...To Build A Fire My favorite Sentence in this short story read, “On the top of this ice were as many feet of snow.” The sentence is at the beginning when the man is describing not only how far he came, but what it looked like. I picture the scene from the end of the movie Shooter. Mark Wahlberg is sniping some of the bad guys who worked for the government. He’s on the top of the snow covered mountain thats wide open, and he can see nothing but the bad guys for the government, and the white snow. “And to get his feet wet in such a temperature meant trouble and danger.” This sentence was my second favorite. In the story where this sentence appears the unnamed man is describing when he was walking down this stream coved in a half inch of ice, and how he panicked when he felt the give under his feet. I know his feeling in this situation. I feel into a stream that was frozen over one winter to save my niece that fell in while we were sledding down a hill. It was very cold, and I panicked as well. Even though it was very cold I wouldn't hesitate to do it agin, because I love my niece with all my heart. I liked that sentence, because it brought back that old memory with me and my niece. Yes we were having fun but sometimes you can have a little to much fun and not be paying attention, therefor you end up having to just in a frozen stream to save your little niece. My favorite character in this short story would have to be the dog. Even tho it was a husky...
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...The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin is the story of Genly Ai’s trip to Gethen, a cold, icy planet inhabited by androgynous people. Genly was sent to this planet by the Ekumen, an interplanetary organization that encourages the exchange of goods and ideas, to introduce the Gethenians to the organization and its technological advances. When he arrives in Karhide (one of the countries on Gethen), he meets Argaven and Estraven, the country’s king and chancellor, respectively. The next day, Argaven refuses the Ekumen’s offer, and he informs Genly that Estraven has been exiled. Genly then journeys to Orgoreyn, a country adjacent to Karhide, to tell the people there about the Ekumen. He soon meets the thirty-three Commensals who rule Orgoreyn....
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...Maynard/Stow — “Every once in a while, people need to be in the presence of things that are really far away.” This was the concluding sentence of a short essay by Ian Frazier appearing in the New Yorker magazine, February 2011. You know – like mountain tops, the Grand Canyon, the Empire State Building or the bow of the Titanic (before it sank). Maynard and Stow offer remarkably few opportunities to be in a place where distant vistas are a view. Once upon a time Summer Hill, now tree-covered and trail-crossed, was open pasture. History Society pictures taken as recently as World War II show an expanse with few trees. Decades earlier, state surveyors installed an official stone marker atop Summer Hill, with the expectation that from that point, clear viewing was available in all directions. Marble Hill, at 440 feet, the highest elevation in Stow, is similarly tree-obstructed. Stow does offer a hill with a present-day view. Stories hold that ships’ pilots in Boston harbor used the stand of pine trees atop Pilot Grove Hill as a navigational landmark, suggesting that in the reverse direction a person atop the hill could see Boston’s skyscrapers. Alas, not so. Mayhap from a treetop, but not from ground level. However, Birch Hill Road, elevation 370 feet, does offer a glimpse of Mt. Wachusett, twenty miles to the northwest. Bridges can offer vistas. White Pond Road over the Assabet River, on the Stow/Maynard border, offers good views up and down river – albeit less than...
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...to Naran to Shogran to Lalezar to Nathiagali to Ayubia to Islamabad & back to Lahore. The trip from Islamabad to Abbotabad was quite good. A good place for a short stopover in Abbotabad for refreshments & freshening up is Lahore Chatkhara Restaurant where the food & snacks are quite good. The tea is exceptionally good. No trip is complete without a puncture or two. Our coaster had one near the restaurant here. So we lost about half an hour in the process of changing the tyres and repairing the punctured one. Mansehra is a sleepy little town; Balakot was very neat and well arranged before the earthquake. The recently planted tea bushes above the road created a very pleasing sight. Kaghan is another place worth spending a day in. Little restaurants line the road and tracks meander down to the silvery Kunhar River rushing past the town. We had piping hot Pakoras and tea on our way back, here. The light drizzle made them even more enjoyable. The huge walnut trees looked majestic and their fruit was in the middle of its growth cycle. My son had to pick one or two just to see how they looked when quite raw. The ride after Kaghan was utterly amazing! Every turn of the serpentine road unfolded new vistas dazzling in their pristine beauty! A bonus was the clean, fresh, invigorating pine scented air. A few miles after Kaghan we came to Kawai. |Kawai is a small...
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...Previous Good Conduct Essay Question: Describe your feelings towards an important character in one text. Explain, giving detailed reasons, why you felt this way. In the short story Previous Good Conduct, written by author Ruth Thomas, the protagonist stands out particularly; that is the character of the mother left at home to look after the children. She is portrayed as a woman who holds very peculiar views and her actions and thoughts are quite unreasonable. There are three important parts to the short story that are relative to the protagonist. These are: the first few sentences that show her initial attitude to life, the flashbacks that show her negative views towards her children and lastly the way in which she convinces herself of the reasoning behind her actions. In the first part of the short story, Previous Good Conduct, the protagonist’s attitude towards life seems very blasé. She is also painted as a person that deals with her emotions by hurting others, such as her nearly four year old son Bobby. She seems blasé because in the first few sentences, her living area is described as very untidy and it seems unrealistic that a mother would ignore the mess and her children. It is untidy because there were ‘cornflakes crunching under her slippers’, ‘a trickle of milk running down the leg of the highchair’, and a ‘nappy resting where she had dropped it’. The protagonist doesn’t seem to be doing anything during this time, other than surveying the scene. The reader first...
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...the Weddell Sea and then use dogs and sledges to support the crew of six men to march on the opposite side of Antarctica. However, their ship became trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, before they could reach the Antarctic coast. For more than eight months, they drifted helplessly with the ocean currents that carried them to over 670 miles north. Attempts were made to free the ship at times when cracks appeared in the ice nearby, but it was of no avail. The ice around the ship was thick and solid. The wooden timbers of the Endurance, unable to withstand the pressure from the ice, eventually gave up, and massive plates of ice crushed it. Shackleton ordered his members of the expedition to take shelter on the ice floes surrounding the ship. They were able to retrieve three lifeboats and as many provisions and supplies as they could from the ship wreckage before it sank. For the next six months, the floating ice became the crew's home. They were now isolated on the drifting pack ice with limited supplies. They were miles away from land, without any ship or mode of communication with the outside world. With food supplies dwindling, the men hunted seals and penguins for fresh meat. They had initially hoped that the ocean currents would carry the ice floe towards land, but as soon as spring started, the ice started to break up. Shackleton realized that they...
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...Frankenstein or (the Modern Prometheus) known as the first science-fiction novel written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, at the age of 21, the widely famous novel was published in 1818. Although serving as the basis for the Western horror story and the inspiration for numerous movies in the 20th century, the book Frankenstein is much more than pop fiction. The story explores philosophical themes and challenges Romantic ideals about the beauty and goodness of nature. But what’s the difference between Frankenstein the story and the film? About the novel (Frankenstein): This novel functions on symbolic many levels such as Frankenstein’s monster symbolize the coming of industrialization to Europe also the destruction and the death...
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...bounded Antarctica to the north, and then march a crew of six men, supported by dogs and sledges, to the Ross Sea on the opposite side of the continent (see Exhibit 1).1 Deep in the southern hemisphere, it was early in the summer, and the Endurance was within sight of land, so Shackleton still had reason to anticipate reaching shore. The ice, however, was unusually thick for the ship’s latitude, and an unexpected southern wind froze it solid around the ship. Within hours the Endurance was completely beset, a wooden island in a sea of ice. More than eight months later, the ice still held the vessel. Instead of melting and allowing the crew to proceed on its mission, the ice, moving with ocean currents, had carried the boat over 670 miles north.2 As it moved, the ice slowly began to soften, and the tremendous force of distant currents alternately broke apart the floes—wide plateaus made of thousands of tons of ice—and pressed them back together, creating rift lines with huge piles of broken ice slabs. For months the wooden timbers of the Endurance, held between three of these floes, creaked and moaned under the immense pressure of the moving ice. It seemed only a matter of time before she would succumb, crack, and sink. On...
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...Sanford was a 72 year old retired Navy Master Chief. He once told me that since the age of 13 there had not been a day that went by when he did not drink. He was kindly referred to by his drinking buddies as, “a salty dog.” Most nights, Mr. Sanford had no problems getting himself home safely. It was just a couple of miles down the road from the bar to his driveway. But that night was different. I recall sitting in my car after work allowing the engine to warm up. As I sat there, I started thinking about all of the statistics I had just learned a couple of months earlier, when my fellow co-workers and I had attended an alcohol training class. It was required of us by the state liquor board in order to continue working as bartenders. In 2008, 46 percent of all car crashes, in the state of Colorado, involving one participant with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.08 percent or greater, ended in a fatality. If you were to take that 46 percent and factor in the presence of black ice, and men over the age of 60 as the impaired participant, you would arrive at a 94 percent fatality rate. McAlister 2 Once my engine had warmed up, I started driving down the short mountain pass from the ski lodge, where the bar I...
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...The RMS Titanic “The story of the Titanic began before anyone had even thought about building the great ship.” These words were quoted from the book Exploring the Titanic, by Robert D. Ballard. In Ballard’s book, it references The Wreck of the Titan, written in 1898 by Morgan Robertson. The Wreck of the Titan’s story followed the largest passenger ship ever, named Titan, on its trip across the North Atlantic. The ship was labeled “unsinkable.” Yet, it sank after hitting an iceberg with many wealthy and renowned passengers on board. Since it didn’t have enough lifeboats for the passengers, a significant amount of lives were lost. Ten years after The Wreck of the Titan was written, a dinner party was held in London. Two men, J. Bruce Ismay, (former President of the White Star Line) and Lord Pirrie (former chairman of Harland & Wolff shipbuilder), were organizing the concept to make three...
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...Ecology Isle Royale In this simulation, you will complete all the activities for exercises 1-5, record all your results, answer all the questions, and provide a final summary of your findings. You will not need to write a formal report. Background Isle Royale is an island sitting about 15 miles from the northern shore of Lake Superior, one of the Great Lakes on the border of Canada and the U.S. Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world, stretching 160 miles from north to south and well over 300 miles from east to west. That's a long way to swim, and not many large animals have made it from the shores of Lake Superior to Isle Royale. About 100 years ago, however, a few moose found their way across from mainland Canada to the island, probably walking most of the way across surface ice during an especially cold winter. The moose found a veritable paradise, with lots of grass, bushes, and low-lying trees to eat and no predators. Their population exploded, reaching several thousand individuals at its peak. In 1949, the area around Lake Superior had another cold winter and large parts of the lake's surface froze solid. A small pack of wolves found a tongue of ice that extended all the way to Isle Royale. There they found a population of moose that had grown so large they had eaten almost all the available food, and many of the moose were severely undernourished. These starving moose were easy prey for the wolves. The wolves and moose on Isle Royale became...
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...went to The Capitol Hill to tell her powerful story. Her words were quoted by Al Gore in one of his speeches. She said through a translator: “We are very concerned, in my community, [and] in my country, about global climate change. Nature is disrupted. We are seeing the impacts on a daily basis. We are losing our lands, water is disappearing, it rains when it shouldn’t rain, and we have freezing temperatures, when we shouldn’t have freezing temperatures. Also, warmer temperatures in our farming area have spurred plant diseases, and the quality of agricultural seeds has degenerated cutting into local women’s ability to earn a living. Because our yields are down, it is difficult to feed our children.” (Jaime Baily 14). Climate change has become a very contested and debated matter. Some scientists say that the earth is warming; skeptics contend that it is cooling. Glaciologists say that the polar ice on earth is melting, and skeptics say that Antarctic ice is growing. Skeptics-that have also concluded that the earth is warming-point out that the earth has gone through many such warming periods (interglacials or periods of desertification) in between cooling periods and that these are natural cycles. But the long-running debate over whether or not global warming is anthropogenic is arriving to its end. Not only it is caused by man, it’s real, it’s here. All across the world, in every place known to man, glaciers and ice-sheets are melting, the average temperature is...
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...fate and finding his home in the blues. While I got stuck on homophones, this story had no qualms with its poetic writing and vivid descriptions of two different people, the narrator and his brother, Sonny, who have grown up completely different even though they are brothers, but despite this, show that different people can have surprisingly similar feelings and goals. The way the author describes the narrator’s feelings in the story is very intense and poetic, but the fact that he begins the story like this caused me to make a few unconfirmed assumptions about the story...
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...‘To Build a Fire” Jack London’s short story, “To Build a Fire,” takes place during a harsh winter in the forest of Alaska. This story is about a courageous but stubborn man who decides to confront the mighty forces of nature. This man takes a journey that not many would have taken, with a husky dog as his only companion. As he travels through the rough landscape of Alaska, he faces many natural obstacles. Facing these barriers make him more aware about reality about challenging the forces of nature, a challenge that in many times becomes a matter of life or death. Throughout the story the main character is not given a name, he is simply known as the “Man.” A hardheaded newcomer to the coniferous forest of Alaska; a man who thinks he knows it all, but is about to come in contact with the worst weather he has ever had to face. The man’s lack of experience led him to his downfall. As his journey began he went into the trail not well prepared, because of the low temperatures a face mask was well needed and he did not bother to wear one. “He does not recognize that man is so finial that the bitterly cold Alaskan inevitably destroys the individual” (McClintock 355). The man had trouble understanding that Nature was something that can never be fought against, but still his machismo personality set in and he was not going to back down from it. Fifty degrees below zero meant nothing to him, he knew it was going to be cold and uncomfortable, and that was it. It did not lead him to...
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...Harvard Business School 9-600-047 March 3, 2000 A FALL BEFORE RISING: THE STORY OF JAI JAIKUMAR (A) D 434. It would seem almost as though there were a cordon drawn round the upper part of these great peaks beyond which no man may go. The truth of course lies in the fact that, at altitudes of 25,000 feet and beyond, the effects of low atmospheric pressure upon the human body are so severe that really difficult mountaineering is impossible and the consequences even of a mild storm may be deadly, that nothing but the most perfect conditions of weather and snow offers the slightest chance of success, and that on the last lap of the climb no party is in a position to choose its day . . .1 Eric Shipton, Upon that Mountain O A RAPID DESCENT He was 24,000 feet above sea level, but the light was fading, and so Jai Jaikumar knew that he had little time to admire the view. It was 4 p.m. on a summer day in 1966, and Jai, an engineering student at the Indian Institute of Technology, stood with one of his closest climbing buddies at the summit of a Himalayan mountain. The final ascent that day, beginning at high camp at 2 a.m., had been rougher and more difficult than the pair had anticipated. They had originally set 1 p.m. as their “turnaround time,” the point at which considerations of safety dictate that climbers should abandon their ascent and head back to high camp. However, the prospect of waiting a few more days to again challenge the summit held little appeal...
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