1.
Relatively unknown to the general public, war correspondent Kate Webb (1943-2007) was a legend among her fellow war reporters, famous not just for her skills as a writer but also for her amazing courage in the face of danger. A New Zealander, Webb began her storied career in Indonesia in the 1960s during the bloody overthrow of President Sukarno. Webb?s legend truly began, however, during the war in Vietnam. Arriving in Vietnam in 1967, Webb felt mostly terror at the thought of covering a war, but she refused to let fear stop her from doing her job. And it didn?t take long for her to become famous for her bravery and determination to tell readers what was happening in the war. In 1971, when she was just twenty-eight years old and the bureau chief in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, enemy forces captured Webb and marched her through the jungles bare foot until her feet were bloodied and blistered. Webb was held for so long that The New York Times published her obituary. Kate Webb, however, wasn?t dead. Twenty-three days after being captured, one of the North Vietnamese soldiers holding her prisoner helped her escape, asking only that Webb "tell the truth about us." Emaciated, bloody, and sick with two different strains of malaria, Webb recuperated briefly and went right back to the war front. In the 1980s, while she was covering Kabul, Afghanistan after the Russians had abandoned their effort to control the country, an Afghan warlord assaulted Webb with the intent of raping her. He smashed her head into the floor of a hotel lobby and was dragging her by the hair across the floor when two other journalists rescued her. Afterwards Webb said only, "There is something very humiliating about having your head bashed." Webb retired in 2001. She died in 2007 of cancer.
Organizational pattern or patterns:
a. definition
b. simple listing
c. comparison and contrast and definition
d. sequence of dates and events
2.
"Flashbulb memories" is a term used to describe those memories of events so horrible or so tragic that we remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when the events occurred. Many people who came of age in the 1960s, for instance, know to this day where they were when they heard that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963. Similarly, many people have flashbulb memories of what they were doing when Martin Luther King was killed by James Earl Ray in the same year. Flashbulb memories don?t, however, occur only when famous or celebrated people die violently. We also have flashbulb memories of where we were and what we were doing when a loved one died. And for everyone except those who were small children at the time, September 11, 2001 was an event that created millions of flashbulb memories all across the nation.
Organizational pattern or patterns:
a. definition
b. classification
c. comparison and contrast and process
d. sequence of dates and events and classification
3.
Some medical myths just will not die no matter how often they are
debunked. Take, for instance, the claim that hair and finger nails continue to grow after death. There is absolutely no truth to it, but the belief survives nonetheless. As the body shrivels after death, the hair and fingernails start to look longer by comparison, and that?s the reason why it has, for so long, been thought that hair and nails continue to grow. Another medical myth is that getting wet in cold weather causes colds. But weather doesn?t cause colds. Viruses do. You can go out in the freezing cold with your hair soaking wet or get caught in an icy rain storm and still stay healthy as long as you don?t make contact with a cold virus while out of doors. Yet another medical myth is that eating sweets causes diabetes. It doesn?t, at least not directly. Eating sugar can and often does lead to weight gain, and it?s being overweight that is a high risk factor for Diabetes 2 (adult onset in contrast to diabetes that occurs in childhood.) It?s also not true that eating chocolate causes acne. Most acne is hormone-related. What you eat doesn?t affect the production of the hormones that produce acne. Yet another myth is that touching a frog will produce warts on your hand. Warts are caused by the papilloma virus. The virus is passed from person to person and enters the body through small cuts or cracks in the skin of the hand. Feel free to touch as many frogs as you want. No matter how many you touch, you still won?t get any warts.
Organizational pattern or patterns:
a. definition
b. comparison and contrast
c. classification and process
d. simple listing
4.
A study in Romania suggests that children who are abandoned at birth and placed in state-run institutions can eventually thrive if they leave the institution and are placed in foster care. In fact, children in the study who were placed in foster homes ended up on par emotionally, intellectually, and physically with children of the same age who had grown up with their biological families. In contrast, orphaned children who never left the state-run institutions showed steady declines in their emotional and mental health over the course of their stay. While the study supports the idea that foster care for abandoned children is better than institutional life, it?s worth noting that Romanian institutions have a particularly horrific reputation for neglect. This may well account for the effects of long-term and unrelieved institutionalization upon abandoned children. (Source of information: Science News . January 12, 2008, p.30)
Organizational pattern or patterns:
a. sequence of dates and events
b. classification
c. cause and effect and comparison and contrast
d. simple listing
5.
Although the oft-repeated notion that people are right-brained or left-brained is close to complete nonsense, it is true that the two hemispheres, or halves, of the brain are dominant, or more proficient, in different areas. The left brain is more detail-oriented whereas the right-brain is better at seeing the global, or broader, more general, picture. When it comes to processing language, the left hemisphere is the one in charge, although it appears to be limited to processing literal meanings. Tell someone with damage to the right hemisphere to "Go jump in a lake," and they just might do it because the right side of the brain is better at coming up with figurative meanings. The left side processes the dictionary definitions and leaves the suggested meanings—in this case, "Get out of my sight"—to the right side. Someone who has right hemisphere damage, then, is likely to take the command to jump in a lake at face value. Overall, the left side has better analytical abilities whereas the right side excels at recognizing spatial relationships and interpreting visual images. That being said, the two halves of the brain are connected by a fibrous bundle of nerves called the corpus callosum . Thanks to the corpus callosum, the two sides of the brain are able to communicate and work together in unison rather than opposition.
Organizational pattern or patterns:
a. classification
b. process
c. comparison and contrast and definition
d. definition