A nightmare

A nightmare

I was seriously preparing for my school examination. Normally people call it exam fever and I believe I was haunted by the feeling of falling ill while the examination was on. But I was able to banish such fears and concentrate on my studies. But this fear crept into my subconscious mind and it played havoc on me. I have now the consolation that it was all a dream.

On November 16, my birthday was arranged to be celebrated in a colorful manner. There was a small party that my father arranged for my friends. I spent the whole evening enjoying myself while my parents were busy watching television. I pretexted as though I had to prepare for the examination, but I was cheating myself with the thought that I would wake up early in the morning and make up the lost time. While in bed, sleep seemed to elude me and the bug of falling ill during the examination began to harass me. However after sometime I slept.

If Alice’s experiences in the wonderland were bizarre, mine was shocking. To my subconscious mind the bogey of illness during the examination was true. I felt a sudden irritation in both my eyes and what started as an irritation became an unbearable pain. I started shouting and my parents rushing into my room. They consoled me, more than that they could do nothing. It was ten at night. My mind became agitated that, I thought that I might not be able to sit for my English and Mathematics examinations.

My father soon realized the problem I was facing, “The Exam Fever”. He made me stand against the wall and by understanding my agony, he carried me downstairs. He then put me in his car and drove me to a nearby hospital. On the way he was consoling me about the examination and trying his level best to make me relax. I explained that I was having an irritation in my eyes as though thousands of needles had pricked. On arrival at the hospital, the doctor performed many tests and finally told my father that, due to nervous feeling of examination, I had spoiled my brain which had affected my eyes. I could not sit for the examination, and he would issue a medical certificate to be produced to the authorities.

My father was undaunted by the doctors’ decision. In total desperation he put me back in his car and drove to another hospital. He explained to a doctor about my case but not the real situation. The doctor had diagnosed correctly at the first sight itself. Before he applied ay medicine he asked me to open my eyes slowly. I said that I could open, but the doctor insisted. By the time tears started rolling down my cheeks and, with the tears forming between my eyelids, I could open my eyes. The room was dark but for a small lamp. There was no doctor. Where had my father gone? I still felt the tears rolling down my cheeks. All I saw was the clock on the wall opposite my bed. Now I realized! Oh! It’s a dream. Soon I overcame myself and was happy to realize my folly. I am really happy because it was just a dream.

Honesty is the best policy

Do you think that “Honesty is the best policy”?

This is an old and often repeated proverb, but it is true? It has a suspiciously worldly flavor, for it means that from a worldly point of view it pays to have honesty. Now a man of complete honesty will not ask whether honesty pays or not. He feels he must be honest, even if honesty brings him loss or suffering, simply because it is right to be honest and wrong to be dishonest. This proverb is therefore of little use to people of sincere honesty: it is really meant only for those unprincipled men who will be honest only if honesty pays, and will be dishonest if they think honesty will pay them worse.

Probably honesty does pay in the long run. In business, for example, a man who deals straight forwardly with the pubic, who sells at fair prices, who gives good quality, and can be relied upon not to cheat, will generally establish a reputation that will be a fine business asset. People will be glad to deal with him; and though he may not make a fortune he will have a sound and satisfactory business.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that success is often due to trickery, and great fortunes have been built up upon dishonesty. Too many successful rogues have proved by experience that for them dishonesty had been the best policy. Of course some of these people come to a bad end, and lose all they have gained by their lies; but many maintain their worldly success is more due to ability, lucky opportunities, and business cunning, than to honesty.

And many examples could be given of men who, from a worldly point of view, have failed because they have scrupulous honesty. A martyr who prefers to be burned at the stake rather than say what he believes to be false, may be a hero; but in the eyes of a worldly man, who thinks only of worldly success, he is a sad failure.

But if we look at such cases from the spiritual point of view – if we consider that truth and righteousness are far more important than wealth and rank and prosperity – then, in the highest sense, honesty is the best policy in the end. “For what it shall profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

Read more about 'Honesty is the best policy':

Read 1:
Honesty is the best policy
Honesty makes us brave and strong. We are not afraid of anybody or anything. Honesty could lead us to face some problems; nevertheless, we are loved and respected by others. Problems are cured themselves later thanks to the understanding of everyone on our situations.... Read more
Source: fotoget.blogspot.com


Read 2:
Honesty is the best policy
From my own experience, I absolutely agree that honesty is the best policy.
One fine day, while I was on my way to school, I found a wallet. It was lying outside the lift.
Opening the wallet, I found two hundred dollars and some coins inside. There were some pieces of paper but no identity card. I was tempted to keep the money, but I remembered what my teacher had taught us that honesty is the best policy... Read more
Source: language123.blogspot.com

Read 3:
Honesty is the best policy (a story)
Source: essays4free.blogspot.com

Read 4:
Honesty is the best policy
Generally, honesty is the best policy in any situation. Some people are very reliable and they hate those who tell lies for any reason. Other people accept “white lies” when situation arises, even if they usually do not like lying. I strongly agree that honesty is the best policy in a relationship... Read more
Source: essays4free.blogspot.com

People who look for excitement and danger are foolish.

People who look for excitement and danger are foolish.

Things that people do for fun or for money are very numerous today. Some of these things are positively dangerous, but there seem to be no lack of people eager to do them. Bungee-jumping, rock-climbing and sky-diving are certainly not everybody’s cup of tea. Then there are less dangerous but no less exciting pursuits of motor-racing and professional boxing. These are all exciting and dangerous things. Some even earn a living doing these dangerous jobs. Why would people put themselves in such dangers? Would they be considered foolish?

Those who purposely go out to get some excitement are usually those who are bored with their lives. Bungee-jumping is a predominantly western invention and the participants are usually bored westerners who would do anything for some excitement. It needs a certain amount of guts to be able to jump off a bridge only to be saved from certain death by a piece of rubber cord failed and the thrill-seekers perished. Yet the others persist. I suspect these others are not only bored with their lives, they could be unconsciously looking to either end their boredom or their lives. In short they could have suicidal tendencies. Would people bent on killing themselves be called foolish?

Rock-climbers and sky-divers also take enormous risks. Deaths resulting from accidents are not uncommon, but people continue to do them. I asked a friend who does rock-climbing why he pursued such a dangerous sport. He said every time he reached the top of a rock, the feeling of excitement and achievement was quite incomparable. It is intoxicating and he is hooked by it. So he seeks to repeat the high, despite the obvious risks.

I suppose the exciting feeling holds true for the other unpaid dangerous sports as well. They get the adrenalin flowing through the blood. These excitement-seekers are obviously addicted to it. The only thing they get out of their pursuits is excitement, which has to be repeated. No other gain is forthcoming except some respect from others. Perhaps respect is also an excitement thing for some.

The professionals who take great risks are far better off than the amateur ones in terms of financial rewards. Race-drivers are usually millionaires. So are boxers. Also these professionals are well covered by insurance and they do not take unnecessary risks. In fact they are very careful indeed in their work.

In conclusion, I would say that amateurs who look only for excitement and danger are foolish because they stand to gain nothing and to lose everything. They are putting their heads on chopping block for the sheer thrill of it. The professionals are different. They get paid and make sure that their necks are well padded. Thus they are not as foolish, not by a long shot.

The ills of modern cities

The ills of modern cities

The most glaring ill of modern cities is that the people in it are always in a hurry. Businesspeople, wage-earners, laborers, pedlars, crooks and assorted characters all rush about in their activities. It is rush, rush and more rush. City folks rush to work, rush to get their work done, rush to have lunch and rush home. Then perhaps they rush to have dinner or rush to a party. Finally in the early hours of the morning it is a rush to, as they say, grab some sleep before the rush next morning.

I was in Sydney, Australia, for a visit once. As I took a leisurely stroll along the city streets, I was amazed at how everyone seemed to be walking very quickly past me. Even old ladies of seventy simply overtook me without any difficulty. Some younger ones were actually running towards God knows where. To cross the busy roads, everyone crowded near the traffic lights. The moment the lights changed to green for the pedestrians, they took off not unlike sprinters off the blocks. That was a rush indeed. I was forced to walk quickly too, otherwise I was likely to be trampled on by the crowd.

NO wonder modern city-dwellers suffer from all sorts of stress-related diseases. Some of these stressed people are probably rushing towards an early grave too.

In a city like Kuala Lumpur, after the workers have gone home, the uglier side of the city emerges. The night-sports open up attracting all sorts of people. Prostitutes, drug addicts, drug pushers, con-men, thugs and other potentially dangerous characters abound. The police are hard-pressed to handle them. The crime rate is always rising.

However, compared to other cities like New York, Kuala Lumpur is relatively tame. In New York, everyone knows that it is dangerous to even go for a walk in some areas after 5 p.m. The likelihood of getting mugged or even killed is very high. The street gangs rule and no sane person would go out to tempt them. Still robberies, murders and all manner of human perversion continue. Certainly there is great ill in this city. This trend of lawlessness s spreading in other cities as well and there is no indication that things will get better.

While skyscrapers dominate the skyline in a city, one could say squatters and shanties dominate the baseline. In some cities, it is estimated that these shanties occupy more than half the city space. On one side, the wealthy ones rush around in their posh cars, while on the other side, the less fortunate ones rush around stealing them. The imbalance of wealth is glaring and nothing is done about it. This is another ill of modern cities.

What are the remedies for these ills of modern cities? It would seem that nobody knows. Nobody seems to care too, which is another typical city illness. At the rate the cities are progressing, it certainly looks like they are headed for some sort of social disaster. Already the inner areas of some huge cities are experiencing a breakdown of law and order. The authorities simply cannot cope. There is not much an ordinary person can do to alleviate these ills. All he can do is to hope that they will go away, which seems very unlikely.

How can a teacher help students enlarge their vocabulary?

Ways to help students enlarge their vocabulary

It is a self-evident truth that a good command of a language requires a knowledge of both its grammar and vocabulary as structural patterns serve as building blocks that hold lexical items together. Therefore, in addition to teaching grammatical rules, English teachers must help their students enlarge their vocabulary. This will not come as a daunting task to language teachers if they know that they can offer assistance to their students in their vocabulary learning and vocabulary expansion in the following ways.

Teachers can first help by raising students’ awareness of the importance of vocabulary learning and expansion. As can be seen, not all students are fully conscious of the necessity of having a wide vocabulary of English. Some students may emphasize the acquisition of linguistic structures over that of vocabulary because the former, in their opinion, can help them operate effectively inn English. However, it is not difficult to find cases in which it is words, not grammatical structures that help one get his message across. For example, a speaker can still make himself understood even though he produces a grammatically incorrect sentence like ‘Yesterday I meet mine old friend’. Therefore, language teachers should give priority to making students aware of the important role that vocabulary plays in language learning. Only when students realize the significance of knowing the lexis of a language will they make effort to learn words and increase their vocabulary.

Second, teachers can help students enrich their vocabulary by teaching words in context. The reasons for this technique are not difficult to understand. For one thing, the environment in which a word occurs with other words that will decide which meaning of the word is intended. Lexical items should thus not be presented to student in isolation; they should be presented in clear and meaningful contexts so that students can work out which sense of the word concerned in used. For another thing, students will get into the habit of guessing the meaning of new or unknown words form context, a badly needed skill for their vocabulary expansion. It is because when they first encounter new vocabulary items students will rely on the context as a clue to their intended meaning. In this way the meaning or use of the word will be retained longer in their mind.

Moreover, teachers can promote students’ vocabulary learning and expansion by teaching words in relation to other words. It is highly recommended that specific words such as red, blue, yellow should be related to the generic term color, that words like happy should compared with happily, happiness, unhappy, unhappily and unhappiness, that words like book should be extended to notebook, textbook and handbook and that acceptable combinations like headache, earache, stomachache should be identified as opposed to illegitimate ones like eye ache or throat ache. In other words, teachers do not simply teach certain words as discrete lexical items; teachers have to present words in a network established by such language phenomena as sense relations word formation and collocation. An additional teaching tip is that teachers can present vocabulary in categories of words depending on topics. Teachers can ask students to keep a notebook to record words in different sections for different themes or topics so that they can develop their vocabulary systematically. In this sense, students not only learn, for example, a single word happy but several connected forms like happily, happiness, unhappy, unhappily and unhappiness and other words referring to human emotional states like glad, pleased, sad, and depressed. This will certainly lead to a massive increase in the number of words students learn and acquire.

One more thing that teachers can do to help their students to widen their vocabulary is to train them in dictionary using skills. Naturally, teachers cannot provide students with all the words they need. So dictionaries will serve as their best source of reference outside class time. And that is the reason why students should be given practice in using dictionaries. Teachers can start by recommending a good bilingual dictionary such as an Oxford or Cambridge or Longman learners’ dictionary. Certainly, a monolingual dictionary has a role to play but an English – English dictionary would expose learners more to the language. As learners’ dictionaries often define more complex words by means of simpler words, students can get at the meaning without switching back to their mother tongue. What is more, as easy and familiar words are used to explain new words, the former are recycled, thus facilitating students’ comprehension and acquisition of the latter. Then teachers can spend some of their class time showing students how to use the dictionary they have recommended. For example, they can set exercises in which students have to look up some new words from their reading or listening texts. This will force them to get to know the symbols and abbreviations used in the dictionary and to choose the most appropriate meaning of the words from a range of meanings listed in the dictionary.

In conclusion, there are just a few ways in which teachers can help their students enlarge their vocabulary. It is hoped that with the help and guidance from the teacher, students can first discover the value of vocabulary learning and expansion in language learning and then develop strategies to increase their vocabulary.

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