Spring Festival Essay Example for Free

Spring Festival Essay Spring Festival is the most joyful festival in China, and it is also the day of a family member reuniting. Do you want to know that Chinese how to celebrate this festival? Putting the spring festival scrolls up, hanging the lanterns, having the reunion meals, having dumplings, sitting up late and waiting for the ring of the New Year are all the Spring Festival’s custom. All the activities contain the nice blessings and willing. For instance, eating fishes during the festival express that they hope they are abundant every year, and giving oranges and apples express lucky and safety. Before the New Year comes, the people completely clean the indoors and outdoors of their homes as well as their clothes, bedclothes and all their utensils. Then people begin decorating their clean rooms featuring an atmosphere of rejoicing and festivity. All the door panels will be pasted with Spring Festival couplets, highlighting Chinese calligraphy with black characters on red paper. The content varies from house owners wishes for a bright future to good luck for the New Year. Also, pictures of the god of doors and wealth will be posted on front doors to ward off evil spirits and welcome peace and abundance. Burning fireworks was once the most typical custom on the Spring Festival. People thought the spluttering sound could help drive away evil spirits. However, such an activity was completely or partially forbidden in big cities once the government took security, noise and pollution factors into consideration. As a replacement, some buy tapes with firecracker sounds to listen to, some break little balloons to get the sound too, while others buy firecracker handicrafts to hang in the living room. The Chinese character fu (meaning blessing or happiness) is a must. The character put on paper can be pasted normally or upside down, for in Chinese the reversed fu is homophonic with fu comes, both being pronounced as fudaole. Whats more, two big red lanterns can be raised on both sides of the front door. Red paper-cuttings can be seen on window glass and brightly colored New Year paintings with auspicious meanings may be put on the wall. People attach great importance to Spring Festival Eve. At that time, all family members eat dinner together. The meal is more luxurious than usual. Dishes such as chicken, fish and bean curd cannot be excluded, for in Chinese, their pronunciations, respectively ji, yu and doufu, mean auspiciousness, abundance and richness. After the dinner, the whole family will sit together, chatting and watching TV. In recent years, the Spring Festival party broadcast on China Central Television Station (CCTV) is essential entertainment for the Chinese both at home and abroad. According to custom, each family will stay up to see the New Year in. Waking up on New Year, everybody dresses up. First they extend greetings to their parents. Then each child will get money as a New Year gift, wrapped up in red paper. People in northern China will eat jiaozi, or dumplings, for breakfast, as they think jiaozi in sound means bidding farewell to the old and ushering in the new. Also, the shape of the dumpling is like gold ingot from ancient China. So people eat them and wish for money and treasure.

Comparing Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels and Terry Gilliams Adventures of Baron Munchausen :: comparison compare contrast essays

Comparing Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Terry Gilliam's Adventures of Baron Munchausen      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The tales of Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift, is a well known story.  Ã‚   For more then two and a half centuries, Gulliver's Travels has been read by children for pleasure.   Terry Gilliam's "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" is much the same.   It can be compared to Gulliver's Travels in many ways.   "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" has been given the subtitle "Gulliver Revived" for the following reasons; the adventures both Gulliver and Munchausen partake, political hierarchy, and satire.      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The adventures Gulliver experienced were much like those of Baron Munchausen. The adventures of Munchausen, as well as the adventures of Gulliver, were very outrageous.   The stories described by both are hard for the reader to believe.   Although very entertaining, they are so farfetched that one would find it difficult to consider as true.      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Baron started off by telling his tales as he remembered them.   He took off in his hot air balloon in search of his magical friends.   He first went to the moon to look for Berthold.   This was much like Gulliver's travels to Lilliput, however, Gulliver did not go there intentionally. Once on the moon, Munchausen set out to look for Berthold.   He discovered many things in his search.   While being locked up for trying to romance the queen, Munchausen accidentally stumbled upon Berthold.   He then moved on to search for the next of his companions.   Munchausen fell off of the moon into a vulcano where Vulcan, who was a Greek God, lived.   He then sat down to drink tea with Vulcan and discovered that Vulcan's servant was none other then Albrecht.   While in the home of Vulcan, Munchausen was introduced to his wife, and fell in the love with the sight of her.   Vulcan saw this, disliked it very much, and became jealous.   The same thing happened to Gulliver, who had many enemies in Lilliput.   Flimnap, Treasur er of the Realm, long suspected, with absolutely no grounds, that Gulliver was his wife's lover, "This Lord, in Conjunction with Flimnap the High Treasurer, whose Enmity against you is notorious on Account of his Lady" (Swift 56 ).   Gulliver's enemies plotted against him, and accused him of treason.   Gulliver then fled from Lilliput.

An ideal family Essay

To create a strong and happy family is a difficult task. Person’s upbringing and education starts in his or her family, even when children grow up and become independent, their parent never stop influencing their lives. From my point of view, parents are our first teachers and most influencing people. The way our parents train and discipline us influence how we act and reason out. Being a parent is one of the most challenging task in the world. Parents should love, protect us and guide their child. As children in many cases take after their parents, the latest should be a good role model. They should bring their kids up in the atmosphere of love, mutual respect. But in some situations they should tell their young ones off. Parents should nurture the most important values in them, such as kindness, compassion, respect, generosity, honesty and responsibility. Teach them to be good critical and creative thinkers in a world that isn’t always friendly with them. Parent should help their kids limp through a crisis and help them to grow useful members of society. Children, in their turn, should try to understand that their parents do their utmost to bring them up correctly. Kids should share their problems with their parents and remember that they can rely on them, not retire into their shells. They shouldn’t use bad language or talk back to their mom and dad, because they may hurt them through the bad words without thinking. Youngsters should look up to their parents, don’t lie to them. They should try not to have their parents worry about them all the time, should act as a grown up. Children should support their parents too, as sometimes they can be bad-tempered or a bit depressed. And, of course, children shouldn’t be shy to show love to their parents, doing it by saying some sweet words, sending gifts, kissing or other ways.

Controlled Experiments Definition and Examples

A controlled experiment is a highly focused  way of collecting data  and is especially useful for determining patterns of cause and effect. This type of experiment is used in a wide variety of fields, including medical, psychological, and sociological research. Below, we’ll define what controlled experiments are and provide some examples. Key Takeaways: Controlled Experiments A controlled experiment is a research study in which participants are randomly assigned to experimental and control groups.A controlled experiment allows researchers to determine cause and effect between variables.One drawback of controlled experiments is that they lack external validity (which means their results may not generalize to real-world settings). Experimental and Control Groups To conduct a controlled experiment, two groups are needed: an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group is a group of individuals that are exposed to the factor being examined. The control group, on the other hand, is not exposed to the factor. It is imperative that all other external influences are held constant. That is, every other factor or influence in the situation needs to remain exactly the same between the experimental group and the control group. The only thing that is different between the two groups is the factor being researched. For example, if you were studying the effects of taking naps on test performance, you could assign participants to two groups: participants in one group would be asked to take a nap before their test, and those in the other group would be asked to stay awake. You would want to ensure that everything else about the groups (the demeanor of the study staff, the environment of the testing room, etc.) would be equivalent for each group. Researchers can also develop more complex study designs with more than two groups. For example, they might compare test performance among participants who had a 2-hour nap, participants who had a 20-minute nap, and participants who didn’t nap. Assigning Participants to Groups In controlled experiments, researchers use  random assignment (i.e. participants are randomly assigned to be in the experimental group or the control group) in order to minimize potential confounding variables in the study. For example, imagine a study of a new drug in which all of the female participants were assigned to the experimental group and all of the male participants were assigned to the control group. In this case, the researchers couldn’t be sure if the study results were due to the drug being effective or due to gender—in this case, gender would be a confounding variable. Random assignment is done in order to ensure that participants are not assigned to experimental groups in a way that could bias the study results. A study that compares two groups but does not randomly assign participants to the groups is referred to as quasi-experimental, rather than a true experiment. Blind and Double-Blind Studies In a blind experiment, participants don’t know whether they are in the experimental or control group. For example, in a study of a new experimental drug, participants in the control group may be given a pill (known as a placebo) that has no active ingredients but looks just like the experimental drug. In a double-blind study, neither the participants nor the experimenter knows which group the participant is in (instead, someone else on the research staff is responsible for keeping track of group assignments). Double-blind studies prevent the researcher from inadvertently introducing sources of bias into the data collected. Example of a Controlled Experiment If you were interested in studying whether or not violent television programming causes aggressive behavior in children, you could conduct a controlled experiment to investigate. In such a study, the dependent variable would be the children’s behavior, while the independent variable would be exposure to violent programming. To conduct the experiment, you would expose an experimental group of children to a movie containing a lot of violence, such as martial arts or gun fighting. The control group, on the other hand, would watch a movie that contained no violence. To test the aggressiveness of the children, you would take two measurements: one pre-test measurement made before the movies are shown, and one post-test measurement made after the movies are watched. Pre-test and post-test measurements should be taken of both the control group and the experimental group. You would then use statistical techniques to determine whether the experimental group showed a significantly greater increase in aggression, compared to participants in the control group. Studies of this sort have been done many times and they usually find that children who watch a violent movie are more aggressive afterward than those who watch a movie containing no violence. Strengths and Weaknesses Controlled experiments have both strengths and weaknesses. Among the strengths is the fact that results can establish causation. That is, they can determine cause and effect between variables. In the above example, one could conclude that being exposed to representations of violence causes an increase in aggressive behavior. This kind of experiment can also zero-in on a single independent variable, since all other factors in the experiment are held constant. On the downside, controlled experiments can be artificial. That is, they are done, for the most part, in a manufactured laboratory setting and therefore tend to eliminate many real-life effects. As a result, analysis of a controlled experiment must include judgments about how much the artificial setting has affected the results. Results from the example given might be different if, say, the children studied had a conversation about the violence they watched with a respected adult authority figure, like a parent or teacher, before their behavior was measured. Because of this, controlled experiments can sometimes have lower external validity (that is, their results might not generalize to real-world settings). Updated  by Nicki Lisa Cole, Ph.D.