Chapter 3
Writing
IC3 Section
English | Vietnamese
IC3 | IT | TOEFL | Best Answer
Assessment
Health/ Sức Khoẻ/ سلامت و بهداشت
Guiding Question: How do people seek to stay healthy in your culture? |
Câu hỏi hướng dẫn: Mọi người giữ sức khoẻ như thế nào trong nền văn hoá của bạn? |
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سوال راهنما: چگونه مردم در فرهنگ شما سعی در حفظ سلامت و بهداشت خود دارند؟
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Skills:
In this chapter you will do these things:
English Language:
Descriptions of Stretching Exercises
Focus on the Topic Sentence
Writing Assignment: Staying Fit and Healthy
Vocabulary for Health and Fitness
Understanding and Comparing Fitness Guidelines
Analyzing Paragraphs
Writing Topic Sentences
Vietnamese Language: Getting to the Hospital: Maps & Directions Vocabulary for Directions Completing the Conversation Writing About Health Care |
IC3: Is Height an Indicator of Health and Fitness? America Loses Its Stature as the Tallest Country TOEFL Appendix: Health & Fitness Glossary |
Intercultural Communicative Competence
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http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/ source/xxx/140/images/ball.jpg |
Are people in your part of the world thought of as tall or short in comparison to other parts of the world? Is height considered an indicator of good health and fitness (nurture) or is it nature? As you read this article, think about these questions and share with others in the IC3 community your ideas on height and size of people in your country and why they are short, tall or average.
America Loses Its Stature as Tallest Country
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 13, 2007; A06
Pundits often opine that America's stature is declining on the global stage. It turns out that Americans -- literally -- are not standing as tall, compared with the rest of the world, as they used to.
U.S. adults lost their position as the tallest people on Earth to the Dutch, who average about two inches taller than the typical American. In fact, American men now rank ninth and women 15th in average height, having fallen short of many other European nations.
"Americans, who have been the tallest in the world for a very long time, are no longer the tallest," said John Komlos of the University of Munich, who has published a series of papers documenting the trend. "Americans have not kept up with western European populations."
The idea that many Europeans are looking down on Americans has led to a flurry of interest in trying to explain the trend, with debate focusing on whether to blame the lack of universal health care and other holes in the nation's social safety net, particularly for children.
"We conjecture that perhaps the western and northern European welfare states, with their universal socioeconomic safety nets, are able to provide a higher biological standard of living to their children and youth than the more free-market-oriented U.S. economy," Komlos wrote in one of his latest papers, published in June in the journal Social Science Quarterly.
While some researchers agree, others are more cautious, arguing that height is determined by a complicated amalgam of genetic, environmental, social and biological influences.
"It's a puzzle to which we really don't have a good answer at this point," said Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. "Nobody has identified anything that can really explain it."
Nourished by a bountiful food supply and free from scourges that plagued Europe, Americans quickly became the tallest people in the world. The colonists were about two inches taller than the British they defeated in the Revolutionary War, and Americans towered about three inches above the average Dutch and other Europeans by the 1850s. That trend prevailed for two centuries through both world wars as America's wealth and influence paralleled its dominant height around the globe.
But in a series of papers, including his most comprehensive work to date -- the June analysis of federal surveys conducted between 1959 and 2004 -- Komlos and others have shown that growth of the average American flagged beginning in the 1950s, allowing other countries to overtake the United States by the 1970s. Although Americans have resumed growing in the past few decades, the rate has not kept pace with other nations.
"Americans were still growing until the Eisenhower administration and then stopped for two decades, which is odd, given the great improvement in health, in medical technology and given the great improvements in income," Komlos said. "Despite this, Americans have been surpassed by western European populations."
The difference cannot be explained simply by the fact that Europeans became more prosperous, Komlos said. The United States continues to lead the world in per capita income, but the richest Americans are still shorter than the richest Europeans, he noted.
Komlos's most recent analysis excluded Hispanics and Asians to try to eliminate the effect of immigration. In another paper that has not yet been submitted for publication, Komlos produced similar findings examining military records that enabled him to exclude people whose parents were born elsewhere to further account for immigration. And another paper being published soon found identical trends among children -- height stagnated among children in the United States for several decades beginning in the 1950s but continued to increase among Europeans.
"That explains why the western Europeans overtook the Americans," Komlos said.
Height is considered a bellwether of a society's well-being. As wealth increases, often so does height. Wealth usually improves nutrition and medical care, enabling people to reach their maximum growth potential and live longer. The key years are early childhood -- with those children receiving the best nutrition and suffering the least illness growing the best.
Komlos and others noted that the contemporary American diet, while plentiful, has become less nutritious in some ways, especially in recent years, which has helped fuel the obesity epidemic, particularly among children. So while Americans are no longer the tallest, they are among the widest.
"The culture of food here is different than other countries," said Richard H. Steckel of Ohio State University. "Children tend to watch more television and snack and eat fast food. When they do this, the fuel they are consuming is not the optimal blend."
The United States also lags far behind other countries in a host of important markers for childhood well-being. Rates of infant mortality, low-birth-weight babies and childhood poverty remain well higher than those in many European countries, and rates of childhood vaccination are much lower.
"American children are not as well taken care of as one would expect, given American incomes," Komlos said.
The health of mothers can also affect the eventual height of their offspring, researchers noted.
"What we're finding out is it's the basic quality of the environment in which people grow up that's crucial, and it takes several generations to overcome poorer environments in the past," said Barry Bogin, a biological anthropologist at Loughborough University in Britain.
But others are skeptical, noting that aside from the Dutch, the differences between Americans and other countries are small. There are also wide variations within every country, and it's difficult to compare a large heterogeneous country such as the United States with small homogeneous countries such as the Netherlands, they say. The effect of immigration can last generations.
"Some of these other countries probably have better family structure in terms of children growing up in two-parent households, for example," said Tom Miller, who studies health-care policy issues at the American Enterprise Institute. "It's a crude and simplistic approach to just say, 'Let's pour some more money into the health-care system.' "
Others, while agreeing that early childhood nutrition and medical care are crucial for attaining optimal height, say researchers are still trying to untangle the myriad factors influencing growth.
"Some people think the Dutch are really tall because they eat a lot of proteins when they are kids, and the Kenyans are really tall maybe because they drink the blood of their cattle," said Angus S. Deaton of Princeton University. "There's a lot of mysteries about this we still don't understand."
Films are more than Just Entertainment:
In many cultures, people have “learned” the social habit of watching a film and once the lights come on, they jump from their seats and leave the theater or auditorium! Why is this? Are we conditioned to think that films are for our “passive entertainment?” Are we conditioned to view them solely as something for my mind and eyes to absorb?
What if we practiced watching films in such a way that the “norm of behavior” was to stay seated for a bit. Then the norm might ask people to think about how everyone seated around them viewed the film. Then the norm could trigger a short but meaningful discussion about the meaning of the film.
Foreign Films, especially, anticipate that viewing audiences might follow just these steps of new behavior. And beyond imagining and dialoguing with those in the same room as you, foreign films open up the possibility of sharing across cultures. Through the IC3 learning platform, follow the links to share the thoughts from your class with other foreign learning communities that have just viewed the same film as you. Click on the Foreign Film toggle on the IC3 homepage. Instructions are provided for posting the thoughts from your own learning community. Read what other communities have posted. Then reflect on what has been learned as people across cultures shared their thoughts. Post a second time in response to these emerging themes.
This exercise takes practice! Why? The simple answer is this: we have, indeed, been conditioned across many cultures to view films as just entertainment, as something “just for me” to view and digest, and not as a medium of artful, relational, inter-cultural, and honest communication. IC3 stands for inter-cultural communicative competence. See your participation in the foreign film series as a chance to build your competence in this form of communicating. And have fun. For films, too, can be very entertaining!
IT Exercises and Activities for Developing Ideas:
Editing Documents
Using Spell Check
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Open your paragraph “Who In the World am I” from your disk.
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Now you want to be sure your document is free of spelling and grammatical errors. We are going to use the computer’s spell check program to help us.
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When your paragraph is on the screen, open the “Tools” menu from the top of the page.
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Click on “Spelling and Grammar,” the first option on the list. This opens up the spell check box. When spell check is open the computer will automatically scan your document for errors.
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Each time an error occurs it will appear in the top half of the “Spelling and Grammar” box. The computer’s suggestions for correcting the error appear in the bottom half. Notice that spelling errors are marked in red and grammatical errors are marked in green.
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Also understand that the computer is not always right. Sometimes it sees things as errors that you wrote deliberately. If this is the case then press the “Ignore” button on the right hand side of the “Spelling and Grammar” box.
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If the computer does pick up an error that you agree with then select a correction from the list in the bottom half of the “Spelling and Grammar” box and press the “Change” button. This automatically corrects the error in the text.
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Sometimes the computer will not be able to come up with any alternatives and the bottom half of the “Spelling and Grammar” box will read “No Suggestions.” If this is the case and you think that there is an error in the text you may click in the top half of the “Spelling and Grammar” box and correct the error in the sentence there. Pressing the “Change” button will enter that change in the main document.
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Spell check your entire paragraph “Who in the world am I” now.
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Once you are done with spell check, save any changes you have made by going to the “File” menu and selecting “Save.”
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Close Word.
Using Technology to Revise
http://word-crafter.net/CompII/TechRevise.doc
Step 1 Spell Check/Grammar Check
Directions: Highlight the paragraph below and spell-check it. Make your corrections and spell-check again. The passage has about 20 mistakes. Some errors will not show up on the spell check, so be sure that your corrected passage makes sense!
Pollution Polution affects all of or environment water, air and land. Mankind is changeing the composition off our atmospher by the addition of greenhouse gases and the distraction of the ozone layer. These alterations can vause changes in the earths climate, effect human ealth and the growth of plants. Water is essential toall life on our planet but ure water is becoming a scarce and expensive commodity. Humans are polluting the vailable water supplies through the waste and chemicals from industry, agriculture and the home.. As the orld's population grows an increasing amount of clen water is needed but more pollution is created! On land chemical pills, ridition from accidents such as Chernobyl and, most of all, out rubbish pollutes larg areas. Can we reduce these problems Adapted from http://www.burford.oxon.sch.uk/ks3ict/Year%209/WP_pollution_task.htm |
Step 2: Readability Statistics
Make sure that your grammar checker is set to show readability statistics.
a. Download the file “TrimTheFat.doc” from word-crafter.net/CompII. Use your grammar checker to determine its readability. Note the average sentence length and the number of sentences per paragraph. Try revising the paragraph to be more understandable, and check the readability of your revised version.
Note: You’ll find help at Dr. Russel Hirst’s Professional Writing Style site <http://www.designsensory.com/pws/lesson3/index.html>.
b. Run a grammar check on a paper you have recently written. Compare the results to the Army’s recommendations for clear writing. If you have too many long or short sentences, choose a paragraph and rewrite it, following the length guidelines below. Keep checking your revised paragraph until you are closer to the recommendations for clear style.
Step 3: Use Find/Replace to search for teachers’ pet peeves or mistakes you commonly make. For example, if your comp teacher tells you, “Punctuate like Americans, not Canadians,” it means she wants you to follow this rule: In American English, periods and commas always go inside the closing quotation marks.
a. You could read through your paper to check every closing quotation mark. However, the Find and Replace feature will do the work for you—and fix the error. In most word-processors, you’ll find this feature on the Edit menu. Once you’ve selected it, enter the mistake you want to find and the correction you want to make. The example below shows how to change ”. to .”
b. If you tend to use there instead of their, you can search for every time you’ve used there. If you meant “in that place,” hit Find Next. If you meant “belonging to,” replace there with their.
c. You can also search for punctuation marks. If you tend to make plurals into possessives (I ate the apple’s), you can search for ’ and leave the Replace field blank. Hitting Replace will remove the unnecessary apostrophe (I ate the apples).
d. Most word-processors will allow you to search for special characters like spaces, returns, or tabs. Look for options in the Find dialog box or check Help.
Cutting and Pasting
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Open your document “Who In the World am I”
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Moving text around word is very easy with a process called cutting and pasting. We are going to move your name and the date from the header to the footer of this page.
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Open the header and footer by double clicking on the light gray text of the header or by going to the “View” menu and selecting “Header and Footer.”
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Highlight your name and date by dragging your mouse over the words while holding the left mouse button down. The text will be highlighted in black and the words will appear in white. Let go of the mouse button when you have highlighted all of the text.
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Next go to the “Edit” menu at the top of the page and select “Cut.” There is a picture of scissors next to the word “Cut.” When you select cut you will notice that your name and the date disappear from the header.
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Scroll down to the bottom of the page and put the cursor in the top left-hand corner of the footer. Open the “Edit” menu and select “Paste.” Notice that your name and date now appear in the footer just as they did in the header.
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Try moving your name and the date back to where it was in the header, but cutting and pasting.
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Now we are going to put your name and date in the header and the footer. Highlight your name and the date in the header and select “Copy” from the “Edit” menu. Notice that your name and the date do not disappear from the header.
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Scroll down and put your cursor in the top left-hand corner of the footer. Open the “File” menu and select “Paste.” Your name and the date should now appear in the footer. Scroll back to the top of the page and notice that your name and the date are still in the header.
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Delete your name and date from the footer by highlighting it and selecting “Cut” from the “Edit” menu but do not paste it back into the header.
Cutting, copying and pasting can be used anywhere on the computer, even between programs. Later you will write a paragraph in Word and copy it to Blackboard.
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Save the changes by going to the “File” menu and selecting “Save.”
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Close Word.
*There are a number of good websites that provide glossaries for computer terms. If you do not understand a word associated with these descriptions, go to: http://www.sharpened.net/glossary/definition.php?harddrive as one example.
These exercises draw upon an article from “Yellow Book 2003-4: Health Hints: Food and Drink / CDC Travelers’ Health. The entire article can be accessed at http://www.cdc.gov/travel/food-drink-risks.htm
The following exercises are incomplete sentences. Beneath each sentence are four words or phrases marked A, B, C, and D. Choose the one word or phrase that best completes the sentence.
Example: Contaminated food and drink are common sources ____________________ infection in the body.
- A. by the introduction of
- B. for the introduction of
- C. for the introduction with
- D. of the introduction to
The correct answer is B.
Risks from Food and Drink
Food
1. To avoid illness, travelers ______________ to select food with care. All raw food is subject to contamination
- should advise
- are advising
- should be advised
- to advise
2. All raw food ______ subject to contamination.
- are
- has been
- is
- were
3. Particularly in areas where hygiene and sanitation are inadequate, the traveler should be advised to avoid salads, uncooked vegetables and unpasteurized milk and milk products such as cheese, and __________ only food that is cooked and is still hot or fruit that has been peeled by the traveler personally
- to eat
- eaten
- eating
- ate
4. Undercooked and raw meat, fish, and shellfish can carry various intestinal pathogens ___________ a fertile medium for bacterial growth and should be thoroughly reheated before serving.
- who provide
- that provides
- provides that
- that provide
5. Consumption of food and beverages _______ from street food vendors has been associated with an increased risk of illness.
- to obtain
- obtained
- obtaining
- which obtained
6. The easiest way to guarantee a safe food source for an infant under six months of age __________ the infant breast feed.
- when having
- are to have
- has to
- is to have
7. If the infant has already been weaned from the breast, formula prepared from commercial powder with boiled water is the_______ and most practical food.
- more safe
- safest
- most safest
- more safest
Directions: In the following exercises each exercise has four bold type words or phrases. Consider the first bold type word to be A, the second one B, the third one C, and the fourth one D. Choose the one word or phrase that must be changed in order for the sentence to be correct.
Water
8. Water who has been adequately chlorinated, by using minimum recommended water treatment standards used in the United States, will afford substantial protection against viral and bacterial waterborne diseases.
9. However, chlorine treatment alone, as used in the routine disinfection of water, might not kill some enteric viruses and the parasitic organisms that causes giardiasis, amebiasis, and cryptosporidiosis.
10. In areas where chlorinated tap water is not available or where hygiene and sanitation are poor, travelers should be advised that only the following might be safe to drink:
- Beverages, such as tea and coffee, make with boiled water.
- Canned or bottled carbonated beverages, including carbonated bottled water and soft drinks.
- Beer and wine.
11. Where water might be contaminated, travelers should be advised that ice should also consider contaminated and should not be used in beverages.
12. If ice has been in contact with containers used for drinking, traveler should be advised to thoroughly clean the containers, preferably with soap and hot water, after the ice has been discarded.
13. It is safe to drink a beverage directly from the can or bottle than from a questionable container.
14. However, water in the outside of beverage cans or bottles might also becontaminated.
15. Therefore, traveler should be advised to dry wet cans or bottles before they are opened and to wipe clean surfaces with which the mouth will have direct contact. Where water might be contaminated, travelers should be advised to avoid brushing their teeth with tap water.
Answer Key:
1. C |
4. D |
7. B |
10. C (made) |
13. A (safer) |
2. C |
5. B |
8. A (that) |
11. C (be considered) |
14. B (on) |
3. A |
6. D |
9. D (cause) |
12. B (travelers) |
15. (travelers) |
After you have completed the Reading, Listening/Speaking, and Writing chapters 3, how would you answer the following question?
Guiding Question: How do people seek to stay healthy in your culture? |
Câu hỏi hướng dẫn: Mọi người giữ sức khoẻ như thế nào trong nền văn hoá của bạn? |
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سوال راهنما: چگونه مردم در فرهنگ شما سعی در حفظ سلامت و بهداشت خود دارند؟
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