How do the goals of communication differ between men and women?

The goals of communication are different between men and women because there are different ways to talk. Generally, men’s communication is more like individuals in a hierarchical social order in which they are either one-up or one-down (Deborah Tannen’s book). In other words, the men are dominant and want to be more independent than women. For men, they try to use conversation to achieve their goals and protect themselves. So they put the others down and push them around. Men’s communication is like a contest to put them in high position and avoid failure. For women, their communication is like individuals in a network of connections. Women’s goals of communication are try to seek and give confirmation and get help from the others, and to reach consensus. They want to get a good relationship between each other. So they use the close way to talk with each other that we call intimacy. They always share their feelings for each other and avoid isolation.
Women achieve the high position and avoid failure, but there are not their goals that they always focus, they tend to guise themselves. For men also, to achieve involvement and to avoid isolation is the goal, but they are not focused on them, and they will use direct way to express their opinion. For example, women usually use “we, and apologize words” during their conversation, but men usually use “I or in my opinion” and they never apologize. So everyone needs both intimacy and independence whoever she or he is, but women tend to focus on intimacy and men on the independence and domination. That’s the goals of communication differ between men and women.

Happiness

The third one can show how my feel about my life as a whole. As I look back on my life, I do not feel like a winner, I usually feel in a bad mood and worried something is going bad. When I am working, I always pay more attention on what is going on around me then what I am doing. Sometimes, I thought I really worried a lot even something don’t happen it yet. For example, during these two weeks, I can’t focus on our course anymore because I am super worried about my CELT result. Even I can’t sleep and no good appetite. I know I always worried the CELT that is not going to help me get a good mark, but I can’t control myself. This is one of examples that can show my personality. I am not good at handling my emotion. I am clarity about my problem, but I can do nothing for this. I usually look back on my life and see what I did. For most of them, I feel good because I am not a super hero or famous people, I am normal as the others. But there is one thing that I really satisfy that is I have a pretty good idea about the purpose of my life.

Obasan

Obasan is an autobiographical novel wrote by author Joy Kogawa and published in 1981. This is the one of the most important books deals with the internment and persecution of Canada Japanese during and after the Second World War through a young child’s eyes. This book helped the Japanese Canadians to get a better life; one novel focuses on so much criticism of how Canadian government treated them. Kogawa uses imagery to describe people’s feelings throughout the novel, such as stones and streams. This novel includes memory and forgetting, prejudice and tolerance and justice.
This autobiographical novel starts with the memories and experiences of Naomi Nakane. She was a 36 year old school teacher who was living in the rural Canadian town of Ceril, Alberta. One day she got a message of the death of her uncle whom she had lived with when she was a child. This message led Naomi to visit and care for her old Aunt Emily. She calls her Obasan; Obasan is A Japanese word that means aunt. In Obasan Emily’s house, they found an old box of correspondence and journals that brought back her painful and suffering experiences as a child during the Second World War and after the Second World War. When the interment began, Naomi did not understand what was happening and nobody tried to explain it to her because she was so young just 5 year old girl, she didn’t know why she lost her mother. She was sexually abused by her neighbor. Then she lost her father when all Japanese have to go to the camps. Then she lived with her aunt Emily, but discrimination and unfair treatment weren’t stop. In the rest of their life, Naomi’s family still torment of the Canadians against the Japanese citizens of Canada. Author mixes two parts of stories together, the past and another is the present. She also mixes experience and recollections, history and memory throughout. For example, Naomi’s aunt saved a lot of letters that recorded their terrible history and so brought them back to their memory.
I feel it’s a little bit hard to get into this novel quickly when I just began with it. Author used a plenty of details of feeling to bring us in. It makes us easy to have a same feeling with the author. Sometimes I may feel I am the one of the characters. This novel is talking facts and history, but Obasan’s became so popular is not only for its deeply thinking story. I am addicted by Obasan because the beautiful language that the author used, so I recommend you to read this deeply feeling book.

Evolution

In this article, “Descent with Modification: a Darwinian View of life”, Biology, 2005, N.A, Campbell, J.B. Reece explain how Darwin came up with his view of life and present the main points of his theory of evolution.

According to the authors, Darwin’s early ideas came from his travelling of five years through the world.(1831-1836) on the Beagle. The ship that he used was to explore the South American coastline. On this ship, he visited jungles, pampas, and grassland of South America. He spent most of time collecting and observing samples of animals, plants and fossils. Some of the fossils belong to ocean which found in mountain, this evidence can show earth He found that the fauna and flora of South America were similar to each other despite climatic differences, but different from Europe. Darwin stopped at the Galapagos Island; he found many species (finches) live nowhere else in the world. Then he began to think the life is influenced by environment.

From the above observations, the authors point out that new species are the result of evolution which Darwin called “descent with modification”. According to Darwin, as species had to adapt to their environment, some of their traits changed. Beaks of finches from Galapagos Islands, they can change their beaks for picking their food just in short period time and one generation. One species in two different environments can have different changes that depend on the environment, so all life forms are related to previous forms, according to Darwin. He used image of a tree to explain the history of life. The tree has multiple branches from a common trunk to the tips of the youngest twigs such as species of life in the present. A good example would be Asian elephants and African elephants. They look similar because they share the same line of descent until a relatively recent divergence from their common ancestors. About 99% branches are extinct, that’s why we can’t see the middle of their generation. Darwin perceived an important connection between natural selection: “struggle for existence” and the capacity of organisms to over reproduce”. Only the strongest survived and reproduce because they are the best adapted to their environments.

The chapter concludes with summary of natural selection, we know Darwin was able to observant how natural selection is working only in few generations. In nowadays, Artificial Selection is humans modify other species over many generations by selecting and breading individuals that make them change their traits. At the end of this article, the authors gave three important points about evolution by natural selection that many students often misunderstand. First one is overproduction of populations, individual do not evolve. That means the individual can’t evolve himself. The second one is heritable variations, means the good traits and genetic mutations transfer to the next generation, and only genetic modifications can be passed on, not acquired ones. The third one is environment factors, every species are influenced by environment. One generation affect by environment, but they may not change it immediately, this year’s positive adaptor would be next year’s negative one.
So, in the authors’ opinion, according to Darwin’s evolution, life changes very slowly, if there is enough time to let life change, entire diversity of life will be changed by environment.

Keep them out of school

In the article of "keep them out of school" is published by Gazette. Quebec's new rule on handheld cellphones is banning cellphones in schools and when people drivig a car because it really bing us a lot of problems, such as stundents do not pay attention to their class, more interupt during the class, increasing car accidents and so on. According to this debate, using the cellphone in school really bing a lot of problems and it becomes worse. For example, a little girl dosen't know how to read the time without cellphone. Some teachers try to use cellphone make their course interesting. Even though there is many problems here, but it still feel hard to ban it bcause their parents. Henry David Thoreau gave us a good point for this problem: we have become the tools of our tools.

In my opinion, yes, ban those cellphones.
Keep them out of of school, we can do nothing for keeping it in school! In my memmory, i was used it in high school, at that time, cellpones don't have such more fouctions like today, i just use it to send messages to my friends and my classmates even we are in the same class and only one meter away. We send the message to each other during our class even the guy beside me. This is our new way to avoid the rule of "no speeking during the class". You see i am not showing how smart we are, i mean the cellphone in school have become a new tool to against our teacher, and it increats students to copy each other's answers. I use the cellpone for 8 years, it really addicte me a lot, without it, i don't know what should i do.

1. What is the biggest difference between your first language and English?

My first language is Chinese. English and Chinese have many significant differences. This makes learning English a serious challenge for Chinese native speakers. So when i compare English and Chinese, there are lot of different things between them, such as different grammar, alphabet, phonology and even the vocabulary. But I think the biggest difference is grammar and vocabulary. Here, I will just talk about vocabulary. English has a number of short verbs that are very commonly combined with participces to form what are know as phrasal verbs. For example, take on and give in. this kind of phrase does not exist in China. I have a lot of problems with these so i avoid using them. So i think i have a lot of work to build my vocabulary. It may take a long time.