Knowledge

                                      Aphantasia: A life without mental images Close your eyes and imagine walking along a sandy beach and then gazing over the horizon as the Sun rises. How clear is the image that springs to mind? Most people can readily conjure images inside their head - known as their mind's eye. But this year scientists have described a condition, aphantasia, in which some people are unable to visualise mental images. Niel Kenmuir, from Lancaster, has always had a blind mind's eye. He knew he was different even in childhood. "My stepfather, when I couldn't sleep, told me to count sheep, and he explained what he meant, I tried to do it and I couldn't," he says. "I couldn't see any sheep jumping over fences, there was nothing to count." Our memories are often tied up in images, think back to a wedding or first day at school. As a result, Niel admits, some aspects of his memor...

                                                                Glaciers Besides the earth’s oceans, glacier ice is the largest source of water on earth. A glacier is a massive stream or sheet of ice that moves underneath itself under the influence of gravity. Some glaciers travel down mountains or valleys, while others spread across a large expanse of land. Heavily glaciated regions such as Greenland and Antarctica are called continental glaciers. These two ice sheets encompass more than 95 percent of the Earth’s glacial ice. The Greenland ice sheet is almost 10,000 feet thick in some areas, and the weight of this glacier is so heavy that much of the region has been depressed below sea level. Smaller glaciers that occur at higher elevations are called alpine or valley glaciers. Another way of classifying glaciers is in terms o...

 Ambergris Ambergris What is it and where does it come from? Ambergris was used to perfume cosmetics in the days of ancient Mesopotamia and almost every civilization on the earth has a brush with Ambergris. Before 1,000 AD, the Chinese names ambergris as lung sien hiang, "dragon's spittle perfume," as they think that it was produced from the drooling of dragons sleeping on rocks at the edge of a sea. The Arabs knew ambergris as anbar who believed that it is produced from springs near seas. It also gets its name from here. For centuries, this substance has also been used as a flavouring for food.  During the Middle Ages, Europeans used ambergris as a remedy for headaches, colds, epilepsy, and other ailments. In the 1851 whaling novel Moby-Dick, Herman Melville claimed that ambergris was "largely used in perfumery." But nobody ever knew where it really came from. Experts were still guessing its origin thousands of years later, until the long ages of guesswork ende...

                      Travel Books                                     There are many reasons why individuals have traveled beyond their own societies. Some travelers may have simply desired to satisfy curiosity about the larger world. Until recent times, however, did travelers start their journey for reasons other than mere curiosity. While the travelers' accounts give much valuable information on these foreign lands and provide a window for the understanding of the local cultures and histories, they are also a mirror to the travelers themselves, for these accounts help them to have a better understanding of themselves.  Records of foreign travel appeared soon after the invention of writing, and fragmentary travel accounts appeared in both Mesopotamia and Egypt in ancient times. After the f...

  Going bananas  The banana is among the world’s oldest crops. Agricultural scientists believe that the first edible banana was discovered around 10,000 years ago. It has been at an evolutionary standstill ever since it was first propagated in the jungles of South-East Asia at the end of the last Ice Age. Normally the wild banana, a giant jungle herb card Musa acuminata, contains a mass of hard seeds that make the fruit virtually inedible. But nowand-then, hunter-gatherers must have discovered rare mutant plants that produced seamless, edible fruits. Geneticists now know that the vast majority of these soft-fruited plants resulted from genetic accidents that gave their cells three copies of each chromosome instead of the usual two. This imbalance prevents seeds and pollens from developing normally, rendering the mutant plants sterile. And that is why some scientists believe the worst – the most popular fru...

 "The Rollfilm Revolution"  The introduction of the dry plate process brought with it many advantages. Not only was it much more convenient, so that the photographer no longer needed to prepare his material in advance, but its much greater sensitivity made possible a new generation of cameras. Instantaneous exposures had been possible before, but only with some difficulty and with special equipment and conditions. Now, exposures short enough to permit the camera to the held in the hand were easily achieved. As well as fitting shutters and viewfinders to their conventional stand cameras, manufacturers began to construct smaller cameras in tended specifically for hand use.  One of the first designs to be published was Thomas Bolas' s 'Detective' camera of 1881. Externally a plain box, quite unlike the folding bellows camera typical of the period, it could be used unobtrusively. The name caught on, and for the next decade or so almost all hand cameral were called ...

 POEPLE AND ORGANIZATION: THE SELECTION ISSUE An organisation is only as good as the people it employs. Selecting the right person for the job involves more than identifying the essential or desirable range of skills, educational and professional qualifications necessary to perform the job and then recruiting the candidate who is most likely to possess these ieltsfever help@ieltsfever.com www.ieltsdata.com 4 www.ieltsfever.com skills or at least is perceived to have the ability and predisposition to acquire them. This is a purely person/skills match approach to selection.  Work invariably takes place in the presence and/or under the direction of others, in a particular organisational setting. The individual has to "fit" in with the work environment, with other employees, with the organisational climate, style or work, organisation and culture of the organisation. Different organisations have different cultures (Cartwright & Cooper, 1991; 1992). Working as an engineer at B...