English Recordings

poverty eradication
tumultuous changes
repudiation of the annual tribute
smear campaign
in a very woolly fashion
swing state
incremental reforms
obituary
excess population
by-election
on the other side of the ledger
lenient stance
untoward development
to top the poll
to partake in ordinary community life
to weep openly
to take up government, or to take up rule
to cow the press
to sort the world out
to go on circuit
to engender instability
front burner
to dispatch new orders
to retrieve one’s position
to mollify critics
to pursue an alliance
to hold out for increased clout in the IMF
public accolade
avarice of the authorities
subversive overtones
to have a political slant
proud boast
keynote speech
legislative abrogation
breadline
to call a general walkout
outgoing parliament

it's very interesting.

1 Galileo Galilei was born way back in the year 1564 in the town of Pisa, Italy. When he was 20 years old, he was studying in Pisa. His father wanted him to be a doctor, but Galileo was bored with school except for math. Because math was the one subject where he was doing well, the court mathematician offered to tutor him privately so he could become a qualified mathematician. Galileo's father was disappointed, but he agreed.

2 Because he needed to earn money, Galileo began experimenting with different things, trying to come up with some sort of invention that he could sell for money. He had a little bit of success with his invention that was kind of like a compass that could be used to measure plots of land. He had already experimented with pendulums, thermometers, and magnets.

3 When he heard that a Dutch inventor had invented something called a spyglass, but was keeping it a secret, Galileo decided to work on one of his own. Within 24 hours, he had invented a telescope that could magnify things to make them appear ten times larger than real life. One night, he pointed his telescope toward the sky, and made his first of many space observations: the moon was not smooth, like everyone thought. The moon was covered in bumps and craters. As technology has improved, first Galileo, and then many others, have made improvements on the telescope, the wonderful device that allows us to see from a distance.

The initial plan, as outlined by the Israelis, called for a major bombing campaign in response to the next Hezbollah provocation, according to the Middle East expert with knowledge of U.S. and Israeli thinking.

Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon’s infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah,
according to the former senior intelligence official. The airport, highways, and bridges, among other things, have been hit in the bombing campaign.

The Israeli Air Force had flown almost nine thousand missions as of last week.

Terrorism is defined in the Code of Federal Regulations as

"...the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives."

There are two things that make humans different from all other animals. They are language and music.

one’s opposite numbers
unspoken enmity
to leave someone in the lurch
procurement of quick-firing field artillery
striking power
to run one’s course
lax security
to be already in train
on weekdays
to be crippled in battles
beyond the purlieus of one’s immediate geographical waters
to take a jaundiced view
fly fishing
to cast aspersions on one’s ally
brinkmanship
to become a flashpoint for wider tensions
impeccable technique
to lob shells
screen detachments, or barrier troops
a long wearisome struggle
to be canvassed as chief of the general staff
to curb naval spendings
to impress the surviving members of the crew into service aboard the pirate ship
to decree a mild punishment
to head off further criticism of the government’s procurement policy
to be allied to mass production

1 When you are preparing to learn something new, it is a good idea to get your brain ready to receive the information. Think of your brain like a gigantic filing system that contains all the things you have ever learned, read, listened to, seen, or experienced. As you can imagine, organizing all of those files is quite a large job. Fortunately for you, your brain has an automatic system that it uses to connect files together to help you quickly locate information you have already learned. If you take a few moments to prepare your brain, you can make it easier for your brain to connect what you are learning to your prior knowledge, all those things that you already have filed away in your brain’s filing cabinet.

2 If you are listening to a teacher or other speaker, write down the topic. Activate your prior knowledge by thinking about things that you already know about that topic. Jot down a few notes before, during, and after the lesson. If you are going to read new information from a textbook, either by yourself or as part of a group, first read the title and scan through the photographs and other visual aids to let your brain make a sort of outline for what it will be receiving. If there are new words in the margins, read the definitions so you will already be familiar with the new words when you see them in the reading. If you forget their meaning when you are reading, look in the margin again to clarify what they mean.
3 Take the time to activate your prior knowledge. Your brain will make the connections it needs to file the new information where you can find it. You will be a more successful student.

Women use an average of 20,000 words a day, compared to the mere 7,000 that men utter. At least that’s the assertion of a number of self-help and popular science books. Quoted by apparently authoritative experts and widely reported, it’s a statement that bolsters the stereotype of the fairer sex spending their days gossiping, while the stoic men folk get on with it, whatever it is, without the need to chatter. But is it actually true?

Talkativeness can be measured in various ways. You can get people into a lab, give them a topic to discuss and then record their conversations. Or you can try getting them to record their everyday conversations at home. You can count up the total number of words spoken, the time each person spends talking, the number of turns an individual gets in a conversation, or the average number of words spoken in a single turn.

By combining the results of 73 studies of children, US researchers found girls did speak more words than boys, but only by a negligible amount. Even this small difference was only apparent when they talked to a parent, and was not seen when they were chatting with their friends. Perhaps most significantly it was only seen until the age of two-and-a-half, meaning it might simply reflect the different speeds as which boys and girls develop language skills.

So not much difference among kids, but what about adults? When Campbell Leaper from the University of California, Santa Cruz, the psychologist who found the very small difference in young children, carried out a meta-analysis on the subject, it was men who talked the most. But once again the difference was small. It was also striking that lab-based studies in which pairs or groups were given specific topics to discuss found greater differences than those carried out in more real-life settings. This suggests that perhaps men were more comfortable in unusual, novel laboratory settings.

Leaper’s findings supported a review of 56 studies conducted by linguistics researcher Deborah James and social psychologist Janice Drakich published in a 1993 book on male and female conversational styles. Only two of the studies found women talked more than men, while 34 of them found men talked more than women, at least in some circumstances, although inconsistencies in the way the studies were done made them hard to compare.

Real life conversations have traditionally been the hardest to study because of the need to get participants to record all of their conversations. But then the psychologist James Pennebaker, of the University of Texas, Austin, developed a device that records 30-second snippets of sound every 12.5 minutes. People can’t turn Pennebaker’s EAR, or Electronically Activated Recorder, off, so it’s gives a more reliable sample of what’s really happening. In research published in the journal Science in 2007, Pennebaker found that in their 17 waking hours the women they tested in the US and Mexico uttered an average of 16,215 words while the men spoke 15,669. Again, a negligible difference.

Not all types of conversations are the same of course. Perhaps what matters is who else is listening. An analysis of a hundred public meetings carried out by Janet Holmes of the Victoria University of Wellington , New Zealand, showed that men asked, on average, three quarters of the questions, while making up only two thirds of the audience. Even when the audiences were equally split gender-wise, men still asked almost two thirds of the questions.

But despite all the evidence to the contrary, we seem wedded to the idea that women talk more. In fact it’s just one of many areas of life in which we expect significant differences between the sexes, but when the research base as a whole is taken into account, men and women are often far more similar than popularly believed.

When researchers reported earlier this year that four-year-old girls had 30% more of a protein thought to be important to language and speech acquisition in a particular region of the brain, some sections of the popular media were quick to interpret this as proof that women can’t stop talking. In fact the study tells us nothing about women, or men for that matter. The chief participants were rat pups, but ten little boys and girls were also tested. Even the authors themselves caution against reading too much into the study, saying that whether human differences in the quantities of this protein can explain differences in language skills is a question for future research.

So where does the idea that men utter 7,000 words a day versus women’s 20,000 come from? They appeared on the dust jacket of The Female Brain, a 2006 book by Louann Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of
When it comes to conversation, are women really more likely to be bigger talkers than men?
California San Francisco, and were widely quoted in reviews. When Mark Liebermann, professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, questioned use of the figures, which appeared to be loosely based on related numbers in a self help book, Brizendine agreed with him and promised to remove them from future editions. Liebermann tried to trace the origin of the statistics further, he had little luck except for a similar claim in a 1993 marriage guidance pamphlet. Not quite the gold standard of scientific evidence.

It was cold today. It rained a little, too.
I was home and kept my computer on all day.
I used it to do my homework.
If the weather had been good, I would have ridden my bicycle.
I had had a good time, nonetheless.
I like to take a bath even more because it has been getting colder.
I put a bath bomb in bath and soak myself in the warm water.
At the moment, I feel relaxed.
I especially like citrus scented bath bombs.

La sortie au cinéma

Cette semaine je suis allé au cinéma. On donne une adaptation du même nom du livre "La stratégie Ender". C'est mon livre favori donc j'avais peur qu'il ne soit pas bien adapté. Le film est différent que le livre, mais il m'a plu tout de même. Je retournerai au cinéma un prochain jour.