Veerendra

Difference between a Reptile and an Amphibian

Reptiles are cold-blooded animals. They typically lay hard shelled eggs and have skin covered with scales or a bony external plate. They either have four legs or descended from four limber ancestors. Some examples of reptiles are: alligators, crocodiles, caimans, gavials, lizards, snakes, turtles, and tortoises. The science dealing with reptiles is called herpetology.

Amphibians are animals that can live on land or in water. They spend part of their lives under water breathing through gills and part of their lives on land breathing with lungs. Amphibians are characterized by glandular skin and no scales. Most amphibians lay eggs in the water. Most have four legs but some have no legs. Some examples of amphibians are: frogs, toads, salamanders, and newts.

The Hobbit Short Summary

When Bilbo, a peaceful hobbit, is approached by the wizard Gandalf and asked to accompany a group of dwarves to take back their kingdom from a dragon, he agrees reluctantly and faces many dangers as they approach the Lonely Mountain, defeat Smaug, and finally join five armies together to defeat an army of goblins and wargs.

There are many events that take place in The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. The most important center on Bilbo’s journey away from and back to Hobbiton.

When Gandalf the Grey arrives at Bilbo’s and tricks him into hosting a party for a group of dwarves, it upsets Bilbo’s quiet, orderly life. Nonetheless, he agrees to accompany the group the next morning to take back the lost dwarven kingdom from Smaug the dragon.

The journey is fraught with peril, including an encounter with Gollum, the keeper of a mysterious ring that Bilbo steals. It makes him invisible when he puts it on. He uses it to rejoin the group of dwarves, which is led by warrior Thorin Oakenshield.

When they arrive at the Lonely Mountain, where Smaug lives, they’re greeted by people from nearby Lake-town, who want the dwarves to kill Smaug. When the party arrives at the mountain, Bilbo steals a cup and manages to spot a weakness on Smaug where a projectile could strike him. Once Smaug realizes what happened, he attacks Lake-town for aiding the person who stole from him.

A thrush that overheard Bilbo’s discovery of Smaug’s weakness reports it to a Lake-town defender who shoots an arrow at Smaug, slaying him.

The dwarves take back their mountain kingdom, but the men and elves who assisted on their journey come to demand compensation, reparations, and treasure they believe they’re owed. When the dwarves refuse, the armies prepare to fight. Bilbo argues with Thorin and asks him to give compensation, but Thorin refuses.

Gandalf returns and warns of an emerging threat: goblins and wargs. The men, elves, and dwarves band together to defeat them. Thorin and Bilbo make up, but Thorin dies from a wound he received in the battle. Bilbo, now rich with a small portion of the treasure he was offered, goes home.

The setting of this poem is a laburnum tree in September. A goldfinch nests in it with her brood of chicks. Color ties the tree and the bird together: at this time of year, the leaves of the tree turn yellow and goldfinches are also yellow or golden in hue. Further, unlike most birds, goldfinches will hatch eggs in the early fall.

The poem is divided into four stanzas of uneven length. In the first, three-line stanza, we are introduced to the top of the laburnum tree, with its yellow leaves accented by the sunlight and its seeds dropping. It is alive and fertile.

In the second, nine-line stanza, the poem’s longest, we are introduced to the goldfinch that nests in the tree. She brings it more fully to life by landing on it, making it tremble. There is movement and the sound of twittering as she appears. She is the “engine of her family.”

In the third, two-line stanza, she flies away from the tree, soaring towards the “infinite.”

In the final stanza, of one six-word line, the tree is “empty” without her presence.

The poem shows how the bird brings life to the tree. While the question asks only for summary, one interpretation of the poem is that Ted Hughes is the tree and the bird that flies to infinity is his estranged wife, Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide, leaving behind two young children.

“The Laburnum Top” is a poem which celebrates the energy and life of nature. The laburnum tree is sitting in the silence of fall, without movement or apparent life. In flies a goldfinch, stirring up life both in and on the tree, as evidenced by the sound of rustling leaves and the scurrying of a lizard. The “engine” has roared to life with all kinds of sounds and life and energy; then the bird leaves and the laburnum falls back into silence and stillness…and the impending dormancy of winter.

There is one major difference between M1 and M2.  The main difference is that M1 is a more limited and more liquid type of money.  More types of money are included in M2, but they are less liquid than those included in M1.

Different kinds of money can be more or less liquid.  This means that they can be more or less usable for buying goods and services.  For example, cash and deposits in checking accounts are extremely liquid.  These, along with travelers’ checks (which used to be a more important form of money) make up M1.

M2 includes all of M1.  However, it also includes other, less liquid, forms of money.  This includes such things as deposits in savings accounts, money market accounts, and money market mutual funds.  It also includes money in certificates of deposit (CDs).  These types of money are relatively liquid, but are slightly more difficult to actually use than the money in M1 is.

Thus, the major difference between these two is that M1 is more liquid while M2 includes more kinds of money but is less liquid.

What does this quote mean: “They who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty not safety.” – Benjamin Franklin

What Benjamin Franklin is trying to say in this quote is that personal liberty is the most important thing in a democratic society.

In democratic societies, we typically say that there is a tradeoff between liberty and safety. We see this tradeoff most clearly in the areas of policing and of anti-terrorism. A recent example of this is the revelation that the government has been collecting data on who we call on our phones. We say that we have to be willing to give up some of our freedoms so that the government can protect us from criminals and terrorists.

Franklin is rejecting this idea. He is saying that no one ought to be willing to give up any “essential liberty.” When he says this, he is claiming that liberty is the most important thing. He is saying that giving up liberty in order to get safety is something that is really bad. It is so bad that we do not deserve to have either liberty or safety if we are willing to give liberty up. This means that liberty is the most important thing.

Precipitation is a form of water that falls from a cloud. Five main types of precipitation are rain, snow, hail, sleet, and freezing rain. Each of the five main forms of precipitation are briefly explained below.

Rain

Rain is in the form of liquid water. It is by far the most common form of precipitation.

Snow

Snow forms via sublimation. In other words, snow forms when water vapor turns directly into a solid state (ice) without first becoming a liquid.

Hail

Hail forms in cumulonimbus clouds. Ice crystals that begin to fall towards Earth’s surface are lifted by a gust of wind within the cloud. Thus, they are brought up higher into the cloud. As this occurs, the hail grows in size as it accumulates more moisture within the cloud. The blowing of a hail ball back up into the cloud can occur several times. Eventually, a hail ball becomes so large and heavy that it falls to Earth.

Sleet

Sleet is a mixture of snow and rain. Sleet is formed when raindrops travel through a cold region of the atmosphere on their way down to Earth. This causes the raindrops to slightly freeze.

Freezing Rain

Freezing rain does not freeze on the way down to Earth. Rather, freezing rain freezes as soon as it hits an object on Earth.

Ionic compounds are between cation and anions. They are usually between a metal and a nonmetal or a polyatomic ion. Ionic compounds are bonded with the cation “giving away” its valence electrons and the anion “receiving” them for a full octet.

Molecular compounds are usually between two or more nonmetals. The nonmetals simply share their valence electrons for a full octet.

When the difference in electronegativity of two atoms is greater than 1.7, the bond is ionic. When it is less than 1.7 but greater than 0.4, the bond is polar covalent. When the difference is less than 0.4, the bond is nonpolar covalent.

One difference between molecular compounds and ionic compounds is that molecular compounds are formed by the sharing of electrons, and ionic compounds are formed by the transfer of electrons. Molecular compounds result from covalent bonding and ionic compounds result from ionic bonding. Another difference is that a molecular bond is formed between two non-metals, and an ionic bond is formed between a metal and a non-metal.

What is the main theme of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” in the Republic?

The main theme of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in the Republic is that human perception cannot derive true knowledge, and instead, real knowledge can only come via philosophical reasoning.

In Plato’s example, prisoners live their entire lives in a cave, only able to see shadows. To them, these shadows are reality. When a prisoner randomly guesses the next shadow to appear, that prisoner will be worshipped as having mastered nature. When one prisoner escapes and understands that life comes from the sun, he realizes his former view of reality based on human perception was wrong. When he returns to tell the other prisoners, they do not believe him, because they are still relying on their perception.

This idea also begins to uncover other issues with human perception. Humans are biased individuals who will explicitly or implicitly apply individual biases to what they perceive. Additionally, two humans can perceive the same object and derive a different meaning from it. For example, a rainstorm can be viewed as a blessing by a farmer or a curse by a sailor.

Ultimately, Plato’s point is that in order to truly gain an understanding of knowledge, humans must submit to the idea of specific and fair philosophical reasoning, which transcends the pitfalls of human perception.

The Allegory of the Cave represents an expression of Plato’s philosophy of truth and reality (which can be termed as Platonic Idealism). When reading Plato’s various dialogues, one will often observe a focus upon themes such as justice, virtue, beauty, and the good. For Plato, these various concepts are not human inventions, but are actually built into reality itself, as part of a more transcendent reality (one that is actually more real, in a Platonic sense, than the material world as it is experienced by human beings).

The Allegory of the Cave serves to illustrate this relationship in more concrete terms, with the prisoners serving as a representation of human existence. Just as the prisoners are ultimately trapped in their cave, watching shadows on the wall, so too are human beings trapped by their material existence (with all of our knowledge and assumptions of the world being much like those shadows). Yet truth still exists. Even as the prisoners remain trapped in the cave, there is still the world outside the cave. This represents the reality of transcendent ideals which Plato speaks about.

Thus, this entire allegory sketches the Platonic vision of reality, in which human beings are only able to indirectly grasp the higher, transcendent reality which emanates through the universe.

The answer above offers a fine description and explanation of Plato’s allegory of the cave. To expand on it a bit, the theme of the cave allegory gets to the heart of the divide between science and philosophy in Western culture. Plato says we on earth live in a cave, watching shadows on a wall. What we think is real—the natural world—is a pale and imperfect reflection of an ideal reality. He wants us to understand this so that we realize that philosophy is superior to science.

For example, we may think the table in front of us is a real table, worthy of study, and not merely an imperfect imitation of an ideal table. However, we can use the following thought experiment to show that any table we try to build in this world, no matter how perfect we try to make it, is just a shadow of the ideal table. Say we decide to build our table to 1/16″ accuracy. That is crude and imperfect: we could always build it to 1/32″ accuracy. But that too is crude and imperfect: why not build to 1/64″ accuracy? Or for that matter, why not build to 1/100,000″ accuracy? But no matter how accurate our measurements, we could always make the table more accurate: hence it will never, in this world, be the ideal table.

Therefore, according to the allegory of the cave, studying the natural world (science) is less worthy than studying philosophy because a scientist is always studying a shadow, an imperfect imitation of the ideal. The only way to truly contemplate reality is to go inward, to use the human mind to imagine the ideal, which is the province of philosophy.

The advantages of computers are obvious and have been covered by the previous answers. I would like to discuss the disadvantages.

Computers have put millions of people out of work. For example, they have ravaged the book-selling business. Book stores are closing all across the country because it is so much more convenient to buy books online and so much easier to find the books you want. But in many cases it is possible to read books on the monitor or to print them. Computers have created jobs but not as many as they have displaced. They are only in their infancy, too. More and more shopping is being done online. Even the supermarkets are being affected. It looks as though the cities are going to be transformed in coming years, and many small towns are already being wiped out of existence.

Another disadvantage of personal computers is that they are addictive. Everywhere you go you see people staring into their laptops, and you may wonder, as I do, what they are thinking and what they find so hypnotic.

The advantages of computers are many. One advantage is their time saving nature. It is much quicker to type a letter than to write one with a pen. The connection to the internet is of great use. The ability to research something or ask questions in real time is amazing. The amount of data that can be stored, manipulated, and retrieved is phenominal. Using the computer save natural resources by limiting our need of paper and pencils.

A disadvantage of computers is when they break down. Most people do not know how to fix them and have to take them to be repaired. Our growing dependence on computers is concerning. Everything is run by computer now and when one goes down it impacts many. Another disadvantage of computers is that some children spend too much time on them. Due to this, their social development may be stunted.

A fortuneless nobleman, Bassanio, asks for a loan from the merchant Antonio so that he can pursue Portia, a wealthy heiress, in order to restore his fortune. Since the merchant has all his assets tied up with ships that at sea, he tells Bassanio he will use his credit to obtain a loan from the Jew Shylock. Because Shylock fiercely hates Antonio, he latches on to the opportunity to get revenge; he agrees to loan Antonio the money. But, if Antonio does not repay this loan, Shylock will get a pound of flesh as payment from him.

With the money he needs, Bassanio pursues Portia, and he selects the casket (small box) that allows him to marry her. But, in the meantime, Shylock’s daughter runs off with a Christian, converts, and steals her late mothers jewels. The avaricious and offended Shylock is enraged by this; he vows to exact the flesh from Antonio, who is unable to pay the loan because his ships are lost at sea. When Portia learns from Bassanio of Antonio’s plight, she disguises herself as a doctor of law and, with her servant Nerissa dressed as a law clerk, Portia appears at court on Antonio’s behalf where Shylock demands of the Duke,

I have possessed your grace of what I purpose
And by our holy Sabbath have I sworn
To have the due and forfeit of my bond” (4.1.34-36).

Portia’s speech before the court is clearly a statement of theme for this drama:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown. (4.1.186-192)

While it seems that Portia goes along with the sentencing, when Shylock takes steps to cut off his pound of flesh, Portia/the doctor of law points out that there was no provision in the conditions for Antonio’s blood, so Shylock can only have flesh–no blood. Defeated, Shylock is further humiliated as he is made to convert to Christianity. Antonio’s ships finally arrive and the lovers, Bassanio and Portia, are married.