Style, Exericise 5.2

1. Vegetation covers the earth, except for those areas continuously covered with ice or utterly scorched by continual heat. Plants grow mostly on richly fertilized plains and river valleys but also at the edge of perpetual snow in high mountains. Dense vegetation grows in the ocean and around its edges as well as around lakes and swamps. Plants grow in the cracks of busy city sidewalks and in seemingly barren cliffs. Vegetation covered the earth before humans existed and will stay long after we have been swallowed up by evolutionary history.

2. Animals in their natural state cannot create and communicate new messages to fit a new experience. Their genetic code limits the number and kind of messages that they can communicate. For example, bees can only communicate information about distance, direction source, and richness of pollen in flowers. Animals are characterized as the same species when messages have a limited repertoire and are delivered in the same way for every generation.

3. In his paper on children’s thinking, Jones (1985) stressed the importance of language skills in children’s problem-solving ability. He reported that when children improved their language skills, they also improved on their ability to solve nonverbal problems. Jones believed that they performed better because they used previously acquired language habits to articulate problems and activated knowledge learned through language. Therefore we could explore if children could solve problems better if they practiced how to formulate them.