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A book has just been published to help parents to deal with their children’s naughty behavior at home. The author, Dr James Bruno, says that the first positive discipline technique is for parents to remain calm because nervous parents don’t get good results. Parents who cannot often remain calm find that their children stop taking any notice of them. The second challenge is to know how to correct bad behavior in an effective way. For instance, punishing children by preventing them from watching their favorite TV program is not an ideal solution. Dr Bruno believes parents should establish clear rules for children to follow. If children refuse to follow these, they know they will be disciplined. Finally, the most effective way of encouraging good behavior is to give positive feedback as often as possible, to show that it is not only naughtiness that attracts attention.

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Tea had a reputation for being both safe and almost always beneficial. However, scientists are now suggesting that tea may not be as safe as we had previously believed. Tea contains caffeine, and caffeine has been linked to sleeplessness and to the unpleasant jumpy feeling some people get when stressed. More seriously, there is a link between miscarriages, and pregnant women are advised to reduce their intake of tea until after their baby is born. Due to its critical side-effects, some people who like tea choose to be safer and drink a beverage from which the caffeine has been removed, decaffeinated tea, but many claim that it simply doesn’t taste right. The reasonable thing to do is probably moderation; continue to enjoy a cup of tea, but don’t have too many!

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Panda is the name for two nocturnal Asian mammals: the red panda and the giant panda. The red panda, also known as lesser panda and cat bear, is found at high elevations in the Himalayas. It resembles a raccoon but has a longer body and tail and a more rounded head. Its thick fur is rust color to deep chestnut, with black on the under parts, limbs, and ears. The red panda spends much of its time in trees but feeds on the ground, eating primarily bamboo leaves but also fruit and roots. The giant panda superficially resembles a bear. The body is chiefly white, and the limbs are brownish black, with the dark color extending up over the shoulder. The ears and eye patches are black. Giant pandas live in restricted areas of the high mountain bamboo forests of central China; their diet consists entirely of bamboo shoots. Rare in the wild, they produce young poorly when they are not in their natural environment. Giant pandas are protected by law in China.

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Stonehenge is an ancient monument situated about ten miles north of Salisbury in England. It was built about 4500 years ago, but by whom and for what purpose remains a mystery. The builders must have known of geometry. They may have been influenced by the Mycenaeans, whose architecture was similar. Some of the stones must have been brought from West Wales, over 135 miles away. These stones weigh more than fifty tons. They may have been brought on rafts and rollers. Experts say that it must have taken 1500 men more than five years to transport them. Stonehenge was probably built in three stages. First, settlers from continental Europe built a temple for sun worship. Later the «Beaker» people added the stone circles. Finally, people of the Wesse Culture transformed Stonehenge into an observatory. They could calculate the exact time of Midsummer and Midwinter and of equinoxes.

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In the 1920s, new technology allowed filmmakers to attach to each film a soundtrack of speech, music and sound effects synchronized with the action on the screen. These sound films were initially distinguished by calling them talking pictures, or talkies. The next major step in the development of cinema was the introduction of color. While the addition of sound to film revolutionized the medium, quickly driving out silent movies, color was adopted more gradually. The public was relatively indifferent to color photography as opposed to black-and-white. But as color processes improved and became as affordable as black-and-white film, more and more movies were filmed in color after the end of World War II, as the industry in America came to view color an essential to attracting audiences in its competition with television, which remained a black-and-white medium until the mid-60s. By the end of the 1960s, color had become the norm for filmmakers.

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An ultralight airplane is very different from a conventional airplane. It looks like a lawn chair with wings, weighs no more than 254 pounds, flies up to 60 miles an hour, and carries about 5 gallons of fuel. Most ultralights are sold as kits and take about 40 hours to assemble. Flying an ultralight airplane is so easy that a pilot with no experience can fly one. Accidents are rarely fatal or even serious because the ultralight lands so slowly and gently and carries very little fuel. Some models now have parachutes attached, while others have parachute packs which pilots can wear.

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The Great Hanshin earthquake, or the Kobe earthquake as it is more commonly known overseas, was an earthquake in Japan that measured 7.2 on the Japanese Scale. It occurred on January 17, 1995 at 5:46 am 52 seconds in the southern part of Hyogo Prefecture and lasted for approximately 20 seconds. The epicenter of the earthquake was on the northern end of Awaji Island, near the cosmopolitan city of Kobe with a population of 1.5 million. A total of 6,433 people, mainly in the city of Kobe, lost their lives. Additionally, it caused approximately ten trillion yen in damage. It is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the costliest natural disaster. It was the worst .earthquake in Japan since the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923, which claimed 140,000 lives.

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When the air is clear, the sunset will appear yellow, because the light from the sun has passed a long distance through air and the blue light has been scattered away. If the air is polluted with small particles, natural or otherwise, the sunset will be more red. Sunsets over the sea may also be orange, due to salt particles in the air. The sky around the sun is seen reddened, as well as the light coming directly from the sun. This is because all light is scattered relatively well through small angles, but blue light is then more likely to be scattered twice over the greater distances, leaving the yellow, red and orange colors.

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Autism is a brain development disorder that impairs social interaction and communication and causes restricted and repetitive behavior, all starting before a child is three years old. The genetics of autism are complex and it is generally unclear which genes are responsible for it. Autism affects many parts of the brain but how this occurs is also poorly understood. Autism is strongly associated with agents that cause birth defects. Other proposed causes, such as childhood vaccines, are controversial and the vaccine hypotheses lack convincing scientific evidence. The number of people known to have autism has increased dramatically since the 1980s. Parents usually notice signs in the first two years of their child’s life. Early behavioral cognitive intervention can help children gain self-care, social and communication skills but there is no cure for it. Few children with autism live independently after reaching adulthood, but same become successful and an autistic culture has developed, with same seeking a cure and others believing that autism is a condition rather than a disorder.

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Traditionally, many linguists stressed the importance of mastering grammar structures first while teaching English. In recent years, the majority of educators have become more aware of the fallacy of this approach and other approaches promoting vocabulary development have gained popularity. It has been found out without vocabulary to put on top of the grammar system, the learners can actually say very little despite being able to manipulate complex grammatical structures in exercise drills. It is obvious that to learn English, one needs to learn many words. Native speakers have a vocabulary of about 20,000 words but foreign learners of English need far fewer. They need only about 5,000 words to be quite competent in speaking and listening. The reason for this seemingly small number is the nature of words and the frequency with which they appear in a language. It seems clear that frequent words should be among the first words to learn because they will be met most of ten and will be needed in speech or writing.

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