Saturday, August 10, 2013

5 new, free scrambled paragraphs

Answers are below the exercise:


Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate.

_____ (Q) Another measure of intelligence the fact that you can count neurons: the common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain, whereas a human has 100 billion.

_____ (R) The average is the size of a walnut—as big as the brain of the famous African gray parrot, Alex, who learned to use more than one hundred spoken words meaningfully, which means it's proportionally bigger than the brains of most of the largest dinosaurs.

_____ (S) For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body. 

_____ (T) But this is where things get weird, because three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms.

_____ (U) “It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6474/





In Keynes' theory, one person's spending goes towards another person's earnings, and when that person spends his or her earnings, he or she is, in effect, supporting another person's earnings.

_____ (Q) Keynes' solution to this poor economic state was to "prime the pump," meaning he argued that the government should step in to increase spending, either by increasing the money supply or by actually buying things itself.     

_____ (R) This cycle continues on and helps support a normal, functioning economy.   

_____ (S) During the Great Depression, however, this was not a popular solution and it is said that the massive defense spending that United States president Franklin Delano Roosevelt initiated during World War II helped revive the U.S. economy. 

_____ (T) Under Keynes' theory, this stopped the circular flow of money, keeping the economy at a standstill.

_____ (U) When the Great Depression hit, people's natural reaction was to hoard their money.  



The president has the power to 'pardon' people.  To pardon a person means, basically, to eliminate a guilty verdict against a person.  Jack Johnson was an amazing boxer but he boxed during a period of time in America when there was extreme racism.  He was especially hated by some people because he was African American but married a white woman.  Indeed, believe it or not, the Congress of the US (at that time) passed a law just to have Johnson arrested.  The law stated that a black man could not travel with a white woman across a state line.  Johnson was arrested after he took a train trip with his wife.  As you can see from the scrambled paragraph, the Congress wants to eliminate the guilty verdict against Johnson posthumously (even though Johnson is dead - if something happens posthumously, it happens after a person's death).

On March 5, 2013 lawmakers reintroduced a resolution (2013 CONG US SCON 5) seeking a posthumous pardon from President Obama on behalf of former boxing champion Jack Johnson.

_____ (Q) The defeat of Jeffries led to race riots nationwide in which numerous blacks were murdered.

_____ (R) Johnson was convicted and sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

_____ (S) In 1912, while married to a white woman named Lucille Cameron, Johnson was arrested by federal marshals and charged with violating the Mann Act (18 U.S.C. 2421) for crossing state lines with Belle Schreiber for "immoral" purposes.

_____ (T) For those unfamiliar with Johnson, he became boxing’s first African-American heavyweight champion after defeating Tommy Burns in 1908.

_____ (U) However, it wasn’t until Johnson retained his title by defeating all-time great Jim Jeffries in 1910 that he truly drew the ire of white society.

http://westreferenceattorneys.com/2013/03/unforgivable-blackness-jack-johnson-and-the-mann-act/

I found a film based on Jack Johnson on youtube:




{{An almshouse was a place for poor people to live.}}

On February 22, 1876, Anne and her brother Jimmie were sent to the state almshouse in Tewksbury, Massachusetts.

_____ (Q) Anne spent four years at Tewksbury, enduring the grief of her brother's death and the disappointment of two unsuccessful eye operations.

_____ (R) Jimmie, who was younger than Anne and had been born with a tubercular hip, died a short time later.
_____ (S) At Perkins, in October 1880, Anne finally began her academic education—quickly learning to read and write as well as learning how to use the manual alphabet in order to communicate with a friend who was deaf as well as blind.

_____ (T) Then, as a result of her direct plea to a state official who had come to inspect the Tewksbury almshouse, she was allowed to leave and enroll in the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts. 

_____ (U) That particular skill opened the door to her future and a life of remarkable achievements, notably her work tutoring the blind, deaf, and mute Helen Keller.

http://www.afb.org/asm/asmbiography.asp

A movie about Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller:



The Vietnam War (American military involvement: 1961 to 1973) was a disaster.  Over 50,000 American soldiers died and over 1,000,000 Vietnamese died.  Horrible things happened in that war.  After several years of fighting, in 1973 the US government, basically, gave up and brought all US soldiers home.  In 1975 (Socialist) North Vietnam finally defeated (Capitalist) South Vietnam (the US had been supporting South Vietnam).  Daniel Ellsberg used to work for the Pentagon but slowly but surely began to feel that the war was wrong and that politicians were lying to the American people about the war.  He photocopied many secret documents and gave them to the New York Times.  By doing this, he  helped show the American people what was really happening and he probably helped to bring the war to a faster end.


In 1967 Ellsberg became a member of the McNamara Study Group that in 1968 produced the classified  History of Decision Making in Vietnam, 1945 - 1968.

_____ (Q) Ellsberg, disillusioned with the progress of the war, believed this document should be made available to the public and gave a copy of what later became known as the Pentagon Papers to Senator William Fulbright. 

_____ (R) President Richard Nixon then made attempts to prevent anymore extracts from the Pentagon Papers from being published, yet the Supreme Court ruled against Nixon and Justice Hugo Black commented that the Times "should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly".

_____ (S) However, he refused to do anything with the document, so Ellsberg gave a copy to Phil Geyelin of the Washington Post newspaper, yet the editors decided against publishing the contents of the document. 

_____ (T) This included information that President Eisenhower had made a secret commitment to help the French defeat the rebellion in Vietnam and that President John F. Kennedy had, essentially, turned this commitment into a war by using a secret "provocation strategy" that ultimately led to President Lyndon Johnson expanding the war after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. 

_____ (U) Ellsberg now went to the New York Times and they began publishing extracts from the document on 13th June, 1971. 

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKellsberg.htm



Answers are below:









Answers:


Octopus brain -----> 2,1,5,3,4       2=Q, 1=R, 5=S, 3=T, 4=U

Keynes ----------------> 4,1,5,3,2

Jack Johnson ----------------> 3,5,4,1,2

Anne Sullivan --------> 2,1,4,3,5

Daniel Ellsberg --------> 1,5,2,4,3