evidently predicated their stories on that of the Boston Globe -- and in a matter of a short time his remarkable dream had been translated into widespread newspaper copy.

When his employers found Somes and demanded more detail and more copy, Somes broke down and admitted that his "report" was not intended as news matter--that it was nothing more than notes on a nightmare. The higher-ups at the Globe
probably experienced a nightmare of sorts at the discovery that they had printed a dream as though it were factual news --and had permitted other papers to duplicate it. Byron Somes was in the doghouse--and out of the newspaper business.

Before the Globe could make a public confession, nature rescued them. Great waves began hammering at the west coast of the United States, seismic waves generated by the explosion of Krakatoa thousands of miles away. News of the disaster began filtering in as survivors reached cities where telegraphed facilities still functioned. As the newswires brought in the real story, hour by hour, the amazing accuracy of the account based on the dream of Byron Somes became evident. That bewildered fellow found himself in the good graces of the Globe again. And the paper declined, at the time, to reveal the story behind the story. [Eventually, the Globe "explained" that Somes's account of the Krakatoa disaster had been based on information from a coffee broker; later this was amplified to include another "explanation" that Somes had also been doing some research on volcanoes in tropical islands at the time of the Krakatoa incident, etc. Author's note.]

In his remarkable dream Byron Somes, in Boston, seems to have witnessed the explosion of Krakatoa, halfway 'round the world, at approximately the time it happened. His dream was translated (accidently perhaps) into a news story which was subsequently confirmed by conventional processes. During the dream Somes kept hearing the word "Pralape." It made no sense at the time, but years later, through a Dutch historical society, he learned that Pralape was an ancient native name
for Krakatoa, unused for nearly two centuries before he heard it in his "dream that shook the world."

http://p102.ezboard.com/dremptOf/fyyondefrm548.showMessage?topicID=24.top

Crossword Puzzles

Go to this site and choose crossword puzzles to do. If you don't know some of the the words or phrases used, write them down so you can learn them!

http://a4esl.org/a/c3.html

Give the Gift of Languages

Directions: Read and print out this article. Answer all of the questions that follow by commenting or by bringing them to class. Also, be sure to know the bold words!

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Give the Gift of Languages
by Beth Butler


We live in an increasingly global society – our neighbor is from Puerto Rico, our co-worker from South Africa, and our child's teacher from Sweden! As adults, we often feel it's too difficult to learn a new language, but for kids, it's easy.

Time and Newsweek ran feature articles on the window of opportunity for second language learning – reported to be between birth and 10 years old. And a growing number of brain studies concur. The truth is, young children learn languages easily and retain them longer if they are exposed to them early in life. That's because when a baby is learning one word for an item, it's just as easy for his young brain to learn a second word for the same item. It grows more difficult as he gets older.

Being bilingual gives advantages beyond the joy of conversing in more than one tongue. A study by Dr. Ellen Bialystok of York University showed that children who received instruction in two languages scored twice as high on language tests than their monolingual peers. These bilingual children also read sooner and demonstrated advanced problem solving capabilities.

Latest research suggests that children learning through a bilingual format will outperform their monolingual peers in grade school as they experience advanced cognitive development. And the added benefit of learning a second language before middle school? These children will speak the new languages with native or near-native pronunciation.

The sooner you get kids started, the better. Believe it or not, at six months old a baby has the ability to learn all the languages of our world at the same time. Up until the age of five, a child still has the ability to learn five languages simultaneously. By middle school we all know learning a new language is no longer as easy as it used to be in elementary school. Children whose brains have been wired to learn languages early in life will experience advanced success in learning any language of their choice later in life.

Find a fun way to bring the language learning into your family's daily routine. Sing, dance, and play together on the road to becoming bilingual. We live in an increasingly global society. There is no better gift you can give your child than the ability to explore that world, speaking seamlessly.

Beth Butler is the creator of the BOCA BETH Language Learning Series for young children. www.bocabeth.com

http://www.education.com/magazine/article/Ed_Give_Gift_Languages_2/

Questions to answer:

1. What does the phrase "window of opportunity" mean? Why do you think the word "window" is in that? Do you know of other common phrases/sayings that use the word "opportunity" or "window"?

2. Define "tongue" as it is used in the article.

3. What does the phrase "believe it or not" suggest/imply?

4. What does it mean for children's brains to be "wired" to learn languages?

5. In the phrase "on the road to becoming bilingual," is "road" literal or figurative? How do you know?

6. What does it mean to speak "seamlessly"? What is a "seam"?

Whale video

Here is the video of the beached whale you asked me to post. It's very tragic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVe4qHGNTO4