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Question
There were many reasons for Helen Keller's embittered childhood. What were they and how were they overcome?
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Solution
When Helen she was 19 months old she lost her vision and hearing to an unknown illness. She was suddenly plunged into silence and darkness.
Her condition made her extremely dependant on her mother and she used a crude sign language to communicate her wants. Gradually, she realised that she was different from the other people. When she was unable to understand what others spoke, her frustration and anger grew. When her sister was born, Helen thought of her as an intruder who had taken her place in her mother’s life.
She became a very rude and an unruly child due to her inability to communicate. She tyrannised their household with her temper tantrums. When Helen was about six years old, her father wrote to Mr. Anagnos, the director of the Perkins Institution in Boston requesting for assistance to educate Helen. Miss Anne Sullivan entered Helen’s life as her teacher and changed it forever
Miss Sullivan began teaching Helen by manually signing into her hand. She brought Helen out of darkness and uncertainty and connected Helen with the outside world. She was instrumental in
teaching her to think and to make a connection between the abstract and the physical world. The two were together for forty-nine years.
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The accounts of exotic places in legends and the reality.
Read the text below and summarise it.
The Great Desert Where Hippos Once Wallowed
The Sahara sets a standard for dry land. It’s the world’s largest desert. Relative humidity can drop into the low single digits. There are places where it rains only about once a century. There are people who reach the end of their lives without ever seeing water come from the sky.
Yet beneath the Sahara are vast aquifers of fresh water, enough liquid to fill a small sea. It is fossil water, a treasure laid down in prehistoric times, some of it possibly a million years old. Just 6,000 years ago, the Sahara was a much different place.
It was green. Prehistoric rock art in the Sahara shows something surprising: hippopotamuses, which need year-round water.
“We don’t have much evidence of a tropical paradise out there, but we had something perfectly liveable,” says Jennifer Smith, a geologist at Washington University in St Louis.
The green Sahara was the product of the migration of the paleo-monsoon. In the same way that ice ages come and go, so too do monsoons migrate north and south. The dynamics of earth’s motion are responsible. The tilt of the earth’s axis varies in a regular cycle — sometimes the planet is more tilted towards the sun, sometimes less so. The axis also wobbles like a spinning top. The date of the earth’s perihelion — its closest approach to the sun — varies in cycle as well.
At times when the Northern Hemisphere tilts sharply towards the sun and the planet makes its closest approach, the increased blast of sunlight during the north’s summer months can cause the African monsoon (which currently occurs between the Equator and roughly 17°N latitude) to shift to the north as it did 10,000 years ago, inundating North Africa.
Around 5,000 years ago the monsoon shifted dramatically southward again. The prehistoric inhabitants of the Sahara discovered that their relatively green surroundings were undergoing something worse than a drought (and perhaps they migrated towards the Nile Valley, where Egyptian culture began to flourish at around the same time).
“We’re learning, and only in recent years, that some climate changes in the past have been as rapid as anything underway today,” says Robert Giegengack, a University of Pennsylvania geologist.
As the land dried out and vegetation decreased, the soil lost its ability to hold water when it did rain. Fewer clouds formed from evaporation. When it rained, the water washed away and evaporated quickly. There was a kind of runaway drying effect. By 4,000 years ago the Sahara had become what it is today.
No one knows how human-driven climate change may alter the Sahara in the future. It’s something scientists can ponder while sipping bottled fossil water pumped from underground.
“It’s the best water in Egypt,” Giegengack said — clean, refreshing mineral water. If you want to drink something good, try the ancient buried treasure of the Sahara.
Staff Writer, Washington Post
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