A comparative analysis of three leading english grammars Essay

A comparative analysis of three leading english grammars - Essay Example Most languages in Europe have some form of codification to the extent that such a record carries authority among native users on its conventions. The study of the rules governing the usage of the English language is called English grammar.Gowers' Modern English Usage was once popularly ascribed to but not many, even leading linguists, have a copy of this text. It can be considered that English is not typical as far as European languages go. It is the world's language, used by around 300 million second language speakers. It dominates the world's communications and is taught in almost every school worldwide. It is also the only language whose second-language speakers or non-native users far outnumber the native speakers. It is also the only language which can make millionaires out of its experts by writing books. The study of these rules may either be prescriptive or descriptive. Prescriptive grammars set rules for language. In descriptive grammar, the manner by which the language is w ritten or spoken is described.The English language is in some aspects quite simple. However, it can also be complex if not exasperating in its other characteristics. For example, English does not make use of grammatical gender. Its plurals and tenses are mostly regular. However, a unique feature of the language is that it employs the use of progressive tense (using -ing). This use of the progressive tense is unique although it is muted in its everyday use. This feature is a source of difficulty to some second-language speakers ... The differences among the various grammars of English is somewhat well-defined. The characteristics of Standard English are relatively clear. Standard English is spoken by around 10% of the population in the United Kingdom (Trudgill ). It is usually derived through formal school contexts. Standard English can also be combined with various accents including regional ones. The differences between Standard and Non-standard are minimal. These differences often involve a small proportion of the words in a passage, affecting only around twenty percent of specific areas of grammar. Non-standard English has many regional variations. An example is the difference between dialects which suppress subject-verb agreement favoring the -s form. An example of this is He like it in Wales in contrast to He likes it in Wales. There are also few gray areas in the definition of Standard, and the uncertainties that arise are specific and often affect the spoken form. Differentiating Descriptive and Prescriptive English There are now several English grammars and they are often classified as either descriptive or prescriptive, although others may have elements of both. The two types of grammars vary in the principles of how they are written. The descriptive and prescriptive approaches to Standard English grammar is the subject of much debate. New trends are also arising which has affected the way English is taught and used. Among these trends is the increasing codification of Standard English among non-native speakers. Ironically, the language is not codified for native speakers. However, this codification of English among native speakers may in the future become part of

Getting into Shape Essay Example for Free

Getting into Shape Essay Fitness is the quality or state of being fit. (Merriam-Webster, 2011) On September 26th, 2011 I took a physical fitness test. The fitness test measured four areas of my wellbeing, cardiovascular fitness, strength, flexibility, and body composition. After taking the test I was really interested in how I scored related to the standard set by other Men of my age. Cardiovascular fitness is the ability of the heart, lungs and circulatory system to supply oxygen and nutrients to working muscles efficiently. Having good cardio fitness allows you to enjoy life to the fullest. Cardio fitness reduces your risk of heart disease, lowers blood pressure, reduces cholesterol and helps you look and feel better. On the fitness test I scored a Maximum oxygen consumption of 58. This score placed me in the 95th percentile of males between the ages of 14-19 and at the low end of the very good category. Scoring high in this area did not surprise me since I do cardio for 3 hours a week. Yet, to improve my fitness and get in to the elite category I am going to incorporate more interval training in my cardio workouts. Strength is the second area that was tested during my fitness test. Muscular strength is the amount of force that your muscles can exert against resistance. (Healthy Flesh, 2011) To measure strength I was asked to bicep curl a bar for twenty seconds. At the end of the twenty seconds I scored 99 pounds and was in the upper end of the good category. If I would have curled 1 more pound I would have been in the excellent category. To get into that excellent category I am going to incorporate a new bicep regimen. The third test was the flexibility test. I knew going into the test that I wouldn’t do well since I do not stretch often. On the test I score 12. 4 inches. Compared with other males aged 14-19 I scored fair. To increase my flexibility I plan on stretching, by stretching after my warm-up, holding each stretch for 10-60 seconds and doing 2-6 repetitions per muscle group. (Liguori Carroll-Cobb, 2012) If I incorporate this stretching plan into my workout routine I should be able to get my flexibility level up to average for my age. The fourth and final test of my fitness was a body composition test. A three site skin fold test was used to determine my body composition for the test. The measurements were chest 3. 5mm, abdomen 12mm, and thigh 11mm. My body weight at the time of the test was 189 pounds. This combined with the skin fold measurements resulted in giving me a body fat percentage of 6. 5. The level of body fat I am at is low for men ages 14-19; it is also the optimal body weight for athletes. I plan on keeping my body fat percentage low by keeping up with my exercise routine and incorporating more cardio. The fitness test measured four areas of my wellbeing, cardiovascular fitness, strength, flexibility, and body composition. In the cardiovascular portion I scored very well. For strength I scored well, while in flexibility I scored fair. My body composition was 6. 5%. Overall, according to the fitness test, I am in excellent physical condition. I plan on continuing to work out, while improving on areas of flexibility and cardiovascular fitness. If I improve on those two areas while maintaining my strength and body composition, I shall live a long healthy life.

Irony in Lord of the Flies :: essays research papers

The Lord of the Flies initiates an ironic structure from its first chapters that becomes evident by the end of the book. Both Ralph and Jack’s attitude are different in the beginning of the novel to the way they turned out in the end. It is ironic how the most optimistic or hopeful situations in the book turn out catastrophic and society only falls apart more. On the surface the story implies that it is the boys’ age and inexperience that causes them to create such a corrupt society, however, on the contrary, there is an exaggerated respect for the ‘adult world’ as you consider the reason why the boys are on the island in the first place. Sardonic events lead to an even more ironic ending where their ultimate rescue is a result of two ironic incidences, the fire and the acceptance of the boys onto the ship by the naval officer. The author uses irony throughout to show how such innocent boys despite their best efforts can turn savage, through the events that unfold that lead them into anarchy. Ralph and Jack’s image of what life on the island would be like and how they would go about it was very different in the beginning of the story to the end. Ralph begins saying ‘This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grown ups come to fetch us we’ll have fun.’(p:45). It is ironic how this optimism is shattered by the end of the novel and events turned out so badly as though it were almost foolish to think they’d have fun from the start. Jack also makes a surprisingly ironic turn in the novel where his ideas appear civilized and orderly in the beginning, ‘We’ll have rules! Lots of rules!’(p:44) however he is the one who becomes the leader of the savages and provokes fear of the beast. It is ironic how the most optimistic situations turn out terribly, in an almost mocking way. Piggy is doomed from the start, they savagely hunt and kill pigs, torturing them and enjoying it. It is the beast within each boy that kills Piggy, as it is the beast within that eats away at any civilized instincts. Ralph wishes, ‘If only they could send a message to us. If only they could send us something grown-up †¦ a sign or something’(p:117).

Mountain Men and The Path to the Pacific

Reading this book was like listening to tall tales told around the dancing flames of a faraway campfire. One can almost hear the Grizzly’s roar, the rushing river, the war cries of long forgotten warriors, and almost smell the mountain forests. Therein lies the key to the author’s approach to historical storytelling: in this book, as in his many other histories written for popular consumption on American western subjects, he vividly and impeccably writes gripping and detailed narratives about well researched colorful individuals on the frontiers of the nineteenth century. He successfully provides the context for these narratives with an easy to understand explanation of America’s western expansion, and seamlessly bundles the entirety into a stylishly written story. Utley focuses on the period between the Lewis and Clark Expedition in1804 and the end of the western expansion era in the 1850s. He chooses his subjects not only because they provided the critical first movement of America into it’s Far West, but because, he argues, their memoirs, maps, and knowledge of geography and the local Native Americans made future settlement possible. I found his thesis well proven. The author provides a brief historical context in each chapter and relates his subject’s adventures from the bottom up – often quoting vivid primary sources that exposes their contradictions — their courage and illiteracy, ambition and uncouthness, their hunger for adventure and appetite for violence, and their often inevitable tragic endings. Each chapter focuses on one or two colorful personalities, men with names like Crazy Bill Williams and Jeremiah Liver-Eating Johnson. The compelling personalities may not contribute to proving the author’s thesis, but they do make the book an enjoyable read. The author devotes more than just one chapter to his favorite, Jedediah Smith, a man as austere as his colleagues were abrasive, who carefully mapped and detailed his travels.   Smith perfectly embodies the author’s thesis, that the mountain men’s maps and journals were essential to the opening of the Far West. Utley believes that Smith was â€Å"point man in the contest for Oregon†[1], and did more to open the Far Western frontier than any other early pioneer did.   Utley notes that Smith was a man in sharp contrast to most other mountaineers, such as Jim Bridger, who were stereotypical mountain men, full of whiskey and gall and telling tall tales, as did Bridger, about petrified forests with â€Å"peetrified birds singing peetrified songs†.[2] Utley writes a revealing key passage about President Jefferson that delineates the book’s central approach to the subject of the Mountain Men. In 1802, Jefferson read a British trapper’s memoir about his travels in the NorthWest. Alexander Mackenzie's book inspired Jefferson to send a band of hearty men on a reconnaissance to scout the unknown Far West, â€Å"†¦to discover the continental passage, colonize the Pacific Coast and tap it’s fur resources, and establish commerce with the Orient.[3]   In Utley’s view, this was no mere reconnaissance, it was the first step in what was to be a century of nation building. Utley expands the scope of his book by elevating Lewis and Clark, who Jefferson delegated to lead this expedition into the new territories of the Louisiana Purchase, and those who later continued the Western exploration, as being more than explorers and trappers, they were expansionists who guided America to its westward boundary on the Pacific. By elevating the significance of his subjects, Utley elevates the overall importance of his book. Utley begins in 1804, with the Corps of Discovery’s expedition to survey the new lands. Frontiersmen and others familiar with the ways of the Native Americans joined Lewis and Clark’s expedition, such as John Colter, a riverboat pioneer, and George Drouillard, a hunter who was half Shawnee and fluent in Indian sign language. The Corps of Discovery mapped the new land, but they also reported a wilderness ripe for trapping and settlement. What the Lewis and Clark Expedition reported on their return enthralled the nation and fired the imaginations of Americans hungry for opportunity. The first to start the movement west were independent entrepreneurs hoping to enrich themselves by harvesting the abundant wildlife – the hunter-trappers. The book chronologically and geographically charts the progress of the mountaineers, always using the mountain men’s history of discovery, exploitation of resources, and mutual cooperation. Utley uses copious primary sources, including the detailed day-to-day diary of Jedediah Smith, who catalogued minutia, such as the changing beaver population, and high drama, such as having his scalp sewn back on to his head after a Grizzly clawed him. â€Å"If you have a needle and thread, git it out and sew up my wounds around my head,† he asked of a fellow trapper [4].   Utley quotes other primary sources, such as John Bradley, a naturalist who kept a detailed journal traveling with a trapping expedition to the Pacific led by John Jacob Astor. [5] Utley addresses what motivated these early pioneers of the Far West, quoting   Warren Angus Ferris, â€Å"Westward Ho! It is the sixteenth of the second month, A.D. 1830 and I have joined a trapping, trading, hunting expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Why, I scarcely know for the motives that induced me to this step were of a mixed complexion†¦Curiosity, a love of wild adventure, and perhaps also a hope of profit.† [6] Utley draws on primary sources to describe a run-in between Hugh Glass and a Grizzly with cubs: â€Å"He lay on his back, bleeding from gashes in his scalp, face, chest, back, shoulder, arm, hand, and thigh. With each gasp, blood bubbled from a puncture in his throat.† Glass’ companions, thinking him near death, left him and went ahead. But Glass was made of true mountain man grit. He rallied, and crawled back to civilization. Utley writes, â€Å"Berries and a torpid rattlesnake smashed with a stone provided his first nourishment. The Grand River supplied water. He dug edible roots with a sharp rock. Chance turned up a dead buffalo with marrow still rich in the bones. Later wolves brought down a buffalo calf that he succeeded in seizing. In a six-week demonstration of incredible strength, fortitude, luck, and determination, Glass crawled back to Fort Kiowa, nearly two hundred miles.† This story exemplifies Utley’s dramatic flair by using colorful characters and events in writing history designed to appeal to the mass audience. Utley addresses the social identity of the mountain men, profiling the diverse sampling of immigrants and culturally dysfunctional individuals willing to live a solitary existence, disconnected from family and community. He examines their alliances with Native tribes, occasionally even marrying into the tribe, and develops a theme that these alliances produced a significant contribution in maintaining peaceful relations, and obtaining future tribal cooperation in exploration and provisioning. Utley also recounts the annual trapper Frolics, when mountaineers gathered to sell their furs and skins to retail traders, replenish their weapons and supplies, swapped tall tales, and threw the frontier equivalent of a modern fraternity toga party. While Utley always presents colorful events and personalities, he always returns to his primary theme – that the detailed maps and knowledge that the mountain men recorded and shared with each other made it possible for others to later navigate the unknown and difficult mountain regions. That their information filled the vacuum of understanding about the new territories and directly prompted the great western expansion, revealing the best routes to cross rivers and mountain passes in summer and winter, as well as where there was relative safety and where danger was to found. In a later, secondary wave of exploration, Utley relates how one veteran mountain man, Kit Carson, led several military expeditions in the early and mid-1840s to the Far West to consolidate the government’s domain and control of the new territories. Commanded by John C. Fremont, who would become known thereafter as â€Å"The Pathfinder,† the expeditions continued and completed the Western exploration started by Lewis and Clark. Utley argues that these military expeditions promoted the great waves of emigration by wagon trains across the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Oregon and California. A note about Utley’s illustrations, mostly period artwork and primary source period maps. At first glance they seemed lifeless, but they ultimately provided something akin to a Rosetta Stone that helped this reader to comprehend the enormity what the mountain men faced and endured. The joy the author demonstrates through-out the book reveals his almost spiritual identification with his subjects and the terrain they pioneered. His enthusiasm and command of detail serves to fully engage the reader, which to me is the gift of a great history book. But as much as the book succeeds, its methodology raises questions about it’s limitations: the author is invested in his own formulaic pattern of popular storytelling, one wonders whether he is choosing his subjects for marketability over significance. The book is informative, engaging, and enjoyable, even inspiring, but its formulaic approach may remove the potential for revolutionary perspective or revealing interpretation. This may be an inevitable consequence of success for any historian, and I suppose one most historians would welcome, but it may limit the book’s scholarly potential. One additional criticism: in Utley’s view, the Mountain Men pursued commerce and produced national growth, but the narrative accepts their chauvinist behavior without judgment and accepts their cruelty virtually without comment, which many could interpret as a lack of balance. The ideal popular demographic target for this book are those who love American historical adventure: those who love John Ford’s films, or Ken Burn’s Civil War documentary, or books about Mountain Men. If one enjoyed the film about Jeremiah Johnson starring Robert Redford, this is a history book made for you. For scholars, it provides an engrossing and interesting read that doesn’t sacrifice its historical themes. For young students, it successfully presents those details that fire the imagination. In other words, its sweeping panorama deserves its sweeping audience. I enjoyed reading it, learned from it, and re [1] P.67 [2] p.173 [3] p.3 [4] p.56 [5] p.24 [6] p.149

The Myth of Cyberterrorism

Problems in economy With using viruses, worm has costed to the USA $15 bil 2 Mind hackers targeted government computers Content and Organisation Read the paragraph below taken from the text â€Å"Myth of Cyberterrorism† and analyse the content and organisation. â€Å"The main reason for this controversy is that cyber-threats have not materialized as a national security threat, even granted that there have been some few incidents with at least some potential for grave consequences.Interestingly enough, both hypers and de-hypers tend to agree on this point. But while the first group assumes that vicious attacks that wreak havoc and paralyze whole nations are imminent, more cautious researchers often point to the practical difficulties of a serious cyberattack (Ingles-le Nobel, 1999), question the assumption of critical infrastructure vulnerabilities (Lewis, 2002; Smith, 1998, 2000), or point to unclear benefits of cyber- attacks for terrorist groups (Barak, 2004).Despite this c aution, however, even the second group contends that one â€Å"cannot afford to shrug off the threat† (Denning, 001 a) due to unclear and rapid tuture technological development as well as dynamic change of the capabilities of terrorism groups themselves (Technical Analysis Group, 2003). To summarize the debate in a nutshell: due to too many uncertainties concerning the scope of the threat, experts are unable to conclude whether cyber-terror is fact or fiction, or, since they are unwilling to dismiss the threat completely, how long it is likely to remain fiction.