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1.  By the end of the 1920s, American society had undergone a long and historic demographic change. Since the 1870s, the country had been moving from a more rural mode that was based on high birthrates—as high as fifty births annually per thousand people in the early nineteenth century—to a more metropolitan mode. Prior to the 1870s, the population of the country was increasing by about a third every decade; however, by the end of the 1920s, a radical about-face had taken place.
2. One major factor to affect the demographics of the country during this period was a dramatic decrease in birthrates. The trend during this era was more pronounced in urban areas but also had an effect in rural areas. As a result of the trend toward smaller families, particularly in cities, the birthrate was down to 27.7 births annually per thousand women by 1920 and had dropped even further—to 21.3 births annually per thousand women—by 1930.
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1 Schizophrenia is in reality a cluster of psychological disorders in which a variety of behaviors are exhibited and which are classified in various ways. Though there are numerous behaviors that might be considered schizophrenic, common behaviors that manifest themselves in severe schizophrenic disturbances are thought disorders, delusions, and emotional disorders.
2 Because schizophrenia is not a single disease but is in reality a cluster of related disorders, schizophrenics tend to be classified into various subcategories. The various subcategories of schizophrenia are based on the degree to which the various common
behaviors are manifested in the patient as well as other factors such as the age of the schizophrenic patient at the onset of symptoms and the duration of the symptoms. Five of the more common subcategories of schizophrenia are simple, hebephrenic, paranoid, catatonic,
and acute.
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 "In your world, people can reach each other in an instant. There's the telephone, and the fax and on the computer you can talk to someone all the way around the world. You've got people telling their secrets on TV talk shows, and magazines that publish pictures of movie stars trying to hide in their homes. All those connections, but everyone there seems so lonely."

(c) Jodi Picoult

July 14, 2008, 6:26 PM
By CARL SFERRAZZA ANTHONY

First Lady is the unofficial title given to the wives of American presidents, or to the female relatives whom single or widowed presidents designated to serve as their hostesses. Never mentioned in the Constitution and unsalaried for the full-time work required, First Ladies have been idealized on the national and then the global stage as a symbol of American womanhood. Their roles have evolved under pressure from the press and the public, and provided a window on American political, economic and social life generally.

Martha Washington (1789-1797), by simply continuing to share the home life with her husband when he became the first American president and entertaining the political and social elite, found herself revered as an American version of British nobility. The references to her as Lady Washington, her popular war-era nickname, suggests that she was elevated to a symbol of leadership.

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B.

Beforehand - before sth else happens or is done.

C.

Clear (sth) up - leave everything clean and tidy.
Contribution - a thing that you give or do to help sth be successful (make a valuable/significant contribution), contribute v.

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Нow do you think the technology from the space industry will affect our lives?

 
As Nasa's space shuttle programme nears its end, the retired craft are being prepared for their new lives in museums around the US.

BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh is one of a handful of journalists given the chance to look inside the fleet leader Discovery before it leaves Florida's Kennedy Space Centre for the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC.

Watch Video

Materials for 9th June

The remnants of a 13-billion-year-old star have been discovered by a team of researchers.
Cambridge professor of cosmology Max Pettini describes what the universe's "dark ages" were like.

Audio

Yale astronomers detect black holes from the birth of the universe
Materials for 7th June

The oldest black holes that were around at the birth of the universe have been found.

They're the earliest ever to have been detected. Astronomers from Yale University used the world's most powerful telescopes.

Priya Natarajan, a Yale cosmologist, told BBC Radio 5 live: "They swallow up everything that's right around their vicinity, and grow by swallowing."

"They grow over time and end up as super massive black holes," Natarajan explained to Rachel Burden on BBC Radio 5 live.

"That's basically a fancy way of saying something that's more than a million to ten million times as massive as our sun."

Audio

 
A meteor as big as the city of San Francisco hurtles towards the Earth at 20 km per second, smashes into the tropical lagoons of the Gulf of Mexico and gouges a fathomless hole. As a result, a tidal wave surges outwards. Fires sweep
5 across North and South America and fallout blocks the sun and plunges the Earth into permanent gloom.
This catastrophic event is the classic answer as to why dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago, but does the theory hold water? Everyone agrees that the Earth suffered
10 a large meteor strike towards the end of the Cretaceous period, yet more than 20 years after the Chicxulub impact was proposed as the cause of mass extinction, scientists are still arguing over what really killed the dinosaurs. On one side are the 'catastrophists', who say the impact
15 snuffed out the majority of life on Earth in a matter of months or a few years. On the other are 'gradualists', who point out that the fossil record shows a steady decline in the number of species, starting several hundred thousand years before the end of the Cretaceous period. This is
20 known as the K/T mass extinction, when some 70% of the world's species died out. The gradualists don't deny the Chicxulub impact happened, but maintain that it wasn't responsible for the mass extinction.
The debate between the two sides has been polarised
25 and acrimonious, but thanks to a feat of engineering, scientists may finally be able to find out exactly what happened to our planet on that fateful day 65 million years ago. By boring through solid rock, drilling contractors have pulled out a core, 1112 metres long and 7.6 cms in
diameter, which records the full story of the impact and its aftermath. Geologists (mainly catastrophists, of course) are queuing up to analyse the core. In so doing, they hope to confirm whether the impact was devastating enough to kill the dinosaurs. As Jan Smit, a geologist at the Free University of Amsterdam, says, 'The rocks are excellently preserved and certainly promise some scientific fireworks!'
For the catastrophists, however, there are two big problems. First, they don't know how intense and widespread the meteor's effects were and would have to provide evidence of an extreme global change that lasted for at least a year. Secondly, it wasn't just meteors that were stirring up unrest. At that time, an area known as the Deccan Traps in what is now Western India was enduring one of the most intense spells of volcanism in Earth's history. A 'hot spot' deep in the mantle was producing plumes of superheated lava that burst through the crust, inundating 2.5 million square km of land.
Greenhouse gases and water vapour emerged with the lava and, in 1981, Dewey McLean proposed that the Deccan
50 Traps triggered severe global warming and a mass extinction. In support of this theory, the gradualists point out that this is not the only episode of supervolcanism that has occurred simultaneously with a mass extinction. At the Permian-Triassic boundary 250 million years
55 ago, over 90% of marine species became extinct just as the region that is now Siberia was being flooded with lava,
More evidence emerged in support of a gradual extinction in 2002, when a team of geologists in China discovered dinosaur eggshells in
60 rock layers above the boundary, showing that some species of dinosaur survived for a further 250,000 years after the Chicxulub impact. One thing is clear: both catastrophists and gradualists still have plenty to investigate; the rest of us can just sit back and enjoy the fireworks.

Materials for  7th June 

The Solar System in which the Earth is situated is part of the Milky Way galaxy, the pale band of light crossing the night sky. This is one of a vast number of galaxies in the universe, each eonsisting of billions of stars (such as our Sun) bound together by gravity. The ancient Greek philosophers speculated on the nature of the Milky Way, and around 2,500 years ago Pythagoras appears to have believed that it was composed of a vast number of faint stars. The astronomer Hipparchus is thought to have created the earliest known catalogue of the stars in the 2nd century ВС. But it was only with the development of the telescope in the 17th century, making far more stars visible, that the nature of the Milky Way could really begin to be understood. When Galileo first turned his telecope on the sky, in 1609, he found proof that, as Pythagoras had suggested, the Milky Way indeed consisted of innumerable stars.
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“The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all necessarily under control”

 (c) Starhawk quotes

 

 
“We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great gleaming nerve-centre from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that”

(c) D.H. Lawrence quotes (British Poet, Novelist and Essayist, 1885-1930)

Famous last words

Something that you say in order to emphasize that what someone said is wrong or is very likely to be wrong.

A: I said I would never speak to her again in my entire life!
B: Famous last words! You just said hello to her.

I can't believe we lost. Everyone said we'd win easily. Famous last words!

The term 'space station' was coined in the 1920s. In the 1950s, Werner von Braun described his vision of such a structure in Collier’s magazine. In 1971, the Soviet’s Salyut 1 became the first space station, followed by Skylab and Mir. The first parts of the ISS were launched in 1998, and the first Expedition crew began living on the ISS in 2000.

When completed, the ISS will no doubt be the largest and most complex international scientific project in history and will represent a move of unprecedented scale of humans away from Earth. The ISS team includes the United States, Canada, Japan, Russia, Brazil, and the 11 ESA nations, all of which will draw upon great scientific and technological resources while constructing the ISS. Four times bigger than Mir, the ISS will “weigh” 472730 kg and have a 106.8 meter width and an 87 meter length. The finished product will sport six labs and an acre of solar panels. The ISS orbits at 402 kilometers above sea level with a 51.6º inclination, allowing easy crew and supply accessibility and coverage of 85% of Earth.

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Go sky-high

Fig. to go very high.

Prices go sky-high whenever there is inflation.

Oh, it's so hot. The temperature went sky-high about noon.

BOSTON—Score one for the little guys. After years of obscurity in the corners of distant planetary systems smaller exoplanets are finally shuffling into the spotlight.

NASA's Kepler spacecraft, built to seek out planets in orbit around faraway stars, has since 2009 been monitoring a vast field of stars to see what kind of planets might be found there. Earlier this year scientists working on the mission announced that they had confirmed 15 exoplanets in Kepler's field of view and identified an astounding 1,200 or so additional planetary candidates, which are probable planets that await independent validation. Prior to that announcement, only about 500 extrasolar worlds had been discovered since planet searches first began to bear fruit in the 1990s.

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Space out

To become giddy or disoriented. Judy spaced out during the meeting and I didn't understand a word she said. I have a tendency to space out at the end of a hard day.

 A.

Asteroid - a rock or Minor Planet orbiting the Sun.

Astronomy - The scientific study of matter in outer space, especially the positions, dimensions, distribution, motion, composition, energy, and evolution of celestial bodies and phenomena.

Axis - n imaginary straight line on which an object rotates.

B.

Black Hole - An area of outer space with an extremely high gravitational field caused by a collapsed star.

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 "Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children, and no theories".

(c) John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647--1680)

Sail under false colors

To pretend to be something that one is not (a pirate ship used to disguise itself as an ordinary ship by using a false flag).

The head of the company is sailing under false colors and he does not really understand how the company works.