Though with a thousand of ‘No’s in my heart, I still went to this recommendatory English for the Second Language class imposed to me. Luckily I had a fun teacher and learned something.

A multicultural and multilingual society is a much healthier society than a one race one language society.”

At the first glance, this statement may seem true. In a modern society, it is a universal belief that a highly diversified society is healthier and provides better opportunity for human development. However, even with the general truth behind this almost self-evident statement, we should still revisit and re-evaluate it in a scientific way. It is difficult to provide a quantitative measure for identifying how healthy a society is. Generally speaking, a healthy society means a fair, free and humanistic society which provides its people equal rights and opportunity to develop and itself opportunity to become more prosperous.

History has shown diversity will improve and propel a society for better advancement. Take China for example, the paramount of its federalism dynasty, Tang, was the most open and diversified period in its history. During Tang period, the emperors encouraged and welcomed the immigrants from all over the world, to study, research and exchange ideologies, trade, reside and intermarry in China.  After Tang dynasty, the emperors of China took the more conservative routes and closed its door to other nations and stopped from learning from other nations. This policy had become to the extreme in Qing dynasty. The Qing Empire declined and fell hard inevitably, not long after living in the dream of being the top of the world. The USA is another good example for being a successful multicultural and multilingual society. Since its establishment, the US government has encouraged immigrations and received great results.  The diverse races, nationalities and cultures from all over the world has injected the motivation and vibe to propel its development, based on the “Everyone is born equal” creed they believe.

But the distinction between different races and cultures in one society has also created unpleasant stories. In New York City, where can be considered the most diversified place in the USA, the fights between different racial gangsters perform every day.  Less extremely but not negligible, the partial favor to one’s own race in competition is also a prevailing phenomenon. The miscommunications and misunderstandings between different cultures and language speakers may escalate to a situation that the law and policy enforcement to guarantee the peace could become very tedious to make the society very inefficient. In my opinion, there should be a balance of the diversity in a society to assure the healthiness. That being said, however, extreme advocates of single race single language, such as the inhumane purgatory of other races and nationalities inside one society, should never be tolerated by the world. Those extremes of single race conservative ideas had created too many miserable memories in the world history.

Additional instructor’s comments about your submission

Shanshan,

You set up your argument really well i the first paragraph. This was really good! As usual, you make a lot of really great points. I don’t have the crossout feature on the computer I am using, so I just highlighted words below if I deleted a word before them… So I hope my suggestions make sense! Anyway, nice job.

Alison

At first glance, this statement may seem true. In a modern society, it is a universal belief that a highly diversified society is healthier and provides better opportunity for human development. However, even with the general truth behind this almost self-evident statement, we should still revisit and re-evaluate it in a scientific way. It is difficult to provide a quantitative measure for identifying how healthy a society is. Generally speaking, a healthy society means a fair, free and humanistic society which provides its people equal rights and opportunity to develop and itself opportunity to become more prosperous.

History has shown diversity will improve and propel a society for better advancement. Take China for example, the paramount of its federalism dynasty, Tang, was the most open and diversified period in its history. During the Tang period, the emperors encouraged and welcomed the immigrants from all over the world, to study, research and exchange ideologies, trade, reside and intermarry in China.  After the Tang dynasty, the emperors of China took the more conservative routes and closed its doors to other nations and stopped learning from other nations. This policy had become extreme in the Qing dynasty. The Qing Empire declined and fell hard inevitably, not long after living in the dream of being the top of the world.

The USA is another good example for being a successful multicultural and multilingual society. Since its establishment, the US government has encouraged immigrations and received great results.  Diverse races, nationalities and cultures from all over the world have injected the motivation and vibe to propel its development, based on the “Everyone is born equal” creed they believe.

But the distinction between different races and cultures in one society has also created unpleasant stories. In New York City, which can be considered the most diversified place in the USA, fights between different racial gangsters happen every day.  Less extremely but not negligible, the partial favor to one’s own race in competition is also a prevailing phenomenon. The miscommunication and misunderstandings between different cultures and language speakers may escalate to a situation that requires the law and policy enforcement to guarantee the peace, whichcould become very tedious and make the society very inefficient. In my opinion, there should be a balance of diversity in a society to assure its healthiness. That being said, however, extreme advocates of single race single language, such as the inhumane purgatory of other races (*Do you mean ‘ethnic genocide’?) and nationalities inside one society, should never be tolerated by the world. Those extremes of single race conservative ideas have created too many miserable memories in world history.

Gait analysis, which means the study of animal locomotion, esp. of human beings, has been an established research area for various medical and healthcare diagnoses. In orthopedics and prosthetics, gait analysis is essential to identify the pathology and assess the efficacy of the orthopedic assistant or prosthetics prescribed. For example, the efficacy of Ankle-Foot Orthosis (AFO) usually prescribed to cerebral palsy (CP) patients, remains unclear. In study on osteoarthritis, knee surgery recovery and rehabilitation, gait analysis focusing on knee joints angle is the key to evaluate the treatment. Studies on recovery and rehabilitation from knee surgery have shown that gait analysis focusing on knee joint angles is the key to evaluating the efficacy of treatment. In elderly healthcare, gait analysis has also played an important role in studies of fall risks and fall preventions, in reason that falls can worsen the health situation of, or be detrimental to the aged population. Even in cognitive and neuropsychology studies, gait analysis becomes an important parameter because of the close relation between human cognitive skills and motor function. For example, some researchers have shown the research value of gait analysis in Parkinson disease and early childhood autism diagnosis, respectively.

The quality of gait research can highly depends on the tools used in the gait analysis. Initially, gait analysis was mainly relied on observation by eyes, later with augmented tools such as camera with capability of continuous picture capturing. Such gait analysis are only limited to the qualitative level from the non-quantitative tools, which fail to provide further information in discriminate the nuances in gaits that vary slightly different. Today, optical motion capturing system, which tracks the spatial position of body segments by infrared camera, provides highly accurate data for gait research. However, while many gait analysis requires natural environment, out-of-lab use, such optical motion capturing system can be expensive and limited to in-lab use. More recently, the development of on-body wearable inertial sensor enables gait analysis to be realized in real-world. With MEMS technology, these motion sensors can be made in a very small form factor and be wearable to human body with less invasiveness.

Additional instructor’s comments about your submission

Shanshan,

Nice clarification in the first sentence and good beginning. I think you may have repeated or forgotten to edit out a sentence in the middle of the first paragraph. There are just a few suggestions below. This is really interesting! I didn’t know you were interested in things like this.

Alison

Gait analysis, which means the study of animal locomotion, esp. of human beings, has been an established research area for various medical and healthcare diagnoses. In orthopedics and prosthetics, gait analysis is essential to identify the pathology and assess the efficacy of the orthopedic assistant or prosthetics prescribed. For example, the efficacy of Ankle-Foot Orthosis (AFO) usually prescribed to cerebral palsy (CP) patients, remains unclear. In studies on osteoarthritis, knee surgery recovery and rehabilitation, gait analysis focusing on knee joints angle is the key to evaluating the treatment. Studies on recovery and rehabilitation from knee surgery have shown that gait analysis focusing on knee joint angles is the key to evaluating the efficacy of treatment.(*Is this the same piece from the sentence before?) In elderly healthcare, gait analysis has also played an important role in studies of fall risks and fall preventions, in reason that falls can worsen the health situation of, or be detrimental to the aged population. Even in cognitive and neuropsychology studies, gait analysis becomes an important parameter because of the close relationship between human cognitive skills and motor functions. For example, some researchers have shown the research value of gait analysis in Parkinson’s Disease and early childhood autism diagnosis, respectively.

The quality of gait research can highly depends on the tools used in the gait analysis. Initially, gait analysis was mainly relied on visual observation by eyes, later with augmented tools such as a camera with capability of continuous picture capturing. Such gait analysis are only limited to the qualitative level from the non-quantitative tools, which fail to provide further information in discriminating between nuances in gaits that vary slightly different. Today, optical motion capturing systems, which tracks the spatial position of body segments by infrared camera, provideshighly accurate data for gait research. However, while much gait analysis requires a natural environment, out-of-lab use, such an optical motion capturing system can be expensive and limited to in-lab use. More recently, the development of an on-body, wearable, inertial sensor enables gait analysis to be realized in the real-world. With MEMS technology, these motion sensors can be made in a very small form factor and be worn on the human body with less invasiveness.

What is your heritage?

When heritage is brought up in a conversation, I always wonder what exactly it is to represent my country. For a Chinese, this word has infinite interpretations. However, the first thing comes to my mind is always Chinese food, which usually foster each Chinese’s appetite she/he can never get rid of in his/her whole life.  Generally speaking, Chinese base their staple food on rice and noodles, with countless kinds of dishes they’ve created and inherited since they mastered the usage of fire.  It is mission impossible to identify some certain types of food to represent Chinese food. However, there is a stereotype that people in the North tend to favor saltier taste food, Southeast sweet, Southwest spicy and West sour. One can only know what Chinese food is when she/he visits China.

Ideology also says a lot about a nation. For China, it is a mixture of the traditional philosophies, contemporary communism and influence from other countries. It takes a while to explain this complicated matter.  The traditional ideology was also a mixture of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. Confucianism was the most dominating mainstream philosophy rooted in every Chinese’s heart, while Taoism can be considered as the primitive ancient Chinese metaphysics to explain the world. Both Confucianism and Taoism were born natively in China, whereas Buddhism was imported from India. Though the fact Buddhism was originally a foreign religion didn’t prevent Chinese people’s adopting nature to tailor to their own pleasure. The mixture of Taoism and Buddhism is usually referred as Zen. I don’t have the level to show the depth of Zen, I can just say every ancient Chinese intellect had studied Zen in their life. Since the establishment of the New China, communism has been adopted for the national ideology.  This ideology has been serving as the beautiful belief of this nation for more than half a century, however, it is under heavy influence of western culture and the foundation of this belief has begun shaken.  Some still hold communism belief and some don’t. Nevertheless, the desire of pursuing a happy life is the same to every Chinese with the idea of Confucianism they’ve never given up.

Cultural traditions such as festivals and rituals are also conversed a lot when talking about China. I’m fascinated about traditional festivals because of every festival has a enchanting mythology behind it. Of course, the special food associated with these festivals cannot be omitted for the charm of these festivals. Several major festivals include Spring Festival to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year, Dragon Boat Day in memory of a great poet Qu Yuan, Mid-autumn Day to celebrate the harvest and family get-together (kind of sounds like Halloween and Thanksgiving), with delicious food as dumpling, Zongzi and Mooncake associated with each festival respectively.

Additional instructor’s comments about your submission

This is great! I think it’s also interesting how many other countries try to recreate what they call “Chinese food” and never seem to get it quite right. I have only really had food from Taiwan, but I wish I was more familiar with the mainland food.

China’s history and heritage is also very fascinating to me. The country has held on to powerful beliefs such as Buddhism and Confuscian ideology and seems to have an interesting mix now. Thanks for sharing!! I really enjoyed it. I made some corrections in blue so you can compare with the original.

Alison

What is your heritage?

When heritage is brought up in a conversation, I always wonder what exactly it is to represent my country. For a Chinese, this word has infinite interpretations. However, the first thing comes to my mind is always Chinese food, which usually fosters each Chinese’s person’s appetite which she/he can never get rid of in his/her whole life.  Generally speaking, Chinese base their staple food on rice and noodles, with countless kinds of dishes they’ve created and inherited since they mastered the usage of fire.  It is mission impossible to identify some certain types of food to represent Chinese food. However, there is a stereotype that people in the North tend to favor saltier taste food, Southeast sweet, Southwest spicy and West sour. One can only know what Chinese food is when she/he visits China.

Ideology also says a lot about a nation. For China, it is a mixture of the traditional philosophies, contemporary communism and influence from other countries. It takes a while to explain this complicated matter.  The traditional ideology was also a mixture of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. Confucianism was the most dominating mainstream philosophy rooted in every Chinese’s heart, while Taoism can be considered as the primitive ancient Chinese metaphysicsused to explain the world. Both Confucianism and Taoism were born natively in China, whereas Buddhism was imported from India. Though the fact that Buddhism was originally a foreign religion didn’t prevent Chinese people’s adopting nature to tailor it to their own pleasure. The mixture of Taoism and Buddhism is usually referred as Zen. I don’t have the level to show the depth of Zen, I can just say every ancient Chinese intellect had studied Zen in their life. Since the establishment of the New China, communism has been adopted for the national ideology.  This ideology has been serving as the beautiful belief of this nation for more than half a century, however, it is under heavy influence of western culture and the foundation of this belief has begun to shake. Some still hold communist beliefs and some don’t. Nevertheless, the desire of pursuing a happy life is the same to every Chinese with the idea of Confucianism they’ve never given up.

Cultural traditions such as festivals and rituals are also conversed a lot when talking about China. I’m fascinated about traditional festivals because of every festival has an enchanting mythology behind it. Of course, the special food associated with these festivals cannot be omitted for the charm of these festivals. Several major festivals include Spring Festival to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year, Dragon Boat Day in memory of a great poet Qu Yuan, Mid-

Great opening sentence! However, it isn’t clear if it has caught the attention of German society or the international society. Also, Neo-Nazi should be capitalized. J  “Neo-Nazi” is either used as an adjective or a single person, where “Neo-Nazism” is the movement.

I have highlighted mistakes and places where it sounds a little awkward. Although it may seem unnecessary, you also need to explain why Nazism was bad and what the implications are of a rise in a Neo-Nazi mentality or movement. In other words, make the problem clear from the beginning.

I really like the perspective you give. You seem to have good insight into this problem. You just have a few problems with some of the work forms.

Suggested Grade: A-

Though appearing to be a global phenomenon, the rise of neo-nazi in Germany has increasingly caught the attention of society. It is a political extreme attempting to justify the historical impact of Nazism and revive the Nazism. Inheriting the Nazism ideology of World War II, neo-nazists seek opportunities to convene in the form of public movements, causing stirs in German society or even globally.

To solve this social issue, further investigation on the reason behind this phenomenon is needed. It is interesting to notice that although with intense emphasis on “denazification” in the retrospect to their war crime in Germany after World War II, the neo-nazism becomes popular among the young German generations, gaining a considerable amount of followers in East Germany.  This is partially because the former Nazi remembers retained their ideology and beliefs and passed it to the new generation. To prevent the rise of ht e neo-nazi trend, a possible solution is to launch and enforce strict laws and policies. However, in fact, the German government does enact strict laws to prohibit the neo-nazi movement without desirable outcome. From my perspective, I highly doubt that stricter laws would be more effective. I think new education ideas in humanistic should be discussed and developed to educate the young generations. Meanwhile, since this is a worldwide issue residing in the wide divide between people with different religions, nationalities, and various cultural backgrounds, a global dialogue on such matter should be initialized as a worldwide movement, discussed  not only by academia and politic elites, but also by the general public.