2. WHERE DOES CORK COME FROM?
When a plant is damaged and its internal tissues are exposed, it is open to fungal and bacterial attack. In a similar way to the human body producing pus, many plant defense mechanisms release a fluid as part of the healing process. From a tissue within the plant, called “callus,” new cells are formed to close the wounded parts. These cells quickly become brown, and assume the nature of true cork.
As man needs cork in rather large quantities, he has found a tree that produces it in large supply, the cork oak (Quercus suber). The outer bark of this tree largely consists of cork, which can be peeled off in large strips during the summer season. This process injures the tree just enough to encourage it to produce more cork to replace what has been lost. That said, many wine producers are moving over to either plastic corks or screw-top bottles.
3. WHAT CAUSES THE WIND?
Winds are air currents and their prime cause is temperature differences created by the uneven heating of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere by the sun.
Polar regions can be 160°F colder than equatorial regions. Also relevant is the fact that in the tropics day and night temperatures differ by more than 50°F. In addition, every mile we rise above sea level will drop the temperature by an average of 17 degrees.
The Earth’s rotation also complicates matters, forming regular winds that were a boon to trade in the days of sailing ships. Currents of cold air from the arctic regions cannot keep pace as it spins and are deflected westward. North winds become northwest winds; the same happens in the southern hemisphere, south winds become southeast winds.
4. WHAT IS CHALK?
Chalk is a soft kind of limestone (a carbonate of calcium). It occurs in many parts of the world and ranges of hills can be composed almost entirely of it. It consists of the shells of tiny animals called “foraminifera,” which live in all parts of the ocean. When the foraminifera die, the insoluble shells form a sludgy deposit that hardens under pressure, and we get chalk. It is often found with flint, another stone composed of fossilized organic remains. Despite its relative softness, chalk can be found in huge cliff formations, such as those on the south coast of England at Dover.
Role-Playing Games
THIS IS not a page telling you how to do something—you’ll see why as you read. It’s a short essay on role-playing games: what they are and how to get started. There are few inventions of the twentieth century that can combine entertainment with imagination so well.
Dungeons and Dragons was put together in 1972. It is still available from online bookshops or gaming stores. To get started you’ll need the player’s handbook, the dungeon master’s handbook, some dice, and eventually, an adventure to play. It isn’t that cheap to start, but after the initial outlay, costs are minimal—it’s all imagination and the occasional pencil.
In essence, you buy the books, read them and choose a character for yourself. There are basic classes like Fighter, Thief, and Magicuser. The character will start out with certain qualities such as dexterity and strength, decided by the roll of a die. With experience, the character grows in power, endurance, and knowledge. The game also grows more and more complex. Fighters win more powerful weapons, Wizards gain access to greater spells. When we were children, we progressed from Basic to Advanced to Expert to Immortal levels, before moving on to battling at a national level and building an empire. You never forget the first time you are exiled from a country you raised from nothing.
You do need a few people for this—it is a social game, which is a recommendation. In a very real sense, it is a training ground for the imagination and, in particular, a school for plot and character. It may even be a training ground for tactics. If you want to be a writer, try D&D. For that matter, if you want to be a mathematician, try D&D.
The Dungeon Master (or DM) is the one who runs the game. He will either collect or write adventures—literally set in dungeons or just about anywhere. The characters battle the monsters he chooses and either solve his traps or fall prey to them, suffering horrible deaths. The players will develop characters with extraordinarily detailed histories, equipment, and skills.
For us, D&D meant hundreds of hours at school and at home playing with pencils, charts, dice, and laughter. If elves don’t grab you, there are many other forms of role-playing—from Judge Dredd, to superheroes, to Warhammer, to a hundred more . . . but Dungeons and Dragons is still the original and the best.
Understanding Grammar—Part Three: Verbs and Tenses
How often will you need to know the difference? Hardly ever, or not at all, but the odd thing is that those who do know these fiddly bits of grammar take enormous satisfaction from that knowledge.
Transitive verbs are verbs that must have an object. For example, “to bury,” “to distract,” “to deny,” and many more. You simply cannot write them without an object—“John denied,” “Susan buried.” John has to deny something and Susan has to bury something for it to make sense.
Intransitive verbs are verbs that can be complete without an object: “to arrive,” “to digress,” “to exist.”
Some verbs can be transitive or intransitive, depending on how they are used in a sentence (just to make things harder): “The fire burns” (intransitive). “The fire has burned my finger” (transitive—“my finger” is the object). “He has broken the glass” (transitive). “Glass breaks easily” (intransitive).
Again, though, this is not calculating parabolic orbits—recognizing whether a verb is used transitively or intransitively is a matter of care, common sense, and memory.
It will come as no surprise to hear that verbs need forms expressing the past, present, and future. There are important differences between someone saying “They have closed the gate” and “They will close the gate.” The three principal forms of verbs, therefore, express these differences. They are known as Present Tense, Past Tense, and Future Tense.
The Present Tense
There are five forms for a verb in the Present Tense:
Present Simple—I write.
Present Emphatic—I do write.
Present Continuous—I am writing.
Present Perfect Continuous—I have been writing.
Present Perfect—I have written.
The Present Emphatic form, “I do write,” may look a bit odd. It is mostly used in negative statements (“You don’t care, do you?”) and in questions (“Do you care?”) and strong, emphatic statements (“I do care!”).
Sometimes, the present can be used to talk about the future—“I go to London next week” or “When he arrives, he will hear the news”—but the meaning is clear from context, as it is here: “Tomorrow, I’m going to the store.”
The Present Perfect “I have written” form may also look out of place at first glance. It is used in sentences like the following: “When I have written this, I will come and speak to you.” This is clearly an action that is going on in the present, coming from the past.
Similarly, Present Perfect Continuous: “I have been writing all my life,”—again, an action which is going on in the general present, if not at that exact moment.
The Past Tense
The Past Tense is usually formed by adding “d” or “ed” to the verb (love, loved; alter, altered); changing the vowel sound (swim, swam; throw, threw); or remaining the same as the present tense (put, put; cast, cast).
When the verb ends in a single consonant after a short vowel with the stress on the last syllable, the final consonant is doubled before the “ed” ending (refer, referred; fan, fanned).
If the letter “y” ends the word after a consonant, it becomes “i” before the “ed” ending (try, tried; cry, cried).
You’ll probably be able to find exceptions to these rules. English has taken so many words from other languages that no rules apply to all of them. However, these work well on most occasions.
There are four standard forms for the past tense:
Simple Past—I wrote.
Past C
ontinuous—I was writing.
Past Perfect (Pluperfect)—I had written.
Past Perfect Continuous—I had been writing.
There are also a couple of specific constructions, like “used to,” that work in sentences about the past. “I used to write about relationships, but now . . .” Clearly, the writing took place in the past.
Similarly, adding “going to” is a common construction: “I was going to call you, but I forgot.” The intention of calling took place in the past.
The Future Tense
First a note on “shall,” a peculiar little word. It is often used interchangeably with “will.” It survives in commandments as “Thou shalt not kill.” Its main use is in expressing a future wish. The fairy godmother says “You shall go to the ball!” to Cinderella.
One distinction between “will” and “shall” is that “shall” implies some choice. When I was a boy, I was taught that only God could say “I will go to the store” as only he could be certain. The rest of us should say “I shall go to the store” because we could be hit by a bus, and not actually make it there. Admittedly, that example rather misses the point that being killed is a little more important than errors of grammar, but it was memorable at least.
The four forms for future time are:
Simple Future—I will write.
Future Continuous—I will be writing.
Future Perfect—I will have written
Future Perfect Continuous—I will have been writing.
There is also a construction using “am going to,” as in “I am going to kill you,” and various other minor constructions using adverbs of time: “I am going home tomorrow,” or adverbial phrases such as “The bus leaves in ten minutes.”
. . . and that is about it for tenses.
If you’ve come this far, we know you’ll be disappointed if we stop it there. “What about modal verbs? What about the subjunctive?” you will say to yourself. Prepare to be thrilled at the final two sections. This is the gold standard. Take it slowly.
Modal auxiliary verbs are irregular auxiliary verbs—the sort of verbs that give English a reputation for complexity. The language has many auxiliary combinations, mostly using “to be” and “to have” in combination with another verb: “I am going,” “I have been watching,” and so on.
Modal auxiliary verbs are often used to express the speaker’s attitude: “You shouldn’t do that,” or as a conditional tense: “Don’t go any closer. He could be dangerous.”
You use them all the time, however, so do not be too worried. Here is a list of them:
will, would, shall, should, may, might, can, could, must, dare, need, ought
won’t, wouldn’t, shan’t, shouldn’t, mayn’t, mightn’t, can’t, couldn’t, mustn’t, daren’t, needn’t, oughtn’t
Note that the use of “need” as a modal verb, as in “Need we do this?,” is not that common, whereas “needn’t” is used quite regularly: “He needn’t enjoy it, as long as he eats it!”
Modal verbs have no infinitive or “-ing” form—“to should” or “maying” do not exist. There is no “s” form of the third person—“he can” not “he cans.” They do not stand on their own and are always used in conjunction with other verbs—“May I go to the cinema?”
The Indicative mood is the standard factual style of modern English: “I walked into the park.” The Subjunctive mood tends to appear in more formal English, when we wish to express the importance of something. This leads on from the modal verbs, as it, too, often expresses a wish, an uncertainty, or a possibility. It is frequently formed using modal auxiliaries: “If only they would come!” This is a complex form and scholarly works have been written on the subjunctive alone. With the limitations of space, we can merely dip a toe.
Present Subjunctive
In the present subjunctive, all verbs look like the infinitive but without the “to”—“do” not “to do”—and they don’t take an extra “s,” even in the third person: “We demand that he do the job properly.”
The verb “to be” provides the most commonly used examples of the subjunctive form. In the present subjunctive, following the rule in the previous paragraph, “be” is used: “Even if that be the official view, I must act.” In the simple past subjunctive, we use “were” throughout. Example: “If he were sorry, he’d have apologized by now.”
Here are some examples of classic subjunctive expressions: “Be that as it may,” “If I were a rich man,” “Suffice it to say,” “Come what may,” “God save the Queen,” “If I were the only girl in the world.”
The subjunctive is also used in sentences beginning “If . . . ,” as long as the subject is expressing a wish, an uncertainty, or a possibility: “If I were twenty years younger, I would ask you to dance.”
Lady Nancy Astor once said to Winston Churchill, “Winston, if I were your wife, I’d put poison in your coffee.” He replied, “Nancy, If I were your husband, I’d drink it.”
The subjunctive should not be used when the “If . . .” construction is a simple conditional: “If you are ill, the doctor will make you better.” “If” is used here to indicate that one event is conditional on another. There is no sense of a wish or possibility. “If my doctor treats you, he will cure you” is another example of a simple indicative conditional. The speaker is expressing a fact conditional on the arrival of the doctor, rather than a speculative possibility.
The subjunctive is also used in certain types of sentence containing “that”:
They demanded that he take every precaution.
It is essential that they be brought back for punishment.
I must recommend that this law be struck from the books.
Past Subjunctive
In the past subjunctive, all verbs take the common form of the simple past tense. “Have” becomes “had,” “know” becomes “knew,” and so on. As mentioned above, “to be” is a little different as it becomes “were” (and not “was”), but all the others are regular. Here are some examples:
He wept as if he were being squeezed.
I wish you were here!
If only I had worked in school.
Note that these can be indistinguishable from the standard past perfect “had worked,” as in the table below. The “If only . . .” and “I wish . . .” beginnings suggest subjunctive.
The following table is almost the end of the grammar section. It covers the subjunctive in all the major tenses, using examples from the verb “to work” throughout. The important thing to remember is that it might look complicated, but there is only one form of subjunctive for each verb tense. If the example is “I work,” then all six persons of the verb use that form.
Mind you, don’t expect to “get it” immediately—this is one of the really tricky forms of English. The answer, however, is not to stop teaching it and watch it wither away as generations come through school with little knowledge of their own language. The answer to difficulty is always to get your hands around its throat and hold on until you have reached an understanding. Luckily, this is happening—especially in America. The subjunctive is on its way back.
Tense Indicative Subjunctive
Simple present He works He work
Present continuous She is working She be working
Present perfect He has worked He have worked
Present perfect continuous It has been working It have been working
Simple past We worked We worked
Past continuous I was working I were working
Past perfect They had worked They had worked
Past perfect continuous We had been working We had been working
In addition, here are eight simple sentences in the subjunctive. It is perhaps more common than you realize. Read each one and see how the subjunctive form of the verb is used.
He acts as if he knew you.
I would rather you had given a different answer.
If only we had a home to go to!
I wish I could run
as fast as my older brother.
Would that you were my friend.
I suggest that he leave.
Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done.
If one green bottle should accidentally fall . . .
Now go back to the beginning of Grammar Part One and read it all again.
Seven Modern Wonders of the World
THE SEVEN ANCIENT WONDERS are set in stone, but any modern seven must in some sense be a personal choice. Humanity has created many, many wondrous things. A Picasso painting is a wonder, as is a computer, a jeweled Fabergé egg, an aria by Mozart, the motorcar, a cloned sheep. The list could be endless.
However, examples such as those don’t seem to match the original style and intention of the original ancient wonders. Surely a modern seven should have some echoes in the old ones. Otherwise why have seven, say, and not nine? Our list comes from two rules. 1. It must be man-made, so no waterfalls or mountains; 2. It must take your breath away. Here are seven modern wonders. You cannot look at any of them without this thought: How on earth did we build that?
1. THE CHANNEL TUNNEL
An engineering project to bore a tunnel between Folkestone in Kent, England, and Calais in France—a distance of 31 miles (50 km), with an average depth of 150 ft (45 m) under the seabed. France and Britain used huge boring machines, cutting through chalk to meet in the middle for the first time since the last ice age. When they did meet, there was less than ⅔ inch (2 cm) error, an astonishing feat of accuracy.
The Dangerous Book for Boys Page 28
