The Stronger summary August Strindberg BBS 2nd year English

 The Stronger 
August Strindberg(1849-1912)

Characters:

MME. X- an actress, married
MME.Y- an actress, unmarried
Bob- MME. X's husband (never appears in the play)

Scene - The corner of a ladies' cafe. Two little iron tables, a red velvet sofa, several chairs. Enter Mme. X dressed in winter clothes, carrying a Japanese basket on her arm.

The Stronger is a play where only one character speaks while the other listens and reacts only, written by August Strindberg. Miss Y is Mrs. X's husband's ex-girlfriend. Mrs. X met Miss Y in a cafe. She greeted her and then made fun of her because she was alone there on Christmas Eve. To make Miss Y jealous, Mrs. X showed gifts that she bought for her family 
She revealed that Miss Y whose name is Amelie was her friend, she made her husband to be friendly with her. Later, they fell in love. When Mrs. X knew this, their friendship broke. When Miss Y and Bob were in love, Miss Y used to offer him tulips in everything that Mrs. X had often noticed. In fact, Mrs.X hates tulips but to please Bob she had bought a decorated tulip slipper on Christmas Eve for him.

Mrs. X said that Miss Y had destroyed her life. Due to Miss Y, she had to like everything that Miss Y liked only to impress her husband. Mrs. X expressed that Miss Y had eaten her like a worm, therefore, she didn't like her. It means she changed a lot to be similar to Miss Y, and she pretended to be the stronger.
 

She said that Bob didn't love her anymore. She invited her to come home to see their love. At last, she said that she had everything but Miss Y had nothing. She couldn't keep a man's love with tulips and thanked her for teaching her husband to love and left the cafe saying that she was going home to love her husband.

Who is stronger?
At one level Miss Y seemed stronger than Mrs. X because she became successful to get Mrs. X's husband's love but at the end, we found that Mrs. X succeeds to keep her husband with herself and her children. She did all that she could to get her husband back. In fact, she has changed herself totally into Miss Y to make her husband happy like Miss Y. Therefore, at the festival time she is with her husband and children and Miss Y is alone at the cafe.

Personal view
We should be ourselves and should not change completely just to keep someone in our life. Otherwise, we are insulting ourselves. Here Mrs. X tried her best to keep her husband with herself but she completely changed herself. This is not good.

Please read the textbook for correct and full information. The summary may misguide you or cannot provide full information. 

The Rights of Animals summary

The Kiss summary

The Gift of the Magi Summary B. Ed. First Year compulsory English

The Gift of the Magi Summary 

Della, a poor woman, had long hair. She felt proud of it. She married Mr. James Dillingham Young. Shortly named Jim. Thin and only 22 years. He had a golden watch without chain. He earned 30 dollars a week. But later he was being paid only 20 dollars. It was not much for a week. Everything had cost more than the lady had expected. They were living in furnished rooms at a cost of 8 dollars a week. 

Della had one dollar and eighty-seven cents. Before the day of Christmas, she counted the money three times and thought that it was very little to buy a gift for her husband Jim.

 

Della stood before the glass. She pulled down her hair and let it fall to its complete length. They were proud of her hair and Jim’s gold watch. Her hair was shining like a falling stream.

Due to her poverty, she went to the market and sold her hair for twenty dollars. She bought a gold watch chain for Jim’s gold watch. When she arrived home, she felt odd as she looked strange with her short hair. Della held the watch chain in her hand and requested to the god that Jim would think her still pretty. 

The door opened and Jim stepped in. His eyes looked strongly at Della. It filled her with fear. Della went to him and told him that she cut off her hair to buy a gift for him and her hair would grow again. 

Actually, he had brought beautiful combs as a gift for Della's long hair. Della had seen those combs in a shop but could not buy them due to lack of money. Now they were hers, but her hair was gone. She was happy at first but later she felt upset.

Della asked him to give his watch to see how the gold watch looked with the chain that she had bought for it. Jim sat down and said that he had sold the watch to get the money to buy the combs. 

Both of them had sold the most valuable things they owned to buy a gift for their partner. They are the wise Magi. Their gifts were doubtless wise ones. They proved love is more important than material possessions.

The Rights of Animals summary Brigid Brophy

 The Rights of Animals by Brigid Brophy

summary

In "The Rights of Animals" (1066) written by Brigid Brophy. She wittily argues that it is the responsibility of the human beings to behave decently towards the animals. She asserts (claims) that our relationship to animals is one of "unremitting (endless) exploitation" and argues that we are under moral obligation to respect their rights and spare them pain and terror (save them from pain and terror)

We employ their work, we eat and wear them, exploit them, sacrifice them to gods, kill them for scientific experiments, and put wild animals in prison i.e zoos and circuses.

Cranks and Kill animals

The essayist says that every new voice for rights seems cranky. Talking about the rights of slaves would have been crank in the ancient world similarly in the future it will seem unbelievable that we do not notice the immorality of our oppression of animals.

Animal exploiters justify themselves by saying that they are saving animals from winter and calve do not mind being tied up because they have never known anything else.

The writer is a vegetarian. She says we eat meat to get joy but by killing an animal we put an end to all the animals' joys along with its life.

Sentimentality

Here she rejects of being a sentimentalist and ignorant of economic realities. She says that she won't kill an animal in order to eat it, but she will willingly eat an animal which had died of old age and the body is kept in hygiene. In this sense, she is not a sentimentalist because she is no respecter of dead bodies whereas other never will eat a dead animal. In this sense, she can save the food that could go waste. It means she is well aware of economic realities than others.

According to her, it is our moral obligation not to give pain to domestic animals. They also feel hurt. Even if we save them from pain, we don't have the rights to kill them just only because we like their taste. 

The only genuine moral problem

If there is a direct clash between an animal's life and a human one then only we have the only genuine moral problem to choose human life over an animal's life. Meat is not essential to human life, our diet doesn't propose such clash.

Vivisection, hunting, and sacrificing activities are an atrocity (cruelty). One of the saddest and most foolish of our superstitious beliefs about sacrificing animals is our belief that by killing them we can somehow survive. If we ban animals acts from circuses many unemployed acrobats and jugglers will get jobs.

she does not keep animals superior or equal to human beings. She just wants that being superior species, rational beings who are capable of moral choice- it is our moral obligation and duty to recognize and respect the rights of animals. 

Please read the textbook for correct and full information. The summary may misguide you or cannot provide full information. 

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On Warts summary

The Stronger summary

On Warts summary Lewis Thomas BBS 2nd year English

The New Physics summary                                           The Rights of Animals summary

On Warts by Lewis Thomas

Summary

On warts is an essay where the writer discusses warts and their treatment. According to the writer, warts are wonderful structures. They appear on any part of the skin like mushrooms on a damp lawn. warts are both useful and essential as the exuberant (very energetic) cells of a wart are the elaborate reproductive apparatus of a virus. 

Warts can be made to go away by thinking by hypnotic suggestions. For the writer, it is more surprising than cloning or recombinant DNA, or acupuncture. No one really understands exactly how the cure works. Is it by science or by magic? And the strangest thing is they vanish without a trace. In hypnotic suggestion, instruction is given in a state of hypnosis to patients' unconscious mind to cure warts. He presents a study in which warts patients were hypnotized, and the suggestion was made that their warts would begin to go away. The results were positive.

The unconscious mind is powerful in the sense that you give yourself thoughts and listen to opinions from others on how to treat and get rid of warts. Therefore, the writer himself wishes to have warts to see how the unconscious mind works. It is mysterious how the unconscious mind can prompt warts to disappear. The writer being a doctor gives hypnotic suggestions, to cure warts. At last, he says to start a war against warts, warts and all. 

Please read the textbook for correct and full information. The summary cannot give you full information or may misguide you.

The New Physics summary Fritjof Capra BBS 2nd Year English

The New Physics by Fritjof Capra - summary

Physics is the branch of natural science that deals with the things like motion energy, space, time, force, etc. In 1900, when a number of revolutionary new concepts about the nature of matter were proposed there comes a division in the field of physics and divided into classical and modern physics.

At the beginning of modern physics, there is a great role of Albert Einstein's intellectuality. Einstein strongly believed in nature's inherent ( inborn) harmony. Throughout his scientific life, his keen interest was to find a unified foundation (base) of physics. He set out toward this goal by building a common framework for electrodynamics and mechanics. These are two separate theories of classical physics. This framework is known as the special theory of relativity according to which time and distance are not absolute. It brought a change in the traditional concepts of space and time and thus weakened one of the foundations of the Newtonian world view.

In 1905 he published two articles one is the above given special theory of relativity (ten years later he included gravity in it and proposed this theory as general theory of relativity) another is the theory of atomic phenomena - it was a new way of looking at electromagnetic radiation which was to become characteristic of quantum theory. Relativity theory was almost entirely completed by Einstein. However, the complete quantum theory was worked out twenty years later by a whole team of physicists. these articles revolutionized scientific thoughts and changed the way people view space, time, mass, and energy. Einstein's scientific papers are intellectual monuments that mark the beginning of twentieth-century thought.

Experimental investigation of atoms in the 20th century brought other major development, physicists discovered several phenomena connected with the structure of atoms, such as X-rays and radioactivity which were unimaginable in terms of classical physics.

In the history of physics, Darwin and Copernicus gave the revolutionary theory which introduced great changes in the general understanding of the universe and shocked many people. In the 20th century for the first time, physicists faced a serious challenge to their ability to understand the universe. They had struggled to understand the strange and unexpected reality revealed to them in their exploration of atomic and subatomic phenomena, their way of thinking, basic concepts, language were insufficient to describe atomic phenomena. Later they realized that paradoxes are encountered whenever one tries to describe atomic phenomena in terms of the classical concept. Then they began to learn to ask nature the right question in atomic experiments to avoid contradictions.

Finally, they found the mathematical formulation of quantum theory but its conceptual framework was not easy to accept. The foundation of physics had begun moving. A consistent, organic, holistic, and ecological world view is now emerging. This view is being discussed by scientists who are deeply interested in the philosophical implications of modern physics. The universe is no longer seen as a Machine, made up of a multitude of objects (mechanistic Cartesian view of the world) but has to be pictured as one indivisible, dynamic whole whose parts are essentially interrelated. In the end, Capra tries to bring together science and physics because both are observations. However, Physicists derive their knowledge from experiments and mystics from meditative insights. Mystical thoughts provide a consistent and relevant philosophical background to the theories of contemporary science.

Please read the textbook for the right ideas. The ideas presented here are not complete and may misguide you.

Light My Lucky summary

Light My Lucky – Summary, R. Scholes, N.R. Comley, and G.L. Ulmer

Light My Lucky – R. Scholes, N.R. Comley, and G.L. Ulmer

 Summary

This is a discussion of a “Lucky Strike” Cigarette ad. It points out how clever the ad is and how important it is for consumers to learn how to make a critical scrutiny (review) of ads or any text made for promotional purposes.

Writers describe an advertisement for Lucky Strike cigarette. Cigarettes ads are cleverly presented. The ad looks very simple. It presents a photo of a young, healthy woman, holding an unlighted cigarette in a hand that rests on her head. She is outdoors perhaps suggesting cigarettes can be smoked openly. The words “Light My Lucky” appear in quotation marks perhaps she says this or wants. At the bottom of the photo, there is a surgeon general’s warning: “Smoking by Pregnant Women May Result in Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, and Low Weight.”

The writers examine the meaning of light and surgeon warning. The word light gives two meanings. It is used in a punning way in the ad. One meaning is fire and another is weightless (opposite to heavy). If we take the word light as fire, it is metaphorically suggesting for sex. Similarly, if we relate the meaning of light with weightless then it means the cigarette is very useful, free from bad ingredients, light cigarettes have less tar and nicotine.

The “light” in Light My Lucky thus refers to both the sexual approach and the healthiness of the light cigarette. Similarly, the Surgeon’s warning is so tricky, that it only warns pregnant women effects of taking Lucky Strike cigarettes. It means others will not be affected by smoking it.

The ad thus shows metonymic associations of the cigarette with beauty, health, and erotic pleasures. This is an extremely clever and well-made ad. Consumers simply come under the influence of pictures and words. They may easily believe that taking Light Strike cigarettes is a symbol of dignity and splendor.

 

*Pun means bringing two meanings in a single word.

*Metaphor is a comparison between two things that are otherwise unrelated. A direct comparison Ex- he is a snake.

*Metonymic - It is a way of replacing an object or idea with something related to it instead of stating what is actually meant. Ex -"Give me a hand" means to give someone help.

 Click  Eveline summary

The Etiquette of Freedom summary