B.

• Movies

  • Watching a lot of movies can influence how you think

  • There are some rules about watching movies that you should consider

  • Movies have changed over the course of time

• Word processors

  • Word processors can change the way you work

  • Being too over dependent on word processors can bring consequences

  • There is guides about how you should use word processors

• Your home town

  • My home town is far away from the urban area

  • There is a lot of activities in my home town

  • Many people from the city come back to my home town to visit relatives and its beauty

• Advertising

  • Advertising can help boost products popularity and help sales

  • Some adverts can be inappropriate and cause harm to the public perception of the product/company

  • Costs to advertise products are expensive but some companies are ready to take the risk

1. Yes

2. No, football is not a dare-devil sport

Homework 3

1. Yes

Have you ever wondered why the day after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday? It’s not just for the dark circles you’ll get after waking up early to snag some deals. Black Friday is the busiest retail day in the United States. Traditionally, it marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season. National brands offer sales in-store and online to lure customers. So why “black”? Ironically, the color is often used to describe a particularly bleak day in financial history. Black Thursday was when the stock market crashed in 1929, sending the U.S. into the Great Depression. Black Monday was a severe global stock crash in 1987. There actually was a Black Friday in 1869. So-called robber barons Jay Gould and Jim Fisk attempted to corner the U.S. gold market. When President Ulysses S. Grant caught wind of their scheme, he ordered four million dollars’ worth of federal gold to be sold. The ensuing crash marred the reputation of Grant’s administration. The term Black Friday was first used to describe the Friday after Thanksgiving in 1951. Factory Management and Maintenance magazine complained of retail employees calling in sick that day to extend their vacations. They wrote, “Friday-after-Thanksgiving-itis’ is a disease second only to the bubonic plague in its effects.” In the 1950s or ’60s, police officers in Philadelphia began grumbling about “Black Friday.” The day often saw hordes of suburban Pennsylvanians coming to the city for holiday shopping, as well as the annual Army-Navy football game. Black Friday as a concept was localized in Philadelphia until about the 1980s, when it began spreading nationally. Retailers originally tried to rebrand the day as “Big Friday.” But no dice. So they invented a new story for the name. For most of the year, the retail stores operate at a deficit, or “in the red.” But during the holiday season, they turn a profit and are “in the black.” Even though Black Friday is associated with American Thanksgiving, several countries have similar sales despite not celebrating the holiday. Canada’s Black Friday sales are on the same day as the U.S.’s, even though Canada’s Thanksgiving is in October. Black Friday is a great day for retailers and shopaholics, but some feel that it represents the dark side of American consumerism. Stores rush to outdo each other, opening their doors as early as 8 PM Thanksgiving night. Shoppers fight over products. There have even been deaths related to Black Friday. In the 21st century, more shopping holidays developed around that same weekend. Cyber Monday is dedicated to online sales. Small Business Saturday encourages people to shop local. The COVID-19 pandemic changed Black Friday too. With one-day sales becoming less feasible, many stores now spread out deals throughout November.

source: The History of Black Friday | Britannica

My critique: The paragraph has all of the sentences tied to the main point: The origin of Black Friday. The paragraph explains its history in detail from the early days to the present, alongside some actions that retailers may take when the event begins, and their effects on the consumers (from getting a great discount to dying). There are no irrelevant points made in the paragraph, and the details are consistent with the writing.

Cohesion: The writer starts with a question for the readers to make them interested in the topic and a topic to build on. Then talks about what it is and moves on to the reason for the color "Black" being used for the name, which is connected to negative things. The paragraph then compared events that used the color black and their meaning. After that, the first time "Black Friday" was mentioned is brought up to explain the reason why it was widespread in the country, and then how it evolved in modern days. The structure that the writer used is: Definition -> Similar events -> Origin (main idea) -> Evolution

Alongside that, they also used some signposting words like: "So", "but", "Even though", but there is still some lacking in their usage.

Firstly, we must understand what social media is. Social media platforms are online applications or websites where people can share their own thoughts through online posts. Popular examples include Facebook, X (formerly called Twitter), Instagram,...

After knowing what social media is, we will move on to how social media democratized the sharing of information. My first reason for this is that the people in control of social media can control the algorithm and manipulate the narrative so that most people would only see the opinions that they want the public to know. Major platforms like Facebook or Threads have been accused of "shadowbanning" unwanted individuals due to their opinions about the United States Republican party, and would mostly push for more posts favouring a specific group, like the Democrats. Another major reason is that people can use advertisements or sponsorship on social media to push for a specific narrative; a few right-wing and left-wing groups in many countries have bought advertisement time on YouTube or Instagram to help spread their political videos, and with the majority of people using social media being children and teenagers, they would be convinced to support that group's cause.

However, some people think that social media democratized information sharing. Their first justification is the freedom of speech, where everyone is allowed to share their own thoughts. Social media platforms most have a very easy sign-up procedure, only requiring an email or sometimes a phone number. But this may come with a risk; some people may abuse this system by creating hundreds of accounts in order to post similar opinions on a mass scale, resulting in others being silenced.

In conclusion, social media has made the social division deeper, with many people trying to take away the other group's right to spread their words. We should be more vigilant about what we are listening to so as to be aware of the false information or propaganda traps that we might fall into.

Class: 10 Anh LN2

Book Title: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

https://saynothingbook.com/

Why I chose this book:

It is one of the only few books I actually read through as I don’t frequently read books but watch movies and documentaries. Somehow the cover caught my interest while I was at a relative’s house and I asked if I could borrow it from them to which they accept. Maybe it was the “10 best books of 2019” seal or the foreshadowing on the cover that had my eyes peeled for what was waiting for me inside. The book is an investigative journalism with historical narrative and true crime that tickled my fancy, it also gave me knowledge about the true events described in the books, it also gave me a new insight into the effects of wars and conflicts.

Overall impression/Summary:

The book is based on “The Troubles” conflict in Northern Ireland which started over British occupation over the mentioned territory and the final goal was to unite Ireland as a whole but was never achieved after 30 years of fighting from 1960s to 1998 after the Good Friday Agreements in 1998. Patrick Keefe started with the violent abduction of Jean McConville in Belfast, a widowed woman who has 14 children but 4 of them were “lost”, the group of 10 children saw their mother taken away forcefully by the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and many others had been kidnapped like her. Her and others people’s fate would remain a mystery for decades until the some members of the IRA would reveal that they had died and buried in hidden locations. The opening had me hooked and it described how chaotic in Northern Ireland at that time, crimes committed by rebel groups to spread their messages. Alongside with details description from victims and perpetrator showed how brutal and violent it was during that time. There were also stories of betrayal and disillusionment like Brendan Hughes who was an IRA commander that led many iconic events of “The Troubles” and trusted his ally Gerry Adams, to be later felt betrayed after the 1980 Hunger Strike that he suffered the consequences of a failed deal while Adams used it as a political tool to pressure the British. In the book, there are some picture of Brendan Hughes so you could easily imagine his state of body and how desperate it was for the IRA to fight against Britain. The author of the book took the story of Dolours Price to explain how tragedy could radicalize people. Dolours Price was a bright students who had relatives in the Replubican Army but she mostly stuck with non-violent means such as student protesting to achieve her goals. Until the Burntollet Bridge Incident in 1969 that changed it all, she was ambushed by the loyalist mobs while the police stand aside with a few cases of them joining in the beating. She then gave up politics and decided that violence was the only way so she and her sister joined the IRA, where she was given the “dirty works” which included transporting victims (they would refer to as “suspected informers”) to execution sites and leading the 1973 London car bombing. After the bombing, she would be captured in mainland Britain, where she would go on a 200 days hunger strike that made the authorities force-feed her by a rubber tube shoved down her throat to which it contributed more to her hatred of the British. Her tragedy showed how war could rip apart a person’s youth, health, ethnicity, and how it could cause other wars by solidifying hatred. There is also Gerry Adams, a retired politician who repeatedly denied participating in the IRA despite proof of him connected to the kidnapping and murder of Jean McConville in the introduction. During The Troubles, he was the mastermind of the IRA in Northern Ireland, restructuring the IRA so British intelligence can’t infiltrate the organization and ordering executions for “The Disappeared” who they assumed was an informer for the loyalists. He would then order the kidnapping and murder of Jean McConville as testified by Brendan Hughes. To his IRA comrades like Hughes, he was a brilliant military mind and to the world he was the president of Sinn Féin (A republican party in Ireland), negotiating the Good Friday Agreement. In the book, Keefe mostly focused on how he didn’t carried out the action himself, it was the volunteers, this comes to show that he was using his subordinates to cover his political records and how he was the last man standing as the others died, went to prison, broken by trauma and poverty, Adams got the best fate. Nowadays, he still go on to fight against lawsuits about The Troubles and maintain his central lie of not related to the IRA.

    The main tone of “Say Nothing” is precision and details, it create a sense of coldness in the book as Patrick Keefe don’t describe the feelings of each characters but rather their actions, words spoken out of their mouth. It is like I’m reading a report, being a bystander watching through the eyes of the victims and characters, not being able to interfere. I could only feel the tense environment surrounding the gloomy city of Belfast and it is what the author intended, they wanted to present the dire conflict between the IRA and loyalist forces, how the IRA resort to using unconventional forces like terrorism in an attempt to kick out the Brits in Ireland and the Brits using torture and ignorant methods to subdue the rebels. The book is meant to show the scars of war, how it could be the fuse for major conflicts like a powder keg. Alongside that, it is also a part of the Belfast Project which is where many participants who were IRA volunteers broke their code of silence and testify to cope with their troubled past and give answers to many questions made during The Troubles which exposes the toxic afterlife of political violence. The IRA may be a “noble rebel” but Keefe forces the reader to confront the reality of intimate acts of cruelty in a “liberator” (IRA) or “protector” (loyalists), he wrote the book as a record of facts to show that there are people like Hughes and Price joined the IRA for a noble cause just to struggle with trauma, regrets in the aftermath of a brutal conflict trying to make those who deny the truths and sacrifice others morality like Adams.