The pаrents оf а 3-mоnth-оld infаnt newly diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (CF) state, “No one in either of our families has ever had cystic fibrosis. We don’t understand how our baby could have this.” Which response by the nurse is most appropriate?
A pаtient is thоught tо hаve been expоsed to аn organophosphate compound at a plastic manufacturing plant. The paramedic should expect to see what signs and symptoms? (Choose three correct answers)
Best Lоrd оf the Rings mоvie?
DIRECTION: Chооse the best аnswer fоr eаch question. Secrets of the Mаya The study of caves and wells in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula is shining new light on the beliefs of the ancient and modern Maya. [A] From deep in a well near the ruins of the Maya city of Chichen Itza, archeoastronomer 1 Arturo Montero shouts to his colleague on the surface, "I saw it, I saw it! Yes, it's true!" Leaning over the mouth of the well, archeologist Guillermo de Anda hopes to hear what he has suspected for many months. "What is true, Arturo?" he shouts. And Montero yells up again, "The zenith 2 light, it really works! Get down here!" [B] The two archeologists are anxious to confirm whether this cenote could have acted as a sacred sundial 3 and timekeeper for the ancient Maya. On two days every year - May 23 and July 19 - the sun reaches its zenith over this part of Mexico. At those moments, the sun is vertically overhead and there is no shadow. On the morning of their descent, on May 24, Montero and de Anda see that the sun's rays come very close to vertical. The day before, they realized, a beam of light would have plunged straight down into the water. [C] Beneath its narrow mouth, the walls of the cenote open up to become a giant dome. It looks like a cathedral, except for the roots of trees that penetrate the rock as they reach for the water. The beam of sunlight dances like fire on the surrounding stalactites, 4 and it turns the water a beautiful transparent blue. The archeologists were probably the first people in centuries to watch the sun move slowly across the cenote's water. [D] Did Maya priests wait in this well - known as the Holtun cenote - to observe and correct their measurements of the sun's angle when it reached the zenith? Did they come here during times of drought to make offerings to their water god, and at other times to give thanks for a good harvest? These and other questions involving the Maya religion and its extraordinarily accurate calendar are what the two explorers were investigating. [E] In recent years, archeologists have been paying more attention to the meaning of caves, the zenith sun, and cenotes in the beliefs of the ancient and modern Maya. Archeologists already knew that the ancient Maya believed cenotes to be doors to a world inhabited by Chaak, the god of life-giving rain, but the significance of this fact has only recently started to become clear. [F] De Anda began exploring Holtun in 2010. One day, inspecting the walls of the cenote a few meters below the surface, he felt something above his head. He was astonished to find a natural rock shelf holding human and animal bones, pottery, and a knife - probably used for sacrifices - all neatly placed there centuries earlier. Below the water, he saw a number of columns and Maya stone carvings - the well was clearly a sacred site. Key to Survival[G] Three years later, in the cornfield on the surface above the cenote, a crew of Maya farmers is working hard in the grueling Yucatan heat to pull the explorers out of the well. "There was a good rain the other day," said the crew's leader, Louis Un Ken, as he wipes the sweat off his face. "The Chaak moved." [H] For men like Un Ken, the old gods are still very much alive, and Chaak is among the most important. For the benefit of living things, he pours from the skies the water he keeps in jars. Thunder is the sound of Chaak breaking a jar open and letting the rain fall. The Chaak had moved, Un Ken said, and that meant the planting season would soon arrive. [I] Chaak's absence can cause disasters for the Yucatan Maya, possibly the demise of the ancient Maya civilization itself. Their land is an endless limestone shelf. Rain sinks through the porous 5 limestone down to groundwater levels, and consequently no river or stream runs through the land. From the air, one sees a green sea of dense jungle, but at ground level, however, the tropical forest appears very thin. Wherever there is enough soil, the Maya plant corn or a milpa, a crop-growing system including the corn, beans, and squash that constitutes their basic source of protein. But corn is a hungry crop; it sucks lots of nutrients from the soil. For thousands of years, milpa farmers have kept their small fields productive by burning a different area of trees every year and planting in the corn-friendly ashes. [J] As for water for the fields, that's where Chaak comes in. Only seasonal rains can make the corn grow, and they must arrive in an exact pattern: no rain in winter so that the fields and forest will be dry enough to burn by March; some rain in early May to soften up the soil for planting; then very gentle rain to allow the planted seeds to begin to grow; and finally, plenty of rain so the corn can flourish. Pleasing the Rain God [K] In the village of Yaxuna, many people still depend on milpa, and an annual ceremony is held there to please the rain god. They walk a long way through the forest to a sacred cave and climb down to its center to bring up the water the ceremony requires. They raise the altar, dig a large cooking pit, and provide 13 fat chickens for the ritual meal. They cook them in the pit so the steam can rise directly to the rain god as an offering. [L] One recent such ceremony in Yaxuna was guided by Hipolito Puuc Tamay, a Maya holy man called a hmem. He stood in front of an altar praying for the holy blessing of rain. On instructions from the hmem, one of the villagers sat on a rock near the altar, blowing from time to time into one of the gourds 6 in which Chaak stores the wind. He was just one of the neighbors, but he was also the rain god, and he sat with his eyes closed so as not to harm the ceremony with his terrible glance. Two other participants brought him to the altar, facing backward, to receive a blessing from the hmem. [M] Out of nowhere, a wind came up, and thunder could be heard in the distance. As the ceremonial meal was being distributed, the rain started - a sign, the hmem said, that Chaak had received his offering and was pleased with his people's prayer. Soon, perhaps, the earth would be ready for planting. 1 An archeoastronomer is someone who studies archeological artifacts to determine what ancient people believed and understood about astronomy. 2 The zenith is a point directly above a particular location. 3 A sundial is a device used for telling the time when the sun is shining. The shadow of a pointer falls onto a surface marked with the hours. 4 Stalactites are rock formations hanging from cave ceilings, slowly formed by dripping water. 5 Something that is porous has many small holes in it, which water and air can pass through. 6 A gourd is a container made from the hard, dry skin of a gourd fruit. Gourds are often used for carrying water or for decoration. What is the purpose of paragraph J?
DIRECTION: Chооse the best аnswer fоr eаch question. The Collаpse of Angkor After rising to sublime 1 heights, the sacred city may have engineered its own downfall .An Empire's Fall [A] Almost hidden amid the forests of northern Cambodia is the scene of one of the greatest vanishing acts of all time. This was once the heart of the Khmer kingdom. At its height, the Khmer Empire dominated much of Southeast Asia, from Myanmar (Burma) in the west to Vietnam in the east. As many as 750,000 people lived in Angkor, its magnificent capital. The most extensive urban complex of the preindustrial world, Angkor stretched across an area the size of New York City. Its greatest temple, Angkor Wat, is the world's largest religious monument even today. [B] Yet when the first European missionaries arrived in Angkor in the late 16th century, they found a city that was already dying. Scholars have come up with a list of suspected causes for Angkor's decline, including foreign invaders, a religious change of heart, and a shift to maritime trade. But it's mostly guesswork: Roughly 1,300 inscriptions survive on temple doors and monuments, but the people of Angkor left not a single word explaining their kingdom's collapse. [C] Some scholars assume that Angkor died the way it lived: by the sword. The historical records of Ayutthaya, a neighboring state, claim that warriors from that kingdom "took" Angkor in 1431. If so, their motive is not difficult to guess. No doubt Angkor would have been a rich prize - inscriptions boast that its temple towers were covered with gold. After its rediscovery by Western travelers just over a century ago, historians deduced from Angkor's ruins that the city had been looted 2 by invaders from Ayutthaya. [D] Roland Fletcher, co-director of a research effort called the Greater Angkor Project, is not convinced. Some early scholars, he says, viewed Angkor according to the sieges 3 and conquests of European history. "The ruler of Ayutthaya, indeed, says he took Angkor, and he may have taken some formal regalia 4 back to Ayutthaya with him," says Fletcher. But after Angkor was captured, Ayutthaya's ruler placed his son on the throne. "He's not likely to have smashed the place up before giving it to his son." [E] A religious shift may also have contributed to the city's decline. Angkor's kings claimed to be the world emperors of Hindu mythology and erected temples to themselves. But in the 13th and 14th centuries, Theravada Buddhism gradually took over from Hinduism, and its principles of social equality may have threatened Angkor's elite. "It was very subversive, just like Christianity was subversive to the Roman Empire," says Fletcher. [F] A new religion that promoted ideas of social equality might have led to a worker rebellion. The city operated on a moneyless economy, relying on tribute 5 and taxation, and the kingdom's main currency was rice, the staple food of the laborers who built the temples and the thousands who ran them. For one temple complex, Ta Prohm, more than 66,000 farmers produced nearly 3,000 tons of rice a year, which was then used to feed the temple's priests, dancers, and workers. Scholars estimate that farm laborers comprised nearly half of Greater Angkor's population. [G] Or maybe the royal court simply turned its back on Angkor. Angkor's rulers often erected new temple complexes and let older ones decay. This may have doomed the city when sea trade began to develop between Southeast Asia and China. Maybe it was simple economic opportunism that had caused the Khmer center of power to shift: The move to a location closer to the Mekong River, near Cambodia's present-day capital, Phnom Penh, allowed it easier access to the sea. [H] Economic and religious changes may have contributed to Angkor's downfall, but its rulers faced another foe. Angkor was powerful largely thanks to an advanced system of canals and reservoirs, which enabled the city to keep scarce water in dry months and disperse excess water during the rainy season. But forces beyond Angkor's control would eventually bring an end to this carefully constructed system. [I] Few ancient sites in southern Asia could compare to Angkor in its ability to guarantee a steady water supply. The first scholar to appreciate the scale of Angkor's waterworks was French archeologist Bernard-Philippe Groslier. In 1979, he argued that the great reservoirs served two purposes: to symbolize the Hindu cosmos 6 and to irrigate the rice fields. Unfortunately, Groslier could not pursue his ideas further. Cambodia's civil war, 7 the brutal regime of the Khmer Rouge, 8 and the subsequent arrival of Vietnamese forces in 1979 turned Angkor into a no-go zone for two decades. [J] In the 1990s, Christophe Pottier followed up on Groslier's ideas and discovered that the south part of Angkor was a vast landscape of housing, water tanks, shrines, roads, and canals. Then, in 2000, Roland Fletcher and his colleague Damian Evans - as part of a collaborative study with Pottier - viewed some NASA radar images of Angkor. The researchers marveled at the sophistication of Angkor's infrastructure. "We realized that the entire landscape of Greater Angkor is artificial," Fletcher says. Teams of laborers constructed hundreds of kilometers of canals and dikes 9 that diverted water from the rivers to the reservoirs. Overflow channels bled off excess water that accumulated during the summer monsoon months, and after the monsoon, irrigation channels dispensed the stored water. "It was an incredibly clever system," says Fletcher. [K] Fletcher was therefore baffled when his team made a surprising discovery. An extraordinary piece of Angkorian workmanship - a vast structure in the waterworks - had been destroyed, apparently by Angkor's own engineers. "The most logical explanation is that the dam failed," Fletcher says. The river may have begun to erode the dam, or perhaps it was washed away by a flood. The Khmer broke apart the remaining stonework and modified the blocks for other purposes. [L] Any weakening of the waterworks would have left the city vulnerable to a natural phenomenon that none of Angkor's engineers could have predicted. Starting in the 1300s, it appears that Southeast Asia experienced a period of extreme climate change, which also affected other parts of the world. In Europe, which endured centuries of harsh winters and cool summers, it was known as the Little Ice Age. [M] To an already weakened kingdom, extreme weather would have been the final blow. "We don't know why the water system was operating below capacity," says Daniel Penny, co-director of the Greater Angkor Project. "But what it means is that Angkor ... was more exposed to the threat of drought than at any other time in its history." If inhabitants of parts of Angkor were starving while other parts of the city were hoarding a finite quantity of rice, the most likely result was social instability. "When populations in tropical countries exceed the carrying capacity of the land, real trouble begins," says Yale University anthropologist Michael Coe, "and this inevitably leads to cultural collapse." A hungry army weakened by internal problems would have exposed the city to attack. Indeed, Ayutthaya's invasion happened near the end of a long period of drought. [N] Add to the climate chaos the political and religious changes already affecting the kingdom, and Angkor's prospects were bleak, says Fletcher. "The world around Angkor was changing; society was moving on. It would have been a surprise if Angkor persisted." [O] The Khmer Empire was not the first civilization brought down by climate catastrophe. Centuries earlier, loss of environmental stability likewise brought down another powerful kingdom halfway around the world. Many scholars now believe that the fall of the Maya followed a series of droughts in the ninth century. "Essentially, the same thing happened to Angkor," says Coe. [P] In the end, the tale of Angkor is a sobering lesson in the limits of human ingenuity. "Angkor's hydraulic 10 system was an amazing machine, a wonderful mechanism for regulating the world," Fletcher says. Its engineers managed to keep the civilization's achievement running for six centuries - until a greater force overwhelmed them. 1 If you say something is sublime, you mean it has a wonderful quality. 2 If a store or house is looted, people have stolen things from it, for example, during a war or riot. 3 A siege is a military or police operation in which soldiers or police surround a place in order to force the people there to come out. 4 Regalia is the ceremonial jewelry, objects, or clothes that symbolize royalty or high office. 5 A tribute is something you give, say, do, or make to show your admiration and respect for someone. 6 The cosmos is the universe. 7 A civil war is a war fought between different groups of people who live in the same country. 8 The Khmer Rouge was a radical communist movement that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 after winning power through a guerrilla war. 9 A dike is a wall built to prevent flooding. 10 Something that is hydraulic involves the movement or the control of water. Which of these is NOT mentioned as a reason for Angkor's collapse?
DIRECTIONS: Cоmplete the sentences using the wоrds in the bоx. chаnnels dispersed doomed ingenuity invаders mechаnisms regime reservoir subsequently subversive Most visitors to Agra in India head for the famous Taj Mahal. But not far away is an impressive deserted city, Fatehpur Sikri. The city was built during the (1) ____________________ of Emperor Akbar, when the Mughals ruled this part of India. The location was chosen when Akbar came to the area to meet a Sufi saint who predicted that Akbar would have a son. (2) ____________________, when the heir to the throne was born in 1571, Akbar decided to build his capital in that place. Mughal civilization was famous for the (3) ____________________of its architecture and the buildings of Fatehpur Sikri are outstanding examples of the style. The city itself covers a wide area with public buildings, mosques, and palaces (4) ____________________ throughout it. Around the city, Akbar built a long fort wall to protect it from (5) ____________________. However, the city was (6) ____________________ to failure. Water in the area was scarce, so the Emperor built an artificial lake to act as a (7) ___ ________________. But the (8) ____________________ for supplying the water channels were not adequate and the city suffered from water shortages. Akbar abandoned his city after only 10 years, and died 20 years later, at the age of 63. The end of his reign was disturbed by the (9) ________ ____________ actions of his son, who rejected his reforms and tried to dethrone his father. The empire rapidly crumbled. Today, visitors to the ghost city can see dry (10) ____________________ that were meant to bring water to large gardens and man-made lakes. The empty red sandstone buildings at this UNESCO World Heritage Site are a tribute to the architectural skill of the Mughals, but also a reminder that water is essential for a civilization to flourish. (6) ________ ____________ [BLANK-1]