Wednesday, July 10, 2013

3 more new, free scrambled paragraphs

Answers are found after the exercises.



Coffee plants grow wild in Ethiopia and were probably used by nomadic tribes for thousands of years. 

_____ (Q) "It actually had a major impact on the rise of business in Europe." Pendergrast says. 

_____ (R) Within another 150 years, it took Europe by storm.  

_____ (S) "Then it really took off," relates historian Mark Pendergrast  — author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.

_____ (T) By the 1500s, he says, the drink had spread to coffeehouses across the Arab world. 

_____ (U) However, it wasn't until the 1400s that people figured out they could roast its seeds.







{{One of my favorite poets...}}
 
Giacomo Leopardi, one of the greatest Italian poets of all time, was born in Recanati, a town not far from the Adriatic coast.
 
_____ (Q) He mastered Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and modern languages; completed numerous translations from the classics; wrote several philological works, a history of astronomy, and a hymn to Neptune in Greek which he pretended to have discovered in an ancient manuscript.

_____ (R) By the time he was nineteen years old he had amassed an amazing store of knowledge, but he had also compromised his health: he began suffering from nervous disorders, his eyesight weakened, he became a hunchback. 

_____ (S) At the age of twelve Giacomo was so erudite that his private ecclesiastical tutor had to admit that his own scholarship was inferior to his pupil's and that consequently there was nothing more he could teach him. 

_____ (T) Sadly he realized that he had allowed his youth to pass, that henceforth his life could be only unhappy, and that above all, being so frail and unattractive, a woman would probably never fall in love with him. 

_____ (U) Devoured by an insatiable craving for learning, Giacomo then resolved to continue his studies alone, and for the next seven years, completely unsupervised, spent most of the day and part of the night poring over the books of the family palace's twelve-thousand volume library. 

  
Sukarno was born June 6, 1901 in Surabaja, Java of Javanese and Balinese parents.  

_____ (Q) He went to a secondary school in which most of the students were Dutch. 

_____ (R) He thus represented a mixture of the Islamic Javanese and Hindu Balinese Malay subcultures.  

_____ (S) But, despite the practical degree which could ensure him a comfortable life, he found his true calling was as an orator and politician, since he found he could profoundly move crowds with his oratory.

_____ (T) He not only received a good education but became imbued, at this school, with a fierce desire for Indonesian independence.

_____ (U) In 1927 he received a degree in civil engineering from the Bandung Technical Institute and became an architect.  

http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/indonesia1.htm

What I think is interesting is that during World War II, both France and Holland had been occupied by the Nazis.  Yet, after the war, both countries hurried to re-occupy 'colonies' they had once 'owned.'  France re-entered Vietnam (causing two brutal wars to follow) and the Dutch re-entered Indonesia (causing a bloody four-year war).  These countries apparently learned NOTHING from being occupied during World War II.

A film about Indonesia's War of Independence against the Dutch:

(There's no really good documentary about Sukarno or Indonesian independence on youtube.)


This one (below) is about Indonesia a few years after the War of Independence:
Answers are below:
Answers:
coffee - 5,4,2,3,1
leopardi -----> 3,4,1,5,2
sukarno ----->  2,1,5,3,4  ------->  2__Q, 1__R, 5__S, 3__T,  4__U
(This one - Sukarno - is tricky because 'school' in (T) could refer to either the secondary school or the institute. Obviously it refers to the secondary school because with the heavily Dutch population of the school he might have felt like an outsider in his own country and then developed a desire for Indonesian independence.
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 Yes, I'm the guy who created the scandal in Asia awhile ago. I felt that the Korean performers I was teaching were not being treated up to acceptable standards, and I reported this to a Korean newspaper to help ensure that, in the future, performers would be treated better. 

Links:


http://www.shoutcastblog.com/2010/05/11/wondergirls-were-mistreated-by-jyp-entertainment/

http://nwww.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20100512000682