The Lion and the Mouse

Once when a Lion was asleep, a little Mouse began running up and down upon him. This soon wakened the Lion, who placed his huge paw upon him and opened his big jaws to swallow him. "Pardon, O King!" cried the little Mouse, "Forgive me this time. I shall never repeat it and I shall never forget your kindness. And who knows, but I may be able to do you a good turn one of these days?" The Lion was so tickled at the idea of the Mouse being able to help him, that he lifted up his paw and let him go. Sometime later a few hunters captured the King and tied him to a tree while they went in search of a wagon to carry him on. Just then the little Mouse happened to pass by, and seeing the sad plight in which the Lion was, ran up to him and soon gnawed away the ropes that bound the King of the Beasts. "Was I not right?" said the little Mouse, very happy to help the Lion. MORAL: Little friends may prove great friends.

Colour by number - 1

Stand Up Tall on Tippy Toes - Hi-5 - Season 12 Song of the Week

Albert Einstein

Illustrations by: Amarjeet Malik

German-American physicist Albert Einstein contributed more than any other scientist to the 20th-century vision of physical reality. In the wake of World War I, Einstein's theories, especially his theory of relativity, seemed to many people to point to a pure quality of human thought, one far removed from the war and its aftermath. Seldom has a scientist received such public attention for having cultivated the fruit of pure learning.

Born in Ulm in Germany on March 14, 1879, Einstein’s parents were nonobservant Jews who moved from Ulm to Munich when Einstein was an infant. The family moved yet again to Milan in Italy in 1894, when the family business of manufacturing electrical apparatus failed.
At this time Einstein decided officially to relinquish his German citizenship. Within a year, still without having completed secondary school, Einstein failed an examination that would have allowed him to pursue a course of study leading to a diploma as an electrical engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (the Zurich Polytechnic). He spent the next year in nearby Aarau at the cantonal secondary school, where he enjoyed excellent teachers and first-rate facilities in physics. Einstein returned in 1896 to the Zurich Polytechnic, where he graduated (1900) as a secondary school teacher of mathematics and physics.
After a lean two years he obtained a post at the Swiss patent office in Bern. The patent-office work required Einstein's careful attention, but while employed (1902-09) there, he completed an astonishing range of publications in theoretical physics. For the most part these texts were written in his spare time and without the benefit of close contact with either scientific literature or theoretician colleagues. Einstein submitted one of his scientific papers to the University of Zurich to obtain a Ph.D. degree in 1905. In 1908 he sent a second paper to the University of Bern and became a lecturer there. The next year Einstein received a regular appointment as associate professor of physics at the University of Zurich.
By 1909, Einstein was recognized throughout German-speaking Europe as a leading scientific thinker. In quick succession he held professorships at the German University of Prague and at the Zurich Polytechnic. In 1914 he advanced to the most prestigious and best-paying post that a theoretical physicist could hold in central Europe: professor at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft in Berlin. Although Einstein held a cross-appointment at the University of Berlin, from this time on he never again taught regular university courses. Einstein remained on the staff at Berlin until 1933, from which time until his death (in 1955) he held an analogous research position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.
Einstein’s special theory of relativity assumed that light travelled through space in the form of photons. He also asserted that the speed of light in a vacuum is invariant, and is independent of the speed of its source. His equations showed that mass increases with velocity, and that time is foreshortened by velocity.
Until the end of his life Einstein sought a unified field theory, whereby the phenomena of gravitation and electromagnetism could be derived from one set of equations. After 1920, however, while retaining relativity as a fundamental concept, theoretical physicists focused more attention on the theory of quantum mechanics - as elaborated by Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and others - and Einstein's later thoughts went somewhat neglected for decades. This picture has changed in more recent years. Physicists are now striving to combine Einstein's relativity theory with quantum theory in a "theory of everything," by means of such highly advanced mathematical models as superstring theories.

Koryo - World Taekwondo Federation 1st Black Belt Poomsae

The Successful Student

COMPOUND NOUNS

Formation

Words can be combined to form compound nouns. These are very common, and new combinations are invented almost daily. They normally have two parts. The second part identifies the object or person in question (man, friend, tank, table, room). The first part tells us what kind of object or person it is, or what its purpose is (police, boy, water, dining, bed):

What type / what purpose	What or who
police	man
boy	friend
water	tank
dining	table
bed	room

The two parts may be written in a number of ways :
1. as one word.
Examples policeman, boyfriend
2. as two words joined with a hyphen.
Examples dining-table
3. as two separate words.
Examples fish tank.
There are no clear rules about this - so write the common compounds that you know well as one word, and the others as two words.

The two parts may be:	Examples
noun + noun	bedroom water tank motorcycle printer cartridge
noun + verb	rainfall haircut train-spotting
noun + adverb	hanger-on passer-by
verb + noun	washing machine driving licence swimming pool
verb + adverb*	lookout take-off drawback
adjective + noun	greenhouse software redhead
adjective + verb	dry-cleaning public speaking
adverb + noun	onlooker bystander
adverb + verb*	output overthrow upturn input

Compound nouns often have a meaning that is different from the two separate words.
Stress is important in pronunciation, as it distinguishes between a compound noun (e.g. greenhouse) and an adjective with a noun (e.g. green house).
In compound nouns, the stress usually falls on the first syllable:

a 'greenhouse = place where we grow plants (compound noun)
a green 'house = house painted green (adjective and noun)
a 'bluebird = type of bird (compound noun)
a blue 'bird = any bird with blue feathers (adjective and noun)

*Many common compound nouns are formed from phrasal verbs (verb + adverb or adverb + verb).

Examples

breakdown, outbreak, outcome, cutback, drive-in, drop-out, feedback, flyover, hold-up, hangover, outlay, outlet, inlet, makeup, output, set-back, stand-in, takeaway, walkover.

Why are Eggs Oval?

By B Sumangal; Illustration by Sudheer Nath

Have you ever climbed a tree and peeked into the nest of a crow or a sparrow? Or looked into that flowerpot where the noisy pigeon decided to lay its eggs? The sight of a mother hen sitting on a bunch of fresh white eggs is great, though most of us see them only when they land on the breakfast table every now and then.

Eggs come in different colours. They may be blue, blue-green, yellow, spotted, blotched or white. No egg looks identical. Even those eggs that are laid in a clutch or at one time may have different colours. Most eggs are oval, and sometimes they are long and elongated. One end is slightly larger and heavier while the other end is smaller and conical.
The shape of the egg has an important use. It protects the chick inside, until it is time for it to break out of its shell. For, even if you press from the outside, the shell will not break unless the chick inside presses too. The chick does it by tapping from inside with its soft beak when it is ready to face the world.
How does the chick come out? Baby birds in fact have an 'egg tooth'. This is a tiny knob at the tip of the beak to help them break out of the shell. It takes a chick 30 minutes to an hour to break the shell. Some albatross chicks have been known to take five to six days to break out as the shell is so thick!
Most nests are shaped like a large bowl - the right shape for oval eggs to rest without rolling out and falling down. Birds that don't build elaborate nests, like the penguin, the tern and other sea birds, have elongated eggs.
Since these birds lay eggs on rocky ledges or on cliffs, the elongated shapes prevent the eggs from rolling over and breaking on the rocks. Instead they just spin around.
Eggs must be kept warm in order to hatch - about 35 degree centigrade (That is about as warm as an early summer day in northern India). The adult bird provides constant warmth by sitting on the eggs or incubating them. Not only that, the bird keeps turning the eggs around so that all parts of the egg receive the same amount of warmth.
Among most kinds of birds it is the female that incubates the eggs, but in some species it is the adult male which does the hatching. The only bird that doesn't hatch its own chicks is the cuckoo.
The bird is so cunning that it lays its eggs in other smaller bird's nest. Since the eggs look similar the mother bird doesn't realise that it is not hers and sits and hatches the cuckoo's eggs too!
The ostrich lays the largest and heaviest eggs. Each egg weighs around 1.7 kg (3.7 lb) and will not break even if a man weighing 120 kg stands on it. That is how hard the egg is. In fact the eggs are so large that the people living in the Kalahari desert in West Africa use them as a water-bottle!

Hey Presto - Hi-5 - Season 12 Song of the Week

Upin & Ipin - When I Grow Up [English Version] [HD]