Read Smart 3: Chapter XI: The secret lives of animals

Today is nearly the end of the fourth week in my schedule and as planned, I've just finished another chapter of the book ReadSmart 3: Chapter XI (ha, I've almost finished the book, only one chapter left).

ReadSmart is a book that may be completely different from those Select Readings which we used last 2 semesters. This book is concerned more with the strategies rather than vocabulary and I have to say this, I don't think much of those styles of learning reading by learning strategies. My strategies are those which have been trained since I began learning English. Now when I learn Reading, I expect to improve my vocabulary (ha, because my partner's vocabulary is gigantic). However, as this is the 'course book', I will follow it.

Each chapter in the ReadSmart book contains at least 3 articles although they're not very long. After each article, you'll have to do some activities to test your strategies and your understanding the text. The chapter I've finished talks about the argument of whether animals should be given rights as human do.

For those who advocate animals' rights, they do several experiments with many spieces and show the evidences that animals have emotion like human do. For example, elephant may show their grief by lingering over the bones of long-dead relatives; or ravens can untangle a knotted string to release a tasty prey... They claim that scientists do not accept animals' rights because they fear being 'anthropomorphic', a scientific sin of attributing human emotions to nonhuman life forms.

And as usual, there are still persons who don't agree with this case. I don't like their arguments, frankly, because they seems to have been too emotional when they gave out those conclusions. They point out that those who support animals' rights are based on their compassion and thus, the case is just minimal. In addition, they suggest that before thinking of giving animals rights, some rights should be restricted to human.

That's all for the chapter. Because I'm major in improving my vocabulary, there's not much to say about the authors' writing styles and their methods of persuading (Haizz, I'm glad I didn't have to do this, but I fear I might have to do all one day T__T).

- NHƯ ANH -