Exercise in Sentence Combining with Adverb Clauses

Exercise in Sentence Combining with Adverb Clauses As discussed in part one and part two, adverb clauses are subordinate structures that show the relationship and relative importance of ideas in sentences. They explain such things as when, where, and why about an action stated in the main clause. Here well practice building and combining sentences with adverb clauses. Practice Exercise:Building Combining Sentences with Adverb Clauses Combine the sentences in each set below by turning the sentence(s) in bold into an adverb clause. Begin the adverb clause with an appropriate subordinating conjunction. When youre done, compare your new sentences with the sample combinations on page two, keeping in mind that multiple combinations are possible. Example:Sailors wear earrings.The earrings are made of gold.Sailors always carry the cost of a burial.They carry the cost on their own bodies.Combination 1: So that they always carry the cost of a burial on their bodies, sailors wear gold earrings.Combination 2: Sailors wear gold earrings so that they always carry the cost of a burial on their bodies. It is unlikely that Cleopatra actually committed suicide with an asp.The species is unknown in Egypt.The boy hid the gerbil.No one would ever find it. Our neighbors installed a swimming pool.The pool is in their backyard.They have gained many new friends.My parents and I watched in awe.We watched on a hot August evening.Erratic bolts of lightning illuminated the sky.The bolts of lightning were from a distant storm. Benny played the violin.The dog hid in the bedroomThe dog whimpered.Natural rubber is used chiefly to make tires and inner tubes.It is cheaper than synthetic rubber.It has greater resistance to tearing when wet. A Peruvian woman finds an unusually ugly potato.She runs up to the nearest man.She smashes it in his face.This is done by ancient custom.Credit cards are dangerous.They encourage people to buy things.These are things that people are unable to afford.These are things that people do not really need.I kissed her once.I kissed her by the pigsty.She wasnt looking.I neve r kissed her again.She was looking all the time. Some day I shall take my glasses off.Some day I shall go wandering.I shall go out into the streets.I shall do this deliberately.I shall do this when the clouds are heavy.I shall do this when the rain is coming down.I shall do this when the pressure of realities is too great. When youre done, compare your new sentences with the sample combinations on page two. Here are sample answers to the practice exercise on page one: Building and Combining Sentences with Adverb Clauses. Keep in mind that multiple combinations are possible. Because the species is unknown in Egypt, it is unlikely that Cleopatra actually committed suicide with an asp.The boy hid the gerbil where no one would ever find it.Since our neighbors installed a swimming pool in their backyard, they have gained many new friends.On a hot August evening, my parents and I watched in awe as erratic bolts of lightning from a distant storm illuminated the sky.Whenever Benny played the violin, the dog hid in the bedroom and whimpered.Natural rubber is used chiefly to make tires and inner tubes because it is cheaper than synthetic rubber and has greater resistance to tearing when wet.By ancient custom, when a Peruvian woman finds an unusually ugly potato, she runs up to the nearest man and smashes it in his face.Credit cards are dangerous because they encourage people to buy things that they are unable to afford and do not really need.I kissed her once by the pigsty when she wasnt looking and never kissed her again although she was looking all the time.(Dy lan Thomas, Under Milk Wood) Some day, when the clouds are heavy, and the rain is coming down and the pressure of realities is too great, I shall deliberately take my glasses off and go wandering out into the streets, never to be heard from again.(James Thurber, The Admiral on the Wheel)

Dinosaur Intelligence, and How Its Measured

Dinosaur Intelligence, and How It's Measured Gary Larson framed the issue best in a famous Far Side cartoon. A Stegosaurus behind a podium addresses an audience of his fellow dinosaurs: The pictures pretty bleak, gentlemen. ..the worlds climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut. (See a slideshow of the 10 smartest dinosaurs.) For over a century, that quote has pretty much summed up popular (and even professional) opinions about dinosaur intelligence. It didnt help that one of the earliest dinosaurs to be discovered and classified (the above-named Stegosaurus, in 1877) possessed an unusually small brain, about the size of, yes, a walnut (its brain was so small, in fact, that paleontologists once speculated that Stegosaurus had a supplementary brain in its butt). It also didnt help that dinosaurs are long extinct; wiped out by the famine and freezing temperatures in the wake of the K/T Extinction 65 million years ago. If only theyd been smarter, we like to think, some of them might have found a way to survive! One Measure of Dinosaur Intelligence: EQ Since theres no way to travel back in time and give an Iguanodon an IQ test, naturalists have developed an indirect means of evaluating the intelligence of extinct (as well as living) animals. The Encephalization Quotient, or EQ, measures the size of a creatures brain against the size of the rest of its body, and compares this ratio to that of other species of roughly the same size. Part of what makes us human beings smart is the enormous size of our brains compared to our bodies; our EQ measures a hefty 5. That may not seem like such a big number, so lets look at the EQs of some other mammals: on this scale, wildebeests weigh in at .68, African elephants at .63, and opossums at .39. As you might expect, monkeys have higher EQs: 1.5 for a red colobus, 2.5 for a capuchin. Dolphins are the only animals on the planet with EQs even close to those of humans; the bottlenose comes in at 3.6. (By the way, EQ scales vary considerably; some authorities set the average human EQ at about 8, with the EQ of other creatures scaled up proportionally.) As you might expect, the EQs of dinosaurs (based on the analysis of their fossil remains) are spread across the lower end of the spectrum. Triceratops weighs in at a scant .11 on the EQ scale, and it was the class valedictorian compared to lumbering sauropods like Brachiosaurus, which dont even come close to hitting the .1 mark. However, some of the swift, two-legged, feathered dinosaurs of the Mesozoic Era posted relatively high EQ scores- not quite as smart as modern wildebeests, but not that much dumber, either. How Smart Were Carnivorous Dinosaurs? One of the trickiest aspects of animal intelligence is that, as a rule, a creature only has to be smart enough to prosper in its given ecosystem and avoid being eaten. Since plant-eating sauropods and titanosaurs were so massively dumb, the predators that fed on them only needed to be marginally smarter- and most of the relative increase in the brain size of these carnivores can be attributed to their need for better smell, vision and muscular coordination, their tools for the hunt. (For that matter, one can argue that the reason sauropods were so dumb is because they only had to be marginally smarter than the giant ferns they munched on!) However, its possible to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction and exaggerate the intelligence of carnivorous dinosaurs. For example, the doorknob-turning, pack-hunting Velociraptors of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World are a complete fantasy- if you met a live Velociraptor today, it would probably strike you as slightly dumber (though a lot more dangerous) than a chicken. You certainly wouldnt be able to teach it tricks, since its EQ would be an order of magnitude below that of a dog or cat. (This is part of the reason why dinosaurs, as a general rule, dont make very good pets.) Could Dinosaurs Have Evolved Intelligence? Its easy, from our present-day perspective, to poke fun at the walnut-brained dinosaurs that lived tens of millions of years ago. However, you should bear in mind that the proto-humans of five or six million years ago werent exactly Einsteins, either- even though, as stated above, they were significantly smarter than the other mammals in their savannah ecosystems. In other words, if you managed to time-transport a five-year-old Neanderthal into the present day, she probably wouldnt do very well in kindergarten! This raises the question: what if at least some dinosaurs had survived the K/T Extinction 65 million years ago? Dale Russell, the one-time curator of vertebrate fossils at the National Museum of Canada, once caused a stir with his speculation that Troodon - a human-sized theropod dinosaur about as smart as an opossum- might eventually have evolved a human-sized level of intelligence if it had been left to evolve for another few million years. It should be noted, however, that Russell didnt propose this as a serious theory, which will come as a disappointment to those who still believe intelligent reptoids live among us.