Concept of Managing Teams at the Workplace

How to Improve Your Vocabulary Steadily

How to Improve Your Vocabulary Steadily How to Improve Your Vocabulary Steadily How to Improve Your Vocabulary Steadily By Michael Sylvia Grappone says, An article on how to improve vocabulary would be helpful. Im in my late 30s and noticed that I can no longer remember things as easily as I did when I was a teen, and with a hubby and kids have no time to really focus on studying. I do read in my leisure time but at the moment only technical books. Would reading novels help my vocabulary? Any shortcuts or techniques? Sylvia, the more you read, the more words youll see, and the more youll understand. Even in the Oxford English Dictionary, the final authority for the meaning of a word is how the word has actually been used in print. But since your family limits your time, let me suggest some ways to improve your vocabulary that are more efficient than reading every book in the library. Make it a priority to learn new words. If you want to improve your vocabulary more quickly, you have to make at least a small commitment. Decide to learn one new word every day or two. Visit Daily Writing Tips for our Word of the Day. Or subscribe to a Word of the Day email list, install a Word of the Day tool on your computer desktop, or buy a Word of the Day calendar. Make your vocabulary practical. Start by learning the words that can express whats most important to you. For example, learn more of your trade language the words that are commonly used in your business or hobby or vocation. Go beyond the jargon and cliches. Find better, fresher, clearer words to express what your peers are talking about. Find the right word for you and use it. When youre writing something, use a thesaurus frequently. That will help you express yourself better. And every time you do that, youll learn a new word and youll use that new word. Start learning where you are. As you read, if you come across an interesting word that you dont understand, dont just bleep over it. See item number 1. Take the time to look it up in a dictionary. Write it down and use it later. Learn roots. Most English words are built from common roots, prefixes and suffixes, often with Greek or Latin origins. Theyre highly reusable. When you learn one root, youll start to understand the many other words that use that root. When you learn a word, use it immediately and frequently. Make it a game. Slip your new word into conversation with as many different people as you can. Repeat it to yourself. Use it in sentences. Write it on a flashcard and practice it while waiting for red lights. The key to a better vocabulary is regular practice and progress. Maybe you cant learn a hundred new words a day, but you can learn one or two a day, totaling thousands of new words over the years. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Vocabulary category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:Creative Writing 101What to Do When Words Appear Twice in a Row50 Synonyms for â€Å"Villain†

Preferred future, what changes do you forsee as an advanced practice Essay

Preferred future, what changes do you forsee as an advanced practice nurse. Relate it to health care reform - Essay Example In order to be a quality-focused pediatric nurse practitioner capable of maximizing patient care and building staff unity, the nurse must take a leadership role within the organization in order to drive improvements. With health care reform currently on the forefront of society’s consciousness, it will be even more important to develop sound leadership skills in order to assist in this change process and also to improve relationships with patients of different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. The future of health care, after potential reform, will change the methods by which nurses conduct their job role responsibilities. However, since this reform has not yet been built into solid legislation, it would be appropriate to compare this potential future for nurses with a preferred future to discuss how best to build a more effective organization. The future of nursing will require an individual with the ability to bridge gaps between colleagues, managers and patients in order to adjust to new health care reform-driven changes. Health care reform is going to mean new demands for pediatric nurse practitioners, especially in terms of how management and nurses interact. Health care reform is going to change the process of controls within the organization, requiring more unity between different professional ranks of the business. In order to facilitate quality relationships of this type, the nurse â€Å"must be a diplomat, helping people get past their conflicts with one another and facilitate their working together† (Grossman and Valiga, 2009, p.138). Unfamiliar changes to health care delivery, imposed by the potential new reform policy, are going to create different reactions from colleagues and superiors. In some instances, these changes may be so radically-different from current operations that members of the organization try to resist these changes through lack

Zara Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Zara - Essay Example nd name of Zara and maintaining quality in the business operation processes will help the organization to capitalize on more potential business opportunities. The organization should not consider focus strategy as it is important for the organization to focus on broad market segment. It will help the organization to gain more competitive advantages. Grand Strategy The organization should also try to adopt and implement grand strategy in the business operation process in order to enhance decision making and strategy development process to set effective long term plans from several available alternatives. This grand strategy can be classified into four major strategies, such as growth strategy, stability strategy, retrenchment strategy and combination strategy. The management of the organization should adopt and implement growth strategy as it is important for the organization to achieve further growth. It is true that emergence of new entrants and adoption of online business activitie s are creating real threat for Zara. In addition to this, high labour cost is affecting the profit maximization aspect of Zara. Adoption of growth strategy will enhance the decision making and strategy development process of the organization. It is highly important for the organization to integrate online business operation process to achieve sustainable growth rate in this competitive industry. In addition to this, consideration of growth strategy in the decision making process will help the organization to adopt effective differentiation process that can influence the management of the organization to enter different fast fashion and fashion accessories industry to secure more market share and gain more potential competitive advantages. Functional Strategy Function strategy can be... The paper describes differentiation strategy which helped to develop the great brand - Zara. Zara already implemented product differentiation strategy. The organization always tries to offer differentiated clothes to target customers. The organization does not target a narrow market segment. Differentiated products for the people of all ages and different cultural background are the major success mantra of Zara. The organization should differentiate its business operation in. Fashion and accessories market is highly demanding and achieving strong growth rate. The organization should not consider focus strategy as it is important for the organization to focus on broad market segment. In conclusion, the report says that slow inventory turnover and critical supply chain management process are the major weaknesses of Zara. Therefore, it is important for Zara to source or prepare limited inventories according to the market demand and requirement. Appropriate production and supply according to the current market demand will help the organization to increase the efficiency of its inventory turnover. In addition to this, the organization should maintain short production cycle to reduce overall supply chain cost. High labour cost is another weakness of Zara. Therefore, it is important for the management of the organization to integrate automation in the business operation processes that can help to reduce the stress and pressure of the employees. High automation can improve business performance and can reduce the human resource management associated costs.

The Life and Work of Matsuo Basho

The Life and Work of Matsuo Basho The life of the great poet Matsuo Basho was one filled with modesty and adventure. His journeys throughout nature and his encounters with new ideas influenced him to create many poems and journals. These works became treasured by his friends and followers due to their unique style and poetic beauty. To this day, his life and works continue to be studied and loved by Japanese and non-Japanese people alike. By observing his life, extensive travels throughout Japan, and highly acclaimed works, one can learn why Matsuo Basho was and is considered to be the greatest and most influential haiku poet of all time. In 1644, near the Japanese village of Ueno, a samurai warrior and his wife gave birth to a son who they named Matsuo Kinsaku. The boy would be known by this name during his childhood and adolescent years, but would later on change it to Matsuo Basho. At that time, Basho’s father was likely to only have been a low ranking samurai, but the boy was still given the right to join the league of great warriors if he wanted to do so. Matsuo took no interest in this profession, because he had fallen in love with poetry. However, despite all this, he would spend quite a while wondering if he had made the right decision by dedicating his life to poetry. The reason for him taking interest in a career so polar opposite to that of a samurai is probably due to Basho’s childhood friend, Todo Yoshitada. Since he was a low ranking samurai, Basho’s father was likely serving under a local aristocratic family; so when Basho’s father died in 1656, Matsuo Basho too came to serve this family. The Todo family had a son named Yoshitada, a boy who was Basho’s elder by two years. Yoshitada had already long taken a fascination to poetry, and now Basho joined in the enthusiasm. With counselling from their poetry master, the two boys quickly took up the art of haikai no renga, an early form of haiku, together. Soon after, in 1662, Matsuo Basho composes his earliest known haiku, and a few years later, in 1664, Basho’s first collection of poems was released. Unfortunately, everything changed when Todo Yoshitada unexpectedly died in 1666 at only twenty-five years old. The loss of such a close friend left Basho so traumatized and deeply shocked that he resigned from serving the Todo family, and embarked on a long journey by himself. For the next few years he travelled to various cities, with no specific records of all of his whereabouts. He was likely hesitant about his decision to become a full time poet and was struggling over the many career options he was passing off because he wrote, â€Å"The alternatives battled in my mind and made my life restless† (Biography web). He did, however, continue to write many poems during this time. Basho’s first major step into bustling society was when he arrived in Edo, the modern day city of Tokyo. He had chosen to come to this busy city to study and craft his poetry skills. During his first year there in 1672, he started working at a waterworks company, began making a good reputation for himself, and in the years following, quickly became embraced by the literary community. Pretty soon Basho started up a poetry school, and nurtured the minds of many great young poets. It was during this time that he adopted the pseudonym Tosei, but he did not keep this name for long. Basho taught his students with a fatherly love and his students came to love and respect him. Through Basho’s teachings, the students were brought success when their works were eventually compiled and published under the title of The Best Poems of Tosei’s Twenty Disciples. Around the year 1680, Basho moved away from the lively city of Edo, and into the more relaxed area of Fukagawa. It was here that Basho’s disciples proved their love for him by building him a home. They also planted a banana tree by the hut that grew so well that Matsuo Tosei changed his name once more to the commonly known Matsuo Basho, meaning banana tree. Matsuo Basho lived in this hut for a few years, but he was not necessarily happy. By this point he was surrounded by success, but still felt incredibly lonely. The cure, he thought, would be to become a practitioner of Zen meditation. Everything turned for the worse when, in 1682, his house burned down, followed by his mother’s death in 1683. With no home at this point, he went to stay with a friend while his students rebuilt his home. His unhappiness remained with him, though, so he decided to do what he did before and set off on another trip throughout the land of Japan. Matsuo had four major journeys around the country. These trips lead him through many famous mountains and towns. Because Matsuo Basho was approaching middle age at this point, many worried for him. Travelling alone was a hazard at this time, and some thought that he would not survive the long treks between cities or, in a worst case scenario, be murdered by some bandits. Basho was aware of this and had even prepared a will in case such a situation ensued. Luckily, this never happened. The most famous of his trips was recorded in a journal titled Narrow Road to the Deep North, in which Basho travels on foot for over five months. He stopped at numerous locations such as hot spring resorts, temples, lakes, and natural wonders. During the entire extent of his travels, Basho recorded what he saw in forms of poetry. His poems left the internal theme they had exhibited before that point and instead focused on the natural beauty of the world. He wrote his most famous poems at this time: a haiku about a frog leaping into a pond. Essentially, his goal was to observe and record the elegance of the earth. In the same way, his path through the country itself was like a poem. His route was so lovely and exotic that tours of Japan are prepared following Basho’s own course. One might think that living such a nomadic life was tiring and lonesome, but Basho would disagree. To begin with, Basho was not always alone. During the trip of Narrow Road to the Deep North, Basho was accompanied by Kawai Sora, his old neighbour and student. Together they visited the sites that they had heard about through older poems, and due to Basho’s then religious state of mind, also visited many shrines and temples. By the end of the journey, Basho had completed the journal that would one day be known as his most famous piece of work. This was all because Basho did not view his roaming lifestyle as a burden, but instead thought that â€Å"Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home† (Matsuo web). Matsuo Basho’s worldview was very mature for his era. He believed that everyone was equal in that, in the end, the journey of life would always end in death. It is believed that his decision to live as a wanderer is based off of this worldview, and that he was physically living out the journey of life until death. A common theme in his writings called mujo, or impermanence, suggests the quickness of human life and nature. He tied this theme together with another similar idea often found in his writing, an idea of soft yet elegant changes in nature, such as the gradual changes of a stream over the years. Basho gradually ended his journeys as he approached his late forties. Though still immersed in his love of poetry, Basho decided to settle down in a new Basho hut built by his supporters. Unfortunately, he had become plagued by an illness, and a few years later, his beloved nephew, Toin, died. He became closed off from most social interactions because of this, and his illness only got worse. In 1694, Basho attempted to plan another journey to western Japan, but the illness overcame him and he passed. He was only fifty years old. From the very beginning, Basho was a boy who harbored a talented mind, and in the end, became a wise man with a unique worldview. His elegant outlook on life provided him with the ability to create works that have left scholars with countless topics for discussion. These works will likely continue to be observed for their thoughtfulness, and remembered for their important insights into the history of Japan. From birth to death, Matsuo Basho lived the life of a friend, a teacher, and a poet. Additionally, when it comes to his works, teachings, and travels, Matsuo Basho succeeded in engraving his name into the list of the world’s greatest poets. Works Cited Barnhill, David Landis. BashÃ…Â Ã¢â‚¬â„¢s Haiku. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Print. BashÃ…Â , Matsuo. The Lightning Flashes! U.S.A.: A Beka Book, Inc., 2013. Print. Biography of Matsuo Basho.Poem Hunter. 2 Jan 2012. Web. 25 February 2014. . Chamberlain, B.H. Prof. Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East. New York: Parke, Austin, and Lipscomb, Inc., 1917. Print. Chopra, Swati. â€Å"BashÃ…Â .† Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2012 ed. 2012. Web. Harris, Michelle. Matsuo Basho. National Geographic Magazine. 17 June 2008. Web. 3 February 2014. . Kohl, Stephen. Matsuo Basho. JZR Aardvark. 9 April 2000. Web. 5 January 2014. . Matsuo, Basho. Matsuo Basho Quotes. Brainy Quote. 2 April 2012. Web. 25 February 2014. < http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/matsuo_basho.html>. Norman, Howard. On the Poet’s Trail. National Geographic Magazine. February 2008. Web. 3 February 2014. . Matsuo Basho Early life Birth and family Finding his path Life in Edo Settling in Edo His school and students Travels throughout Japan Works created during his travels Worldview and death

Report on the Film “Black Cat, White Cat” by Emir Custurica Essay

have chosen to watch and report on the film â€Å"Black Cat, White Cat† by Emir Custurica for several reasons. Firstly, Custurica is a globally famous filmmaker, known in the US for his â€Å"Arizona Dream†. Secondly, Custurica does pay much attention to matters of culture in his films, so his works are very informative. Thirdly the characters of â€Å"Black Cat, White Cat† belong to different peoples and cultures, including Serbians, Gypsies and Bulgarians. So the film tells enough about cultural and cross-cultural communications. Produced in 1998, the film is a kind of romantic comedy telling a story of several young people in search of their love in the world of gangsters and smugglers. One of those smugglers named Matko Destanov owes money to a gangster named Dadan. Dadan is eager to find a husband for Afrodita – his midget sister and he proposes to settle the debt by marriage of Matko’s son Zare with his sister. However, Zare is in love with another girl named Ida, and Afrodita dreams o another man. After numerous funny and dangerous adventures all of the young people find their happiness, and Dadan finds himself in manure both in metaphorical and ordinary sense. The film is very ironic and easy to watch as a family comedy. As I have already noticed, the film tells much about cultural communications. Firstly these are family and friendship. The characters seem to be very family-oriented and â€Å"beautiful friendship† is one of the core motifs of the story. Young people dream of a family and stable relationships, older people desire to make their children happy as Zare’s grandfather and even such a savage man as Dadan wishes to do the will of his parents even though through violence. Personal relations are basic forces driving the characters in life, business and even crime. They rely upon help of their pals and relatives in virtually every action they take, thusly playing a tricky party game – each for own purposes but considering the will of the others. This can be illustrated by relations of Zare with his grandfather. Zare loves his grandfather and helps him to escape from hospital to return to his bacchanalian lifestyle, and the thankful grandfather gives all his money to Zare. Such approach to personal relations is full of traditionalism and is pretty different from the present situation in this country. Another cultural aspect, which might seem rather evil in this country is attitude of characters towards law. Throughout the film it may seem that there is no law and legal formalities at all. Customers are easily bribed, medical personnel is unable to control the patients, gangsters behave as actual rulers and an official solemnizing a marriages passively does everything what he is ordered to do, even knowing that marriage between Zare and Afrodita is forcible. However, the characters actually do not feel any discomfort from absence of formalities. Law is replaced by aforementioned personal relations, and perhaps they would feel unhappy from presence of legal obligations rather from absence of such obligations. There are many interesting minor cultural details in the film such as marriage customs, costumes, language features and other which, being combined together, create a fascinating impression of involvement in other culture. Films like â€Å"Black Cat, White Cat† cause spectators to become interested in strange lifestyles and habits forming an idea of global cultural diversity.

“The interrogation” by Edwin Muir

The poem â€Å"The interrogation† by Edwin Muir is about the different ways that people deal with and react in different situations. I think this poem is about a few emigrants who are illegally crossing the border to enter a country they are not lawfully permitted to. The interrogation that the poem talks about is the questioning that these people are put through by the law enforcement troops that these emigrants encounter at the border. We know that the poem is about this illegal emigration because at the beginning of the poem states, â€Å"and then came the patrol;† This confirms that there is a governmental group of people involved. I think the central opposition of the poem is about courage and fear. The way these people choose to handle the ‘interrogation' determines whether or not they will be able to cross the border. If they answer with courage and confidence then they will be much more likely to be allowed through as opposed to if they answer with fear. We know that they reacted unwisely in this scenario because the poem says they â€Å"hesitated† in their approach to crossing the border. This is what led them to be interrogated by the â€Å"patrol†. This has a direct relation to real life; you are more likely to succeed in things that you handle with courage then those that you handle with fear, as fear leads to suspicion. These people are doing an illegal act and we know that they handle the situation with the wrong approach. We are further confirmed that what these people are doing is illegal when the poem says â€Å"Must come out now, who, what we are,† It conveys a sense of deception to the readers. I also think that according to the poem some people, that were confident and came as families were let through to cross the border with ease. This is supported because the poem says, â€Å"The careless lovers in pairs go by,† Near the end of the poem, the poet talks about the response and state of mind of these emigrants. The poem tells us that these people are getting more nervous as they are being questioned more and more. This is a build-up in the poem and it demonstrates how the people are increasingly getting more nervous as this interrogation progresses. We know so from the following lines, â€Å"And the thoughtless field is near. We are on the very edge, Endurance almost done, And still the interrogation is going on.† There is a contrast between the different groups of people shown in this poem because the people that are going in â€Å"pairs† tend not to â€Å"hesitate† when they cross the border, whereas these other people do. This is a contrast between the different ways that people handle situations. We can assume, from the evidence that I have given that it is an interrogation that questions the actions of these emigrants and why they are trying to cross the border. These would be regular routine questions. The fact that the poem is written using â€Å"we† shows that there is more than one and perhaps it's a gang or group of people. However, the impression that is given to the readers is that these emigrants are innocent people just looking for a new home, rather than a group of criminals. The poem is written in clear language and has a lasting effect on the readers. It demonstrates how actions can determine where different people will end up in the long run. It gives the readers a chance to think of how and why some of the people were held back and interrogated while others weren't and crossed this road without difficulty. The effect of the courage and fear aspects is significant and seems like it was the main intention of the reader to highlight those features in the poem. They happen to be very effective techniques in catching the reader's attention. However, the poem is not so predictable and changes its style in which the points are pointed out to the reader often.