THESAURUS QUIZ
We were given a task to try a quiz out. It is basically tests us on our synonyms. It really helped me in my summary and I could think of various types of synonyms for a word. These are my results for a few attempts:

The Importance of Listening - When, and why

My teacher actually gave this topic because she was apparently triggered with a few of us in class who was talking when there were people who were presenting their ULBS presentation. I was honestly wondering what is the point of scolding us because we have nothing to do and its not like we were the panel or the ones presenting. But oh well, I still have to write this blog.

Listening should not be taken for granted. Before the invention of writing, people conveyed virtually all knowledge through some combination of showing and telling. Elders recited tribal histories to attentive audiences. Listeners received religious teachings enthusiastically. Myths, legends, folktales, and stories for entertainment survived only because audiences were eager to listen. Nowadays, however, you can gain information and entertainment through reading and electronic recordings rather than through real-time listening. If you become distracted and let your attention wander, you can go back and replay a recording. Despite that fact, you can still gain at least four compelling benefits by becoming more active and competent at real-time listening.

When you focus on the material presented in a classroom, you will be able to identify not only the words used in a lecture but their emphasis and their more complex meanings. You will take better notes, and you will more accurately remember the instructor’s claims, information, and conclusions. Many times, instructors give verbal cues about what information is important, specific expectations about assignments, and even what material is likely to be on an exam, so careful listening can be beneficial.

Besides that, when you give your best attention to people expressing thoughts and experiences that are important to them, those individuals are likely to see you as someone who cares about their well-being. This fact is especially true when you give your attention only and refrain from interjecting opinions, judgments, and advice.

When you listen well to others, you reveal yourself as being curious and interested in people and events. In addition, your ability to understand the meanings of what you hear will make you a more knowledgeable and thoughtful person.

When you listen well to others, you start to pick up more on the stylistic components related to how people form arguments and present information. As a result, you have the ability to analyze what you think works and doesn’t work in others’ speeches, which can help you transform your speeches in the process. For example, really paying attention to how others cite sources orally during their speeches may give you ideas about how to more effectively cite sources in your presentation.

Free Topic- What I Love Or Abhor About It

Our English teacher, Puan Monica, gives us blogs to do every week and every once in a while she asks us to do free topics. There are many reasons why I love about it.

First, it gives us freedom on whatever we want to talk about. We can basically write about anything we want. Sometimes when my teacher gives a blog topic, I do not have any idea on what to write about. However, when she gives us free topic, it is much more easier to write as I can write about whatever I like. 

Besides that, writing free topics helps us to think more, free topics helps in building up a creative mind which can be used in our work and school.

 Write about an event that makes you angry. Give reasons why the event makes you feel this way. (Dear Mr Kilmer)

The novel that I studied was ‘Dear Mr Kilmer’ by Anne Schraff. An event that made me angry was when the Schermers’ tavern was vandalised. I was angry because of two reasons.

Firstly, I was angry because some Turtle Lake people were being unfair to the Schermers. They vandalized the Schermers tavern. They painted “Dirty Huns” all over the walls. They said that the Schermers were Huns. Some Turtle Lake people believed that Huns were a barbaric clan originated from Germany. They said that the Schermers were unpatriotic because they spoke German and served Hun food at their tavern while a war was going on against Germany.

Secondly, I was angry because Richard’s classmates were being unkind to the Schermers after the Schermers’s tavern was vandalised. Mrs Hansen brought a card to express regret for what had happened Mrs Hansen asked her class to sign the card. The troublemakers like Abner, Harry, Blanche and Peggy refused to sign the card. They warned other classmates not to sign the card. The boys were afraid Abner and Harry would hit them. The girls worry that popular girls like Peggy and Blanche would not speak to them. However, Richard was the only student who signed the sympathy card for Hannah Schermer. After school, Richard took the card from Mrs Hansen. He wanted to give the card to Hannah. Hannah accepted the card reluctantly. Later, Hannah apologised to Richard for being rude. This was the beginning of their friendship.

In conclusion, the event where the Schermers was being mistreated infuriated me. I truly believed that discrimination was unjust.

My English Blog

I am having Puan Monica as my English teacher both last year and this year. She makes our exams so hard because we have to do our work and BLOGS ESPECIALLY. When she told us we had to do blogs, I felt very weird because she is the first teacher that has ever asked her students to do blog. But I guess it helps me in both my English language and essay.

I have been doing my English blogs for the past two years and I feel like I have got used to it. I will usually do my blogs at the last minute which is straight right after an exam ends or I will do it right before an exam starts. I will usually stalk my friend’s blog and copy some of them.

What I learned from my classmates’ and my ULBS Presentations

So for the past few weeks, we have been told to do ULBS presentations for our SPM. I am doing it because it is for SPM and I do not want to fail.

What I learned from my ULBS presentations is that keeping in topic during our presentations are very important. We had to do our ULBS twice and my first try was very bad. I did not really follow the topic and it was sort of out of the topic. If that was my actual ULBS presentation, I think I would have failed where as the second time, it was the official ULBS presentation. I think I learned from my mistake and I guess I did quite well.

As I was giving comments to my friend’s presentation, I also learned a lot from it. I had to give comments on Lacshen and Farisha’s presentation and they did very good, it was honestly very hard to find a negative comment but I realized that we have to show evidence about the facts that you are presenting from the novel. This gives me a lesson to help me in exam so that I will not repeat the same mistake.

Sleep ( free topic )

Sleep is a naturally recurring state of mind and body, characterized by altered consciousness, relatively inhibited sensory activity, inhibition of nearly all voluntary muscles, and reduced interactions with surroundings. It is distinguished from wakefulness by a decreased ability to react to stimuli, but more reactive than coma or disorders of consciousness, sleep displaying very different and active brain patterns.

Sleep occurs in repeating periods, in which the body alternates between two distinct modes: REM sleep and non-REM sleep. Although REM stands for "rapid eye movement", this mode of sleep has many other aspects, including virtual paralysis of the body. A well-known feature of sleep is the dream, an experience typically recounted in narrative form, which resembles waking life while in progress, but which usually can later be distinguished as fantasy.

During sleep, most of the body's systems are in an anabolic state, helping to restore the immune, nervous, skeletal, and muscular systems; these are vital processes that maintain mood, memory, and cognitive function, and play a large role in the function of the endocrine and immune systems.The internal circadian clock promotes sleep daily at night. The diverse purposes and mechanisms of sleep are the subject of substantial ongoing research.

Sleep is a highly conserved behavior across animal evolution

Humans may suffer from various sleep disorders, including dyssomnias such as insomnia, hypersomnia, narcolepsy, and sleep apnea; parasomnias such as sleepwalking and REM behavior disorder; bruxism; and circadian rhythm sleep disorders. The advent of artificial light has substantially altered sleep timing in industrialized countries.

How I’m going to utilise my English period on Monday 25 February 2019.

I’ll be utilising my English period on Monday 25 February 2019 is by doing homework that I have accumulated for the past one and a half months. I was really lazy and I procrastinated a lot. Therefore, I wrote all my homework down and I decided to do it all at that time. It is rushing and hard but at least I am trying. I hate doing homework. Bless my soul… I can die. 

I will also do my tuition homework. My life is boring I know. 

Malaysia is a multicultural country. Describe a festival you celebrate in Malaysia

A festival that I celebrate in Malaysia is Chinese New Year (or generally referred to as Lunar New Year globally) is the Chinese festival that celebrates the beginning of a new year on the traditional Chinese calendar. The festival is usually referred to as the Spring Festival in mainland China, and is one of several Lunar New Years in Asia. Observances traditionally take place from the evening preceding the first day of the year to the Lantern Festival, held on the 15th day of the year. The first day of Chinese New Year begins on the new moon that appears between 21 January and 20 February. In 2019, the first day of the Chinese New Year was on Tuesday, 5 February, initiating the Year of the Pig.

Chinese New Year is a major holiday in Greater China and has strongly influenced lunar new year celebrations of China's neighbouring cultures, including the Korean New Year (seol), the Tết of Vietnam, and the Losar of Tibet. It is also celebrated worldwide in regions and countries with significant Overseas Chinese populations, including Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Mauritius,as well as many in North America and Europe.

Chinese New Year is associated with several myths and customs. The festival was traditionally a time to honour deities as well as ancestors. Within China, regional customs and traditions concerning the celebration of the New Year vary widely, and the evening preceding Chinese New Year's Day is frequently regarded as an occasion for Chinese families to gather for the annual reunion dinner. It is also traditional for every family to thoroughly clean their house, in order to sweep away any ill-fortune and to make way for incoming good luck. Another custom is the decoration of windows and doors with red paper-cuts and couplets. Popular themes among these paper-cuts and couplets include that of good fortune or happiness, wealth, and longevity. Other activities include lighting firecrackers and giving money in red paper envelopes. For the northern regions of China, dumplings are featured prominently in meals celebrating the festival

FAMILY (FREE TOPIC)

 In the context of human society, a family is a group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth), affinity (by marriage or other relationship), or co-residence (as implied by the etymology of the English word "family")[citation needed] or some combination of these.[citation needed] Members of the immediate family may include spouses, parents, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters.[citation needed] Members of the extended family may include grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, and siblings-in-law.[citation needed] Sometimes these are also considered members of the immediate family, depending on an individual's specific relationship with them.[citation needed]

In most societies, the family is the principal institution for the socialization of children. As the basic unit for raising children, anthropologists generally classify most family organizations as matrifocal (a mother and her children); conjugal (a wife, her husband, and children, also called the nuclear family); avuncular (for example, a grandparent, a brother, his sister, and her children); or extended (parents and children co-reside with other members of one parent's family). Sexual relations among the members are regulated by rules concerning incest such as the incest taboo.

The word "family" can be used metaphorically to create more inclusive categories such as community, nationhood, global village, and humanism.

The field of genealogy aims to trace family lineages through history.

The family is also an important economic unit studied in family economics

My impression of Dear Mr Kilmer

When my teacher, Pn Monica gave us the Dear Mr Kilmer book, she told us to go home and read it. I was really lazy so I didn’t.

She gave us work regarding about the book because she was not here for a month. As I was doing the work, I read the novel too. It was a very interesting book. The fact that the book is about Richard Knight’s passion on writing poems just motivates me to do things that I love. The novel also tells me that I accept what other people does and that I should not judge or discriminate. After all, we are all humans.

Besides that, we should also love our family members. For example, how Pa actually loved his sons by accepting what Richard does in the end. He was also worried for Gus who served in military.

‘Ping.. My mobile phone lit up with a message from Pn. Monica....’ Write a story starting with the above sentence.

‘Ping… My mobile phone lit up with a message from Pn Monica and my happiest day has been ruined by that message. It was supposed to be my most memorable day as I was having an amazing time in Bangkok for my holiday. There many things to buy and shop. I usually do not like shopping but somehow I loved it when I was in Bangkok. But a message came from Pn Monica and I was really sad because she told us to finish our composition homework.

In my heart, I was asking myself whether holidays are supposed to be a time to relax or a time to be stressing out with school work. It drove me up the wall. I had to release my anger as I did the work. I tore the book into pieces and I did not care whether if I will get scolded or not. It is honestly very ridiculous to give work to the students during holidays. Can’t the teachers emphatize with the students?

Discuss the plurality of Malaysian society and its effect on you

Malaysia is regarded one of the most plural countries in Southeast Asia. The plurality and the diversified nature of the society and the ability to live in relative peace and harmony make it possible to speak about Malaysia's experience of multiculturalism and co-existence. Upon independence in 1957 and the formation of Malaysia in 1963, the various religious and ethnic groups have practically demonstrated a remarkable sense of tolerance and reciprocity when they agreed to uphold the proposed Federal Constitution, which among other things granted citizenship to the immigrants (by the principle of jus soli), the recognition of Islam and the special Malay and Bumiputra rights. This paper seeks to depict the experience and the state of multiculturalism and the pattern of reciprocity and tolerance rooted and accustomed in the Malaysian society. It also traces some of the possible factors that are helping to shape the present generation's outlook towards multiculturalism

The plurality of Malaysian has benefited me in a sense of racism. With the amount of different races, religions and culture, I am able to communicate and also understand the way other races work. For example, other religions, there are many taboos that they are not allowed to do. I am able to learn and also respect on what they are doing.

MY ASPIRATIONS FOR 2019 AND HOW TO ACHIEVE THEM

In this year 2019, one of my biggest aspiration is to go to Korea with my family. I have always wanted to go there but my family keeps on procrastinating and it really drives me crazy. I want to go at the end of the year as it is snowing and that would be my first time seeing snow. Korea is my favorite country because it has a variety of food and the genre of their songs suites me. The environment and the atmosphere there is really different from Malaysia.

I am planning to achieve them by getting good grades for SPM as it is a really important thing this year. It is tough to study for SPM but determination is what pushes me to go further. I really hope that the result will be surprising instead of a sad result.

There is really nothing much that I hope for this year to achieve but I feel that this is enough for me to make my whole year happy.

KEEPING A WEEKLY BLOG HELPS ME IMPROVE MYSELF

Blogs has really helped a lot for this past year. I really do enjoy writing blogs but sometimes I am very lazy to do it.

First of all, blogs has helped me in getting new and creative ideas on what to write for essays or anything random. Blogs helps me in brain storming ideas that are interesting and attractive for other people to read. Whenever I am given a free topic, I intend to write weird blogs that I don’t even mention in front of people. It really brought my thoughts to a whole new level.

Besides that, blogs also helps me in gaining marks for my exam and in the beginning I thought that it was useless and I was doing by force but now I can see the fun in it. I am a homework type of person so I will try not to miss any blog that my teacher gives and it really pushed my grade for English higher

UKULELE – FREE TOPIC

The ukulele is a member of the lute family of instruments. It generally employs four nylon or gut strings or four courses of strings. Some strings may be paired in courses, giving the instrument a total of six or eight strings.

The ukulele originated in the 19th century as a Hawaiian adaptation of the Portuguese machete, a small guitar-like instrument, which was introduced to Hawaii by Portuguese immigrants, mainly from Madeira and the Azores. It gained great popularity elsewhere in the United States during the early 20th century and from there spread internationally.

The tone and volume of the instrument vary with size and construction. Ukuleles commonly come in four sizes: soprano, concert, tenor, and baritone.

HAMBURGERS – FREE TOPIC

A hamburger, beefburger or burger is a sandwich consisting of one or more cooked patties of ground meat, usually beef, placed inside a sliced bread roll or bun. The patty may be pan fried, grilled, or flame broiled. 

Hamburgers are often served with cheese, lettuce, tomato, bacon, onion, pickles, or chiles; condiments such as mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup, relish, or "special sauce"; and are frequently placed on sesame seed buns. A hamburger topped with cheese is called a cheeseburger.

The term "burger" can also be applied to the meat patty on its own, especially in the UK where the term "patty" is rarely used, or the term can even refer simply to ground beef. The term may be prefixed with the type of meat or meat substitute used, as in "turkey burger", "bison burger", or "veggie burger".

Hamburgers are sold at fast-food restaurants, diners, and specialty and high-end restaurants (where burgers may sell for several times the cost of a fast-food burger, but may be one of the cheaper options on the menu). There are many international and regional variations of the hamburger.

SURFING – FREE TOPIC

Surfing is a surface water sport in which the wave rider, referred to as a surfer, rides on the forward or deep face of a moving wave, which usually carries the surfer towards the shore. Waves suitable for surfing are primarily found in the ocean, but can also be found in lakes or rivers in the form of a standing wave or tidal bore. However, surfers can also utilize artificial waves such as those from boat wakes and the waves created in artificial wave pools.

The term surfing refers to the act of riding a wave, regardless of whether the wave is ridden with a board or without a board, and regardless of the stance used. The native peoples of the Pacific, for instance, surfed waves on alaia, paipo, and other such craft, and did so on their belly and knees. The modern-day definition of surfing, however, most often refers to a surfer riding a wave standing up on a surfboard; this is also referred to as stand-up surfing.

BOWLING-FREE TOPIC

Bowling is a sport or leisure activity in which a player rolls or throws a bowling ball towards a target. It is one of the major forms of throwing sports. In pin bowling variations, the target is usually to knock over pins (10 pins) at the end of a lane. A strike is when all the pins are knocked down on the first roll, whereas a spare is when all the pins are knocked over on the second shot. The maximum score is 300, which is achieved by getting 12 strikes in a row. Three consecutive strikes are known as a "turkey". Further strings of strikes are referred to as the number with the word "bagger", such as "four-bagger" for four consecutive strikes. The term "hambone" has also been used to describe four consecutive strikes. In target variations, the aim is usually to get the ball as close to a mark as possible. The pin version of bowling is often played on a flat wooden, or other synthetic, surface (which can be oiled in different patterns for different techniques). In target bowling, the surface may be grass, gravel or a synthetic surface. The most common types of pin bowling include ten-pin, nine-pin, candlepin, duckpin and five-pin bowling. 

In target bowling, bowls, skittles, kegel, bocce, carpet bowls, pétanque, and boules, both indoor and outdoor varieties are popular. Today the sport of bowling is played by 100 million people in more than 90 countries worldwide (including 70 million players in the United States), and continues to grow through entertainment media such as video games for home consoles and handheld devices.

SPORT-FREE TOPIC

Sport includes all forms of competitive physical activity or games which,through casual or organised participation, aim to use, maintain or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants, and in some cases, entertainment for spectators. Hundreds of sports exist, from those between single contestants, through to those with hundreds of simultaneous participants, either in teams or competing as individuals. In certain sports such as racing, many contestants may compete, simultaneously or consecutively, with one winner; in others, the contest (a match) is between two sides, each attempting to exceed the other. Some sports allow a "tie" or "draw", in which there is no single winner; others provide tie-breaking methods to ensure one winner and one loser. A number of contests may be arranged in a tournament producing a champion. Many sports leagues make an annual champion by arranging games in a regular sports season, followed in some cases by playoffs.

Sport is generally recognised as system of activities which are based in physical athleticism or physical dexterity, with the largest major competitions such as the Olympic Games admitting only sports meeting this definition, and other organisations such as the Council of Europe using definitions precluding activities without a physical element from classification as sports.However, a number of competitive, but non-physical, activities claim recognition as mind sports. The International Olympic Committee (through ARISF) recognises both chess and bridge as bona fide sports, and SportAccord, the international sports federation association, recognises five non-physical sports: bridge, chess, draughts (checkers), Go and xiangqi, and limits the number of mind games which can be admitted as sports.

Sport is usually governed by a set of rules or customs, which serve to ensure fair competition, and allow consistent adjudication of the winner. Winning can be determined by physical events such as scoring goals or crossing a line first. It can also be determined by judges who are scoring elements of the sporting performance, including objective or subjective measures such as technical performance or artistic impression

GIF – FREE TOPIC

The Graphics Interchange Format, is a bitmap image format animation that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite on June 15, 1987. It has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.

The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel for each image, allowing a single image to reference its own palette of up to 256 different colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of up to 256 colors for each frame. These palette limitations make GIF less suitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with color gradients, but it is well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.

GIF images are compressed using the Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW) lossless data compression technique to reduce the file size without degrading the visual quality. This compression technique was patented in 1985. Controversy over the licensing agreement between the software patent holder, Unisys, and CompuServe in 1994 spurred the development of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) standard. By 2004 all the relevant patents had expired.

MEMES – FREE TOPIC

A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture—often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon,theme, or meaning represented by the meme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.

Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influences a meme's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.

A field of study called memetics arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that academic study can examine memes empirically. However, developments in neuroimaging may make empirical study possible. Some commentators in the social sciences question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units, and are especially critical of the biological nature of the theory's underpinnings. Others have argued that this use of the term is the result of a misunderstanding of the original proposal

The word meme is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins. It originated from Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins's own position is somewhat ambiguous: he welcomed N. K. Humphrey's suggestion that "memes should be considered as living structures, not just metaphorically" and proposed to regard memes as "physically residing in the brain". Later, he argued that his original intentions, presumably before his approval of Humphrey's opinion, had been simpler.

LOVE – FREE TOPIC

Love is a force of nature. However much we may want to, we can not command, demand, or take away love, any more than we can command the moon and the stars and the wind and the rain to come and go according to our whims. We may have some limited ability to change the weather, but we do so at the risk of upsetting an ecological balance we don't fully understand. Similarly, we can stage a seduction or mount a courtship, but the result is more likely to be infatuation, or two illusions dancing together, than love.

Love is bigger than you are. You can invite love, but you cannot dictate how, when, and where love expresses itself. You can choose to surrender to love or not, but in the end, love strikes like lightning: unpredictable and irrefutable. You can even find yourself loving people you don't like at all. Love does not come with conditions, stipulations, addenda, or codes. Like the sun, love radiates independently of our fears and desires.

Lastly, love cannot be turned on as a reward. It cannot be turned off as a punishment. Only something else pretending to be love can be used as a lure, as a hook, for bait and switch, imitated, insinuated, but the real deal can never be delivered if it doesn't spring freely from the heart.

WHAT IS A BLOG – FREE TOPIC

A blog (a truncation of the expression “weblog”) is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). 

Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. 

In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.