Think in English with Adah

1. Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

 - Mark Twain (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910) an American author and humorist

2. You have learned something.  That always feels at first as if you had lost something. 

  - Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) a British writer, The Father of Science Fiction. His works include The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper Wakes, and The First Men in the Moon.

3. I am learning all the time.  The tombstone will be my diploma. 

- Eartha Kitt Kitt (January 17, 1927 – December 25, 2008) an American actress, singer, and cabaret star

This argument came across my mind during a random post-lunch chat with some colleagues this noon:

Eventually it is (pretty) women who get the fortune of the entire world.

Let me explain the steps that led to this conclusion:

Step 1: Most of the time women outlive men.

Reasons: women have a lot of biological and social advantages compared with men, e.g, women do not like to consume a lot of energy at 1 time; female bodies can reserve more energy than male bodies; women eat more vegetables and fruits than men who live on a monotonous diet of meats and starch; women pay more attention to their health conditions and they like to talk about them; women release stress and bad emotions easily by crying and confiding their worries to their friends, but men do not tend to do the same because it is against the social norms that men are “big men” who do not show any weaknesses to others…

Step 2: The above rule also applies to rich men.

Despite that rich men can enjoy extremely good health care and medical services, they die prior to their wives do due to that men’s  biological decline happens much earlier than it happens to their wives.

Step 3: What’s even worse, most rich men (old or young) like to marry pretty women that are (much) younger than them. And about 85% of the fortune of the world is owned by about 15% of the polulation, the wealthy men, according to the famous 15% rule.

This means the gap between the life span of the wealthy husbands and that of their younger wives would be bigger than the average gap between the average life span of less wealthy men and that of their wives.

Step 4: These younger wives of the dead rich men get most of the heritage left by their rich husbands. The wives of less rich men or average men also get the heritage from their less rich husbands across the globe.

Step 5: Eventually women (espeically attractive women) get most of the world’s fortune by means of marriage.

A furthur conclusion:

Men make money for women to spend. The world is seemingly controlled by men but eventually it is owned by women. Wahahaha!

Carl Gustav Jung - “The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.” 

Adah’s notes: We can accept others’ merits and faults (such as our friends, colleagues and family members) completely but accepting ourselves without question stops us from growing. From time to time we need to challenge our understanding of who we are by asking questions such as “Am I good enough? Can I refuse to accept my current weaknesses as part of me? If I can, what changes are needed to get a ‘better’ me?”

Questions lead to actions. If we don’t start questioning ourselves, how can we make correct changes to ourselves? Questioning about our shortcomings helps us to be more conscious about who we are right now and who we choose to become in the future. 

This may be very hard because we are “insiders” to ourselves. One Chinese saying goes “Those closely involved cannot see clearly but the onlookers are clear-headed.” We are too closely involved in our own merits and weaknesses to see them clearly. But others cannot help us because they don’t really care or dare. An objective perpespective is needed when we look at ourselves. It has to be cruel and we need to have the courage to put ourselves under a microscope invented by ourselves. 

An introduction to  Carl Gustav Jung:

“Carl Gustav Jung (German pronunciation: [ˈkarl ˈɡʊstaf ˈjʊŋ]; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of Analytical psychology. Jung’s approach to psychology has been influential in the field of depth psychology and in countercultural movements across the globe. Jung is considered as the first modern psychologist to state that the human psyche is “by nature religious” and to explore it in depth.^[1] He emphasized understanding the psyche through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, religion and philosophy. Although he was a theoretical psychologist and practicing clinician, much of his life’s work was spent exploring other areas, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as well as literature and the arts. His most notable ideas include the concept of psychological archetypes, the collective unconscious and synchronicity.

^{The above 2 paragraphs are from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung .}

This is the game we used in the discussion session this week.

One of the objects in the following sets of 4 is odd. Please choose the odd one and explain the reasons. Some sets allow more than 1 reasonable answer.

Example:

Cabbage fish tomato carrot

Answer: Fish is the odd one out because the others are all types of vegatables.

1. Duck turkey lamb chicken

2. Milk salt rice tomato

3. Banana mango pineapple raspberry

4. TV computer mobile fridge

5. Syrup sauce icecream chocolate

Make your own choices and write your own explanations.

This essay has been published on Issue No.7 of Huizhi - an Accenture Greater China Employee Newsletter. Copyright fully reserved.

WOMEN will spend more than 8 years averagely

 in shopping according to a recent study conducted by GE Money! One of the possible reasons that shopping is mostly done by women is NOT because women like to indulge themselves into making choices among colors, styles, sizes and smells, but that men in the house DO NOT shop!

Dealing with over 8 years of shopping experience (retail experience to be more exact) that should commence at an age of a girl,  most women are trying to develop great retail skills out of just grabbing their targets and going away. Women should treat these 8 years with real delicacy in the way of carrying on a second profession in their life. This can be an art for men to learn in years! Men are not likely to shop around to get the best price. They never comprehend why a on-sale message from your favorite mall would infuse you and you would be on your way to the mall in the next 15 minutes however exhausted you are. They seldom know where to get great deals of the last season or year at discount stores. They never understand why a great deal - buying a cup with 5 yuan off would throw women into ecstasy!

Women relate their shopping experience with an array of aspects that might be meaningless to men, such as how they like the way the sales clerks address them, the decoration in the mall and even how a brand tag is attached to an item: whether it’s sealed on the clothes or just strung with a fine nylon! This could be the reason why men tend to enjoy shopping experience much more than women do. They are not susceptible to these subtleties nor they choose to be just for convenience.

It is very common to find in China that a new wife who usually buy things for her family at high prices would be called a wasteful wife by her parents-in-law and a prediction that she is likely to squander the money of the family some time in the future would be made against her automatically.  She could get some credits off the record of being a good wife and a future mother immediately if she does not know how to improve. Stereotypes in China or almost every other country help men to rid the inconvenience of shopping around and women have to go out and do more shopping than their boyfriends or husbands do.

But women are in luck that we actually FEEL happy in simply keeping ourselves fed and clothed with our own careful choices. As a woman, I know how strong the sense of achievement emanated from shopping is, which could drive us further than 8 years. It is said that the habit of collecting berries and roots had been coded in women’s genes since ancient times when modern human beings (homo sapiens) lived on the planet several hundred thousand years ago. Female homo sapiens brought tubers, fruits and vegetables in all colors with all kinds of odors and tastes back to their houses  (or should I say caves?) while the male just brought some plain dead meat which looks and tastes not too differently! Just imagine that and you can realize why women are genetically able to sense so many variations and choose from them.

Why do women shop more often than men do? This is a question for men basically. For a woman, why not feel great when you know there are a lot of good deals out there waiting for you?

by Kerry Maxwell, author of Brave New Words, with recordings by speechinaction

“gas-sipper” also “gas sipper” noun [C] informal
a vehicle which is cheap to drive because it does not use a lot of fuel

“gas-sipping” adjective [U]

‘Should you dump the SUV for a gas-sipper? That’s the question everyone is asking these days …’
Business Wire 30th June 2008

‘Scooter sales appear to be climbing faster than the price of gasoline … Smith said his business has grown 200 percent in the last few months. It’s been so good that he’s now collecting deposits on the gas-sippers until he can catch up with the backlog.’ -Houston Chronicle 3rd July 2008

‘Meanwhile, the Japanese manufacturers are continuing to crank out gas-sipping hybrids (Toyota’s Prius is selling like hotcakes) and companies you never heard of are beginning to market a wide range of hybrid and plug-in electric vehicles for neighborhood or short distance use.’ -Western Farm Press 16th July 2008

Price, recorded mileage, colour … cup-holder? The factors influencing which car to purchase are as diverse as the motorists themselves. If, however, your main priority is fuel consumption – whether that’s for financial or strictly eco-friendly reasons – then what you should be looking to buy is a gas-sipper.

With the cost of fuel reaching record highs on both sides of the Atlantic, suddenly it seems more important than ever to consider those ‘miles to the gallon’ (or ‘litres per 100 kilometres’ in metric terminology). The question is just how far can our beloved four-wheeled friend travel on a full tank of juice? Whereas in recent years we were preoccupied with vehicle size, both for practical and aspirational reasons, we’ve now realised that there’s something to be said for economy, whether wanting to save cash, or the planet. And the English language has responded. The nineties gave us the gas guzzler, and the noughties has correspondingly seen the emergence of the gas sipper.

Following the pattern of gas guzzler and related adjective gas-guzzling, vehicles which are economical on fuel can be described as gas-sipping. As well as conventional cars with low running costs, the term gas-sipper can apply to alternative forms of transport which are cheap to run, such as motor scooters and electric or so-called hybrid cars (cars with more than one power source, such as batteries or an electric motor as well as a conventional engine).

The current period of escalating fuel prices, coupled for many consumers with a growing environmental conscience, has created an unprecedented demand for gas sippers. Scooter manufacturers are reporting record sales. In the car industry, technological innovation becomes increasingly significant, as manufacturers struggle to meet the demand for more energy efficient, gas-sipping models. This is particularly the case in countries whose governments have imposed a gas-guzzler tax, which is a levy on large, energy-inefficient domestic vehicles.

Background

The expression gas-sipper is new for 2008, and is of course an extension of the ‘drinking’ metaphor used in gas guzzler (according to the Macmillan English Dictionary, to guzzle is ‘to eat or drink a lot quickly …’ whereas to sip is ‘to drink in small amounts’). Gas is short for gasoline, a word used in American English whose British equivalent is petrol. Though gas is US only, gas guzzler is used in both varieties, with far less evidence for lexicalisation of expressions such as petrol guzzler.

Related neologisms in this domain are the expressions ecodriving and hyperdriving, (also ecomiling and hypermiling) which refer to the practice of adapting your driving style in order to reduce fuel consumption. Typical measures include better anticipation of traffic flow (therefore reducing the amount of braking and accelerating, which wastes fuel), driving in higher gears, and maintaining a steady (and preferably slower) speed. Drivers who adopt these measures are correspondingly referred to as ecodrivers/ecomilers or hyperdrivers/hypermilers.

Search the Web Google hits on 28th July 2008

gas sipper 32,700
gas-sipping 59,500
fuel sipper 25,800
fuel-sipping 95,500
ecodriving 73,400
hyperdriving 1,100
ecomiling 54
hypermiling 719,000
ecodriver 4,460
ecomiler 6
hypermiler 270,000
gas guzzler 1,030,000
gas-guzzling 876,000

I would like to share a great website where you could find meanings and origins of a staggering amount of English phrases with you. Here is the link to the index page: http://www.phrases.org.uk/index.html. You can discover that there are four columns on this index page:

1. Meaning and Origins (This sub-link is a free but powerful phrase finder engine spawning information of phrases as the title suggests: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/index.html. You could also browse phrases by the beginning letters of the first words of the phrases you are finding. The explanations you can find through this engine are fully studied and correct.)

2. The Phrase Thesaurus (A thesaurus is something like a dictionary with more synonyms. However, you need to subscribe and pay for this service before you use it.)

3. Bulletin Board (If you still couldn’t find the meanings and origins of the phrases from the first phrase finder engine, have a go on this bulletin board. If you click on the term ‘Discussion Forum’ included in this column, you will be steered to another searching engine powered by the database of Phrase Finder Archives: http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/index.html. All the explanations that you can find through this engine came from the understanding of individuals, mostly native, on the meanings and the origins of the English phrases you are looking for. Please be sure to know that what you have found from this engine might not be the true definitions of the phrases. But this can allow you pick from different perpectives the most accurate meanings and origins. And you have to be really smart to tell the correct meanings or origins from the one-sided ones, which means you also need to use your brain in learning new phrases.)

4. A Phrase A Week (Learning one phrase a week should not be too demanding for all English learners. You can subscribe this for free by typing in your name and email address and the system will send you a phrase a week. )

When to use these phrase finder engines? 

It is a common experience of us that sometimes dictionaries does not tell you the meanings and origins of some phrases such as “go the whole nine yards”. What are you going to do if you are still self-driven to know the meaning of it? It is time for you to try these phrase finder engines! 

This phrase finder engine provides more than 70,000 previous postings on English phrases written by the general public, which might not be able to be located in both online and brick-and-mortal dictionaries. This can help us in getting to know difficult English phrases once we couldn’t find them in a dictionary.

Be smart when you use the third engine “Bulletin Board”.

This is just a reminder for those who are big fans of McDonald’s or KFC that hanburgers and sandwiches are two different types of food.

The thing that defines what a hamburger is is that there is a fried cake of ground BEEF and other ingredients in the middle of the two or more slices of bread. This is what a hamburger looks like:

A sandwich has the same appearance of a hamburger and its fillings include chicken, pork, fish, shrimps and a lot more except beef. Here is a picture of a chicken sandwich:

Finally here comes the latest shrimp sandwiches from KFC:

Yummy!

We have learned a lot of facial expressions and feelings that human beings would experience everyday. I am not confident in that all of you can still remember how to describe those complicated emotions that we have in ourselves every day. However, I do believe you can understand that the cycle of language learning that we introduced during one of our dialogue sessions involves 3 steps: “learning”, “memorizing” and “practising”. A cycle is so in that it is an ongoing process during which every step in it will recur once in a while. There is only one kind of raw materials which needs to be repeatedly used during all of the 3 steps in the learning cycle, which is language input, including new words, sentence patterns and new sound combinations.

An reflection on my own English learning experience also tells me that our human brain espeically an adult brain is heavily reliant on repeated language input when acquiring a foreign language. If you revisit our old training materials and practice those language points in them as often as possible, you will find out it is really worthwhile in doing so for you will become more familiar with the language terms we’ve learned in the past.

 Enough for the linguistic muttering! Let’s revisit those facial expressions and emotions shown in the following pictures:

We had a really great trip to Dalian last May during the Community Event of our company. Dalian seems to a dreamland for people from over-crowded cities such as Guangzhou, Shanghai and Hong Kong.  Known as a city famous for tourism, Dalian carries a bit romantic and exotic hue:  pointed rooftops in Russian style, roads curving along the coastlines, European villas upon hills and seaside, foreigners walking on the street with bare feet coming from a morning swimming in the sea… Even the Russian pop music on our shuffle bus brought us to this retired lifestyle of Dalian. 

But that is not all the elements that Dalian is made of. Restaurants have titles in Korean and Japanese characters where waiters and waitresses are dressed with the latest hairstyles. You could also discover that the splendid night views of the squares and busy shopping streets are exactly the same as the things that people in any other big cities live up to. All of those remind me we are in a city full of modern moves, just like Guangzhou or Shanghai.  

The sea in Dalian holds the most clean and cool water than any other seas I have ever been to. I could not resist the temptation of stealing a piece of the beautiful scenery home. Although feeling guilty, I picked some stones from the Silver Beach. Even glasses have been polished into a round shape by the blue water of the sea of Dalian.