Tuesday, June 8, 2010

5 Things You Need to Know About Cancer and Broccoli

1. The Phytonutrient Superstar
Have you heard about the cruciferous vegetables? Maybe not, but broccoli is one of them--the most popular vegetable from this cabbage group and a close relative of cauliflower, Brussels Sprouts and all forms of cabbage. This cold-weather crop "tree," as children like to call it, is packed with antioxidants, folic acid, vitamin A and C and beta-carotene. Steam a half cup cooked broccoli for about 25 calories and over two grams of fiber.

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2. Broccoli Halts Breast Cancer Cells
This vegetable contains cancer-preventive indoles and isothiscyanates that block carcinogens and interfere with the action of a precancerous form of estrogen. Research has shown that the chemical indole-3-carbinol halts the growth of breast cancer cells without actually killing normal cells. This compound works independently of the hormone estrogen which could allow combination therapy with drugs that interfere with estrogen, such as tamoxifen, a potent breast cancer drug.

3. Cruciferous Consumption for Prostate and Bladder Cancer
What about other types of cancer? Greater consumption of dark green and cruciferous vegetables--including broccoli--was associated with a decreased risk of aggressive prostate cancer, biologically virulent and linked to poor prognosis. Add more broccoli for preventive measures. Recent animal studies provide potent evidence that broccoli sprouts have an anti-cancer effect, reducing the risk of bladder cancer through specific compounds, called glucosinolates. During digestion, these are transformed into isothiocyanates, playing a role in cancer inhibition.

4. Add Broccoli to Your Diet
Recommendations for amounts of vegetables and fruits have increased--from the five a day campaign to the current five to nine a day for better health. Although it might seem daunting at first, serving sizes are small--half cups for cooked broccoli or one cup raw. Both kids and adults love broccoli as an appetizer with a low-fat dip or dressing, as a side dish for your protein-rich fish dinner, stir-fried with grilled tofu, or even as a blended vegetable juice with other favorite produce.

5. Get the Most From Broccoli
Cooked broccoli should be green and tender-crisp. To avoid loss of water soluble nutrients, such as Vitamin C, wash it under cool running water. Quickly cut the florets into uniform pieces for even cooking without letting it sit in water. Steam it three to four minutes or simmer for the same amount of time. If overcooked, broccoli develops a strong sulfur odor, turns dark green and suffers nutrient loss, especially Vitamin C.

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Read more: http://www.livestrong.com/article/4749-need-cancer-broccoli/#ixzz0qHBiKC8y

Thursday, May 27, 2010

4 Strategies to improve your memory power

4 Strategies to improve your memory power

Our life is convenient if we have powerful memory. We can easily recall important information without much effort as if knowledge is always at our finger tips. For those school students, it would be great to score well in exam that requires a lot of memorizing

However, having a weak memory can be a nightmare. Imagine putting your heart and soul in reading a wonderful book and end up remembering very little. That’s a waste of precious time and energy.

Don’t worry. The good news is that memory can be improved. By following the four strategies below, your memory can become like a super sponge that soaks up information for a long time. Unfortunately, these strategies require you to be serious and take real action for them to work. But I believe you can do it well.

The 4 strategies to power up your memory:

■Mental development
■Information conversion
■Memorizing technique
■Recalling power

1) Mental development

If you want to be physically fit, you exercise to build muscles, increase stamina, and promote flexibility. This is the same as mental fitness – you exercise to increase your mental power.

Mental training is not just an abstract process that happens in imagination. It actually develops your physical brain. As your mental power develops, the inter connectivity of your brain cells improves. It won’t take a long time to see the progress of your mental performance, so it’s worth investing in developing your mind power.

Good mental fitness can improve our memory directly or indirectly. Some of the mental aspects that you can develop are creativity, thinking skill, imagination, awareness, analytical skills, and many more. There are many self improvement books on this topic, such as the ones written by the famous Tony Buzan and Edward de Bono.

For example, imagination is a good tool to help increase your memory. Imagination should involve various senses, not just visualization alone. You train yourself to create mental reality with vivid picture, realistic sound, touch, taste, and smell. You feel your body’s gravity and internal body resistance. You develop your imagination so well that simulating a real life event is easy like peanuts. A student who can properly imagine a well polished, artistically carved, shining pewter vase can remember much more objects than a guy who can’t even clearly visualize the letter A.

2) Information conversion

Remember reading through a whole chunk of dull text? This kind of information is hard to digest. So we convert this raw information into a form that is “tasty” enough for our memory to digest. “Tasty” information is bits of info that is easy to remember, hard to forget.

We can convert a boring article into bullet point form, which is much tastier than before. Each bullet point should be short, simple, and contain only one core message. The language used should be simple and direct. Avoid difficult words and ideas that are not clear.

Besides that, we can use other methods like color coding, highlighting, mind mapping, simple database for illustration (diagrams, graph, table) and many more “tasty recipe” to spice up knowledge input for a nice “educational dinner”. Always convert complex information into simple bits with simple words and structure.

3) Memorizing technique

We build up our mental fitness in strategy 1 and now we can apply it directly to absorb knowledge. The 3rd strategy is similar to strategy 2, but it is purely a mental process in converting information.

Our brain can remember information better with certain kind of stimulation. It remembers emotional stories much better than scientific facts and boring statistic. Therefore, we can make information “tastier” to the brain by altering the information without reducing its content.

For example, we can peg or relate a dull fact that lacks meaning to something meaningful to us (plain number like 12365 can be remembered as “one year has 12 months 365 days = 12365”). We can relate information to a concrete, interesting analogy. It’s also a good idea to relate information to certain emotions or senses (music, color, happy event etc.). There are so many ways to peg information and it’s up to your creativity to spice up your meal of learning. Tony Buzan has authored many books on ways to memorize information so that’s a good place to start with this strategy.

4) Recalling power

Most of the time, we don’t forget something, we just fail to recall it. You don’t forget your dream 10 minutes ago, you just failed to remember it. We can condition our mind to get use to recall things like having a portable DVD player that replays past event.

We usually let our subconscious mind do all the learning work and left our conscious mind pampered too much like a spoilt kid. Now it’s time to let our conscious mind exercise a bit by increasing our awareness.

We can increase our awareness of daily activities through daily retrospection. Before we go to bed, we recall the events happened in our life today. We replay the life scenes and see the people we interact with, the food we eat, the things we read, the stuffs we do etc – a mental simulation of our life in one day. This awareness-increasing exercise trains you to recall things well. As we improve, we can go further on until we can recall events in many days.

Sometimes daily retrospection works so well that we can even recall dreams. Don’t just stop there, get a dream journal and record your last dream right after you wake up. Days later you will have deeper awareness until you can remember a few dreams easily. If you can recall daily events and dreams, you can remember many other things. Heck! you can even play back the classes you attended and extract information from there.

Meditation is also a good way to increase awareness. It has many other positive “side effects” as well, such as better disciplined mind with less inner “monkey” voices, and better emotional control. You can do a few short meditation sessions per day, where each session lasts about 6 minutes (a timer or egg alarm would be useful here).

Finally, the last trick to enhance recalling ability is to have a habit of repeating what we have learned. For example, when you read a book, recall what you have read previously. And before you put down your book, mentally summarize the whole thing that you have just read. By doing so, you screen through the reading material 3 times. You can recall repeated information better than stuffs that you read only once.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Apa itu perenggan isi ??

PERENGGAN
  • Perenggan dapat dibahagikan kepada:

Pendahuluan

Perenggan isi

Penutup

  • Perenggan isi terletak selepas perenggan pendahuluan dan sebelum perenggan penutup.
  • Jumlah perenggan isi adalah bergantung kepada jumlah idea yang hendak disampaikan.
  • Perenggan isi bertujuan untuk mengembangkan idea utama.
  • Perenggan isi mempunyai 2 komponen yang penting iaitu

Ayat judul

Ayat sokongan

1.1 AYAT JUDUL

  1. Ayat judul ialah ayat yang mengandungi maklumat atau gagasan penting yang berkaitan dengan idea utama.
  2. Ayat judul menjadi panduan kepada penulisan sebuah perenggan
  3. Ayat judul akan disampaikan dalam satu ayat dalam setiap perenggan.
  4. Ayat judul biasanya akan terletak pada awal perenggan.( deduktif)
  5. Ayat judul juga boleh terletak pada akhir perenggan.( induktif)

1.2 Ayat sokongan

  1. Ayat sokongan ialah ayat yang menyokong ayat judul.
  2. Digunakan untuk memperincikan idea yang terdapat pada ayat judul.
  3. Menampilkan fakta untuk menyakinkan pembaca, ayat sokongan ialah sah.
  4. Fakta-fakta ayat sokongan boleh didapati di jurnal, majalah, buku dan sebagainya.

Hukum DM

Hukum DM
menyatakan bahawa sesuatu kata yang menjadi inti/kepala haruslah boleh diterangkan.

  • Unsur inti ini seharusnya mendahului penerang

PENERANG: bermaksud sesuatu yang menerangkan inti/kepala.

  • Kesalahan sering dilakukan dengan meletak penerang mendahului inti.
  • Contohnya:

pisang goreng

pisang ialah inti

goreng ialah penerang

Namun terdapat pengecualian untuk frasa tertentu yang telah mantap seperti perdana menteri dan bukannya menteri perdana

Hal ini kerana telah lama digunakan dan dikatakan telah sebati dalam Bahasa Melayu

kolokialisme

Kolokialisme ialah bahasa basahan dan bukan bahasa baku. Kolokial ialah perkataan yang telah digugur imbuhannya, ialah perbualan yang tak formal.
Tujuan kolokialisme ialah untuk mendapatkan kesan yang mesra dan langsung.
  1. kolokial tidak bermakna bahasa yang buruk atau bahasa yang tidak betul tetapi perbualan yang tidak formal yang digunakan oleh semua orang sama ada berpelajaran atau tidak.
  2. contoh perkataan kolokial ialah:

tak, nak, ku, mu, kau

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Kepentingan perenggan

  1. Memudahkan penulis untuk menyampaikan ideanya secara sistematik.
  2. Perenggan yang baik menunjukkan kepada pembaca setiap perenggan adalah satu unit pendapat.
  3. Penulis dapat mengawal penyampaian isi karangan secara sistematik satu demi satu sehingga selesai.
  4. Memudahkan pembaca untuk mengikuti idea-idea penulis dan memahaminya.
  5. Perenggan boleh merupakan satu alat untuk penulis menarik minat pembaca.

Pendahuluan

Pendahuluan yang lemah diibaratkan mengail dengan bermata kail sahaja.
Pendahuluan yang kuat akan menjerat dan menangkap mangsanya.