Today in class and ... university student drinking

I know some of you had a hard time getting to class today as there were local residents obstructing the way in Tazon to protest about their situation, ( lack of water or milk, criminality, etc., who knows, it can be any or all of these and more).

Just 12 students showed up in class and we discussed and checked: if clauses (when they are certain, probable, improbable or impossible), probability using modals and certain words, identifying hypothesis and distinguishing between fact and hypothesis (Focus on Reading pages: 146, 147, 148, part of 149).

Then we reviewed the text on Dinosaurs, checked answers and finished page 59.

Since there is a Physics exam this Friday, almost all students preferred to do pages 43-46 ("What happens when you drink?") as homework and leave earlier today, although we did discuss about alcohol drinking, designated drivers and some consequences of drinking heavily at this stage of your lives. The assignment should be handed in next Monday in a separate piece of paper with your name on it (pages 45-46 of reading guide).

If you want to read more about tips to survive university student drinking, you can check here and more facts about the effects of alcohol you will find here.

How much do you know about dinosaurs?

Yesterday we read about possible theories on how dinosaurs disappeared.

But did they die because they were too heavy? There is one explanation called the Gravitational Hipothesis. Click here to read about it.

Later, you can take a quiz on dinosaurs . Always answer the question at the top of the screen (there is a lot of unrelated information at the bottom)

If you have time, solve a vocabulary puzzle. It is timed (90 seconds to do it) and you can check the "hints" button if you have no idea of what the possibly words are. I hope you enjoy it.

More on Tsunamis

One of the most terrible tsunamis of modern times hit Indian Ocean shorelines on December 26, 2004. That tsunami is believed to have the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. Some 200,000 people were killed in a single day.

Click here to watch a 3:27 minute video from National Geographic in case you want to know more about this topic that came up in one of our class activities this week. It takes some time to download and even has an IBM ad before it shows, but very effective for visual learners like me. Tell us if you found new information or what you found interesting, shocking, revealing, thought-provoking ...

Are you an auditory learner? Do you learn better when you LISTEN?

Check this link, where not only you will be able to read but also listen to a study about "sleep".

After reading and listening to this text, tell us if you would change your sleeping habits and why. Was there something in this research that had an impact on you to make such change? Did you find cause-effect relationships in this text?

In case you liked this link, here is another.

Sample departmental test

My colleague, Prof. Gilberto Berríos, created this exam for his students last term which resembles our Departmental Exam. There are 25 questions with three alternatives and the test has a time limit of 1 hour 30 minutes (exactly like the departmental exam). Please write your name and last name so he can keep track of the test because his students will be taking it too and he will like to know the results. I hope you find it useful.

Strain gauge: How does it work?

BINGO!!!

I went to the link in our side bar that helps us find how something works and wrote "strain gauge", a word many of us were not very familiar with from page 134 in today`s exercise on cause-effect. Well, here is a link to a place that gives us more information on the use of this device to measure the weight of trucks that run in North American highways.

Reminders ...

The departmental exam will be week 6, Friday February 22nd at 11:30 in room MEM317. Do not forget to bring your ID card in case something unexpected happens and a different professor comes that day ... one never knows so it is better to play around with Murphy´s Laws.

Your homework for this Wednesday is from page 32 to ... of the reading guide and the text is entitled "Clouds in the Greenhouse". A nice diagram that explains this effect can be found here.