Thursday, January 23, 2020

Summary and Analysis of The Clerks Tale Essays -- Canterbury Tales Th

Summary and Analysis of The Clerk's Tale (The Canterbury Tales) Prologue to the Clerk's Tale: The Host remarks that the Clerk of Oxford sits quietly, and tells him to be more cheerful. The Host asks the Clerk to tell a merry tale of adventure and not a moralistic sermon. The Clerk agrees to tell a story that he learned from a clerk at Padua, Francis Petrarch. He then praises the renowned Petrarch for his sweet rhetoric and poetry. The Clerk does warn that Petrarch, before his tale, wrote a poem in a high style exalting the Italian landscape. Analysis In the Prologue to the Clerk's Tale, Chaucer indulges yet again in a mild critique of his contemporaries. Here he analyzes Petrarch's stories and finds fault with his overindulgent descriptions of the Italian landscape, yet nevertheless he finds Petrarch's story good enough to adapt for his own Canterbury Tales. Geoffrey Chaucer did adapt most of these tales from outside sources, modifying them as he saw fit and often making significant changes in tone and plot points. Nevertheless, many of the stories in the Canterbury Tales did not originate with Chaucer himself. The Clerk's Tale: The tale begins with the description of Saluzzo, a region at the base of Mount Viso in Italy. There was once a marquis of this region named Walter. He was wise, noble and honorable, but had one major flaw. He refused to marry, choosing careless pursuits instead. His refusal was so steadfast that the people of his realm confronted him about this, pleading with him to take a wife. They offer to choose for him the most noble woman in the realm for him to marry. He agrees to marry, but makes this one condition: he will marry whomever he chooses, regardless of birth, and his wife shall be tr... ...tes Griselde's fortitude is callous and inappropriate to the purpose. The following tests that Walter inflicts on his wife appear to serve a different purpose. Walter's motivation seems to shift from demonstrating his wife's capacities to breaking down his wife. This may be due to envy for Griselde, a woman universally beloved by his people, who at the outset of the story consider Walter irresponsible and immature. By the time Walter sends Griselde naked from his home he has become wholeheartedly sadistic. The reconciliation that concludes the Clerk's Tale is therefore unsatisfying, for it restores to Walter what he does not deserve. The reconstruction of the family that occurs when Griselde and her children return to Walter's estate is at best tenuous, bringing together a wife and a husband who tortured her, and children and the parents who did not raise them.

Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Education and obesity Essay

Although many have studied the association between educational attainment and obesity, studies to date have not fully examined prior common causes and possible interactions by race/ethnicity or gender. It is also not clear if the relationship between actual educational attainment and obesity is independent of the role of aspired educational attainment or expected educational attainment. The authors use generalized linear log link models to examine the association between educational attainment at age 25 and obesity (BMI ≠¥ 30) at age 40 in the USA’s National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort, adjusting for demographics, confounders, and mediators. Race/ethnicity but not gender interacted with educational attainment. In a complete case analysis, after adjusting for socioeconomic covariates from childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, among whites only, college graduates were less likely than high school graduates to be obese (RR = 0.69, 95%CI: 0.57, 0.83). The risk ratio remained similar in two sensitivity analyses when the authors adjusted for educational aspirations and educational expectations and analyzed a multiply imputed dataset to address missingness. This more nuanced understanding of the role of education after controlling for a thorough set of confounders and mediators helps advance the study of social determinants of health and risk factors for obesity. Nutrition in pregnancy and early childhood and associations with obesity in developing countries. Concerns about the increasing rates of obesity in developing countries have led many policy makers to question the impacts of maternal and early child nutrition on risk of later obesity. The purposes of the review are to summarise the studies on the associations between nutrition during pregnancy and infant feeding practices with later obesity from childhood through adulthood and to identify potential ways for preventing obesity in developing countries. As few studies were ident ified in developing countries, key studies in developed countries were included in the review. Poor prenatal dietary intakes of energy, protein and micronutrients were shown to be associated with increased risk of adult obesity in offspring. Female offspring seem to be more vulnerable than male offspring when their mothers receive insufficient energy during pregnancy. By influencing birthweight, optimal prenatal nutrition might reduce the risk of obesity in adults. While normal birthweights (2500-3999 g) were associated with higher body mass index (BMI) as adults, they generally were associated with higher fat-free mass and lower fat mass compared with low birthweights (

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

35 Common Prefixes in English

If you were a prefix, you could change the same word in different ways.You could make a cycle a unicycle, a bicycle, or a tricycle.(Marcie Aboff and Sara Gray,  If You Were a Prefix. Picture Window Books, 2008) A prefix is a letter or a group of letters attached to the beginning of a word  (or word root) that partly indicates its meaning. For example, the word prefix itself begins with the prefix pre-, which generally means before or in front of. (By contrast, a letter or group of letters attaching to the end of a word is called a suffix.)   Many of todays English words contain prefixes from Greek or Latin. Understanding the meanings of the most common prefixes can help us deduce the definition of new words that we run across in our reading, especially knowing that they can make a word mean its opposite, such as the difference between possible and impossible.Still, we do need to be careful.  The same prefix may be ​spelled in more than one way (pre- and pro-, for instance), and some prefixes (such as in-) have more than one meaning (in this case, not or without versus in or into). Even so, being able to recognize prefixes can help us build our vocabularies.   To Hyphenate or Not? Rules vary as to when a word should have a hyphen separating it from  its prefix. Go by the dictionary if you are unsure. If you are writing a paper for a class and a particular style guide is used, such as MLA, the Chicago Manual of Style, or APA, the stylebook may have a hyphenation guide or a preferred dictionary to follow for which words to hyphenate and which to close up. If a prefix is attached to a proper noun, you generally hyphenate, such as pre-World War II or anti-American.   The following table  defines and illustrates 35 common prefixes.   Common Prefixes Prefix Meaning Examples a-, an- without, lack of, not amoral, acellular, abyss, achromatic, anhydrous ante- before, earlier, in front of antecedent, antedate, antemeridian, anterior anti- against, opposite of anticlimax. antiaircraft, antiseptic, antibody auto- self, same autopilot, autobiography, automobile, autofocus circum- around, about circumvent, circumnavigate, circumscribe co- with, together co-pilot, co-worker, co-exist, co-author com-, con- together, with companion, commingle, contact, concentrate contra-, contro- against, opposite contradict, contrast, contrary, controversy de- down, off, away from devalue, deactivate, debug, degrade, deduce dis- not, apart, away disappear, disagreeable, disbar, dissect en- put into, cover with enclose, entangle, enslave, encase ex- out of, from, former extract, exhale, excavate, ex-president extra- beyond, outside, more than extracurricular, extramarital, extravagant hetero- different, other heterosexual, heterodox, heterogeneous homo-, homeo- same, alike homonym, homophone, homeostasis, homosexual hyper- over, more, beyond hyperactive, hypersensitive, hypercritical il-, im-, in-, ir- not, without illegal, immoral, inconsiderate, irresponsible in- in, into insert, inspection, infiltrate inter- between, among intersect, interstellar, intervene, interpenetrate intra-, intro- within, inside intravenous, intragalactic, introvert macro- large, prominent macroeconomics, macrostructure, macrocosm micro- very small microscope, microcosm, microbe mono- one, single, alone monocle, monologue, monogamy, monotony non- not, without nonentity, nonaggressive, nonessential, nonfiction omni- all, every omniscient, omnivorous, omniscient, omnidirectional post- after, behind postmortem, posterior, postscript, postoperative pre-, pro- before, forward precede, predict, project, prologue sub- under, lower submarine, subsidiary, substandard sym-, syn- same time, together symmetry, symposium, synchronize, synapse tele- from or over a distance telecommunications, telemedicine, television, telephone trans- across, beyond, through transmit, transaction, translation, transfer tri- three, every third tricycle, trimester, triangle, triathlon un- not, lacking, opposite of unfinished, unskilled, ungraceful, unfriendly uni- one, single unicorn, unicellular, unicycle, unilateral up- to the top or north, higher/better upbeat, updo, upgrade, upload, uphill, upstage, upscale, up-tempo