Comparative Writing Task essays

Comparative Writing Task essays We have studied two texts, throughout this year, written by John Marsden and Anthony Hill. The two texts are Tomorrow When The War Began by John Marsden and Soldier Boy by Anthony Hill. In this task I will be comparing these two texts. Uniquely, the two texts both deal with war and are also Australian. In Tomorrow When The War Began Australians are invaded, on Australian soil. Soldier Boy is mainly about the trip to Gallipoli and Gallipoli itself. In both texts, however, they show how terrible war is even though one is true and the other imaginative. The difference between how the texts deal with war in a different fashion is that in Tomorrow When The War Began, Australia itself is the victim and is being invaded, whereas in Soldier Boy the Australians are the invaders. Soldier Boy is based on World War One and Gallipoli, but Tomorrow When The War Began is imaginative. The characters in Tomorrow When The War Began are not soldiers but in fact teenagers but in Soldier Boy they are real soldiers which go through military training and are part of a regular army. For example, Jim Martin from Soldier Boy is part of the 21st battalion. The texts are different because one is a work of fiction and one is a work of non-fic tion. The two texts differ in purposes for various reasons. Soldier Boy was written about World War One and war tradition. Tomorrow When The War Began is set in a couple of years in the future. John Marsdens purpose is to entertain young adults and he writes for fun. Anthony Hill writes for a wide range of people, it is not to entertain but to inform us about Gallipoli life and what war was about. John Marsden creates suspense, while Anthony Hill wants to convey a message and stick to the facts. John Marsden writes to entertain, and his book is about how terrible war is and it is a good read. Soldier Boy is informative about war and it is not set out for entertainment values. ...

Past Participles in Spanish

Past Participles in Spanish In both Spanish and English, past participles can come in handy. Not only can they be used as parts of verbs (and not just for speaking about the past), they can also be adjectives. Past Participles Behave Similarly in Spanish and English The past participles in the two languages have similar origins, so they are not only similar in function, but also vaguely similar in the way they are formed. In English, the past participle for regular verbs is formed by adding -ed to the end. In Spanish, the past participle for regular verbs is formed by adding -ado to the stem of -ar verbs or -ido to the stem of -er or -ir verbs. To use a few examples of words that are similar in both languages, the past participle of to select is selected, and the past participle of seleccionar is seleccionado. The past participle of to exert is exerted; the Spanish equivalents are ejercer and ejercido. And just as the past participle of to comprehend is comprehended, the past participle of comprender is comprendido. Unfortunately for the learner, both languages have a fair number of irregular past participles that dont always seem logical, and these need to be learned individually. (Examples of irregular English participles are broken, said and gone.) Among the common Spanish irregular participles are abierto (opened, from abrir, to open), dicho (said, from decir, to say), escrito (written, from escribir, to write), hecho (done or made, from hacer, to make or to do), puesto (put, from poner, to put) and visto (seen, from ver, to see). Following are some of the ways past participles are used: Using Past Participles To Form Perfect Tenses As a verb form, the most common use of the past participle in the two languages is to form what are known as the perfect tenses (they are called perfect because they refer to actions that have been or will be completed). In English, the perfect tenses are those formed by using a form of the auxiliary verb to have and following it with the past participle; in Spanish, theyre formed by using a conjugated form of haber (again, haber and this usage of to have come from similar origins) and following it with the past participle. (Note: If youre a beginner, the following examples may use some verb forms and tenses you havent learned yet. You dont need to learn them to understand the examples; what is important now is to learn how the past participle is used.) He ido. (I have gone.)Habr salido. (He will have left.)Habà ­a estado enferma. (She had been sick.)Habrà ­a trabajado. (I would have worked.) Using Past Participles To Form Adjectives As in English, many past participles can be used as adjectives. As adjectives, they agree with the nouns they describe in both number and gender; plurals have an s added, and in the feminine form the final o is changed to a. Because of differences in which participles can be used as adjectives, the Spanish participles cant always be translated directly to English as an adjective. Hay tres personas heridas. (There are three wounded people.)La oficina tiene dos puertas abiertas. (The office has two open doors.)Estamos cansados. (Were tired.)Comprà © la casa renovada. (I bought the renovated house.)Los viajeros llegados fueron al restaurante. (The passengers who had arrived went to the restaurant. The arriving passengers went to the restaurant.)La ventana est rota. (The window is broken.) Using Past Participles for Passive Sentences Just as the passive voice in English can be formed by following to be with a past participle, the same can be done in Spanish by using a form of ser followed by the past participle. This construction should not be overused, as it is much less common in Spanish than in English, and it is even less common in speech than in writing. As the examples below show, the passive voice is a way of showing that a noun was acted upon without directly saying who or what performed the action. In such sentences, the past participle functions like an adjective in that it agrees with the subject in both number and gender. Fue descubierto. (It was discovered.)Fueron descubiertos. (They were discovered.)El libro ser publicado. (The book will be published.)La cancià ³n ser grabada. (The song will be recorded.)Los nià ±os sern vistos. (The children will be seen.)Las nià ±as sern vistas. (The girls will be seen.)

Trends in Labor in the United States Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Trends in Labor in the United States - Assignment Example Ltd., 2013). Another factor that contributes to the growth of outsourcing is the availability of cheaper labor offered by some countries, without sacrificing the quality of the products or services (Flatworld Solutions Pvt. Ltd., 2013). Aside from work expertise and cheap cost of labor that a company can gain from outsourcing, their resources can be focused on the more essential aspects of their business. Outsourcing presents several advantages and disadvantages for both corporations and the domestic economy. Some of the advantages of outsourcing are the swiftness and expertise of the outsourced labor, the concentration on the crucial business processes rather on the minor ones, the risk sharing between the outsourced vendor and the organization outsourcing and the reduction in the operational and recruitment costs (Flatworld Solutions Pvt. Ltd., 2013). Outsourcing has its drawbacks too. These include the risk of exposing the organization’s confidential information, lack of control with schedules and delivery times, possible hidden costs and a lack of concern for the customers’ needs (Flatworld Solutions Pvt. Ltd., 2013). A significant effect of outsourcing on the US labor market is the rise in the unemployment rate among Americans. The technological and engineering jobs are mostly diverted to India and China which offers lower wage rates but matched with superior talent (Miah, 2007). The bottom line for most companies is that outsourcing gives better profits. Nationalism is put aside because the business decision makers consider their responsibility to their shareholders the priority (Miah, 2007). The result of this attitude is the American working middle class are up in arms against outsourcing (Miah, 2007). Another major effect of outsourcing on the US labor market is the weakening of the workers’ bargaining power. Since it is very easy for

Ancient Chinese Contributions Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

Ancient Chinese Contributions - Essay Example Gunpowder is considered as the most important invention of the ancient Chinese, according to the legend, the invention of gunpowder was an accident (McClellan, 2011, p.125). Those who were responsible for inventing gunpowder were actually trying to locate a method through which human beings could remain immortal and by accident, they produced gunpowder which has the ability to take human life easier. Gunpowder is an essential contribution of the ancient Chinese because it has helped human beings in defending themselves against loss of life and loss of property for several years. Gunpowder has been used by militia and defense forces of the western world to protect themselves at the time of war and to protect loss of property and life against enemy attacks. The use of gunpowder in the field of warfare started taking place during the 14th century. Ancienct Chinese have even gained heavy recognition for the creation of compass. If the compass would not have been invented then individuals would have suffered great difficulty in moving from one end to another. They would have faced difficulty in finding their local destinations and destinations they intended to reach. Chinese should be thanked for their invention of compass because without this invention people would not have been able to fly aircrafts and condcut adventorours activities such as hiking. The early compass devloped by the ancient Chinese was created to help the chinese population in finding the location to the southern regions as these regions were considered as significant areas for them (McClellan, 2011, p.126). The compasses that were manufactured during the 4th century were created with the useof lodestone. Today education is considered as one of the most essential parts of humanwellbeing and if it would not have been the contribution of paper made by the anci ent Chinese, human beings would have remained uneducated for a very long period of time. If paper would not have been created by the great ancient chinese, record keeping would have never existed as there is no humanbeing who can hold huge amount of data in their memories for a long period of time. Paper has assisted in managing reocrds and has helped humanbeings in managing important information. The modern day paper used by the entire world is an achievment that was created by Cai Lun, he was the inventor of paper and during A.D 105, he invented paper by mixing fibers obtained from wood and water (Ho, 2000, p.216). The fourth greatest invention made by the ancient chinese was the Chinese abacus which is a simple tool for conducting calculations that are mathematical in nature. The four main mathematical functions that are performed with the assistance of abacus includes: multiplication, divison, addition and subtraction. The abacus was an invention of Chentg Dawei and this inventi on was created during the era in which the Ming Dynasty was in power (Ho, 2000, p.85). Abacus proved to be very

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Differences and Similarities in The Odyssey and Inferno When going through the stories The Odyssey by Homer and Inferno by Dante, you get the feeling of how diverse, yet similar the two stories are. When reading The Odyssey, you find Ulysses trying to get home to his love, Penelope. He has been gone for twenty years, and through those years, he has struggled with good and evil, just like Dante in Inferno. Ulysses finds himself time after time fighting off gods and their children. Dante, struggling with good and evil, works his way through the nine levels of hell. He is struggling to find where his faithfulness lies. He also is trying to find his way to his love, Beatrice. When reading The Odyssey and Inferno, we find many similarities and differences, from the main characters characteristics, to the experiences within religion during Dante and Homer’s times. Ulysses, in The Odyssey, is the hero who has been trying to get home to his love, Penelope, and also his beloved country. He has found himself at war with many different gods and people, including Neptune, who is not yet ...

“My Life had stood †a Loaded Gun †” Feminist Analysis Essay

This poem was written by the American poet Emily Dickinson around the year 1863. It is probably one of the most complex of all Dickinson’s poems because it does not have a single coherent and satisfactory interpretation. This is due to the fact that it exemplifies her technique of the ‘omitted centre’, a device by which the author omits information that is crucial to the understanding of the poem. Nevertheless, the aim of the present paper is not to discuss the manifold possible interpretations of the poem. Its aim is rather to try to explain it or analyze it from a feminist point of view, highlighting how it gives an image of a woman different from the one people are used to, as well as how it inverts the gender roles but accepting them at the same time. The speaker starts by presenting herself as â€Å"a Loaded Gun†, that is as a mortal weapon capable of killing and destroying. This can be understood as the poet’s rejection of the traditional ideas and images about femininity, she is portraying herself as strong and potentially active in opposition to the common ideas of weakness and passivity associated with women. Later on, in the third stanza, she will compare herself to a volcano, turning the possibility of destruction – a contingent fact up until that point – into a reality. So now she is not only telling the reader that she can be active, dangerous, and destructive, but she is actually being it: the previous threat is now an event. This image of the volcano is even more important because it is a common one, used also by Emerson – one of her greatest influences – to refer to the poet. The difference is that whereas in Emerson’s essay The Poet it is a rather benignant image – this of the volcano – used to portray the poet as a power of nature; in Dickinson’s poem it is a burning and destructive force. With this change in the meaning or connotation of the metaphor, she may be telling us that creation, carried out by a woman, is at the same time an act of aggression. This idea is closely related to the reading many feminists have made of this poem, seeing it as an example of how power in a woman can be seen as a danger or even a threat. As for the gender roles one may argue that there is a contradiction in this poem. On the one hand she depicts herself as the active force in her relationship with her â€Å"Owner† and â€Å"Master†. She speaks â€Å"for Him†; she fights for him and defends him from Salceda 2 his foes. It is important to notice how in the fourth stanza she guards his head while he sleeps, thus preferring or putting her role as defender before her role as lover, i.e. her masculine role before of her feminine role. It is better to kill for him than to lay with him. In this poem she is the â€Å"knight in armor† while the male is, as to say, the â€Å"damsel in distress†. But on the other hand, the reader is told at the beginning that her â€Å"Life had stood – a Loaded Gun – / In Corners† until her â€Å"Owner passed† and â€Å"identified† her. That is, she had no identity of herself; she did not exist as an individual endowed with consciousness until he found her. It is also important to notice that the vocabulary used in the first stanza depicts her as an object. Therefore all her representations of herself as the leading figure in the poem, the strong one, the powerful one are, in some way, undermined by the fact that, at the beginning, she is just an object endowed with subjectivity by a real and pre-existent subject – the male character – who then becomes an object himself. The idea that her subjectivity is only one borrowed from him can be clearly seen in that, throughout the poem, her only goal is to defend him, to protect him form his foes who are at the same time hers. Nonetheless, this dependence on a male subject is, if not denied, at least overcome in the last stanza where the speaker presents herself as immortal. Thus, if she will live long before he has died, her existence must be independent of his. If the last part of my analysis seems confusing and even contradictory, it is because the poem itself, as it has already been said at the beginning, is confusing and even contradictory. To sum up I would like to say that, from my point of view, the important point about this poem is how Dickinson’s attempt to break up with the traditional ideas of womanhood and gender roles, since it is based upon the traditional opposition between femininity/masculinity, passivity/activity, object/subject, proves itself in some way â€Å"futile†. One may notice that she is not defending femininity, or trying to posit it higher or at the same level than masculinity, but what she is doing is taking a male position. This may explain why she takes her identity from a man. She is opposing the fact that being a woman entails being passive and defenseless, but at the same time she is saying that her aggressive character appeared only after a man identified her. So, she is not pulling down the differences or the hierarchy existing between male and female, but interchanging the roles. Nevertheless, one should not think that Dickinson’s poem is a failure – from a feminist point of view –, but on the contrary it is a success, since she manages to highlight the difficulty, or even impossibility, of writing at the same time Salceda 3 from and against a preestablished language and a system of thought, which are the very bases of the discrimination of women.

Compare/Contrast Essay Brother Dear and The Charmer

Compare/Contrast Essay The Canadian short stories â€Å"Brother Dear† by Bernice Friesen and â€Å"The Charmer† written by Budge Wilson focus on the struggles and common conflicts between parents and their children during adolescence. Both stories are told in the younger sister’s point of view and show how everyone matures and gains independence throughout and at the end of the story. Friesen and Wilson’s short stories over all focus mainly on the theme of dysfunctional families; which can be represented through the characters, symbolism, and conflict in the stories. Both parts of the family: the parents and the children, play a part in what is considered a ‘dysfunctional family’. In the story â€Å"Brother Dear† the son Greg is expected to stay and†¦show more content†¦Considering how lenient the father was with Zack and allowing him to get away with so much and forgiving him all the time, even if he had expectations for Zack that he didn’t go through with, he probably would’ve used his charm to get out of the situation. The short stories â€Å"Brother Dear† and â€Å"The Charmer† contain symbolism that represents the theme of dysfunctional families. In â€Å"Brother Dear†, when Greg returns home he has garbage bags of laundry with him. The garbage bags could symbolize the fact that Greg has returned home to tell his parents that he didn’t make it to the final exam and he isn’t continuing his schooling, which could be referred to as his garbage that he is dumping off or emptying at his house. In â€Å"The Charmer† Zack’s mother calls him a â€Å"real devil† (Viewpoints 103). â€Å"Devils are considered fallen angels, and can often fool you for a very long time† (Viewpoints 103). So Zack is considered a devil because of how he wrongfully fools his family all of the time to get what he wants, and because he has addictions to gambl ing and drinking. When Greg in â€Å"Brother Dear† is caught flaring his nostrils when Sharlene asks him if he has a girlfriend, Sharlene stays that he is â€Å"hiding something† (Viewpoints 28) when he flares his nostrils. This could symbolize the fact that not only is he hiding something about his relationship status, but he is hiding the truth about how he didn’t make it