The Importance of Eating Breakfast

           Breakfast is the first meal of the day as it helps everyone start the day off on the right foot. Eating breakfast not only fills one up in the morning, but it also improves concentration and memory, and keeps people healthier. Eating breakfast also reduces the risk of having diabetes and or having a heart attack, and helps to maintain a healthy weight.

            According to an article in the scientific journal Physiology & Behavior, an experiment by Loughborough University(¹) showed that eating breakfast improves concentration. Students who ate nutritional balanced breakfasts reported better concentration and more positive reactions to difficult tasks in the morning and throughout the day. Those students (who ate breakfast) showed twice as much concentration as the students who did not eat breakfast. They also had a faster memory recall that was about 75% faster than students who did not eat breakfast, showing that eating breakfast improved more positive reactions and faster memory recall. 

            Web MD(3) and the American Journal of Epidemiology(4) suggests that eating breakfast keeps people healthier over all. Having food in one’s stomach helps every system in the body function properly. It stops the body from hoarding food and gaining excess weight. Eating breakfast allows the body to regulate its system not just in the morning but also throughout the day. 

            BBC News' Dr. Mark Pereira(2) showed that breakfast, in addition to keeping up general health, also reduces the risk of having diabetes and or having a heart attack. Eating breakfast helps to balance the body’s systems, which is what the body needs to maintain good health. Overall good health puts less stress on the body allowing it to produce all of the insulin it needs to function properly.

            Eating breakfast helps the body in so many beneficial ways that it would be hard to imagine skipping it. The positive feedback our bodies give us in return for eating a healthy breakfast turns the foods we choose into a breakfast of champions.

Citations

1. Simon B. Cooper, Stephan Bandelow, and Mary E. Nevill “Breakfast consumption and cognitive function in adolescent schoolchildren” Physiology & Behavior Volume 103, Issue 5, 6 July 2011 <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031938411001375>
2. "Breakfast is the most important meal" <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2824987.stm>
3. "The many benefits of breakfast" Kathleen M. Zelman, MPH, RD, LD, <http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/many-benefits-breakfast>
4. <http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/158/1/85.full>

Introducing Linguistics - A Graphic Guide - Quiz

I have returned to the wonderful fairy tale world that is our library. Among the many books I have at my disposal, I decided to start with "A Graphic Guide to Linguistics" - because I love comics and this is a graphic guide, but also what better subject with which to start then the study of words and language.

These little books are jam-packed with information, so here comes one of the first of the quizzes I will make for the book. 

1. Who took the first step in European Linguistics?
2. Who was the first to classify between nouns, verbs, articles, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, and participles?
3. What other language used the Greek analysis to order their language accordingly?
4. Which 17th century scholars put together a remarkably original "universal" grammar of French?
5. Saussure said that "A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name but between a _____ and a ______".
6. While Saussure died without publishing his ideas, how were his ideas spread?
7. What is the difference between synchronic and diachronic structures?
8. Who was the first to make the connection between culture and language?
9. Post-Bloomfield Structuralists were the first to?
10. Generative Grammar was invented by whom?

1. Answer on Page 6 (Aristotle) 2. Answer on Page 7 (Thrax) 3. Answer on Page 8 (Latin) 4. Answer on Page 11 (Port-Royal Circle) 5. Answer on Page 16 (Concept, Sound Pattern) 6. Answer on Page 17 (His students pooled and edited their leture notes and had it published in 1916) 7. Answer on Page 22 (Diachronic looks at language over time, while synchronic looks at langauge at a particular moment in time.) 8. Answer on Page 29 (Sapir) 9. Answer on Page 36 (Look at langauge in a scientific manner, by collecting empirical data.) 10. Answer on Page 38 (Noam Chomsky)

Religious Life of the Fertile Crescent

The flooding of the Tigris and the Euphrates was violent and unpredictable: from one day to the next, life-giving rain could change into an agent of devastation.

It was believed the gods controlled these powerful forces, with humans little more than slaves subject to the whims of fate.

This put religion firmly at the center of daily life, with a temple dedicated to one of the major gods at the heart of each town or city.

Initially these were fairly simple mud-brick constructions, decorated with cone geometrical mosaics and frescos with human and animal figures.

A rectangular shrine, known as a "cella", had a brick altar or offering table in front of a rituals, food sacrifices and libations took place on a daily basis, as well as monthly feasts and annual celebrations of the New Year.

For more on Signs and Symbols of the Fertile Crescent CLICK HERE