What is this?

Hi! My name is Ulrik, and this is my student blog. My posts will be based on tasks and subjects given to the class by my English teacher Ann. I am currently in my third year at Sandvika High School, Norway.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

1950-1953-2012

The Korean conflict


These days, USA and South Korea has a big scale military exercise. North Korea is as usual not very happy with this, and threats with full scale war. This is not the first time North Korea does this. Two years ago they fired missiles at South Korea, and their relationship is not exactly getting better. With concentration camps, and the most guarded border in the world, North Korea is the worlds most dangerous dictatorship. A war would be devastating for both sides.


The Korean War 1950-53(The too short and easy version)

At the Potsdam conference in 1945, the allied forces of world war 2, decided to split Korea(partially occupied by Japan) into two parts. North Korea was communists and south was anti communists, supported heavily by the US. In 1950 a full war began, and the UN decided to support South Korea. US troops would represent almost 90% of the UN troops. North Korea was able to push heavily into the south, but was repelled. The war soon became stagnant, and except for heavy casualties on both sides, it didn't look like it would be won by anyone. Three years later not much had happened, except for five million dead civilians and soldiers. Both sides signed a truce, which is still active.

The modern conflict 1953-

Today the war is still going on, but there is a truce. The borders are still the same, and it is the most heavily guarded border in the world. This is what the whole modern conflict is about. US still have thousands of soldiers in South Korea, and if the truce is broken, both sides has nuclear weapons and are able to use them. Let us hope that's not going to happened.

The English dictionaries


The good, the not so good, and the ugly one

There's so many online dictionaries to chose from, many of them are totally crap, and the good ones often costs money. I will try to compare three different  free online English dictionaries, and hopefully find a good one. 


The Free Dictionary 

The first dictionary i found, was www.thefreedictionary.com. At first glance it looked a little bit chaotic, and not very user friendly. How ever, after looking around on the site, i found out that it has a whole lot of languages(i will only write about the English), and a lot of possibilities. On the left side of the site i found different categories within the English language. I clicked on "legal dictionary", and found myself looking at a list of some popular words like "income tax". If i clicked at "income tax", I found a whole article about the meaning of the word, how it is used, and what it is used for.
However, I could not search within the legal dictionary, I could only search the entire dictionary. I don't know why, but that was the case. So then i tried to search the word "Hi", and got a whole lot of different definitions. All of them making sense.
Expect from looking a bit old and a little chaotic, this dictionary is definitely acceptable.

                         The Cambridge Dictionary

The second dictionary i looked at was www.dictionary.cambridge.org. This looked much nicer than thefreedictionary.com. The site was smooth, and easy to navigate on. Like the other one, this had some different categories, but on this one you could easily search within the category you wanted. However, here i did not find whole articles about words like "income tax", only a short definition. So this site looked much better than the other one, but it did not have so many definitions or articles explaining  deeper. But i would recommend this if you just want to look up a word.


One look                          

The last dictionary i will look at, is www.onelook.com. When i went on the site, i came straight to a search field. I search the word "fish". Then i was told that they had found 98 English dictionaries, who contained the word "fish". I clicked on the first hit, and got redirected to a yahoo site, which said everything i needed to know about the word "fish". However, when i clicked on another link, i got no results at all.So what this page do, is redirecting you to another dictionary. So i would not recommend this site, since you have to click around until you find a good definition. Pages like the Cambridge dictionary, and the free dictionary are much smoother to use, and they have good definitions. Personally i think i would use the Cambridge dictionary.

                                    



Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Hello from Sandvika!

My first blogg!

Today my teacher gave the news that everyone was going to make a blogg. It was going to be about the English class and what we do. I thought it was a fun idea, and even though I have never made a blogg in my entire life, or thought about doing so, i will do my best and hopefully succeed. Wish me luck!

Who am I?

My name is Ulrik, I am 16 years old and live in Asker, just outside Oslo if it means anything to you. I've just started at Sandvika VGS (it's almost like high school in the US), and so far it's awesome! I have a family, and my house is fifty minutes away from the school if you walk, but train or bus is the most common i guess.
At my spare time i do archery and politics. I'm also extremely interested in history.

Norway!

As you already know, I live in Norway. It's a small country placed almost on the top of the world. And no, we don't have polar bears running around(except from Svalbard). It's a great country to live in, and there is not much to complain about, expect for the fact that there's to cold here in the winter.

So, that's all for now i guess... There will soon be more!