Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Psychological Benefits of Exercise essays

Psychological Benefits of Exercise essays The physical benefits of exercise has been the main motivating factor for many people who adopt a regular physical fitness program. Physicians have long known the benefits of regular exercise and a healthy diet, although weight loss or weight management has been a major influence for people who begin a regular exercise program. Many more people, however, are directed by their own physician to become physically active or risk disease and/or possibly death. Regular physical exercise has proven beneficial to cardiovascular health by controlling diabetes, slowing the progression of osteoporosis, lowering high blood pressure, improving cholesterol levels, as well as decreasing the chances of contracting colds and flu. While these factors alone are sufficient reasons for a life-long commitment to physical exercise, further developments have been realized in the psychological benefits of exercise. Could exercise possibly have an effect on emotional health and if so what are they? Research has shown that regular exercise provides psychological benefits, which include positive effects on memory and thinking, anxiety and depression, overall emotional well-being, creativity and imagination, and improved mental vigor. Probably the most known benefit of exercise to the human body is the improvements of cardiovascular health. The heart is a muscle that becomes stronger and larger with exercise, enabling it to pump blood through the body more efficiently. Exercise has also been shown to cause the development of new blood vessels in the heart and enlarges the arteries that supply blood to the heart (Landry 1). A healthy diet and regular exercise can also improve cholesterol levels: People who maintain an active lifestyle have a 45% lower risk of developing coronary heart disease than do sedentary people. A recent study reported that moderate dietary changes improve cholesterol levels and so lower the risk for coronary artery disease ...

Monday, March 2, 2020

Go Ahead, Put that Preposition at the End!

Go Ahead, Put that Preposition at the End! Go Ahead, Put that Preposition at the End! Go Ahead, Put that Preposition at the End! By Maeve Maddox Commenting on one of my posts about prepositions, Annette writes: When did the rule about ending the sentence with a preposition change? Its always been one of my pet peeves (in written word more than spoken) because we learned it was wrong in high school grammar. but now Im reading that its acceptable? Could all our English teachers have been wrong? No grammarian can be more cantankerous than H.W. Fowler (A Dictionary of Modern English Usage), but here is what he says about prepositions at the end of a sentence: It is a cherished superstition that prepositions must, in spite of the incurable English instinct for putting them latebe kept true to their name and placed before the word they govern. He says Dryden, Gibbon, and Ruskin spread the notion that English sentences must never end with a preposition. Dryden was so steeped in a classical education that he sometimes translated his sentences into Latin before writing them down in English. Gibbon was so determined not to end a sentence with a preposition that he avoided ending them with adverbs that looked like prepositions. For example, words like on, over, off, and under may be either prepositions or adverbs, depending on their function in the sentence, He ran after the wagon and jumped on. on is an adverb telling where He left on the horse he rode in on. on is possibly a preposition, but would the sentence be improved by writing He left on the horse on which he rode in? We still have a word that looks like a preposition ending the sentence. Would it really improve an idiomatic sentence like What did you do that for? to rewrite it as For what did you do that? Weve all heard how Churchill rebuked the secretary who revised the great mans sentences to avoid ending them with prepositions: This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put. The sentence is funny and succeeds in poking fun at the over-venerated rule, but the expression put up with is a phrasal verb that means endure or suffer. Idiomatic English makes use of many such verb phrases: ask out George wants to ask Mary out. add up These figures just dont add up. As writers we need to be aware of the rules of our medium and strive not to write anything barbaric, i.e., unidiomatic. We need to be alert to differences between formal and informal expression, but whether we are writing a scientific treatise or an irreverent novel, we need to stay true to our instinctive grasp of our native language. Ill give Fowler the last word: Those who lay down the universal principle that final prepositions are inelegant are unconsciously trying to deprive the English language of a valuable idiomatic resource, which has been used freely by all our greatest writers except those whose instinct for English idiom has been overpowered by notions of correctness derived from Latin standards. The legitimacy of the prepositional ending in literary English must be uncompromisingly maintained; in respect of elegance or inelegance, every example must be judged not by any arbitrary rule, but on its own merits, according to the impression it makes on the feeling of educated English readers. For a useful list of phrasal verbs, visit Daves ESL Cafe. See Churchill on Prepositions for a discussion of the Churchill anecdote. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Grammar category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:Fly, Flew, (has) FlownFlied?Difference between "Pressing" and "Ironing"Narrative, Plot, and Story