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As lapsed Catholics, they sought a group which had as little doctrine and dogma as possible, but what they considered having good moral and ethical values. After some searching, they joined the local Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Although my parents did not attend Meetings for worship very often, I went to first Day School there regularly, eventually completing the course and receiving an inscribed Bible.
At the Quake School, I learnt about the concept of the "inner light" and it has stayed with me. I was, however, unable to accept the idea of Jesus Christ being any more divine than, say, Buddha. As a result, I be- came estrange from the Quakers, who, though believing in substantially the same moral and ethical values as I do, and even the same religious concept of the inner light, had arrived at these conclusions from a premise which I could not accept. I admit that my religion is the poorer for having not revealed word and no supreme prophet, but my inherited aversion to dogmatism limits my faith to a Supreme Being and the goodness of man.
Later, at another Meeting of Worship, I found that some Quakers had similar though not so strong reservations about the Christian aspects of their belief. I made some attempt to rejoin a Meeting for Worship, but found that, though they remained far closer to me than any other organized religious group, I did not wish to become one again. I do attend Meeting for Worship on occasion, but it is for the help on deep contemplation which it brings rather than any lingering desire to rejoin the fold.
I do believe in a "Supreme Being" (or ground of our being, as Tillich would call it). This being is ineffable and not to be fully understood by humans. He is not cut off from the world and we can know him somewhat through the knowledge which we are limited tea-the world. He is interested and concerned for humankind, but on man himself falls the burden of his own life. To me the message of the great prophets, especially Jesus, is that good is its own reward, and indeed the only possible rewards that are intrinsic in the actions themselves. The relationship between each human and the Supreme Being is an entire personal one.
It is my faith that each person has this unique relationship with the Supreme Being. To me that is the meaning of the inner light. The purpose of life, insofar as a human can grasp it, is to understand and increase this lifeline to the Supreme Being, this piece of divinity that every human has. Thus, the taking of any life by choice is the closing of some connection to God, and unconscionable. Killing anyone not only denies them their purpose, but corrupts the purpose of all men. (553)
If offered a reward for doing a good deed, the author would ______.
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About how many hectares of the farmland were lost to economic expansion and natural disasters in 1998？
The discovery of the Antarctic not only proved one of the most interesting of all geographical adventures, but created what might be called "the heroic age of Antarctic exploration". By their tremendous heroism, men such as Shckleton, Scott, and Amundsen caused a new continent to emerge from the shadows, and yet that heroic age, little more than a century old, is already passing. Modern science and inventions are revolutionizing the techniques of former explorers, and, although still calling for courage and feats of endurance, future journeys into these icy wastes will probably depend on motor vehicles equipped with caterpillar traction rather than on the dogs that earlier discoverers found so invaluable.
Few realize that this Antarctic continent is almost equal in size to South America, and enormous field of work awaits geographers and prospectors. The coasts of this continent remain to be accurately chartered, and the mapping of the whole of the interior presents a formidable task to the cartographers who undertake the work. Once their labors are completed, it will be possible to prospect the vast natural resources which scientists believe will furnish on the of the largest treasure hoards of metals and minerals the world has yet known, and almost inexhaustible sources of copper, coal, uranium, and many other ores will become available to man. Such discoveries will usher in an era of practical exploitation of the Antarctic wastes.
The polar darkness which hides this continent for the six winter months will be defeated by huge batteries of light, and make possible the establishing of air-fields for the future inter-continental air services by making these areas as light as day. Present flying routes will be completely changed, for the Antarctic refueling bases will make flights from Australia to South America comparatively easy over the 5,000 miles journey.
The climate is not likely to offer an insuperable problem, for the explorer Admiral Byrd has shown that the climate is possible even for men completely untrained for expeditions into those frozen wastes. Some of his party were men who had never seen snow before, and yet he records that they survived the rigors of the Antarctic climate comfortably, so that, provided that the appropriate installations are made, we may assume that human beings from all countries could live there safely. Byrd even affirms that it is probably the most healthy climate in the world, for the intense cold of thousands of years has sterilized this continent, and rendered it absolutely germfree, with the consequences that ordinary and extraordinary sicknesses and diseases from which man suffers in other zones with different climates are here utterly unknown. There exist no problems of conservation and preservation of food supplies, for the latter keep indefinitely without any signs of deterioration; it may even be that later generations will come to regard the Antarctic as the natural storehouse for the whole world.
Plans are already on foot to set up permanent bases on the shores of this continent, and what so few years was regard as a "dead continent" now promises to be a most active center of human life and endeavor. (517)
When did man begin to explore the Antarctic？
Why Immersion Teaching Works
As a Canadian immersion teacher, I was enthused to see the letter from John Whelpton about the Canadian immersion experience (South China Morning Post, June 11). I would like to take this opportunity to expand upon and challenge some of his views.
I agree that the Canadian immersion and bilingual schools have been successful in producing functionally bilingual students. In the province of Manitoba, there are French, Ukrainian, and German immersion schools; Hebrew bilingual schools; and a school for native Indian students. English immersion programs are popular for students from the province of Quebec as well as from countries such as Libya and Japan. However, Mr. Whelpton's suggested condition that teachers in these schools must be fully bilingual may be unnecessary. For example, primary teachers can and do function with a smaller vocabulary than secondary teachers.
Secondly, it is doubtful that students will use English because they understand and accept the objective of "making English the language of the classroom" which is a rather sterile motive. One reason that Canadian immersion programs work is because of the commitment to Whole Language Learning, that is, children learn a language, (first or second), by using it to transmit or receive meaningful messages that are interesting, real and important.
They want to make their needs and desires known and to understand the world around them. Immersion programs integrate language and content in an activity-based, child-centered manner so that the child is motivated to use the second language as a tool to transmit and receive messages related to social and academic interests. In addition the second language is modeled throughout the school, is encouraged and rewarded, and thus becomes the language of choice. It is not necessary to "abandon" Cantonese; an immersion program should pro- vide some daily instruction in the first language.
Mr. Whelption's third argument that all the students in one class need to be at approximately the same level of English proficiency when they switch to English is unrealistic and unprofitable. How does a teacher group children who have a huge vocabulary but poor grammar skills and others who have correct grammar but a poor vocabulary？
Also, suppose the students have similar language abilities but different learning styles! The odds are that a teacher, at any point in time, will be teaching at a level that is too difficult for one-third, too easy for one-third and appropriate for the final one-third of the students. Hence the concept of cooperative learning: students in heterogeneous groups with a mixture of personalities, talents and weaknesses (a more realistic reflection of life) learn better as they cooperate, instead of compete, and depend on each other for support and information.
This type of learning environment frees the teacher from the traditional lecturing mode in favor of circulating, monitoring and challenging the students to make use of their different experiences to expand their knowledge and skills.
I support immersion programs not simply so that Hong Kong remains "competitive as an international business center", but because children who learn a second language partake in an educational experience that expands their horizons in addition to their cognitive, social and affective capabilities; important goals of education indeed. (530)
This passage is ______.
E-Mail Madness: Breaking Rules and Loving It
For all the cultural upheavals being wrought by new technology, the spread of writing may be one of the biggest. Everybody, it seems, is writing these days.
The catalyst is e-mail messages and Web chat. In electronic messages and conversations, millions of people who thought that after their schooling ended they would never have to worry about a semicolon again are spending time, lots of it, writing.
“E-mail is basically a kind of grass-roots rediscovery of writing,” said Rob Wittig, the director of Tank20, which puts fiction on the Web. "People didn't have a rule-based way of thinking about e-mail when they first got it. It was purely utilitarian. The verbal play and inventiveness of spoken conversation was able to jump the barrier into the new medium and get combined with visual things."
The e-mail-chat culture may be ushering in the demise of the things that sustain it: grammar, syntax, spelling and, eventually, because of the visual, shorthand, hypertextual nature of the medium, possibly even some words. As with any cultural upheaval, the changes are eventually appropriated by the era's artists.
A typical e-mail message does away with commas and capital letters, and is riddled with misspellings, some of which are deliberate, most probably not. There is a lot of white space because the return key functions as punctuation. Acronyms and little pictures, called glyphs or emoticons, communicate thoughts and expressions. The freedom implicit in jettisoning grammatical rules could be what has enabled the e-mail-chat revolution to occur, unlocking the inner writer in everyone. Not having to abide by grammatical rule, as chat room visitors might say, makes them smile.
But is writing e-mail and chatting really writing？
Some writers who still believe in the importance of things like etymology and spelling and grammar say more people writing more often can only help the march of literature itself.
“Anything that takes away the fear of writing has got to be very healthy,” said William Zinsser, who teaches writing at the New School University in New York. "What has been given back to people by e-mail is really their natural right to talk to someone else on paper without all these inhibitions that the school systems have foisted on them."
The ease of writing on the Internet may also be fostering a legion of would-be writers. Depending on one's point of view, this may or may not be a good thing.
Proponents of electronic literature say that in addition to unlocking the writer within, e-mail and chat are fostering a new wave of literacy. As a result, a new language is developing, and like all Internet phenomena, it is evolving quickly.
But Cynthia Ozick, the essayist, novelist and short-story writer, said that the speed and ease of composing on the computer doesn't help the language change but rather, it stunts it. Writing on the computer, she added, foster prolixity; ease of use deprives the author of much-needed time to ponder. That disappoints her.
“At the start,” Ozick said, “there was this excitement: we're going to enter an age like the new 18th-century epistolary, glorious age. We do have an epistles age--it consists of grunts.”
Wittig, who puts some of his writings on the Tank20 Web site, said that people should expect that writing will evolve. "Many people who are really smart make the mistake of identifying the beauty of language, love of language, history of language with their own beloved style," he said. "If there's anything that we learn from the long view of literary history it's that styles change."
The ease and speed and casualness of writing found on the Internet has infected some authors who write work to be published online, including Ozick, who mostly uses pen and paper to write. In 1997, Ozick wrote a diary for the online magazine Slate.
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