Wednesday, October 28, 2009

INHERIT THE WIND

Character profil
1. Bertram Cates: He is the main caracter. He is a young teacher who teaches Darwin's theory in his class. He is the accused of the play.
2. Matthew Harrisson Brady: He is a politician from Nebraska. He wanted to be the presidant many times. He is an admirable caracter. He losses the support of people around him during the play.
3. Henry Drummond : At the beginning, he is mistaken for the devil. As the play go by, he starts to be seen as a hero even if he loses the case. He is not cnocerned about what people think about him and he has a good sence of humour. He always prefers the truth even if it is sometimes cruel or unpleasant. He has a lot of compassion and respect for people around him even for his opponents.
4. E. K. Hornbeck is a cynical journalist but a positive caracter. He is covering the trial for the Baltimore Herald. For him, Cates is a hero.
5.Reverend Jeremiah Brown represents the Christian belief.
6. Rachel Brown : 22 year old, daughter of Reverend Brown. She is a teacher close to Cates but in conflict with his beliefs. She is torn between her feelings for Cates and her Christian belief.
7. The Judge: is as impartial as his deep belief in the Bible will allow him to be.

8. Townpeople : colourful buch of people. represent religious beliefs.

BRANDING

My choice
Food : Starbuck
Technology : Koodo (Telus)
Cars : Mazda
Entertainment : Walt Disney
Computer : Apple
Financial : ING DIRECT
Clothes : Le Château
Electronics : Sony
Household : GE
Software : Microsoft
TOP COMPANY
Cocacola is 123 years old and the top brand. It is in almost every country. (200)
The top technology compagni is for INTERNATIONAL BUISNESS MACHINE. It is in 170 countries.
Toyota is the top car compagny. Their revenues decreased of 21% because of the economical crisis.
For entairtainment, Disney is the winner even if they are going down of 3%. They will make Toy Story 3. (same as my choice)
The top company for product is Intel.
The top financial company is American Express. They went down of 32% because of the crisis.
Louis Vuitton, even if it is very expensive, is the top clothing company.
In electronic, NOKIA is the most popular company.
Household: GE (same as my choice)
Sofware : Microsoft (same as my choice)

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Mid-term Writing Test

CREDIT CARD HABITS

Introduction

Credit cards are all around us. A recent study of Statistic Canada showed that there are around 3.1 credit cards per adult in our country. We also observed that people tend to use credit cards younger than before because it is accessible and simple. Even though companies and banks are pleased to see this great market of customers, we think that those people are dangerous for our economy because of their credit habits. We believe that young people are not enough responsible to manage credit cards or to have good credit habits.

Method

First of all, we created a survey that contains ten questions. We send it to two groups of people. Our first selected group was 33 people between 15 and 25 years old. Twelve people of 26 years old and over were in the other group. We ask them several questions to understand their credit situation and habits. Moreover, we wanted to have their opinion about credit cards so we asked them: what word comes to your mind when you think about credit card?

Results

To our surprise, young people were not has bad has we thought. On the one hand, they have fewer credit cards than older people and more than 80% of them always pay their bill. Our survey demonstrates that 78% of the participants between 15 and 25 years old who answered to our questions have less than 100$ of debts on their credit card. On the other hand, some of them have an enormous credit card limit. The other problem is that young people use their credit cards often and not necessarily for excellent reasons. More than 60% of them told us that they use their credit cards for clothing and 50% of them use it for hobbies like cinema and music.

Discussion

To summarize, our hypothesis was partially true. Teenagers and young adults have better credit habits than what we thought. If we had to do this survey again, we would ask it to more people because are survey was not enough representative of the population.

Finally, we concluded that our expenses should always correspond to our incomes. We should not live a lifestyle that we cannot afford because it will catch us up someday. That is why we think people between 15 and 25 years old should not have more than one credit card. Although some teenagers and young adults are as responsible as adults, they don’t have big incomes to cover an important debt if they load their card.

420 words

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

(Second chance) Learning express Library- course 2

Vocabulary and spelling courses 2 : roots, prefixes and suffixes.

1. Interest level:

I think this subject was interesting because we talked a bit about this prefixes ans suffixes in class and I wanted to go further in this subject. This lesson shows how to understand unfamiliar or complicated words by analysing their structure.


2. Difficulty

The words were very complicated so it was pretty hard. I had a lot of difficulty to understand the meaning of the words when they were not in context. I noticed that I did some mistakes because some words look like French words but they don't have the same meaning at all. The easiest part was "Prefixes that change meaning" because I was able to deduce the meaning with my prior knowledge.


3. What I learned (3 points)

-I learned trategies to learn new words with their sound, prefixes or suffixes.

-I also learned a lot of vocabulary :"impediment" means "hindrance"

-"conspicuous" means "evident"

-"hindsight" means "retrospect"

-"illegible" means "unreadable"

4.My score

My score is 73%. I think this result is too high. I got a lot of good answer because I was most of the time lucky in the first part of the course.

5.Course rating

This course was interesting from the beginning to the end. I rate this lesson 8,5/10 because I think it was sometimes discouraging to face 15 new words and try to do the exercises without dictionnary. Even though, I improved my vocabulary a lot so I would recommand it.

Monday, October 19, 2009

(Second chance) Learning express Library- course 1

Grammar Skills for Writing 1: Punctuation in Sentences
1- Interest level
Grammar skills #1 interested me because I think we neglect our grammar in CEGEP when we write because we take it for granted. This course was about ponctuation rule and how to use each sign properly. This course also gave tricks to avoid common mistakes using ponctuation signs.

2- Difficulty
Level 1, 2, and 3 were much easier than the rest of the course. I only had to choose the sentence that was written corectly between the two choices offered. Most of the time, the error was obvious. In the two last levels, the exercises were longer and arduous. I had to analyse run-un sentences and fragments. Such exercices were new to me so it destabilized me sometimes. It was also difficult because I had to correct common errors that we do when we use the comma and it is one of my weakness in English.

3- What I learned (3 things)
First of all, I learned that we have to put a period at the end of a sentence that asks an indirect sentence. I thought we had to put a question mark because I sometimes transpose French rules to English even if these two langages are very separate.
Second, I learned that we have to put a question mark at the end of words that asks a question even if it is not a complete sentence.
Finally, I learned a lot about how to separate sentences properly, but I believe more exercises are needed to unterstand all possible cases.

4- My score
My score was higher than what I had expected. I got 90%. I don't think I understood everything perfectly, but my guesses were often good.

5- Course rating
On the one hand, all the information I have learned in the course was relevent. I think we overestimate our knowledge in grammar because I really learned new things about capitalization and ponctuation even if I am in CEGEP 2. On the other hand, the course was too long. Grammar is not a subject that captures my attention for more than one hour but this lesson took me more than two hours. I should look twice at the time estimate that they give in the course description next time I do a LEL.