Reflections

Reflection is an important quality. Here are some that we hope you will find useful.

IMASE Reflections 9: I am hungry, can you feed me please?

In the early days, societies were made up of 'hunter-gatherers'. If a person was hungry, they would go into the jungle, the original supermarket, to get their fruits and vegetable or hunt animals for their meat. The river would 'sell' the fish they needed to survive. As time passed, people began to cultivate their own vegetables and rear their own animals. This was the beginning of agrarian society.

IMASE Reflections 8: Can you to do me a favour, please?

Imagine you are out of town and check yourself into a hotel and you pay the owner with a $100 bill for your stay. He then takes the $100 and buys vegetables from the market for his kitchen. The market owner next takes the $100 and gives it to the wholesaler who supplied him with the vegetables. The wholesaler then uses the $100 to buy vegetables from the farmer who grows the vegetables. The farmer then takes this $100 bill, many days later, and gives it to you since you are a fertilizer producer and the farmer needs what you have. You now have the same $100 bill which you gave away many days before.

The question is; has this $100 bill changed in anyway? Does it look different? Has is changed is shape? Has it grown in value?

IMASE Reflections 7: The Giver of Life

The most significant feature of Earth that separates it from the rest of the planets in the known Universe is that the Earth is a living planet. Although there is no definitive definition of life, some scientists define life as a characteristic of organisms that exhibit phenomena such as metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, reproduction, and homeostasis.

Life on Earth has been known to exist for more than 3.5 billion years. Life on Earth also began and evolved in stages, starting with single cells to multiple cell organisms. Life forms can therefore be divided into the broad classes of plants and animals, which in turn may be further sub-divided. The discipline of biological classification is called Taxonomy where the term ‚Äòspecies‚Äô refers to one of its basic units, each having a determined name.

IMASE Reflections 6: The Sustaining of Life

Fire is a form of energy released as heat and light during a chemical reaction known as, an exothermic combustion. During an exothermic reaction, substances transform to a more stable chemical form, in the case of a fire, it is carbon dioxide and water. Depending on the reaction the flame may or may not emit light, for example, burning alcohol or burning hydrogen is usually invisible to the naked eye.

Fire occurs naturally on earth and has played an important role in the development of the planet. Green plants change light energy to chemical energy, fire changes chemical energy to heat energy. Organisms change heat energy to other form of energy to live. ‚ÄòFire‚Äô breaks down complex organic molecules to smaller ones in our body when we digest food. The ability to control fire is one of humankind's great achievements. Fire making allowed humans the ability to generate and control the heat and light and made it possible for people to migrate to colder climates and enabled people to cook food.

IMASE Reflections 5: The Protector of Life

The Earth's atmosphere is made of layers of gases which are retained by the Earth's gravity. Some planets, such as Jupiter are among the ‚ÄúGas Giants‚Äù which consist mainly of gases and thus, have very deep atmospheres. Earth contains roughly (by molar content/volume) 78% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% carbon dioxide, trace amounts of other gases and a variable amount (average around 1%) of water vapour, together, it is commonly known as air. The density of air at sea level is about 1.2 kg/m3. This well-balanced composition protects life on Earth by absorbing ultraviolet solar radiation and reducing temperature extremes between day and night.

Atmospheric pressure is the force (per unit area) that is applied perpendicularly to a surface by the surrounding gas. It is determined by a planet's gravitational force and the total mass of a column of air above a location. Surface gravity, the force that holds down an atmosphere, differs significantly among the planets. The distance from the sun determines the energy available to heat atmospheric gas to the point where its molecules' thermal motion exceeds the planet's escape velocity, the speed at which gas molecules overcome a planet's gravitational grasp. Since a gas at any particular temperature will have molecules moving at a wide range of velocities, there will almost always be some slow leakage of gas into space. Earth's magnetic field helps to minimise this.

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