1.What exercise is to the body, reading is to the mind. There are different purposes of reading. One of them is deriving pleasure. Children reading for their pleasure rarely stop to ask about the words. They want to get on with the story. If the word is important, they can usually make a good guess about what it is. “He drew an arrow from his quiver”. Easy to see that a quiver is some sort of gadget to put arrows in. More complicated words they figure out by meeting them in different contexts. People learn to read well and get good vocabulary, from books, not work books or dictionaries. 2. As a kid I read years ahead of my age, but I never looked up words in dictionaries, and didn’t even have a dictionary. In my lifetime I don’t believe I have looked at even as many as fifty words – neither have most good readers. Most people don’t know how dictionaries are made. 3.Each new dictionary starts from scratch. The company making the dictionary employs thousands of ‘editors’, to each of whom they give a list of words. The job of the editor is to collect as many examples as possible of the ways in which these words are actually used. They look for the words in books, newspapers, and so forth and every time they find one, they cut out or copy that particular example. 4.Then after reading these examples they decide ‘from the context’ what the writer in each case had meant by the words. From these they make definitions. A dictionary in other words, is a collection of

cannon is placed at the bottom of a cliff high. If the cannon is fired straight upward, the cannonball just reaches the top of the cliff. (a) What is the initial speed of the cannonball? (b) Suppose a second cannon is placed at the top of the cliff. This cannon is fired horizontally, giving its cannonballs the same initial speed found in part (a). Show that the range of this cannon is the same as the maximum range of the cannon at the base of the cliff. (Assume the ground at the base of the cliff is level, though the result is valid even if the ground is not level.)

the correct answer is b. in order to explain a point clearly in an essay, it is always better to include a clear example of your ideas. including an scenario in which a family is affected by consumerism will support your argument as well as supporting details, such as quotations from experts and statistics. option a could be correct, but statistics and quotations are supporting ideas rather than clear explanations. choices c and d are simply inadequate. they do not add information about the effects of consumerism, rather they are strategies for engaging the reader

21 balloons is the story of professor william sherman's travels.

in 1883, he set off from san francisco for a balloon ride over the pacific and was found a month later floating with 21 balloons in the atlantic ocean. this seemed an astounding feat and everyone wanted to know what had happened.    

professor sherman was loyal, however, and said he would tell his tale first to the western american explorers club in san francisco, of which he was a member. this built up suspense for several chapters before he began to tell of the wonders of his adventures and the amazing island of krakatoa, an island which had just been blown up by a volcano.  

the residents of krakatoa are all millionaires who live under a "gourmet government" of their own devising. we get to see all the incredible adventures that creative people with unlimited resources would create according to the author.