Exercise 5.2, Style Practice

1. Vegetation is found all around the world, save for places of extreme temperature. Plants thrive in richly fertilized plains and river valleys as well as on the edge of perpetual snow in high mountains. Dense vegetation exists in the ocean and its edges as well as in and around lakes and swamps. Plants are present in the cracks of busy city sidewalks as well as what seem to be barren cliffs. Vegetation covered the earth before humans ever existed and will continue to do so long after our existence has come to pass.
2. Animals don’t have the power to create and communicated new messages fit to new experiences naturally. Their genetic code limits the number and kind of messages they have the ability to pass on. Bees, for example, can only communicate distance, direction, source and richness of pollen in flowers. Animals of the same species characteristically have a limited cache of messages that can’t be sent that span over generations.
3. Language skills were stressed by Jones (1985) in his paper on children’s thinking as very important in children’s problem-solving abilities. Language skill improvement reportedly causes improvement in nonverbal problem solving. Language habits that were previously acquired used along with the activation of knowledge previously learned through language are thought to be the cause of better performance. Therefore, the verbal formulation of nonlinguistic problems prior to attempts at their solution, when systematically practiced, might be an avenue for exploration in the enhancement of problem solving in general.