THE MOST SEVER THREAT WE FACE TODAY IS WATER SHORTAGE,DISCUSS Essay

THE MOST SEVER THREAT WE FACE TODAY IS WATER SHORTAGE,DISCUSS - Essay Example Instead, it signifies the increasingly growing problem of lack of potable water supply for the inhabitants of the world. With the sources of clean water dwindling and becoming harder to come by with each passing day, a severe water shortage in the future, possibly towards the middle of this current century, is seen by many experts as the most severe threat that we face as a member of the world population today. With our ever ballooning world population, our society is currently facing a problem in terms of finding and developing sustainable water sources that can help extend the current life cycle of our water sources. Climate change is fast drying up the liquid that can be found in our usual supply points such as rivers and oceans. It is believed that the worlds biggest rivers -- the Ganges Indus Brahmaputra, Yangtze Mekong, Salween, and Yellow rivers may be totally dried up by the year 2035. Such an event will have a direct effect on the world's biggest continent and could very wel l cause a chain reaction of natural calamities such as wild fires, hunger and famine, social conflict, war, and diseases 1. Global warming has turned our water supply situation into a terrifying reality that in the United States alone, the data sheets indicate that more than one third of the countries in the lower 48 will have to deal with a water supply shortage by mid century. This while more than 400 other countries will also have to deal with the international water supply shortage caused by global warming 2 (NRDC â€Å"Climate Change, Water and Risk†). Recent studies by the United Nations have clearly indicated that the water supply shortage that our world is currently experiencing has directly affected the lives of more than 1.2 billion people, approximately a fifth of the world's population 3 (United Nations â€Å"International Decade for Action 'Water for Life' 2005-2015†). This dire situation has become a reality due to the fact that there are quite a number o f countries that lack the necessary abilities with which to be able to harness the water streaming directly from rivers and aquifers. There has been a notable increase in the need for water in the 21st century stemming from agricultural needs for food to construction requirements for the building of homes and other necessary infrastructure for the survival of mankind. These heavy water requirements of our population has led to the twofold increase in the water requirements of the world's population. That is why although the world wide water shortage does not exist at the moment, there are still parts of the world that find themselves constantly lacking in water supply for their region. Keeping in mind the aforementioned facts about the way that we as a society use our existing water supply, it becomes easier to understand the causes of the water supply that we experience at one point or another in our lives. As human beings, we have begun to take our water supply for granted simply because we were told that our planet of composed mostly of water. It became a logical conclusion for us that since our planet is composed of 80 percent bodies of water at the very least, then we would not run out of water to supply our life sustaining requirements. Man has abused the water supply

A Contrastive Study between English and Arabic Prepositional Phrases Essay

A Contrastive Study between English and Arabic Prepositional Phrases - Essay Example This problem also has pedagogical implications, as a better understanding of the problems faced by students during translation can enable teachers to better address the problem. This study could therefore prove useful in the field of language education, particularly for teaching EFL to Arab students.Ho-Abdullah & Hasan’s (2009) study also examined issues concerning English prepositions when translated into Arabic and vice versa. However, it was concerned solely with the preposition explaining how its translation reflects the use of different conceptual mapping domains. Moreover, this study only involved 75 Iraqi secondary school students, so it was focused on the translation difficulties faced by Arabic speaking students when translating from English into Arabic. In Habash’s (1982) earlier study on the use of English prepositions by Arab students, the errors made in using prepositions were categorised according to their number of occurrences. While this is useful, agai n the focus was on teaching English to Arabic students in order to improve their English. Moreover, the analysis of translations was based on existing and formal written work rather than under experimental conditions.This study attempts to compare and analyze English and Arabic prepositional phrases in terms of their functions, uses, order and meanings. It also attempts to illustrate similarities and differences between English and Arabic prepositional phrases as not every prepositional phrase.... This includes difficulties related to pronunciation (Al-Saidat, 2010), various reading difficulties (Patil, N.d.), and so on. This study will be concerned with difficulties encountered in translating prepositional phrases. The preposition is a key component of the prepositional phrase so the difficulty in translating the latter is often due to difficulty with the preposition itself. The difficulty of translating prepositions from English into Arabic can be illustrated by the contrast between and . Whereas suggests a position, suggests a movement, but in Arabic, would be used in both cases, so Arabs may find it difficult to differentiate between them. The Arabic thus has a much wider domain for its usage, and it can also be used for expressing , , , etc. On the other hand, Arabic prepositions are purely spatiotemporal prepositions whereas English prepositions actually function as either proper prepositions, substantive-derived locative (directional) adverbs, or as particles (Lindstrom berg, 2010, p. 23). Hence, the English concept of a preposition is wider in scope than in Arabic. The nature of the errors tends to be errors of omission, substitution, or redundant usage. Prepositions also pose a problem for machine translations in translating English noun phrase into Arabic (Shaalan et al., 2004) so the problem is not unique to human translation. Also, the problem is by no means peculiar to Arab students. English prepositions are notorious for being problematic for many EFL students. As Pittman (1966 in Mickiewicza, 1993, p. 181) remarked, â€Å"Among those who teach or learn the English language, prepositions have earned a reputation for difficulty if not downright unpredictability†. The main