Trip To Bryce Canyon

Bryce Canyon, UT, USA

The Bryce escarpment, with its thousands of geological gargoyles and castellated spires, is the product of the relentless destructive powers of water and time. Under the onslaught of weather, nothing at Bryce Canyon National Park remains the same for long. The canyon is one of the best places on the planet to observe the forces that shape the surface of the earth.

A single summer cloudburst can carry off thousands of tons of gravel, sand, and silt to the Paria River and then on to the Colorado River and into the Grand Canyon. Bryce is changing at a fantastic rate: Its rim is receding one foot every 65 years. The place is an open textbook of geology.

Sixty million years ago, a vast body of water, which we refer to today as Lake Flagstaff, covered southwestern Utah. As the ages passed, sediments of gravel, sand, and mud accumulated to thicknesses of 2,000 feet or more beneath the sea. Eventually, cemented together by minerals and pressure, the sediments turned into solid rock, which is now called the Wasatch Formation.

Beginning about 16 million years ago, colossal movements of the earth's crust forced the formation upward. This stress produced great breaks in the rock. One of these chunks is the Paunsaugunt Plateau. The fracturing of the rock on the eastern side of the plateau, where Bryce is situated, left it particularly vulnerable to the forces of weather, especially to the slow, steady power of water.

These powerful erosive forces are most on display in late winter and early spring. As the ground thaws on warm days, you can hear the grinding, groaning, and grumbling of erosion at work. Water runs down crevices, rocks tumble, and gravel and pebbles shake loose from the sides of the canyon's weird formations.

In Bryce, the endless power of erosion has sculptured thousands of the limestone hoodoos. Derived from the word "voodoo," the term means "bad luck," but in Bryce Canyon, hoodoo invokes only the benevolent magic of wondrous shapes and colors.

The stunning terra-cotta, yellow, pink, and mauve of the canyon's rock formations result from oxidized chemicals in the stone: Red and yellow come from iron; blue and purple, from manganese. Light also affects the colors of the formations in Bryce. The colors change throughout the day, moving from the blue end of the spectrum in the morning light toward red hues at sunset.

The kaleidescope of colors of Bryce Canyon have amazed travelers for hundreds of years. Today, its geological marvels make the park a perfect destination for sightseers and explorers from around the world.

Reference : 
http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/family/bryce-canyon-national-park-ga2.htm

7 Pleasurable Ways to Improve Your Reading Ability

Habarana, Sri Lanka

1. Read about things that interest you. If you are interested in what you are reading about, the words will come alive, and you will be motivated to understand. You will feel satisfaction in accomplishing a task that you enjoy, and which you consider meaningful. The more you read, the better you will become at reading. Just get started and it will become a habit, as long as you are interested in what you are reading.

2. Read material that is at your level, or just a little difficult for you. Read material that you find easy to read, or just a little challenging. Looking up many unknown words in a conventional dictionary is tedious, and the results of the dictionary search quickly forgotten. It is better to stay within your comfort zone and keep reading. Soon you will be able to take on more difficult content.

3. Learn to read in depth, stay on the same subject for a while. If you are familiar with the subject you are reading about, you will understand better. Do not just read short articles. Commit to books. Stay with one author for at least one book. If the subject matter is new to you, you should even try to read a few different books or articles about the same subject, before you move on. This way you will meet the same vocabulary and ideas often, helping you to learn. You will also be able to get deeper into the subject and your reading confidence will grow.

4. If you have trouble reading, listen first. Many great works of literature were written to be read out loud. Learn to appreciate the art of the narrator. Listen to audio books or audio files of the material that you are reading. This will help make difficult content seem more familiar. If you can hear the new words and phrases that you are reading, you will have an easier time understanding and remembering them. Hearing the rhythm of someone reading a text will help your own reading.

5. Let your imagination get involved. Good readers get engrossed in their reading and let it trigger their imagination. Learn to enjoy your reading without asking too many questions or analyzing too much. It will just spoil the sensual enjoyment of the reading experience. You do not need to predict or analyze. Just enjoy and look forward to absorbing the information, ideas and thoughts expressed by the writer.

6. Don’t worry about what you don’t understand. Most of your reading should be for pleasure. You can enjoy reading without understanding all of what you read. You may even understand some things in your own personal way. Neither you nor a teacher needs to “monitor” your understanding. Learn to enjoy reading, even while feeling that you do not fully understand or remember what you have read.

7. Recognize that the key is to read a lot. You may develop a system for keeping track of new words that you encounter in your reading, using lists, or Flash Cards, or other memory systems available on the Internet or elsewhere. However, the main growth in your vocabulary and reading skill will come just from reading as much as you can. So learn to enjoy reading and read a lot. Keep reading, and you will become a better reader.

Reference :  

http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/7-pleasurable-ways-to-improve-your-reading-ability/