Dear Jackie,

I was pleased to receive your request for a letter of recommendation for admission and a scholarship to the University of Andew. Of course, I’ve known your parents for years through various projects in the community, but I’m afraid my knowledge of your own academic abilities, character, and goals is extremely limited. Although I’d be happy to comment about the fine relationship I have with your parents, I hesitate to pass judgment on someone I’ve had very little association with at all. Perhaps you could find someone who could give you a much better recommendation than I could. I wish you the best in your academic pursuits at the University of Andew.

Sincerely,
Mark Harris

One of the most difficult things many successful people do is to challenge their own beliefs. Convictions that may have once been true and useful may change. Friedrich Nietzsche said it well when he said, “It’s not simply a question of having the courage of one’s convictions, but at times having the courage to attack one’s convictions.” That’s how you grow. That’s how you mature. That’s how you develop. Look at Tolstoy himself, a great example of a man who was willing to grow because he realized that he had to attack, at times, his own convictions. Socrates said it well when he said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” But we need to add that the examined life is painful, risky, full of vulnerability. And, yet, to revitalize public conversation, we have to ensure that self-criticism and self-correction are accented in our individual lives, as well as in our society and world.

Why do we need to routinely have the oil changed in our automobiles? Why do we need to see our dentist twice a year? The simple answer to these questions is preventative maintenance. How many times have you heard of stories where people ignored the warning signs and adverse situations seemed to present themselves overnight? A friend of mine knew there was a nail in one of his front tires, but there didn’t seem to be any obvious damage to the tire. He chose to ignore the nail until he found himself on the side of the highway with a flat tire. He later told me that before he experienced the embarrassment of having a flat, he “planned on getting it fixed when he had the time”. If he would have only taken a few minutes to get the nail removed, he most likely would not have received a flat tire on that particular day.

One of the reasons for difficulty in achieving one’s optimal weight is poor nutrient timing. When you eat is almost as important as what you eat, because the same nutrients have different effects on the body when consumed at different times. The body’s energy needs change throughout the day. It’s important to concentrate your food intake during those times when your body’s energy needs are greatest and not to consume more calories than your body needs to meet its immediate energy needs at any time. When you consume calories at times of peak energy need, most of them are used to fuel your muscles and nervous system, to synthesize muscle tissue, and to replenish muscle fuel stores. When you consume more calories than you need at any time, those excess calories will be stored as body fat.
*replenish: 다시 채우다

The words you speak to someone may have the potential to make or break that person, so it is important to choose words carefully. When it comes to benefitting the talk you intend to have with others, this becomes even more important. If you are someone who just says whatever crosses your mind without thinking about how those words might be taken by others, then you are setting yourself up for failure as a small talker. Most people keep away from people they consider too blunt and some will be even brave enough to leave your company if you are insensitive. Careful choice of words means that you would have thought about what you are going to say beforehand. Besides helping you keep the small talk going, thinking before speaking also helps prevent you from saying some embarrassing things you may end up wishing you could swallow.

Stepping off the plane, Kara let the heat sink into her bones. Breathing in the new air, she felt the kind of excitement that only new beginnings could offer. With the phone number of a professional surfer from her flight folded in her pocket, she felt the promise of an exciting new life. She grabbed a cab to her new apartment, one that she’d found online―just close enough to campus that she could walk, but far enough that she didn’t feel she’d be overwhelmed by campus events. She looked happily out the window, welcoming the warm air and hot sun on her face, and at the palm trees and sidewalks full of athletic people running, skateboarding, and casually hanging out with friends. She couldn’t wait to get to the beach to start making friends.

The graph above shows how often Americans ate at fast food restaurants in 2006 and 2013. ①Respondents who ate at fast food restaurants every day took up the smallest proportion with 3% both in 2006 and 2013. ②Compared to 2006, the percentage of respondents who ate at fast food restaurants several times a week and the percentage of those who did about once a week decreased in 2013. ③In 2006, the percentage of respondents reporting that they ate at fast food restaurants about once a week was the largest, accounting for 33%. ④In 2013, the percentage of respondents who ate at fast food restaurants once or twice a month was less than twice that of respondents who said that they did a few times a year. ⑤The percentages of respondents who never ate at fast food restaurants in 2006 and 2013 were equal to each other.

Frank Lloyd Wright was born on June 8, 1867 in Wisconsin. During his childhood, Wright fell in love with the rolling landscape. This inspired him as an architect to incorporate a more organic feel into his buildings. While in college, Wright worked with an architect in order to pay his tuition. Upon discovering his own passion and talent for the subject, he dropped out of school and went to work for an architectural firm in Chicago. He eventually parted ways with the firm and began designing a series of public buildings and private residences that earned him fame, including an earthquake-proof hotel in Tokyo. Due to the Great Depression, Lloyd stepped back from designing and began writing and teaching. Later, he returned to the scene and designed one of his most famous buildings, Fallingwater, which was built on top of a waterfall. Time cited it after its completion as Wright’s “most beautiful job.”

Vegetable Gardening Workshops

Grow Your Own Vegetables
Sundays: April 9, 16, 23 & 30
9:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.

Create your own fresh organic garden by learning
1. What, how, and when to plant
2. How to create good soil out of your current one

* The class will include a lunch of salad greens and homemade bread.
* Where: Anne’s Farm (756 River St. South City)
* Cost: $100 (20% off for the first 30 local residents: please call for availability.)

To sign up for the class, go to Anne’s Farm event page on the web or call 213-763-3349.

History Course: War and Memory at Laurier University

This history course examines the causes and effects of World War I. This course also includes a field trip to the War Museum for a more in-depth look at World War I.

Course Date
∎ 21 August - 27 August, 2017

Course Tuition Fee
∎ $300 per person (transportation fee included)

To Apply
∎ Applicants should be at least a second-year student.
∎ Applications will be received until July 31st.
∎ Applications must be submitted by email to Christine Wieg at cwieg@lu.ca.

Please contact Terry Couper at 532-135-4070 with any questions.

In early modern Europe, transport by water was usually much cheaper than transport by land. An Italian printer calculated in 1550 ①that to send a load of books from Rome to Lyons would cost 18 scudi by land compared with 4 by sea. Letters were normally carried overland, but a system of transporting letters and newspapers, as well as people, by canal boat ②developed in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. The average speed of the boats was a little over four miles an hour, ③slow compared to a rider on horseback. On the other hand, the service was regular, frequent and cheap, and allowed communication not only between Amsterdam and the smaller towns, but also between one small town and another, thus ④equalizing accessibility to information. It was only in 1837, with the invention of the electric telegraph, that the traditional link between transport and the communication of messages ⑤were broken.
*scudi: 이탈리아의 옛 은화 단위(scudo)의 복수형

You can use a third party to compliment a person you want to befriend and still get the “credit” for making the target of your compliment feel good about themselves and, by extension, feel good about you. When you (A) directly / indirectly compliment other people, particularly anybody who suspects you might want something from them, they tend to discount your efforts because they suspect you are intentionally trying to influence them through flattery. A third-party compliment (B) eliminates / encourages this skepticism. To construct a third-party compliment you will need to find a mutual friend or acquaintance who knows both you and your person of interest. Further, you should be relatively certain that the third-party individual you choose will be likely to pass along your compliment to the person for whom it was intended. If this (C) clarification / transmission of information is successful, the next time you meet your person of interest, he or she will see you from a positive perspective.

A mechanic had a shop student who was wanting to acquire the knowledge of what it truly meant to be a mechanic. Taking the student in, the mechanic showed ①him the ins and outs of being a mechanic in that shop. When he asked the student a question, he always congratulated ②him when the answer he provided was correct. Even when the answer was not, ③he encouraged the student to think of the right answer. In the rare events when ④he could not think of the right answer, the mechanic told him to go look in his book instead. The mechanic also said that the student had someone who believed in ⑤him and his ability to become a mechanic.

In psychology, a ‘model’ of something should never be taken as an exact copy of the thing being described, but rather as a representation of it. A map of the London Underground, for example, is a representation of the Underground layout that helps us appreciate how it works and where it goes. Of course direction, scale, etc. must be distorted somewhat to make it all fit neatly on the page. A model of memory is also a representation. Based on the evidence available, a model provides us with an analogy of how memory works. Describing memory in terms of ‘stores’ or ‘levels’ or ‘loops’ makes our understanding more concrete, and simply conveys to a reader a(n) ________________ of how a particular psychologist has attempted to understand and explain the available evidence. These models change as the available evidence changes, so should not be seen as permanent fixtures.
*analogy: 비유

Whenever you feel yourself triggered by a passing thought, emotion, or sensation, you have a simple choice: to identify or get identified. You can observe the thought and “identify” it. Or you can let yourself get caught up in the thought, in other words, “get identified” with it. Naming helps you identify so that you don’t get identified. As you observe your passing thoughts, emotions, and sensations, naming them—Oh, that is my old friend Fear; there goes the Inner Critic—neutralizes their effect on you and helps you to maintain your state of balance and calm. My friend Donna even likes to give humorous names to her reactive emotions such as “Freddy Fear,” “Judge Judy,” and “Anger Annie.” (Humor, incidentally, can be a great ally in helping you regain perspective from the balcony.) As soon as you name the character in the play, you ______________________.

Here’s something I learned growing up in a military family and living overseas as a child. Being in environments where people did not look like me or even speak the same language as me forced me out of the comfort zone of obvious similarities. When you walk out of your house knowing that most of the people on your street speak a different language, you can either get hung up on that fact or you can open your eyes and begin to ____________________________. Perhaps your nationality and language and culture and skin color are not the same, but your love of family and strawberries and holiday traditions are undeniably alike. It was a training ground for spotting commonalities. And there began my intrigue with cultures and language and people. Overfocusing on differences narrows your influence. But when you focus on commonalities, your influence grows.

For almost every location in the world, there is an “optimal” temperature at which deaths are the lowest. On either side of this temperature—both when it gets colder and warmer—death rates increase. ____(A)____, what the optimal temperature is is a different issue. If you live in Helsinki, your optimal temperature is about 59°F, whereas in Athens you do best at 75°F. The important point to notice is that the best temperature is typically very similar to the average summer temperature. ____(B)____, the actual temperature will only rarely go above the optimal temperature, but very often it will be below. In Helsinki, the optimal temperature is typically exceeded only 18 days per year, whereas it is below that temperature a full 312 days. Research shows that although 55 extra people die each year from it being too hot in Helsinki, some 1,655 people die from it being too cold.

Imagine that you just played “Happy Birthday” on a tuba. Next, you play it on a high-pitched violin. None of the tuba’s sounds are duplicated by the violin.

(A) The German word Gestalt means form, pattern, or whole. Gestalt psychologists studied thinking, learning, and perception in whole units, not by analyzing experiences into parts. Their slogan was, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

(B) Yet, we notice something interesting: The melody is still recognizable―as long as the relationship between notes remains the same. Now, what would happen if you played the notes of “Happy Birthday” in the correct order, but at a rate of one per hour? What would we have? Nothing!

(C) The separate notes would no longer be a melody. Perceptually, the melody is somehow more than the individual notes that define it. It was observations like these that launched the Gestalt school of thought.

*tuba: 튜바(금관 악기의 일종)

The Earth is a somewhat irregular clock. Some years the length of the day is found to vary by as much as one part in 10 million, or three seconds in a year of 31.5 million seconds.

(A) During the winter in the northern hemisphere, water evaporates from the ocean and accumulates as ice and snow on the high mountains. This movement of water from the oceans to the mountaintops is similar to the skater’s extending her arms.

(B) In addition, there are also seasonal changes of a few milliseconds per year. In the winter the Earth slows down, and in the summer it speeds up. Think of the Earth as a spinning skater.

(C) So the Earth slows down in winter; by the summer the snow melts and runs back to the seas, and the Earth speeds up again. This effect is not compensated by the opposite effect in the southern hemisphere because most of the land mass is north of the equator.

We are now at a point where this type of data analysis can no longer be done manually, because people who can do such analysis are rare.

Almost all of science is fitting models to data. Scientists—such as Galileo, Newton, and Mendel—designed experiments, made observations, and collected data. (①) They then tried to extract knowledge by devising theories, that is, building models to explain the data they observed. (②) They then used these theories to make predictions and if they didn’t work, they collected more data and revised the theories. (③) This process of data collection and theory/model building continued until they got models that had enough explanation power. (④) Furthermore, the amount of data is huge and manual analysis is not possible. (⑤) There is thus a growing interest in computer programs that can analyze data and extract information automatically from them—in other words, learn.

As a result, the first group, thanks to their cooperative tendencies, can take over.

Cooperative tendencies cannot evolve (biologically) unless they present a competitive advantage on the cooperators. Imagine, for example, two groups of herders, one cooperative and one not. (①) The cooperative herders limit the sizes of their individual herds, and thus preserve their commons, which allows them to maintain a sustainable food supply. (②) The members of the uncooperative group follow the logic of self-interest, adding more and more animals to their respective herds. (③) Consequently, they use up their commons, leaving themselves with very little food. (④) They can wait for the uncooperative herders to starve, or, if they are more enterprising, they can wage an unequal war of the well fed against the hungry. (⑤) Once the cooperative group has taken over, they can raise even more animals, feed more children, and thus increase the proportion of cooperators in the next generation.
*common: 공유지

The growing seasons for tea in different geographic areas vary greatly. ①In a few locations with prime conditions, particularly at latitudes near the equator, tea can be harvested year-round. ②At higher elevations in areas farther from the equator, the productive season may be limited to only one or two flushes of new growth. ③For example, Kenya, which lies on the equator, is one of the countries with the potential of year-round harvests, while farmers in areas of Shandong Province, the most northern tea farms in China, begin harvest in April and end in September. ④China’s tea industry has great advantages on natural resources, geography, varieties of tea and technology. ⑤Throughout the more than forty countries that grow tea commercially, there is a wide range in conditions that lead to the great variations of harvest times and in the flavors of the teas they produce.
*flush: (새잎이) 돋아남

According to Skinner, we, too, in most aspects of our lives, are like pigeons pecking at a button to receive little snacks. And this, according to the cognitive scientist Tom Stafford, explains the check-in impulse behind email and other online technologies. Unlike food, email isn’t always rewarding; in fact, it is often annoying. Once upon a time, there could be no new email for days at a time. Much of what we get is uninteresting or indeed difficult to deal with. But every so often we get a message we are very glad to have. That such “rewarding” email comes unpredictably does not dim its attractiveness or keep us from looking for it. On the contrary, the most effective way of maintaining a behavior is not with a consistent, predictable reward, but rather with what is termed “variable reinforcement”—that is, rewards that vary in their frequency or magnitude.

In spite of the rare case of receiving rewarding email, we cannot ____(A)____ the impulse to check email because our behaviors are maintained with the reward presented in a(n) ____(B)____ way.

Have you ever found yourself speaking to someone at length only to realize they haven’t heard a single thing you’ve said? As remarkable as our ability to see or hear is our capacity to _______________________. This capacity, along with the inherent need to pay attention to something, has dictated the development of the attention industries.
Every instant of every day we are overloaded with information. In fact, all complex organisms, especially those with brains, suffer from information overload. Our eyes and ears receive lights and sounds across the spectrums of visible and audible wavelengths. All told, every second, our senses transmit an estimated 11 million bits of information to our poor brains, as if a giant fiber-optic cable were plugged directly into them, firing information at full speed. In light of this, it is rather incredible that we are even capable of boredom.
Fortunately, we have a valve by which to turn the flow on or off at will. To use another term, we can both “tune in” and “tune out.” When we shut the valve, we ignore almost everything, while focusing on just one discrete stream of information out of the millions of bits coming in. In fact, we can even shut out everything external to us, and concentrate on an internal dialogue, as when we are “lost in thought.” This ability—to block out most everything, and focus—is what neuroscientists and psychologists refer to as paying attention.

Have you ever found yourself speaking to someone at length only to realize they haven’t heard a single thing you’ve said? As remarkable as our ability to see or hear is our capacity to _______________________. This capacity, along with the inherent need to pay attention to something, has dictated the development of the attention industries.
Every instant of every day we are overloaded with information. In fact, all complex organisms, especially those with brains, suffer from information overload. Our eyes and ears receive lights and sounds across the spectrums of visible and audible wavelengths. All told, every second, our senses transmit an estimated 11 million bits of information to our poor brains, as if a giant fiber-optic cable were plugged directly into them, firing information at full speed. In light of this, it is rather incredible that we are even capable of boredom.
Fortunately, we have a valve by which to turn the flow on or off at will. To use another term, we can both “tune in” and “tune out.” When we shut the valve, we ignore almost everything, while focusing on just one discrete stream of information out of the millions of bits coming in. In fact, we can even shut out everything external to us, and concentrate on an internal dialogue, as when we are “lost in thought.” This ability—to block out most everything, and focus—is what neuroscientists and psychologists refer to as paying attention.

(A) Jeremy was a humble man who cleaned the floors of the king and was always smiling and happy. The king complained to his advisor, “How come I’m the richest man in the kingdom, and I’m always unhappy, yet (a) he’s always beaming with happiness?” That night, the advisor visited a little hut where Jeremy lived happily with his family. He placed a bag with forty-nine gold coins in front of the poor man’s house and left.

(B) “How could this be?” Jeremy whispered. He was missing one. He asked his son if (b) he hadn’t taken one of the coins. He didn’t understand where the fiftieth coin had gone. He had forty-nine. That was incredible. But if he just could get to fifty! That should be the goal. If he could round out to fifty gold coins, he’d be immensely rich. He hid the coins under the earth and went to work.

(C) Next morning Jeremy’s son found the bag and asked his father to come and see it. Jeremy came out and opened it. He was in shock. Gold coins. Just one of these gold coins was more than (c) he could have ever hoped to see in his life. He counted them, and it was FORTY-NINE! “Wait a second,” he thought to himself. “That is an odd number. I must have miscounted.” So (d) he counted again and found, again, only forty-nine coins.

(D) Throughout the day Jeremy was obsessed with how he was going to save enough money to get to the fiftieth coin. (e) He needed more working hours, so he took on two, and then three, shifts at work. This made Jeremy so exhausted that he lost his health and could not work any longer. While he was in his little hut, watching his family care for him, he regretted being greedy and realized that there were more important things than being rich.

(A) Jeremy was a humble man who cleaned the floors of the king and was always smiling and happy. The king complained to his advisor, “How come I’m the richest man in the kingdom, and I’m always unhappy, yet (a) he’s always beaming with happiness?” That night, the advisor visited a little hut where Jeremy lived happily with his family. He placed a bag with forty-nine gold coins in front of the poor man’s house and left.

(B) “How could this be?” Jeremy whispered. He was missing one. He asked his son if (b) he hadn’t taken one of the coins. He didn’t understand where the fiftieth coin had gone. He had forty-nine. That was incredible. But if he just could get to fifty! That should be the goal. If he could round out to fifty gold coins, he’d be immensely rich. He hid the coins under the earth and went to work.

(C) Next morning Jeremy’s son found the bag and asked his father to come and see it. Jeremy came out and opened it. He was in shock. Gold coins. Just one of these gold coins was more than (c) he could have ever hoped to see in his life. He counted them, and it was FORTY-NINE! “Wait a second,” he thought to himself. “That is an odd number. I must have miscounted.” So (d) he counted again and found, again, only forty-nine coins.

(D) Throughout the day Jeremy was obsessed with how he was going to save enough money to get to the fiftieth coin. (e) He needed more working hours, so he took on two, and then three, shifts at work. This made Jeremy so exhausted that he lost his health and could not work any longer. While he was in his little hut, watching his family care for him, he regretted being greedy and realized that there were more important things than being rich.

(A) Jeremy was a humble man who cleaned the floors of the king and was always smiling and happy. The king complained to his advisor, “How come I’m the richest man in the kingdom, and I’m always unhappy, yet (a) he’s always beaming with happiness?” That night, the advisor visited a little hut where Jeremy lived happily with his family. He placed a bag with forty-nine gold coins in front of the poor man’s house and left.

(B) “How could this be?” Jeremy whispered. He was missing one. He asked his son if (b) he hadn’t taken one of the coins. He didn’t understand where the fiftieth coin had gone. He had forty-nine. That was incredible. But if he just could get to fifty! That should be the goal. If he could round out to fifty gold coins, he’d be immensely rich. He hid the coins under the earth and went to work.

(C) Next morning Jeremy’s son found the bag and asked his father to come and see it. Jeremy came out and opened it. He was in shock. Gold coins. Just one of these gold coins was more than (c) he could have ever hoped to see in his life. He counted them, and it was FORTY-NINE! “Wait a second,” he thought to himself. “That is an odd number. I must have miscounted.” So (d) he counted again and found, again, only forty-nine coins.

(D) Throughout the day Jeremy was obsessed with how he was going to save enough money to get to the fiftieth coin. (e) He needed more working hours, so he took on two, and then three, shifts at work. This made Jeremy so exhausted that he lost his health and could not work any longer. While he was in his little hut, watching his family care for him, he regretted being greedy and realized that there were more important things than being rich.