Global Issues: Prejudice

Prejudice

Did you know?

▪ The word "prejudice" comes from the Latin roots "prae" (in advance) and "judicum" (judgment), which essentially means to judge before. When we "pre-judge" someone, we make up our minds about who they are before we actually get to know them. Prejudices or "pre-judgments" are not based upon actual real-life interaction with a person or group it is often born of stereotypes and forms the fertile soil of discrimination.

For instance, a person may hold prejudiced mentally towards a certain ethnic group or gender etc. (e.g. sexist).

▪ The word ‘stereotype’ comes from the French adjective ‘’stéréotype’’, which itself comes from the Greek στερεός (solid) and τύπος (type). The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary of this usage is from a 1922 essay by Walter Lippmann in the journal Public Opinion: “A stereotype may be so consistently and authoritatively transmitted in each generation from parent to child that it seems almost like a biological fact.”

For instance, a person may stereotype a certain group of people, by the pre assumption based on some members of that group etc.

▪ The word ‘’Discrimination’’  from the Latin ‘’discrīminātus’’, which means literate to separate, can be considered the culmination of both previous terms, it is the behavior or action to make a distinction in favor of or against an individual, a group of people or something (being also most of the time negative) especially based on sex, race, social class, etc.

 For instance: a person might discriminate another by their different way of dressing. 

▪ The effects of social norms on prejudice: 

According to McLeod, S. A. (2008) on Prejudice and discrimination, Minard (1952) investigated how social norms influence prejudice and discrimination. The behavior of Afro-descendants and Caucasian miners in a town in the southern United States was observed, both above and below ground. (Read more)

▪ Affirmative Action

 An Affirmative action is an action or policy favoring those who tend to suffer from discrimination, especially in relation to employment or education; it is also known worldwide as a positive discrimination. Thinking like that it would be right to affirm that this kind of attitude or policy is for the best, isn’t it? Not so fast…

Ten myths about affirmative action:  In recent years, affirmative action has been debated more intensely than at any other time in its thirty-year history. Many supporters view affirmative action as a milestone, many opponents see it as a millstone, and many others regard it as both or neither, as a necessary, but imperfect, remedy for an intractable social disease. Here are some of the most popular myths about affirmative action, along with a brief commentary on each one. (Read more)

▪ Social media prejudice

Is it possible to be preconceived while networking, when we are comfortably set in our couches using smartphones or even during games online? Sadly but indeed it is. The social networking site as we probably know very well today, such as facebook, Instagram, twitter and many others, are formed by human beings, and being imperfect as we are, any tool we possess has the potential of being used as a tool for prejudice.

‘’Social networking as we know creates an "echo chamber" in which a network of like-minded people share controversial theories, biased views and selective news, academics found.
This means that any bias held is simply repeated back to them unchallenged and accepted as a real fact.’’ Says a study by The Telegraph journal. (Read more)

There is also a study about human behavior with and without social Medias: The study compared crowd-sourced and social media recruits to in-lab participants.  Check it out!

▪ Different types of prejudice

Different kinds of prejudice lead to different forms of discrimination. (Read more)

▪ Unconscious bias

Are you preconceived in any way? Do you know what unconscious bias is?

Find out at the videos below.

▪ Prejudice Consequences

Prejudice affects the everyday lives of millions of people across the globe. Prejudice held by individuals unnaturally forces on others who are targets of their prejudice a false social status that strongly influences who they are, what they think, and even the actions they take. Prejudice shapes what the targets of prejudice think about the world and life in general, about the people around them, and how they feel about themselves. Importantly, prejudice greatly influences what people expect from the future and how they feel about their chances for self-improvement, referred to as their life chances. All of these considerations define their very identity as individuals.

Conheça a Alpha Idiomas

How to write a Dissertation

Argumentative Essay

▪ What is an argumentative essay type of text?

An argumentative essay is a type of text in which the writer, through the usage of arguments and research, supports or not a specific line of thinking of a subject, typically it contains many different kinds of information, often located in specialized parts or sections. 
In an argumentative essay also known as a dissertation, you desire to convince someone to agree with; not only your viewpoint but also your assumption by the usage of evidences based on research.
Similarly, to other types of text, an essay is not difficult or challenging to write when you have both the right formula and method, as well as information at your disposal.

Let us check those tools and tips to assist you with writing astounding essays!

▪ Important aspects to consider when writing an argumentative essay

▪ Consider both sides of the topic, but take your position by supporting only one.

▪ Provide arguments based on data collected in charts, news, researches and influential people from the subject you are writing about.

▪ Research on more than a single source, webpage or book and compare the data that you have gathered in order not to contribute with erroneous information to the reader.

▪ Talk to experienced people concerning the subject, a teacher/professor will certainly enjoy exposing their point of view towards you.

  

▪ Formula to write an argumentative essay

There are uncountable different formulas to create an essay, through your deep studies; you are certainly going to develop your own style with time. However, it is indeed a good idea to have a starting parameter,

Allow yourself to examine an incredibly consistent on done with just five paragraphs.

1 - Introduction: the introduction is made of three parts being:

▪ Hook: the first sentence also known as hook, is where the author (you) grab the attention of the reader, hence administering a feeling of interest in reading the whole production.

▪ Background:  on the background, the author can grant the reader a brief touch on what it is going to be said concerning the following paragraphs.

▪ Thesis:  the last sentence of the first paragraph should deliver a concept of what is the study (essay) position over the topic, being for or against it makes no difference.

2/3/4 - Arguments: The argumentation part can be divided in three (two supporting arguments and one against). Each of those can also be divided into two other sections:

▪ Claim: a statement about the topic that you are supporting with both arguments and data in the next part.

▪ Data/Evidence:  After the statement, you should prove it through the usage of arguments (the arguments must be written according to the "Important thing to consider when writing an argumentative essay". 

▪ Counter argument:  the final argument, which is against the ones supported by the author, this one should be given coherently, but soon after, you should show why you disagree with this perspective by using arguments.

5 – Conclusion: At the final paragraph, the author want to give a conclusion showing that, with the data that previously given, it is possible to prove a point of view being the right one.

You can also picture how the world (or that subject) would be if your opinion was implemented.
(Read more)

▪ Answering questions – reasoning with your reader

Another helpful aspect is to anticipate different essay sections as answering a series of questions your reader might ask when encountering your thesis.

Readers should have questions. If they do not, your thesis is most likely simply an observation of a fact, not an arguable claim.

▪ "What?"  The first question to anticipate from a reader is what:

‘’What evidence shows that the phenomenon described by your thesis is true?’’

Examine your evidence, thus demonstrating the truth of your claim. This what or "demonstration" section comes early on, often directly after the introduction, since you are essentially reporting what you have observed. Nevertheless, be forewarned: it should not take up much more than a third of your finished essay. If it does, the essay will lack balance and may read as mere summary or description.

▪ "How?"  The reader will also want to know whether the claims of the thesis are true in all cases. The corresponding question is how:

‘’How does the thesis stand up to the challenge of a counterargument? ‘’

How does the introduction of new material, a new way of looking at the evidence, another set of sources affect the claims made? Typically, an essay will include at least one "how" section. This section usually comes after the "what”.

▪ "Why?’’  Your reader will also want to know what is at stake in your claim:

‘’Why does your interpretation of a phenomenon matter to anyone beside you? ‘’

This question addresses the larger implications of your thesis. It allows your readers to understand your essay within a larger context. In answering why, your essay explains its own significance. Although you might gesture at this question in your introduction, the fullest answer to it properly belongs at your essay's end. If you leave it out, your readers will experience your essay as unfinished or, worse, as pointless or insular.

▪ Grammar outcome and review

Although writing can be easy and fun if you apply techniques you are comfortable with, you shouldn’t permit yourself to stay at the comfort zone! Make use of tools like;

▪ Formal writing: avoid slangs or idioms for this type of text, you might apply phrasal verbs with no issues though.

▪ Conjunctions: These are crucial way to connect elements for your arguments, use all its variants, but maintain the formality coherence, do not join informal connectors with formal ones.

▪ Perfect tenses: By using those, your text production is going to become certainly a lot more pleasant to the reader, save no vocabulary, use all your artillery.

▪ Variable synonyms: You are probably have to show things more than twice, avoid repeating words as much as possible.

▪ Indefinite pronouns: Giving support by mentioning sources, doesn’t necessarily mean you need to name and date them every time, make use of this incredible tool.

First person pronouns might be used into specific cases on argumentative essays.

Consider the circumstances below:

▪ You can use first person when you include a personal anecdote.

▪ You may use first person when convincing/ establishing your credibility.

▪ You are allowed to use first person when clarifying passive constructions, to avoid confusion.

Watch out!

You must not use a first person pronoun in any other case.

Reviewing your essay is as important as writing it, take your time and read it aloud to put yourself in your reader’s shoes.

(Read more)

Instructional Video: 

Conheça a Alpha Idiomas

How to write a Composition

▪ What is a composition type of text?

According to the online Cambridge Dictionary It’s “ a short piece of writing about a particular subject, done by a student”. Also known as a Review The main purpose of a review is describing, judging or even expressing a personal opinion about something based on what the writer knows or has experienced. Both Description and explanation are key functions for this time of text and it will normally include a recommendation to the reader.

Writing a composition can be fun if you do it the right way. Here you can check some exceptionally useful tips on making a good composition.


▪ Tips for Writing an Introduction to a City

▪ Read, watch, or listen information about it more than once, to confirm your first overall impressions.

▪ Discuss one aspect of the city in each paragraph. For example, one paragraph about general facts and population, one paragraph about industries, one paragraph about culture, etc.

▪ Use resources to help you find facts about the city, you can use this https://alphaidiomas.blogspot.com.br/2018/01/composition-tips.html to assist you. Keep in mind to check for more online.

▪ Take a stand by stating your opinion, being it negative, positive or mixed;

▪ Attention at the usage of possessive adjectives when writing about a city. For example, Its (not his/her) main exports are ...

▪ When using numbers, write out the numbers up to twenty. For larger numbers, use numerals. For example: There are two professional sports organizations ... BUT there are over 130,000 inhabitants in XYZ.

 ▪ Write 'million' when expressing very large numbers. For instance: 2.4 million people live in the greater metro area.

▪ Make sure to CAPTALIZE specific names of companies and monuments.

 ▪ Never forget to include all the advanced grammar you are learning. If you learnt a new tense or technique, be sure to use it at your next composition, this way, your composition will turn from an ordinary text, to a masterpiece of writing. (Read more)

▪ Formula to write a composition

1 - Introduction: For every composition (except poetry), you will need to introduce either your topic and position (for an essay) or characters, plot and setting (for narrative, short story and play) or place and its general information.

2 - Body:  As mentioned on the tips above, the body can be made of several paragraphs talking about different topics inside the main subject of the composition. For example, a composition about a city could have separate paragraphs mentioning food, culture, touristic spots, nightlife, safety, cost of life, weather and seasons, people’s behavior and so on (not necessarily on the order mentioned).

3 – Conclusion:  This simply wraps up what you have said in your composition. It can basically restate what you said in your introduction. If your composition is longer, you can sum up your main points. Try to phrase them a little differently so it will not sound repetitive.

Use P-O-W-E-R: This is one of the best writing techniques out there. You have done the P-plan, O-organize and W-write components; now you will finish with E-edit and R-revise. You will do this for every type of writing. Reread your work. Look for spelling, grammar, and content mistakes.

(Read more)

▪ Analyze critically the information you get

Analyzing all the data you’ve found on the internet is an important process to create a very good composition. You have a great departure point using your Material from Alpha Idiomas, however go for more, keep in mind that time flies, and things change quickly.

 You can do so by:

·          ▪ Checking its integrity.

·          ▪ Comparing to other sources.

·          ▪ Asking to people that have direct contact with the subject.

·          

Global Issues: Water Crisis

Water Crisis

“Clean, safe drinking water is scarce. Today, nearly 1 billion people in the developing world don't have access to it. Yet, we take it for granted, we waste it, and we even pay too much to drink it from little plastic bottles.
Water is the foundation of life. And still today, all around the world, far too many people spend their entire day searching for it.” (Continue reading...)

▪ Water Crisis Causes
 
▪ Pollution: Shanghai, with its fancy cafes, glitzy shopping malls and organic health food shops, is emblematic of improving quality of life for China’s urban middle class. Yet while the city’s veil of smog has lifted slightly in recent years, its water pollution crisis continues unabated – 85% of the water in the city’s major rivers was undrinkable in 2015, according to official standards, and 56.4% was unfit for any purpose.
(Read more)

▪ Groundwater overdraft: Groundwater overdraft occurs when groundwater use exceeds the amount of recharge into an aquifer, which leads to a decline in groundwater level. This condition is occurring in an increasing number of groundwater basins throughout California, and is affecting the state in many ways.
(Read more)

▪ Population growth: Water is a key element of life for everyone on Earth. As the world’s population grows, the demand for water mounts and the pressure on finite water resources intensifies. Climate change, which is also closely tied to population growth, will also lead to even greater pressures on the availability of water resources.
(Read more)

▪ Water privatization: The process of water privatization in Chile, which began in 1981 under General Pinochet, established a model for water management that strengthened private water rights, adopted a market-based allocation system and reduced state oversight. That model became emblematic of neoliberal reforms heavily promoted by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
These reforms fundamentally changed the way water is valued and managed globally. No longer a mere necessity for human survival, water has become an object of international financial speculation and experts predict that “blue gold” will soon become the most important physical commodity worldwide, dwarfing oil and precious metals.
(Read more)

▪ Bad insfrastructure: Failure to replace and upgrade our country’s water infrastructure poses a severe risk to both the quality and quantity of the country’s water supplies.
(Read more)

▪ Water misuse and overuse: “The big cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco, consume massive amounts of water daily due to their massive populations concentrated in one area. New York City, for instance, consumed 1007.2 million gallons of water per day in 2009 (NYC Government). This is 125.8 gallons per person per day. To put this amount in comparison, most people living in Africa only use around 5.28 gallons per day (Water for Africa). Therefore, the average American living in NYC is using 25 times more water than the average public who is living in Africa. In no economy is this comparison acceptable.”
(Read more)

Why Water from charity: water on Vimeo.

▪ Diseases in relation with inadequate water supply: These diseases result from the lack of adequate water supply for human use. The pathogens are passed on faecal-orally from humans to humans or by contact with contaminated surfaces.
▪ List

▪ Ten countries most in need of clean water: The goal of World Water Day is to raise awareness about the water crisis that is happening in our world. We need to educate ourselves on where the crisis is taking place and then we need to do our best to make it so that there will never be a need for another World Water Day.
(Read more)


▪ Natural insfrastructure could help solving Brazilian water crisis: Serious water crisis have plagued Brazil’s major cities in recent years. Severe pollution in Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay is jeopardizing sailing and other water sports at the upcoming Olympic Games.
(Read More)

▪ An Approach to solve the water problem


▪ Water Facts
By BluePlanet 
By OneDrop

▪ Save Water: How scarcity & misuse is threatening our planet  

Global Issues: Energy Crisis

Energy Crisis

The energy crisis is the concern that the world’s demands on the limited natural resources that are used to power industrial society are diminishing as the demand rises. These natural resources are in limited supply. While they do occur naturally, it can take hundreds of thousands of years to replenish the stores.

 

World energy consumption has been rising at a conerning rate since the mid 1970s. The reliance on oil presents a problem as this form of fuelruns out, the energy crisis worsens. Although rates of increase in energy use have been declining, the industrialization, agricultural development and rapidly growing populations of developing countries will need much more energy. However to bring the developing countries' energy use up to that of industrialized countries by the year 2025 would require an increase in the current global energy use by a factor of five. The planetary ecosystem could not stand this, especially if the increases were based on non-renewable fossil fuels. The current threats of global warming and acidification of the environment also tend to preclude even a doubling of energy use based on the present pattern of energy supply.
(More info)

▪ Energy Crises Causes 
There are many different causes of energy crisis like:


▪ Overconsumption:
Overconsumption is a situation where resource use has outpaced the sustainable capacity of the ecosystem. A prolonged pattern of overconsumption leads to environmental degradation and the eventual loss of resource bases.
(Read more)



▪ Overpopulation: Over the last half century the population of the world has exploded. At the time of writing there are seven billion people on the planet and this number is projected to grow in a short period of time.
(Read more)



▪ Poor infrastructure: Aging infrastructure of power generating equipment is yet another reason for energy shortage. Most of the energy producing firms keep on using outdated equipment that restricts the production of energy. It is the responsibility of utilities to keep on upgrading the infrastructure and set a high standard of performance.
(Read more)

▪ Energy poverty: More than 1.3 billion people – almost a quarter of humanity – have no electricity.This means they have no light in the evening, limited access to radio and modern communications, inadequate education and health facilities, and not enough power for their work and businesses.
Worldwide, more than 3 billion people depend on dirty solid fuels to meet their most basic energy need, cooking. At least 2.5 billion cook with biomass (i.e. wood, dung and agricultural residues), and over half a billion cook with coal.
(Read more)

▪ Poor governance: “The current energy crisis, though also a global problem, has become a critical socio-economic issue for Pakistan and is rooted in the country’s poor governance”.
(Read more)





▪ Unexplored renewable energy options: Renewable energy still remains unused is most of the countries. Most of the energy comes from non-renewable sources like coal. It still remains the top choice to produce energy
(Read more)

▪ Wastage of energy:  Without paying much attention, we use a lot of energy each day — from charging electronics to watching TV. In fact, in 2014, the average U.S. residential household consumed 10,982 kWh of electricity and spent around $2,200 annually on utility bills. Luckily, households can lower this amount up to 25 percent by being more proactive with energy conservation tips.
(Read more and check some tips to avoid the wastage of energy)


▪ Poor distribution system: Our electrical grid is being stretched to the brink. The U.S. is making itself less resilient against catastrophic failure from a major weather event or terror attack every day.
(Read more)


▪ Major accidents and natural calamities: In the spring of 2010, drought devastated China’s southwest, reducing the flow of major rivers and slashing hydroelectric power generation dramatically, upping China’s demand for energy inputs and putting pressure on global fuel prices.
In 2011, a magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami raged a dual attack on Japan – destroying much of northern Japan’s energy infrastructure and devastating four nuclear plants and Fukushima – forcing Japan to up its imports of oil, coal and natural gas and causing several countries worldwide to cease nuclear development altogether.
Despite different causes and countries, the impacts both natural disasters have had on global energy are enormous.
(Read more)

▪ Wars and attacks: The Heritage team simulated the effects on world oil supplies, demand, and prices after a major terrorist attack on oil exports from Saudi Arabia and resulting disruption of oil shipping lanes between the Middle East and major Asian economies. Analyst...  measured the effects of these disruptions on the U.S. economy and found:
(Read more)

▪ A Crises of Energy

▪ Renewable Energy