BLOG 7: Have Fun with Making Videos

I have been in Singapore for nearly four months. During this period, I have being trying many new things, one of which is making videos with iMovie. I find that it is really challenging, interesting and meaningful to making videos.

Above all, it is challenging to start from scratch to learn to make videos. You must patiently try to explore the features of the video software and find out the functions of every icon. Apart from this, the most difficult problem for me is to match the pictures to the rhythm of the background music.

However challenging making a video is, I am always interested in it because it is really interesting! You will satisfy yourself when you handle one problem after another and have a great sense of achievement after you have finish your work.

Now, we come to the meaning of making videos. Let me introduce the videos I made first. 1. I made a video of my friends in Chongqing University as a present for New Year to them. 2. I made a video of my family as a present for Chinese New Year. 3. I made a video to memory my Senior School life. 4. I made the video for my Orientation Camp’s group to present in the Talent Show. 5. I made a video as an AD for CELC in class. 6. I made a video for Ji Yi’s birthday. From examples above, I think the meaning of making a video is to record our precious life, memory our past and celebrate events. One special meaning is that videos can be saved permanently and not like other things, the value of them increases when time passes by. Imagine after many years, you open the videos you made today and recall the sweet time you were in. How nice the feeling could be!!!

Well, anyway, I have been a little bit crazy about making videos and I hope all of you can join to explore the joy in it with me.

Blog 6: My Discovery in the Singapore Zoo

Last Sunday, we went to Singapore Zoo to have our study of service learning program. At there, I gained not only the primary methodology of a successful service for others, but also a new realization of a wonderful zoo.
I found many differences between most Chinese zoos and the Singapore Zoo. However, I think the biggest and the most important difference is the distance between people and the nature. The difference is shown in many aspects.
First of all, Singapore Zoo provides more possibility for people to communicate with animals. Sometimes, it seems as if we are the ones being watched by animals but not the animals, especially when we walk on a narrow road through a jungle or a bush because most of the animals are living in habitats free and comfortably without a limitation of a cage made of iron wire. For instance, when I got out the lecture hall, I amazingly found that there were many bats sleeping soundly above my head. When I went across a bridge, I saw some crocodiles having sunshine bath comfortably. I also saw some orangutans doing some difficult movements like some gymnastic athletes on a rope above. Two Great Tortoises were lying on the ground without any movements like big stones near us. Some small kangaroos were palying and taking photos with people. Two white tigers were having a bath in a pond not far away from us. The natural and relaxing environment really impressed me a lot. I could imagine that if the tigers do not have danger to us, we could even take photos and play with them. To sum up, the zoo gives people more chances to be in touch with the nature and close to the animals.
Moreover, many buildings in the Singapore Zoo mix well with the nature. I saw that many houses were made of wood and had the same colors with the surroundings. What impressed me most was the toilets because they were well decorated in many details. The washbowl looked like a root of a big tree and the partition was like a fence made of small trees. There was even a fish pond in the toilet. All of them made us feel as if in the wild nature far away from big cities without noise and pollution.
As we can see, the Singapore Zoo makes people closer to the nature and let people enjoy the experience of communicating with animals. Actually, these are what we really want in a zoo. Thus, there is no doubt that the Singapore Zoo is so popular.

Blog 6：My Most Precious Gifts

Just as many people, I have received many gifts ever since I remembered. I cherish each gift that I get, but some of them, in my opinion, are the most precious ones.

I can still remember on my birthday of last year, I got a gift from one of my best friends in senior high school. It was a quill pen with a bottle of ink. I was excited and extremely surprised when I saw the present, as I really wanted to get a quill pen but I did not tell my friend about it! Moreover, the pen was made in Britain and it was mailed to China from Britain. As a big fan of Harry Potter, I truly love this gift. However, there is one more reason why I cherish it as one of the most precious gifts that I have got. After asking my friend, I got to know how she got this present. She told me that she knew I love Harry Potter very much and I have a hobby of collecting pretty pens, so she decided to buy a special present for me. She contacted one of our classmates who went to study in the UK and asked her to buy a quill pen that was made in the hometown of Harry Potter, and then mail it to her. Her action was extremely touching for me. Now, I regard the quill pen as a representation of our deep friendship and I would keep it forever.

I once thought the quill pen would be the only one gift that has so much significance for me, until several days before, which was also my birthday, I got another gift that I believe I would cherish for a life time. It was a video from the boys in our group. I have to admit that it was a big surprise. In my own experience, the birthday gifts are usually some small objects, such as a candle, a pen, a toy, a music-box and so on. These were the most common gifts I have received or sent. Therefore, I have never thought of receiving a video as a birthday gift. When I watched the video, I was totally moved. I could tell from the video that you must have spent a lot of time on making it, as the songs sounded so nice and your performances were also brilliant! Actually, I am not a talkative or active person and I did not expect that you would put so much effort in preparing such a gift for me. I was surprised and happy! (^o^) Thank you very much!

In the end, I would like to say that I am really grateful for what you have done. I would keep the video and cherish our friendship forever!

Blog 6:Areastrological signs really related withone’s personality?

Astrological signs are equal segments or divisions of the ecliptic, usually associated with the twelve signs of the zodiac. According to astrology, celestial phenomena reflect or govern human activity on the principle of "as above, so below", so that the twelve signs are held to represent twelve basic personality types or characteristic modes of expression.There are "sun" signs and "moon" signs, which both depend on your date of birth.

The above is the basic explanation for astrological signs from Wikipedia. Even nowadays, the astrological signs are still hot issues among adolescents. There was once news saying that a girl broke up with her boyfriend just because a book she read said their star signs didn’t match with each other. However, can the star signs really affect humans’nature? I believe you can find the answer after finishing reading this composition.

Every zodiac symbol has a description of this group of people’s personality. Teenagers believe that it exactly describesthem, so they begin to believe everything about astrology. It’s quite an irrational action. Some scientists carried out an experiment in which they handed out two types of questionnaires.One contained the so-called authoritative descriptions for each star sign’s personality; the other was the messy version. They asked the students to answer the question whether the description for their own zodiac symbol was correct or not. As what they hadexpected, the rates from two different questionnaires of students whose answer is “yes” were almost the same.This result could be explained by the following two reasons. Firstly, every one’s character is complicated, so one could find something quite correspond to his or her disposition in every description. Secondly, the descriptions were fairly vague, that is, they described the common individuality of human beings and they said most of the good things. That’s why astrological signs have gained such great popularity. There are also many common senses which are against the zodiac symbol. For instance, how can humans only have 12 different types in terms of personality?

Nonetheless, why individuals especially the juveniles are so crazy about it? The most important reason is probably that adolescents are in a stage of life where they start to find the meaning of life and the unique identity of themselves, but it’s a question with no answer and thus, they turn to an easily accessible way-astrology-to get the answer. For me, Ithink it shouldn’t be to blame too much because things like the star signs act as a good topic for conversation in modern world. It is not only for teens but also for adults to use as a diplomatic tool at some special occasions.In addition, apart from the use in astrology, constellations themselves arebeautiful and magic enough.

Blog 7: Dream and Reality

Our life is filled up with all kinds of dreams. The dream can be complicated or simple, funny or serious, etc. But they are all our desires for a certain period of time.

I still remember my first dream is to become a biologist and live in the jungle playing with those creatures for the whole life. At that time I really like all kinds of insects. My father told me that I always brought some strange insets back to home trying to feed them and when I felt bored I would kill them without hesitation. I couldn’t imagine how I could be that cruel and brave we I was young, because now I’m even afraid of getting closer to the insects. Whenever an insect appears I am always controlling myself not to scream.

My dream is always changing as the time goes by. But the longest dream I’ve had is to become an architect. This dream starts from my love for painting. Spending the days painting a lot of pictures sounds really perfect. However, to be realistic, supporting ourselves or even the whole family by being an artist is almost impossible. Many masterpieces were admitted after the painters died. Painters like Vincent Van Gogh was extremely poor throughout his life. I'm just an ordinary person wishing to have a good living condition. Then when I was studying in middle school my art teacher introduced the architect Gaudi Antonio. His works were really amazing and I was deeply attracted by those buildings. Since then I've set a dream for myself. But between dream and reality there is always a long way to go. After the college entrance examination in order to ensure to major in architecture I went Chongqing University. However, to my great surprise, another person with higher marks was also making the crazy decision as I did. Thus I had to become a student of civil engineering, preparing to change my major to architecture when studying the master's degree. After two months' studying, I found myself gradually falling in love with civil engineering. But it was at that time I was selected to be one of the SM3 scholars. In NUS we are not supposed to learn architect so my plan was to learn civil engineering. But after searching on the Internet, the civil engineering in NUS is really far away from what I though before. That is to say, maybe it's not the right way leading to my dream. 
Perhaps now it's the time to give up and try to be practical. Nothing will last forever in the future I'm sure to find something else worth working hard for my whole life.

Blog 6:If We Have Tails

This week,we have talked about the origin of the human beings. Affected by the evolutionism,most of us think that human beings are evolved from the apes. However,can we say that all of our physical features are better than that of apes? So,out of curiosity, when we are talking with each other at break time,we began to imagine the life with tails of ourselves.


If we have tails,what will our lives be like? The first question I can think of is that how to make our pants. Is it necessary that we leave a special part especially for our tails or just let our tails stay with our legs? I do not know how you think about it, but I do think that it will be good if we make a protuberant part of our pants for our tails. If so,we can use our tails do a lot of things. To begin with, we can use our tails to answer the phones. We can invent a new type of phones so that the phones can be fixed on the edges of our tails. When our phones begin to vibrate,we can use our tails to place our phones near our ears. Isn't it convenient? Besides,we can also use our tails to fix us,sometimes. That is for the police. Sometimes,the police need to use their two hands to grab a rope so that they can shift from one side of the cliff to another side which is extraordinary dangerous. It is known that the triangle is stable, so if the police are able to take advantage of their tails………


That is my idea of the tails. Don't you think it is better? It is true that we are evolved from apes, but can we say that all of our physical are better than that of apes?

Blog6: Who Watch Who

  Have you ever noticed that when you go to the zoo to observe animals, some of them are observing you too? Perhaps this idea is amusing, but it is the truth. When we regard ourselves as the most important, we will ignore many important things.

  Today I went to the Singapore zoo to see the animals. One of impressive things was that most of the animals were not in the cases and live freely. They should live in nature more freely but as a zoo, it had shown enough respect. Animals lived on an island and were separated from us by a small river or the distance in space. There was an area in which orangutan can play freely without limits of space which is unique in the world. I have heard about a kind of zoo in which human is in a car and animals are outside. All of this kind of zoo shows the harmony among humans and animals. However I do not want to share this point with you here, for there was already a blog in which the point was stated.

  What I noticed today was a lion, which stayed outside the house that I was in. The lion looked gentle and did not move too much. The reason why I noticed it was that it was looking at people in the house. This causes me to think. I go to the zoo to observe the animals and saw only a few, but the lion stays there and see large amount of different people every day. Perhaps it is the nature reaction of a lion to watch the living things or moving things. Assuming that the lion has a little intelligent, it also observes human. We cannot regard ourselves as the owner of the nature. We are merely a part of nature. Human does have intelligent but it is just a feature of human. The lion interesting for us and to the lion, we are also interesting.

  We, human, are consuming nature resources and have made huge improvements in building a civilization. We hardly cannot do anything and have achieved a lot already but we do not show enough respect to nature which we rely on. Along with the development of human beings, here come a lot of problems. It is time for us to think about the behaviors of ourselves. Although there are still suspicions towards whether the human activities affect the nature environment, we do have had adverse influences on nature. The reason why we still damage nature is that we regard human as the highest class feature.

We are not special and we are only the result of nature. Show respect to nature and we will live better because we are a part of nature.