Daily Content Archive
(as of Thursday, April 30, 2015)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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schism
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| Daily Grammar Lesson | |
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AdverbsAn adverb refers to any element in a sentence used to modify a verb, adjective, another adverb, or even an entire clause. What is an adverbial? More... | |
| Article of the Day | |
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 The Toyota PriusThe award-winning Toyota Prius was the world's first commercially mass-produced and marketed hybrid automobile. Toyota's goal for the Prius was to reduce the amount of pollutants it produced and to increase its energy efficiency. To achieve this goal, the company reduced the engine's gasoline consumption, added two electric motor/generators, reduced air resistance and road friction, and reduced the car's weight. Supposedly, why did Toyota choose the name "Prius" for their hybrid car? More... | |
| This Day in History | |
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 Casey Jones Dies on the Cannonball Express (1900)Jones was an American locomotive engineer whose main claim to fame, until his fateful run on the Cannonball Express, was his punctuality. On April 30, 1900, he was driving the Cannonball Express south on a dangerous, accident-prone run when he suddenly saw a stalled freight train ahead. Instead of jumping to safety, he stayed to slow his train, saving his coworkers and passengers but losing his own life in the process. Who wrote the ballad that immortalized him as a folk hero? More... | |
| Today's Birthday | |
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 Eugen Bleuler (1857)Bleuler was a Swiss psychiatrist who in 1908 introduced the term "schizophrenia." While studying schizophrenic patients, Bleuler concluded that the disease was not one of dementia, a condition involving organic deterioration of the brain, but one consisting of a state of mind in which contradictory tendencies exist together. He argued, against the prevailing opinion, that such patients were not incurable. "Schizophrenia" replaced what term for the disease? More... | |
| Quotation of the Day | |
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 There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.George Eliot (1819-1880) | |
| Idiom of the Day | |
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be in tall cotton— To be in a time or period of great success or wellbeing; to be doing very well. More... | |
| Today's Holiday | |
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 Stratford Festival (2020)What started in Stratford, Ontario, in 1953 as a six-week Shakespearean drama festival under the artistic leadership of Alec Guinness and Irene Worth has since expanded into a 26-week event drawing an audience of half a million people. All of Shakespeare's plays have been performed here over the years, as well as works by Sophocles (c. 496-406 BCE), Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Jean-Baptiste Molière (1622-1673), Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Richard Sheridan (1751-1816), Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), and a number of Canadian playwrights. More... | |
| Word Trivia | |
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Today's topic: mushroommushroom - Before it was a mushroom, it was called either toadstool or funge, from Latin fungus; small mushrooms are called "buttons," medium-sized ones are "cups," and the largest are "flat" or "open" mushrooms. More... fly agaric - A mushroom with a narcotic juice that, in sufficient quantities, is poisonous. More... pileated - Etymologically means "capped," like a mushroom, but now refers to a bird with a crest on the top of the head from the bill to the nape. More... shiitake - Japanese for "evergreen beech, chinquapin" (shii) and "mushroom" (take). More... | |