Air Pollution Affects Us More Than We Think Professor Ramos Blog

Air Pollution Affects Us More Than We Think Did you know that air pollution does not just affect our environment and health, but that it also affects us psychologically? When someone says air pollution people usually tend to think of factories putting chemicals in the air, forest fires, or old cars. What they do not think of is all the problems that come out of air pollutions. When getting to know about pollution it is important to know other countries who have gone through it such as china, the type of health problems that it causes, the psychological issue, and the solution.Since 1982 China has dealt with the problem of air pollution. A majority of the pollution in China comes from the four major cities Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, and Shanghai that have an air quality level of PM 2.5. PM stands for particulate matter which is the particles found in the air such as dust, dirt, smoke, chemicals, etc. PM 2.5 means that the particles in the air are 2.5 micrometers. Our bodies are able to breath in and exhale PM10 particles and we will be fine, but for PM2.5 it â€Å"is much more dangerous to our health as it can penetrate deep into our lungs and enter our bloodstream.† (Health and safety, 7). The air quality in China has gotten so bad that it has contributed to 1.6 million deaths in 2014. To help solve the air pollution, China has many air quality monitors that monitor on the ground daily. The monitors have found out that â€Å"a wide variety of factors may influence the PM2.5 level, which may be closely related to environmental and industrial factors, we focus on inferring statistical dependence and causal relations between four major cities in China based on the PM2.5 measurement data as observational evidence.† (Min Kim, 6). Due to the monitors they are not certain that it is the factories that are the main source causing the bad air quality, but they are working on making the chemicals coming out of factories better.The type of health issues that air pollution can cause are nausea, diffi culty in breathing, skin irritation, or even cancer. It could also cause health problems such as birth defects, serious developmental delays in children, and reduced activity of the immune system. What happens is that heavy metals such as lead, mercury, arsenic, dioxins, etc. goes into the nervous system and causes those types of problems. â€Å"Moreover, there exist several susceptibility factors such as age, nutritional status and predisposing conditions.† (Kampa, Castanas, 11). Memory and attention are another common health problem that comes from air pollution. A study of air pollution exposure during children’s first year at life found that it associates â€Å"with reduced psychomotor development, as well as with autism spectrum disorder, and impairment in cognitive development.† (Rivas, 4). How they did this study is they got a group of kids between the ages of seven through ten from Barcelona, Spain and New York, New York to take three tests. The ns of th is is that people feel like if they are in a more polluted area, they can lie a lot easier. That they could do things to benefit them more if the air quality and the environment is not that healthy because in a polluted place, they already see the earth going downhill and think that telling the truth is unethical. If the air quality gets any worse and people do start lying more because they feel like it a common/acceptable thing to do than the world could spin into mayhem and become a more deceiving world. â€Å"Air pollution may increase individuals consideration of and desire for behavioral outcomes, especially material ones, and lead them to transgress rules to reach such outcomes.† (Wu, 5). Air pollution can also raise people’s anxiety and depression. Gloomy skies tend to make some people feel sadder and have the feeling of being sluggish. While for anxiety air pollution can cause the person to feel uneasy and worried about the environment and nervous of what this will cause.To help solve the problem of air pollution one thing that commoners can contribute to is the type of cars a person has. To reduce the air quality and meet the legal limits a way to fix cars outtake on pollution is a new combustion processes for internal combustion engines. A new combustion that we are trying out is called the HCCI combustion. â€Å"The HCCI combustion process is a form of low temperature combustion [1] and has the advantages of lower emissions of NOx, compared to both compression ignition and spark ignition (SI) mode of operation, and at the same time of high efficiency (diesel like efficiency numbers).† (Vucetic, 2). A problem with the HCCI is the sensitivity to the intake air temperature. The intake of air can go up to 200 degrees Celsius; if the temperature goes any higher the exhaust will go out. There are still studies on it and making the engine better for cars, so that we can reduce the air pollution.It is important to acknowledge this probl em because it will not only affect our environment and make the world a gloomier and more polluted place, but that it will affect our health in a negative way causing things such as asthma, skin dieses, cancer, etc. It will also make the world a more chaotic place when it starts affecting our behaviors such as lying, depression, and anxiety. That’s why we need a plan of action, even something as small as fixing engines of our cars, so that we are not spreading chemicals around the world.Castanas, Elias. Kampa, Marilena. Science Direct. 10 June 2007. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.465.5144rep=rep1type=pdf Health and Safety in Shanghai. 2019. https://www.healthandsafetyinshanghai.com/china-air-quality.html Min Kim, Jong. PLOS ONE. 14 March 2019. http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=6sid=5c5a3c67-eab7-49da-b552-a2afd415fbf7%40pdc-v-sessmgr02 Rivas, Ioar. Environmental Health Perspectives. 9 May 2019. https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10. 1289/EHP3169 Vucetic, Ante. Department of IC Engines and Transportation Systems. 15 March 2018. http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4sid=efa52648-0080-49a6-b8b7-ce55591f86c6%40pdc-v-sessmgr01 Wu, Song. Wang, Tingbin. PLOS ONE. 29 April 2019. http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=5sid=a51dba5c-09a0-4156-8024-e411fd2c9654%40sessionmgr4007

Where did English come from - Claire Bowern Essays - Language

Where did English come from - Claire Bowern Essays - Language When we talk about English, we often think of it as a single language but what do the dialects spoken in dozens of countries around the world have in common with each other, or with the writings of Chaucer? And how are any of them related to the strange words in Beowulf? The answer is that like most languages, English has evolved through generations of speakers, undergoing major changes over time. By undoing these changes, we can trace the language from the present day back to its ancient roots. While modern English shares many similar words with Latin-derived romance languages, like French and Spanish, most of those words were not originally part of it. Instead, they started coming into the language with the Norman invasion of England in 1066. When the French-speaking Normans conquered England and became its ruling class, they brought their speech with them, adding a massive amount of French and Latin vocabulary to the English language previously spoken there. Today, we call that language Old English. This is the language of Beowulf. It probably doesn't look very familiar, but it might be more recognizable if you know some German. That's because Old English belongs to the Germanic language family, first brought to the British Isles in the 5th and 6th centuries by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. The Germanic dialects they spoke would become known as Anglo-Saxon. Viking invaders in the 8th to 11th centuries added more borrowings from Old Norse into the mix. It may be hard to see the roots of modern English underneath all the words borrowed from French, Latin, Old Norse and other languages. But comparative linguistics can help us by focusing on grammatical structure, patterns of sound changes, and certain core vocabulary. For example, after the 6th century, German words starting with "p," systematically shifted to a "pf" sound while their Old English counterparts kept the "p" unchanged. In another split, words that have "sk" sounds in Swedish developed an "sh" sound in English. There are still some English words with "sk," like "skirt," and "skull," but they're direct borrowings from Old Norse that came after the "sk" to "sh" shift. These examples show us that just as the various Romance languages descended from Latin, English, Swedish, German, and many other languages descended from their own common ancestor known as Proto-Germanic spoken around 500 B.C.E. Because this historical language was never written down, we can only reconstruct it by comparing its descendants, which is possible thanks to the consistency of the changes. We can even use the same process to go back one step further, and trace the origins of Proto-Germanic to a language called Proto-Indo-European, spoken about 6000 years ago on the Pontic steppe in modern day Ukraine and Russia. This is the reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European family that includes nearly all languages historically spoken in Europe, as well as large parts of Southern and Western Asia. And though it requires a bit more work, we can find the same systematic similarities, or correspondences, between related words in different Indo-European branches. Comparing English with Latin, we see that English has "t" where Latin has "d", and "f" where latin has "p" at the start of words. Some of English's more distant relatives include Hindi, Persian and the Celtic languages it displaced in what is now Britain. Proto-Indo-European itself descended from an even more ancient language, but unfortunately, this is as far back as historical and archeological evidence will allow us to go. Many mysteries remain just out of reach, such as whether there might be a link between Indo-European and other major language families, and the nature of the languages spoken in Europe prior to its arrival. But the amazing fact remains that nearly 3 billion people around the world, many of whom cannot understand each other, are nevertheless speaking the same words shaped by 6000 years of history.