Blog 18

Summary: In the article, "The $2 camisole: How cheap is ruining our lives",by Mary Elizabeth Williams she talks about cheap prices and their quality. Black Friday is an oppertunity to buy stuff for an incredible low price. According to her, people have a mania to spent money on low cost supplies. Buying them for low prices can bounce off on the quality of the product. But some stores put a higher price on a low quality items. It seems the cheaper the product, the worse quality it is, but not everyone can afford a really expencive pair of glasses. The cheap quality makes us buy more and also spent more, because our stuff breaks easily.

Thesis: I agree with the author because I'm tired of throwing out my stuff after it breaks 2-3 weeks after the purchase.

Reason 1:The quality of the product is bad
Example: I bought a piece of jewlery from a tattoo shop, I payed a nice price for it, and it looked solid. Month later, I lost a piece at work.

Reason 2:Problems with phones
Example: My phone is not even a year old and it gets stuck. The sales person guaranteed the best service for a low price. Well the price that I payed, I have the results.

Blog 14: Ideas for Improving My Performance in the CATW

Strategy for my next CATW, based on the example of theannotations of a student who read the same reading, I underlined same sentances, that were the most meaningful to the reading, as the student in the example. But I think I should underline more, and ask myself questions, so later I will understand the reading faster, when I would want to go back and have a fast glance at the passage. Other thing, which is important, I should connect the sentences together so they compose a passage that is understandable to a reader. Plan out a map so I will follow it and prevent different ideas to be all over the paper.

Blog 13: "How to Do One Thing at a Time"

      In an article "How to Do One Thing at a Time", written by Nancy Jones, she introduces us to our reality. Jones writes about our habits of multitasking, and shows us examples of studies that prove to fail of being a multitasker. Students at a Stanford University were split into two groups, one that had to do 3 things at the same time, the other had 10 minutes for each task. Guess who did better? The group that had 10 minutes for each task did better. "A tremendous amount of evidence shows that the brain does better when it's performing tasks in sequence rather than all at one"(Nass).
      Multitasking seems efficient for many people, they feel as if doing many things at the same time, they accomplish more. I guess our brains are not that advanced as we would like them to be, because talking on the phone and driving or texting and walking on the street, makes us focus on one of the tasks more than on the other.
      It is against the law to hold a cellphone and drive a car, there were many accidents caused by that. The reason is, the driver was probably focused on holding the phone and talking rather than steering the wheel and paying attention to the traffic. My dad got into an accident because he forgot his bluetooth, but had to make a call. He was not injured, but the car was and his insurance went up. But do the bluetooth devices help? Maybe a little, but some people get too involved into their conversations.
      I have seen people, mostly teenagers, who were engaged in texting that they forgot they are on the street. Once, this guy was on his phone and texting. When he got to the street and started crossing it on red light, a car came but it stopped just in time. The guy got so scared by the honk that he dropped his phone on the ground and i shattered into pieces. It made me laugh so hard, my dad thought I was crazy.
      From my experiences and observations, I am sure that multitasking is not possible. It's either we do those things not 100% right, or we might cause an accident. We can't walk and text or drive and be on the phone, because we are putting ourselves and people around us in danger.

Blog 12: Michael Pollan's advice on how to eat healthier

Cold Stone PB&C (Gotta Have It size, 24 fl oz)

                                                2,010 calories
                                                131 g fat (68 g saturated)
                                                153 g sugar

      Michael Pollan gave a lot of good advices in his book called In Defense of Food. I did not read the actual book but I read a fragment of it. The way that fragment was written, it made me laugh a little, because I felt as if Pollan was making fun of the food that we consume now when he wrote "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food". He also has great tips and points, which are helpful to keep a healthy diet and weight, when he writes about eating slowly with company, and consuming lots of vegetables.
      Everything that Pollan, wrote makes sense to me because it's what dietics in U.S. are encouraging people to do, for example, drink V8 because it has couple of daily servings of veggies hidden by the taste of fruits. The thing that I agree the most with the author is the fact, that people in U.S. don't eat enough of produce during the day, sometimes its caused because they can't afford it, I'm not even mentioning the organic produce. What might be hard to accomplish is being able to do gardening, especially in New York City because not everyone has access to the ground, some of us live on 3rd, 10th, or 25th floor. I wish, I could do some gardening on my own but my present lifestyle enables me because I live on the 3rd floor and there is no possible way to garden on fire escape. Of course we tried to have some flowers at least, but they either didn't have enough sun or squirrels and birds were digging them out, Once we even had a nest with pigeon's eggs. It was a complete fail, so me and my Mom gave up on any kind of planting.

Don’t

Blog 11: "Let Them Eat Fat"

      In "Let Them Eat Fat" Critser discisses fast food consumption in America. He explains how people in his lower-middle-income area stop by places, like McDonald's, for a quick bite, late at night. The fast food companies attract customers by letting them supersize their meal for less than a dolar. But with the supersizion, comes a bigger amount of calories that are being consumed. That concerns dietics in U.S. because more teenagers are getting obese by the arrival of huge meals and physical activity amonge them drops by almost a half.
      One thing this article reminds me of is me and my friends because we used to eat McDonald's late at night. Later, we would complain about our weight or high cholesterol level at age of seventeen.
      The article mentioned poor people in low-middle-income areas, I don't think we are poor, we just found it more convienient because it was open 24/7. There were no other stores or restaurants open at 3 a.m. to get a warm meal. It was an easy access and tasted, could say, well. They always had nice advertisments, telling us to get more and more food.
      I am interested in dietition and I have been observing people around me, since I opened my eyes. Teens don't really watch what they are eating, and I used to be the same. I was in my doctor's office when I stood on the scale an it showed that I was 160 lbs. heavy. That hit me hard and I decided to lose weight by eating healthier and excersizing. That's when I realized there is more thicker teenagers than those who are thin.
      I think that the reason for teenagers being obese is not only because fast food is cheap, but because fast food industry makes themselves easy to access. They are mostly open 24/7, they have drive thrus, and there is so many of them all over the place. It's also true they are cheap and you can get a lot of food with as much as $5, but the dark and hidden secret are the calories and fats. And those are not the good and healthy ingredients, but the bad ones, which are the cause of so called "love handles".

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