Improve Your Communication Skills
Comic Book Characters and Diversity
We’re very pleased here at Jump. In the last few months, several of our favourite comic book characters have been changed and redesigned. This isn’t just about new costumes.
It shows that the designers and writers want to make these stories more diverse. After all, not every person in the world is white and male…so it seems silly that superheroes should be!
Read on to find out about the transformations of Batgirl, Thor and others.
A Poem – Sadness is a Storm
This poem was sent to us by one of our talented young readers, 14 year old Rebekah.
Sadness is a storm.
A clap of thunder,
As you howl and wail,
Yet through it all,
You still prevail.
Nothing withstands
The heart of the tempest.
Ominous clouds loom,
Lightning flashes.
Light still gets through.
It gives you a glimpse,
Of hope pure and true
All’s well once more,
With the subsiding of the storm.
.
Shooting stars, Weather, and Rocks falling from the Sky!
What do shooting stars, weather and rocks falling from the sky have in common? Are you wondering whether we have gone mad asking such a question? Do rocks ever fall from the sky? Of course they do! You might know them better as “meteorites”, and they are meteors, or rocks from outer space, that fall down to the earth. And what does that have to do with weather? It’s not like they come down like rain! And before you say to yourself “meteor shower”, remember that a meteor is actually a shooting star, a space-rock that burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Related, yes, but weather, no.
The weather connection is through another word, generally used to mean “study of the weather”. That word is “meteorology”. As you can see, all three have something in common – the word “meteor”.
So what is this word, and how did it come to mean these different things?
Meteor came into English through French in the late 15th century. In French it was meteore. Very similar, you might think. Does this mean that it is a French word. Not at all. The next question we must ask ourselves is where did French get it from? The answer is from Medieval Latin meteorum, which meant “things in the heavens”. But this is not the end of the tale. Latin took the word from ancient Greek, and in Greek we can analyse the word to see what it really means.
The Greek word μετέωρα (meteora) can be broken into two parts: meta, which means “over, beyond” and aora, which comes from the verb αείρω/ αίρω (aeiro, airo), which meant “to raise, lift up”. Even today, in Modern Greek, αιωρείται (aioreitai) means “it hovers”. All this means that the original meaning of the word was “thing that is raised in the air”. And even in ancient times this developed to mean “things in the sky” and gradually came to have the meaning it does today.
Another interesting point is that the word “air” is in fact from the same root as αείρω (aeiro), which makes it a distant cousin, or cognate, of “meteor”.
Did you know:
One of the largest and most famous meteor craters is to be found in northern Arizona, desert of the U.S. It is 1,200m wide, 170m deep and calculated to be created 50,000 years ago! It is more commonly known as the Barringer Crater.
Title Photography: Mike Lewinski 2013
Social Hierarchy in Schools – Vive le Petit Revolution! – Written By You
What does ‘social hierarchy in schools’ mean? It means the status of each person in the school.
You know how some kids are the ‘cool kids’ and some are the ‘nerds’ or the ‘geeks’. The hierarchy means the levels of ‘cool’. Our contributor Madeleine decided it was time to shake things up a bit.
Talking in Text
Text speak is very confusing for a lot of people, but it is one area in which children and teenagers are far more advanced than adults. Mobile phones and the internet are recent inventions.
Imagine what it was like for your parents as children. If your parents are 30 years old, the internet did not exist for them! Mobile phones were only invented in 1973 but did not become common for 15 or 20 years. The first ones cost thousands of pounds and were the size of house bricks!