[a 30-minute essay] Choosing to Enter Campus: Reasons Note: The essay is written for practicing TOEFL's Writing Section. Therefore, it is hurriedly written, and the mistakes, if any exists, are not corrected. The essay is left as if it were a finished assignment waiting to be scored. Thus, read carefully. Thank you. The percentage of people who enter college has been rising constantly. However, our grandparents, or even parents for some of us, have succeeded in their life without any university's tuition. Thus, why entering into a campus? There are two main reasons that make virtually everyone wants to take the entrance exam: knowledge and joy. The first group of people we are going to discuss wants to do what colleges are built for: studying. The group's individuals are eggheads. Knowledge to them is as important as food. It is true that some of them want to apply the subjects they enroll while they are studying, but there are also people who learn because the knowledge is there. On the contrary, a sacred place called university may look like an amusement park for the second group's people's eye. For them, colllege means activities. Singing and dancing all year's long, it would be a miracle for them to get an "A" or a "G". Some register their way into university to find friends. What's more, some people enroll to find their potential wife! Even thoush there are various reasons why people attend college--the stated two are just the tip of the iceberg--universities do their jobs smoothly for most of the time. There is indeed miraculous power whose majesic quality holds everything together. After all, a college with all sorts of people is a happy college, isn't it? ».Å. ¶éҶ١㨢ͷԻÊÑ¡¹Ô´¹Ð¤ÃѺ   Create Date : 10 µØÅÒ¤Á 2552     0 comment Last Update : 7 µØÅÒ¤Á 2554 22:03:36 ¹.     Counter : 403 Pageviews.   Share Tweet

How did a Green and a Red Frogs Get Friendly with Hinata Family Here we’ll be looking into the background of the friendship between two members of the Keroro Platoon and the people residing at its base of operation—the Hinata Family. The first pair we’re going to discuss is the strong bond between the leader of the platoon, Sergeant Keroro, and the youngest member of Hinata house, Hinata Fuyuki the occult boy. Next, we’ll look at the hard-boiled (but one-sided) love of Corporal Giroro towards Fuyuki’s sister, Hinata Natsumi; what’s more, we will also see at the other end of the red thread the poor corporal has been trying to bind himself and Natsumi. That is, we will follow the progress of Natsumi’s feeling of friendship towards Giroro too. Once upon a time, Keroro was so careless that it exposed itself to the eye of two Pekoponians (the inhabitants of Earth)—Hinata Natsumi and Fuyuki. After that, when the main force of the Keron Army—the frog’s homeland—signaled the encounter, it decided to leave the Keroro Platoon members to fight alone. The reason was that the Army didn’t want its plan to be widely known by humankind. Left without any choice, Keroro committed itself to be Fuyuki’s friend. Although the friendship was a fake one in the beginning, the real empathy between them really developed as time flowed its way calmly. The bond is made by every kind of adventures one could think of that could happen with a teenage boy and a frog together. At last, Keroro couldn’t pinpoint the exact time he had become the Earth’s protector instead of its invader. After a while, Giroro found where Keroro resided. He scolded Keroro harshly for befriending Pekoponians, and he set up booby traps to finish the people in the house. However, the plan backfired on him; not only did Natsumi got pass all the traps, but she also planted a flower inside Giroro’s heart when she slammed her school bag fiercely at the latter. After all, Giroro prefers strong people. Nonetheless, he never confided the secret to Natsumi, although all his Keron friends acknowledged it easily after a while. He put full effort to win his loved one’s heart, yet no real love have been seen on Natsumi’s cute complexion. However, the postbox frog needn’t to be desperate at all, for all his effort weren’t in vain. Natsumi slowly offered some friendship to Giroro, who accepted it blissfully. Maybe the fact that Natsumi allowed Giroro to live in Hinata house’s garden is the strongest proof of that. In conclusion, some observers of their life can have some hope, no matter how little it is, that a romantic story is to come. The friendship between humankind and other intelligent organism from space has been many people’s dream since the time of yore. Scientific researches as been conducted without success to find that kind of wise living things. However, there’s also a theory stating that even if the space “human” exist, they mat not want to communicate with us. N one can be really sure about that. Maybe some of them has deliberately—or accidentally—contacted with some chosen (or lucky) people. The preceding two examples we has been following their progress demonstrated the possibility that such intimation relationship can really be true. *Some parts are corrected by Microsoft Word. ».Å. ¶éҶ١㨢ͷԻÊÑ¡¹Ô´¹Ð¤ÃѺ   Create Date : 28 ¡Ñ¹ÂÒ¹ 2552     0 comment Last Update : 7 µØÅÒ¤Á 2554 22:03:49 ¹.     Counter : 313 Pageviews.   Share Tweet

Constructing a Yu-Gi-Oh! Deck If you read this sentence, it means you’re interested in Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game, aren’t you? Welcome! Have you bought your first Starter Deck? How about Booster Packs? Do you know how to make a deck that can make it through tournament all over the world? Here we will talk about the importance of a pre-duel preparation: making your Main Deck. It’s not just about cramming forty cards together thoughtlessly, nor is it involving only relying on sheer brute force of the cards. The two following tips about deck construction can help you becoming a Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Master in no time. The first golden rule you must always bear in mind is that level 4 or below monsters rule. Without them, you will be in deep trouble. Each of them is a storehouse of power for your other cards. Even if you somehow manage to wipe all the cards off your opponent’s field, it will be no use if you don’t hire some creatures to deliver the finish blow. A common good deck should have at least 12 of these to be secure. However, the number can go up to around 20, depending on your strategy, but anything more than that can mean disaster because you may not be able to endure your opponent’s Magic and Trap cards. Beginners really do like normal monsters with high ATK (Attack) Power, such as Vorse Raider or Gemini elf. They are easy to be summoned and to be ordered to attack. However, as one’s experience increases, one can’t help but notice the existence of effect monsters. Mostly, they’re weak, yet they store some magic which normal monsters can only dream of. For example, who won’t want to use Skilled Dark Magician, whose ATK is 1900 too, coming with the effect of special summoning Dark Magician (ATK 2500) in (potentially) one magical turn? To summarize, you should employ moderate amount of level 4 or below monsters and ponder their effectiveness carefully before you let a card join your team. The other point begging to be stated here is that you should use tangible combos. I know the characters in the anime looks good when they draw just the right card at the right moment that helps them to perform an important summon (or do something else) to win. That rarely happens in real life, so you should make the chance swell as much as possible. One way to do this is to confining your deck size to exactly 40 cards. Well-balanced 40-card deck should easily be able to beat 80-card deck that contains one-in-the-world cards. There are some cards that contain rewarding effects, but they do require some hard-to-find condition to activate. A good example of this kind of cards is Exodia the Forbidden One. Provided that you have this card and four other “the Forbidden One” cards in your hand, you win the duel. Sounds easy, huh? What if one of them just happens to be at the bottom of your deck? What if your opponent gets to randomly discard a card in your hand, and they simply choose a piece of Exodia? For that reason, people began to construct an Exodia deck, whose focus is only on assembling all five pieces before his opponent beats him down to death. It surely is not an easy task. In conclusion, you should limit your deck size and use “easygoing” cards that don’t ask much of you to use it, at least until you are no longer a beginner. Just these two regulations should make you bode well in the duels to come. However, you should not stick with these rules for too long. After you’re more experienced, why don’t you try some challenging deck constructing work of art? For example, you may devise a deck with only 7 or 8 monsters and use other Magic or Trap cards to summon them quick and to recover them from the Graveyard when they’re sent there. Also, a choosy deck such as Elemental Hero deck looks really cool when you can activate combo after combo, for Konami did a good job writing each cards’ effect to make it easy enough for anyone to combine them without the feeling that they’re just another set of you-can-use-me-anytime cards. In other words, there is really no limit in making a deck, which is the fact that makes the game so popular. ».Å. ¶éҶ١㨢ͷԻÊÑ¡¹Ô´¹Ð¤ÃѺ   Create Date : 15 ¡Ñ¹ÂÒ¹ 2552     0 comment Last Update : 7 µØÅÒ¤Á 2554 22:03:59 ¹.     Counter : 321 Pageviews.   Share Tweet

Two Contributing Factors of Boredom *Some parts are corrected by Microsoft Word. I’m often bored of the world because people waste their time doing seemingly pointless things. For example, watching an episode of a series could cost them at least two hours of their precious life. What’s more, some happy citizens spend their whole adult live working 24-7. That is not to say being diligent isn’t good, but there are many ways to overwork. Is it really worthwhile to gain some valuable paper and stone in exchange with health and time? However, the irony part of all this is that when one doesn’t have those time-wasting things to do, one feels even worse. The feeling is called boredom, which is the same pattern of chemical reactions with one buoying in my head. With the above thoughts in mind, I would now begin to ponder the causes of boredom, a thing that have urged all humankind to think, say and act. First, boredom could be attributed to the nature of all matter in the universe. As Buddha has wisely preached a long time ago, nothing is really static. That is, all the creatures and the objects are subject to constant change. Do you remember what you’re looked like when you were, say, a fetus in your mom’s womb? Don’t you see you have changed a lot since then? So do all the inanimate. How long have you been using your current computer? Is it working in the same perfect condition it once was when you bought it? If yes, do you think it would be so in fifty years from now? All human thoughts, speech, and acts are a part of nature too, hence the mandatory state. An NDS that delighted you last summer might now be left in a shabby corner of the house. Admit it. You’re bored of it after having played it for 500 or more times day after day. It wasn’t your fault, or so it seems. The chemical process in your brain doesn’t treat the game console as an attractive something anymore. It is, therefore, the very reason that makes you feel bored at times—the natural development (or decaying?) of mind. The other point to stress as a source of boredom is that one’s lifestyle is drastically modified recently. Early generations’ people surely don’t get bored that easily, not when they must hunt for their lives. To be frank, who on Earth could yawn lazily while a mammoth is chasing? Moreover, the life span was short. Even in 1500 B.C.—only 500 years before—the life expectation of a newborn baby is only 25-30 years, according to a certain book I couldn’t quite spell its name. Consequently, there wasn’t that much time to get used all to the miracle of the blue planet, Earth. Nowadays, on the contrary, we have plenty of free time. It is not unusual anymore to have two holidays per week, namely, Saturday and Sunday. Besides, we now live to as much as 70 or even 80 years. The world, thus, has much more lessons of earthly unhappiness in store for us. It is our blessing of medical treatment that trigger the phenomenon. In conclusion, boredom is just a part of normal modern life. So, we all must face it somehow, sooner or later. There seems to be no escape route from it, as starting to do something to get rid of boredom is also the start line of another case of boredom in the future. Yet, that is not to say we must live in such desperation forever. The last example is my own case. I now feel like going to watch a clip on Youtube.com right after having finished the essay. Of course, writing sure is a challenging pastime, isn’t it? ».Å. ¶éҶ١㨢ͷԻÊÑ¡¹Ô´¹Ð¤ÃѺ   Create Date : 11 ¡Ñ¹ÂÒ¹ 2552     0 comment Last Update : 7 µØÅÒ¤Á 2554 22:04:14 ¹.     Counter : 306 Pageviews.   Share Tweet

Paragraphs Versus Essays: Similarities *The essay is automatically corrected by Microsoft Word in some parts. Do you think you know what does paragraph mean? How about essay? What regulations do you have to bear in mind both when writing a paragraph, narrative or descriptive or argumentative or whatever type it is, and an essay? If you can answer all of the questions, bless you. If not, then look no further. There is a set of restrictions controlling any writing job; it is almost as solemn as the law. We are going to discuss both the similar points between writing a well-refined paragraph and a beautifully woven essay, in which we would talk about some examples too. Generally, the (artificial) universal rules of writing are where the somewhat-resembling aspects of paragraphs and essays lie. For (the first) instance, as we have been taught in our sophomore year or before then, a good paragraph must have unity. It means all the sentences in a paragraph must point to the same persona, namely, the main idea of the paragraph. In much the same way, the Writers Taskforce of Fictional World has been enforcing the same rules on all the essays writers in the world; the punishment for those neglecting the Law of Unity is called Sorry-but-your-work-is-not-published syndrome. All the sentences and paragraphs in an essay must point to one and only one Thing, and it is called, in this case, the thesis sentence. Second, there is an angel named coherence, who dearly wishes to be a part of every paragraph, floating omnipotent in every language’s arsenal of lexicon. Coherence defies the Buddha’s teaching stating that the world is lack of continuity by prohibiting the surreal art instinct of the authors from showing itself too much. Every sentence in a paragraph must be related in one way or another with the preceding sentence. The said relationship may be that one sentence is the cause or an effect of the other, or the sentence X may be the other side of the sentence X-1, for example. This prevents the readers’ suffering from severe headache. Violating this, too, spells horrible disasters for any human writer. For instance, no one would ever want to read a short story, which is a set of finely sorted compositions (a kind of writing very similar to essay), whose point of view is constantly changing to and fro between the protagonist and her maid, who lives a blissful yet (seemingly) boring life, and sometimes even wander around pointlessly—or, to be frank, hopelessly—as far as some villains smoking his cigarettes in prison or the heroine’s aunt’s cousin’s sister who has the ability to play the piano perfectly. The effect of such a thing (not having coherence) would result in the very same feeling I bet you must have had when you were reading the sentence describing it—desperate confusion. That exactly could be another point of view of the word (coherence), that is, the meaning of not talking (or writing) too aimlessly. The third similarity between a paragraph and an essay is the use of transitional words; they are the words that help to link ideas between sentences. These words include “and”, which suggests the ideas’ friendship, or, well, “or”, which means the preceding sentence is having an argument with the following, and many others. These kinds of idea sound familiar, huh? In fact, embedding those linking words into one’s work is a part of making its coherence, so I wouldn’t preach you again about them. However, it is obligated that we separately say about transitional words because it is one of the most important things to achieve the said coherence. To conclude the whole thing into just one sentence, there are three essential things in common to bear in mind when writing a paragraph or an essay: unity, coherence, and transitional words. Everyone, from as great a writer as Jane Austen or J.K. Rowling to any Mr. Writer Wannabe, more or less uses or even manipulates them. Nevertheless, there is one last short note to be noticed. It is that the whole essay does not and would never mean that one could not abuse the rules or even treat them as Death Note’s MU—nothingness—if the situation requires. The most vivid example type of writing is (literally translated) “experimental type” of a certain two-time S.E.A. Write Thai author. He wrote a whole short story out of just nouns (and another one using only interrogative sentences). Hence, what is being emphasized here is that, the stated three similar laws between paragraphs and essays are forceful, but they are not the sacred cow to be worshipped. Summary: There are regulations regarding both a paragraph and an essay. First, both must have unity; all the sentences must relate to only one idea. Not writing so makes the work unpublished. Next, there is coherence—the smooth structure of the work. Bouncing around in every direction leaves readers confused. The last mandatory thing is the use of transitional words to link sentences, which is in fact a part of coherence. Sometimes, however, these rules could be bended. ».Å. ¶éҶ١㨢ͷԻÊÑ¡¹Ô´¹Ð¤ÃѺ   Create Date : 09 ¡Ñ¹ÂÒ¹ 2552     0 comment Last Update : 7 µØÅÒ¤Á 2554 22:04:26 ¹.     Counter : 316 Pageviews.   Share Tweet