Compilation Of Reflections (Yung Lung)

Tuesday, 7 January 2014

REFLECTION (YungLung)

During the holidays , my parents brought me to resort world sentosa marine life park . There were a lot of people there and we had to squeeze our way through just to see the attraction. During the course, i learnt many facts about the different marine animals and well as seeing them swimming gracefully in the waters. I really enjoyed this experience and would like to go there again. The most intriguing marine animal that i have seen is the jellyfish as they are just made up of protein and water but yet they could swim so gracefully in the waters as well as to protect themselves of they are out in the wild therefore i would like to learn more about it.

Saturday, 11 January 2014

Poverty reflection( Yung Lung)

Poverty in Singapore may not be necessarily people who lines the street begging for money to sustain a living neither be hungry people who goes on the street scrounging food. In Singapore, people struggles with relative poverty can be defined as income falling below the substantial amount to maintain a living in Singapore because of the high cost of essential needs such as food etc. Poverty in Singapore Grew from 16% in 2002 to 28% in 2013

As a result, if people have health problems and needed expensive treatment or those with cash flow problems in their family will have to struggle to survive on a day to day basis. Apart from this, they are also trapped in a bad cycle which caused them to have no money or little to provide themselves a better life. Children are often having bad education due to them lacking of accessibility to knowledge and education, most of the time having to quit school to earn more money.

However government have been trying hard to tackle these problems by providing different types of financial aids and schemes for the poor and underprivileged. Each help scheme will have its own set of eligibility and their own specific purpose to help the people who needs it, such as housing and healthcare, or developmental areas such as early childhood development and education, our subsidies cover a wider group of Singaporeans. With higher levels of subsidies for the lower income, heavy burdens for low income family may be eased.  On top of these, programs such as Workfare and ComCare provide additional assistance to a smaller group of low income Singaporeans who need extra support.

Programs like money-management workshops can be organized which can  allow children to understand the concept of money and how to use it wisely so as not to waste money when they grow up and start earn their own income. Upgrading of one's work skills and knowledge will also allow adults to have a better chance to gain a more competitive edge in the job market, while better coping with economic challenges.

YAY:) after the introduction, now its time for our own views!

Although most of us, including me, does not really live in poverty, which can be a good thing for us. Most of us does not pay much attention to the people who lives in poverty and needed our help and thus we did not spare a thought for them just because we are not living in the same condition as them.....

well... not much of a good sight ain't it?

Sky high price of housing, atrocious food prices, high job competition, low wages.... sounds familiar?

These may be the many common cause of poverty in Singapore. for low education people who are in the blue collar industry , their wages could have been too low to sustain a living in Singapore due to the high cost of living.

As for the old , they may have been abandoned by their children or they could be childless. due to their old age they are too frail to work so their income may not be enough to sustain a living in singapore.

There may be a lot of people who needed our help out there,however, we may not have the ability to help them all as we our ownself also have to survive. Therefore, there are some nice , low cost methods to lend a helping hand to assist these unfortunate people.
1.We can help to donate food and daily necessities to charity organization to be distributed to those who needed them.
2.instead of wasting our unwanted but still in good condition clothing by throwing them away, we can also donate these to people who needed them so that they too can enjoy some luxury that we have.
3. even a simple task like actively participating public events(similiar to CIP/VIA) that may be held by charitable organizations to raise funds and do our part in helping them.
4. instead of throwing away our old textbooks, we can also donate or give them to other students whose parents may some difficulties buying their new textbooks.

Apart from these, we are also helping them in our ability as a student such as participating in VIA/CIP that may have been organised such as collecting newspaper from the different HDB blocks. Most students may not have understood the purpose of such activites and may be just doing for the sake of the VIA Hours. We MUST understand the value learnt behind these VIAs and not be materialistic and just eye for the hours.

Thanks to the government, we have such a clean and green environment as well as a safe place to live in as compared to those less developed countries.We must be thankful of what we have so we should always try to give back to society and not be selfish, keeping all our luxuries to ourselves. We must also spare a thought for those who have difficulty maintaining a living . Act Now, Don't Hesitate, Help others as much as we can :)

Consolidation of Learning 17/1/14 Yung Lung

After attending these few Cid lessons, i learnt much mainly on our observation skills for the first few weeks, such as observing the famous picture , vulture and child, taken by kevin carter. After observing this photo, it brings out several meaningful views that we should take note of. This picture tells us that there are other unfortunate fellow people out there who cannot enjoy even the basic necessecities such as food, one of such example is the boy in the picture that kevin carter had taken.

  During the second lesson where we were told to observe two photos of people begging for money. This activity indeed allowed me to further understand the importance of not judging the book by its cover. We must always observe as carefully as possible and not miss out any important minute details. It is always important to view a single photo at different angles and analyse it carefully to determine what message it is conveying. In the tasks assigned that week, i also learnt the importance of researching as well which allowed me to go in depth and understand the poverty situation in singapore. In the course of researching, i understood that we are far more fortunate than people living in other countries especially those living in less developed countries. We should start cherishing whatever we have now and stop lamenting that we cannot get the best or the things we wanted as there are people with much less fortunate lives than us.

  After these three week, a lot of ideas and their importance sank into me. These lessons made me understand that we should think broad and deep into the subject and not look at the immediate effects of the subject that we are looking into, this will cause us to make the wrong decision as we continue to look further into the subject. We must also observe carefully for the different clues, evidence etc. to make a deduction and conclusion on a particular subject. For example when we meet a certain problems in our daily lives, we can look at the different angles and survey the difficulties carefully and thus in this process deriving at a most effective solution to the targeted problem. We must not just look at the straightforward angle but think deeper and "hit the nail on its head"

~Yung Lung

Chingay Reflection (Yung Lung)

我们这里是新加坡,我阿爹系海山街住过... heard of this familiar song? Yes you're right its the uniquely Singapore song,麻雀衔竹枝, created by Liang Wern Fook. Hmmmm. thought of something else that is uniquely Singapore? 

Yea I am now writing about another uniquely Singapore parade- Chingay Parade. And yes! the song is the one that we heard when we were heading to out seats at the Chingay parade. This is the second time I have to chance to catch this parade life! I am so nervous about this chance to watch the parade. it is very honoured to be given this unique chance. 

Greeted by a sea of dancers, donning colourful dresses and costumes, I am so looking forward to what kind of performance that they will be putting up for us to see! After some entertainment by the emcees for that day, the parade slowly started and the whole area begin to come to life with students cheering happily, blasting music escaping the large sub woofers- all bringing us into the mood of the parade! 

Different type of floats together with a whole group of accompanying dancers appeared one by one. I was mesmerised by their graceful dance moves and the coordination displayed in the dances which I myself normally hard to do so even with just 3 people. The performers had really put in a lot of effort judging from the spectacular performances they have put up for us. This parade allowed me to harvest lots of understanding of different important live values and dances of the different type of culture.

As no good things come without a history, i was also shocked to learn about  Chingay Parade's transformation!  It was actually part of chinese new year celebrations and was normally solely performed by the chinese but yet it has now transformed into "rojak" with the different types of culture present in just one parade!

 This opportunity to head to a live performance of Chingay really allowed us to bond as a class and also allow to step out of our comfort zones. This opportunity is also and eye opener for me! This was exceptionally memorable experience with the parade ending with a spectacular fireworks display. Sadly it was put up on our side and cant really sit down and view it comfortably though... I really hoped that there will be more opportunities for us to participate in eye opening events. Don't you feel the same too? Join us if we have another chance.

Feeling about the presentations (YungLung)

Well... These two weeks my friends were all presenting on the Chingay parade that we participated last month! I am looking forward to their wonderful presentations but as the saying goes, nothing in this world is perfect and practice makes improvements.

There is room for improvement in their presentation as what Mr Chua had pointed out After all those preparation we made, its finally the chance to present it to our class, we are so nervous about it. However things did not go smoothly, things did not go as planned for some parts, for example, one group member stated that she wanted to do an extra point but however she decided not to in the actual presentation, how annoying it is for the person who did the slides an't it! 

Furthermore, we actually forgot to say our reflections, what a waste, thrashing our efforts down the drains resulting in lesser points maybe? 

 Overall I personally feel that other groups presentations were relatively good especially Tiffany's group, with their deep reflections and feelings, allowing us to catch a feel of how much they have enjoyed or disliked the Chingay performance. Speaking of this, i also learnt new ways of expressing our own opinions which can be convincing for us audience!

 This presentation also brought up a huge number of learning points for presentations and content wise. for me, I personally received a comment that I was too monotonous. Luckily, I was quite familiar with my script thus i was able to maintain eye contact with my classmates. rather than just learning from my weakness, we also learnt about the different weakness that were brought out by other group's presentations, for example, standing posture, voice projection and other types of presentation skills that is necessary for us to learn.

These series of presentation also allowed my to mature my confidence in myself too! I prepared a script and even decided to read off the script, however i will compromise eye contact thus i actually made up a "new" script on the spot and spoke pretty smoothly( though a bit monotonous...). As such i found a new form of confidence in me and subsequently i did the same with other presentations!

 I was glad to go through this series of presentations because I benefited greatly form it especially building up my confidence and presentation skills. I personally hope that there will be more of such chances for us to polish our presentation skills and learn from our mistakes improving our skills everytime we have a new chance

The Forbidden Palace.

 From this structure i can infer that the rulers are wasteful.Resources pooled in to build the palace could have been used to support and help poor farmers and peasant who can barely survive and yet the imperial rulers used these resources for their own interest which more than half of those buildings redundant or extra large. Even a family of 6-7 can live in such a small HDB flat but yet the imperial rulers built a single palace for each concubine... What are they thinking? Its clearly a waste of resource. 

 It also shows that the rulers were irresponsible.Being the ruler of the country, the emperor should be thinking of the welfare of people and yet he went to have someone to build such a big palace and yet poor people can barely afford a house themselves. It clearly shows that imperial rulers are not doing their job. 

 They were also being selfish by building the palace for themselves and used funds from taxing the people. They used so much funds to build the palace that they could not upgrade their army and protect the people. It also a waste of manual labour of the builder.In the past, there are no machines the aid in building the palace. It all rely on manual labour and it is dangerous to construct high buildings. By building extra or redundant buildings, labour of the people are being wasted.

The Forbidden City displayed the bad attitude of the imperial rulers of being inconsiderate rulers and selfish, self centered people.

China one child policy(Yung Lung)

 What is child policy? It is the official the family planning policy,the population control policy of the People's Republic of China. Yes this may seems to be a solution to China underlying problem but upon giving it a deeper thought i felt very sad and infuriated

 No child in the world should be living in loneliness after they are born. With the one child policy, children cannot have siblings and would feel very lonely without a playmate. I feel terribly sad that children have to go through this due to the policy. Apart from these it also encourages infanticide. Who on earth does not deserve a chance of living? This policy indirectly causes parents to destroy their child's chance to see the beautiful world especially when the fetus is a female one. Furthermore, it also cause a larger work force strain.

 This policy is very unfair to the common people and will cause them to be unhappy because they have to give up their second child destroying their first child's playmate causing them to be lonely. furthermore, this policy did not seem to achieve its goal since the population of china is still growing which now is the second largest in term of population. With reference the lone child as mentioned earlier,I feel that it is at a disadvantage for them because they will not have a companion to accompany them through their growing years furthermore this will more likely to cause this lone child to make friends with bad company because they may be desperate for a friend to accompany them. for those parents out there in china who were affected by the one child policy, how sad to deprive your child from companions and destroy a wonderful childhood every children should have, its very heart breaking ain't it?

  There is even a more heartbreaking point prior to not having a second child- killing female fetus as people want male to carry on the family line. This is much more heartbreaking, don't you think so? Rather than fulfilling its main purpose, it brought about more harms to the citizens and children.

  I hope other types of population control measures will be implemented instead of ways with disadvantages for the children and is ineffective in achieving its intended purpose

China-economy ( Yung Lung)

China now ranks second in terms of total GDP. With 3,854,082 square miles, there will be a lot of spaces for office buildings, residential and commercial building and there are a lot of space for other economic activities to be conducted. Furthermore, the rental,labour and tax rate are in low rates there thus attracting more companies to set up factories there to manufacture their products. Apart from this, china has a population of 1.3 billion which will result in more economic activities because salaries will be lower, attracting firms. With this larger number of favtories, carbon emissions will be higher , thus air quality would be lower and pollution problems will worsen drastically. 

 I feel that china should put in more effort in limiting carbon emissions. They could have set more strict emissions standards, conduct more frequent checks on factories to see whether there is any firm that violates the law using inefficient way of production. Carbon emission is so harmful! Causing global warming which has countless of adverse effect on us and environment! 

If global warming worsens, even by a 1 degree, huge adverse environmental will surface as a result. The people of Carteret Islands have already became environmental refugees due to global warming effects! China should really put in more effort to curb emission rates.

China should start to limit carbon emission to make the world a better place to live in, Think of this, with the increasing amount of carbon dioxide and air pollution, people will develop eye irritation and respiratory problems. How can these people even enjoy the growing economics with deteriorating health? At such economic growth can be slowed down in order to protect citizens' health rather than a rising economy which people cannot enjoy peacefully. 

True that health is an important aspect that we should never ever overlook, i do not blame china seriously. Since she is a developing country, she should not compromise economic growth by using higher cost clean and green production methods which reduces emission of air pollutants into the atmosphere

Although the government is largely responsible for the increasing air pollution, i think that factories owners play an even important part because most of them may have the ability to make use of greener energy source but yet they chose to use the cheaper but least environmental friendly coal.

 We should always think win-win. We should not compromise people's health just to obtain a higher economic growth. Everything must be balanced even though i admit that economic growth cannot be compromised. This can be achieved like what u haved stated earlier, setting more strict regulations to mitigate pollution issues and even make an effort to reduce emissions of air pollutants and carbon dioxide!