Category: Essentials

Core classes in English Literacy, Khmer Literacy, Math, and Science.

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First Chemistry Lab

Lab Report:

Title: What is the Metal type of the Malaysia 50 Sen Coin

by Mengthong Long

Introductory Chemistry

September 4, 2018

Abstract

The coins were introduced as a method of payment around the 6th or 5th century and from that time different countries tried to invent a different style of the coins for their currency. In the contemporary world, we still use the coin as our payment methods and those coins are made out of different metals types such as copper, aluminum, gold, silver, iron, nickel and many more. In this lab, it was set up for figuring out the Malaysia 50 Sen coin metal type. To do this, knowing the density of the coin was essential. So there were two main steps, first was to calculate the volume of the coin and then calculate the mass of the coin. Our results showed that the average density of the Malaysia 50 Sen coin was 7.9 g/ml and the coin was made out of a Gadolinium but compared to the actual data the coin was actually made out of a Brass Nickel.  

Introduction

Coins are very important and necessary for many countries for their payment system, they use the coins as money in everyday transactions and exchange. There are many styles of coins that are made out of different metals depending on their value and each country preference. The basic of the coins are usually disc-shaped with different sizes and designs.

The main purpose of this experiment was to figure out the Malaysia 50 Sen coin metal type. Before the experiment, the hypothesis was that the Malaysia 50 Sen coin was made out of an Aluminum since the mass of the coin was light so its density wouldn’t be that much either, therefore, Aluminum was the choice based on the mass and observation.

Materials and Methods

 

In the experiment, there were two main steps, first was to calculate the volume and the second was to calculate the mass of the coin. At first, grabbed the 100 ml graduated cylinder and fill it with 30 ml of water. For this step, make sure that the lower curved surface of the water was in the same level of 30 ml, not surface due to the design of the graduated cylinder at the bottom surface. After the water was on the mark, slowly placed the coin into the graduated cylinder then note down the total volume into the table data. Finally, repeat the same steps for three replications for precise data. Then clean up space, especially, tried to clean and dried the coin properly so that it wouldn’t affect the mass result. Next, get the coin and tried to place it on the center of the scale. Lastly, note down the mass into the table data and repeat this process for three replications.

Results

Table: Calculate the average density of the Malaysia 50 Sen coin

As a result, the density of the first, second, and third replications was 6.7 g/ml, 8.0 g/ml, and 8.9 g/ml respectively. The average density of the Malaysia 50 Sen coin was 7.9 g/ml and based on Engineers Edge Densities of Metals and Elements Table, the coin was made out of a Gadolinium metal type.  

Discussion

The result didn’t support the hypothesis, the hypothesis was that the Malaysia 50 Sen coin was made out a Gadolinium metal type but the result wasn’t correct either. According to Invest Silver Malaysia, the study showed that the Malaysia 50 Sen coin was actually made out of a Brass Nickel metal. There were a few errors during the process of the experiment. The biggest error was properly the step to observe and note down the accurate volume of the coin since the mark on the graduated cylinder was tiny and wasn’t clear. In addition, when the coin was placed into the cylinder the volume didn’t increase that much so it was a struggle to mark the accurate volume.

Reference

LLC. “Densities of Metals and Elements Table.” Engineers Edge, 30 Mar. 2017, www.engineersedge.com/materials/densities_of_metals_and_elements_table_13976.htm.

“10 Facts About Malaysia’s New 3rd Series Coins.” Invest Silver Malaysia, 23 Aug. 2011, investsilvermalaysia.com/10-facts-about-malaysias-new-3rd-series-coins/.

 

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SAT Preparation

The senior will have an official SAT test soon on either October or March, it is really necessary to practice as much as we could to get prepared and be ready to the test. Coach Larry Gelwix once said, “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent.” This quote is really fundamental in a test like SAT. We need to practice a lot and as well finding an efficient way to solve different problems in SAT. This is what SAT all about, practice, speed, and efficient with the strategy to apply. We had two weeks of SAT boot camp with the students from America who had been trained and experienced this test. It was really helpful because we had many tips and practices from our two mentors. In the essential math class, we continue to practice and build our test-taking strategy on the subjects such as Circle Theorem, Trigonometry, Unit Circle, Imaginary Number, Function, and Quadratic. In my math class, I spend a huge chunk of my time on quadratic using both Khan Academy and Desmos to do self-learning on this important skill in SAT.   

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Literacy Leadership Team

This year my English literacy class was really different and unique from other groups. The other groups they had a unit about America. But for my literacy class, we called The Liger Leadership Team, we took a different approach to learn the advanced literacy skills and as well learn to be independent and be the leader for other students. For the first few weeks, we have been reading some kid books such as Mr. Nosey, Arrow to the Sun, and Rosie Revere, Engineer. I realized that literature and literacy skills can be learned from any kind level of books. Even though the above books were written for kids but I found out that it included some of the advance literacy skills such as repetition, idiom, onomatopoeia, alliteration, and a tremendous amount of new vocabulary.

Beside from that, we were the first literacy group to read the book called The Rent Collector. The Rent Collector was written by a foreign author, Cameron Wright. So The Rent Collector was a 50% story based on a real life of Sang Ly’s family, who live at the landfill at Steung Meanchey that struggle to fight through to survive and find a better life for herself and her son who is always sick. Sang Ly had a dream to learn how to write and read. But at one day, she asked Sopeah who was the “the rent collector”, and who was normally care about herself. But she ended up accept to teach Sang Ly and at last literature play a role in Sang Ly’s life and help her right through the difficulties she had faced.   

As a final product, we had created our own literature event about our book, launch our Lit Studio which is our library, and share our poem about The Rent Collector. The event went so well, everyone enjoys listening to our inspiring speech about The Rent Collector, book summary, students’ testimonials, and spoken word. I had written a few poems and I had an opportunity to share one of them the crowd that was expressing Sang Ly’s feeling when she lived at the dump.

 

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Khmer Poem Book

Last year, the senior started to write their own poem about any topics that they feel interested to write about. I had written three different poems that were mostly related to education and the issues in my society. This school year we have been working on our poem book and in the first few weeks, we tried to edit to our poem. After we finished our editing, we started to put all of those poems into a format of the book. My first role with the poem book was to write the instruction and show a proper way to write the poem. In addition, my role changed to work as a person who manages and organize the book format. This role was really important because if the book didn’t have the same format it will look so awkward. So when the format was finished the students started to follow and use it as a sample. Even though this job was mainly run by me but I needed to communicate with other students and show them the update of the format since we had a different period of Khmer class. On September 24, 2018, we had our first book draft and it looked astonishing, everyone was really happy to see the book and what we had accomplished from the past few months.  

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How do scientists study the geography of the ocean?

Sonar is a type of technology that had been used by many scientists to navigate the geography and atmosphere in the water, but mainly in the ocean. There are two types of sonar: active sonar and passive sonar. Active sonar is able to send the signal of sound in the water, however, when the object is in the path of the sound pulse it will bounce the echo signal back to the sonar transducer. The sonar transducer signal has the ability to tell the strength of the signal, determine the distance and the orientation of the object. On another hand, passive sonar able to detect the noise in the ocean, it does not emits its own signal but instead, it uses to detect the noise that comes toward the vessels. Passive sonar doesn’t have the ability to measure the range of the object.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) uses sonar technology to study and understand the geography and the atmosphere in the ocean. Scientists primarily use sonar to map objects on the seafloor like shipwrecks and as well use to map the geography of the seafloor itself.
As can be seen, sonar technology can be so useful to the scientists that are doing geography research. Because of this technology that’s why humans are able to have a better scene of the environment underwater, as well as using that information to prevent danger or risk when traveling in the ocean.

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Woman doesn’t deserve the proper credit for theirs achievements

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was born on May 10, 1900, Wendover, England. She was one of the fewest astrologists who was successful with her career to discover what the Sun was made out of, as well as other stars in the universe. Her discovery had an immense distribution impact on our society. She had proved people wrong that the outside world isn’t the same as the Earth. With her amazing discovery, she never deserves a proper credit for her hard work to figure out this enigma.     

In 1919 Payne entered the University of Cambridge to learn science but she didn’t know what aspect of science did she wants. She made her decision to study astrology and stars after she was inspired by a lecture of a famous astronomer Arthur Eddington. She knew that England wasn’t the best place for women to explore in the science field so she moved to the US in 1923, attempted Radcliffe College (now it’s a part of Harvard), the only academic institutions that accepted women in science. It was Harvard that Payne achieved her flourished success as an astronomer.

Just in 2 years, in 1925 she was the first women who received a Ph.D. degree in astronomy. In that time, we believed that the elements that made our planet is the same as the outside world. In fact, her discovery had proved everyone wrong that our earth and the outside world is totally different. Payne had discovered that the Sun, as well as the stars, are mainly made out of two elements, hydrogen, and helium. In addition, she also found out that we can classify the stars by its temperature. As a young scientist, living in the world that was dominated by older man, she didn’t get the credit that she should deserve. Her advisor, Henry Norris Russell persuaded her that she shouldn’t publish her discovery because it was too controversial, so she took his advice. A few years later Russell took her discovery and published it by himself. Eventually, she became a technical assistant working at Harvard. In 1956, she became a Chair of the Department of Astronomy, making her the first woman with a department at Harvard.  

Source: 

1-https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cecilia-Payne-Gaposchkin

2-http://www.documentarytube.com/articles/cecilia-payne–the-woman-who-discovered-what-the-sun-was-made-of-but-never-given-credit

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Competent Holds Women Back

The author of “One Plus One Equals Three” stated, “Women are smarter than men and that is a problem.”

Men are confidence, they are overestimated their abilities.
Women are competent, they are underestimated their abilities.

Men care more about the result.
Women care more about being perfect and correct.

Females tend to be more competent, perfect with both ability and performance and that is the issue that holds their back. They underestimate themselves, lack of confidence to take the test, job interview, play sports, asking questions and they won’t take the risk unless they are assured it is perfect or 100 percent.

In fact, men tend to be more confident because they care more about the result, taking risks, not restricted, not asking for permission and not being perfect; they just want what they want.

We always stated that men are dominated the society which is true, but is it a problem because of men or is it women who are overthinking themselves. Sheryl Sandberg, a Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, said, “It wasn’t men who hold women back, it was women who are holding women back.”

Women care more about being perfect than the result. Usually, women second guess themselves before they make an attempt.
They follow the rules, they want to be as perfect as possible, despite it pulls them down instead.

According to The Atlantic, it’s stated, that women working at Hewlett-Packard, the computers and electronic company found that women applied for a promotion job when they meet 100 percent of the qualifications. In contrast, men are happy to apply when they could meet 60 percent of the job requirements.

“Women were smarter than men and that was the problem.
Women would listen more carefully to what was said.
Women would respond more thoughtfully.
Women would pay more attention, answer the question, solve the problem.
Women would underestimate their abilities.

It’s not thinking.
It’s overthinking.

Men wouldn’t do any of that.
Men aren’t listening to anyone else.
Men are just concentrating on what they wanted.
Men are overestimating their abilities.
And it worked.”

What caused the women to feel that way, care more about being perfect?

Based on Bright Network, it’s stated, the women are taught to be head down, follow the rules when they were young from high school to college. Moreover, the experiences and pressure from the society that put on women; this can contribute to a lack of confidence since they experienced the adverse of not being perfect.
Boys are making more mistakes than girls because they are confidence and that process of failure lead to an important consequence for them; it’s building their confidence to accept failure and taking the risk.

It’s now 2018, it is time for women to get out of this fear of underestimation, the fear that keeps them away from the opportunities, from success and from this world. Women should be like men, focus more on being confident, not competent.

No one will raise women up beside women, so they should stop underestimate their abilities but instead show their skills, their confidence and the capability of their work. Not only that, but women should shout for their works, fight for it, to pursue their dream.

Confident should be first and competent should be second.

Sources:

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Pchum Benh Project

Pchum Benh is a traditional ceremony for Cambodia. In the ceremony, everyone will mostly leave Phnom Penh and travel to differences to many provinces to meet their family. Also during the ceremony, there are many other events that will happen in the pagoda. So in Khmer class before and after Pchum Benh when had worked on the Pchum Benh project. We did a lot of researches about Pchum Benh such as the history, the date that this event occurs, what clothes do we need to wear when we go to the pagoda. Moreover, we also did the research about the fairy tale of Pchum Benh. Lastly, after our hard work that we put into this project for a few weeks, we finally created the report about Pchum Benh.

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Math SAT Practice

On the 14th, October, 2017, the senior cohort had the SAT practice test where we took the reading session, language usage session and lastly math session. It was really difficult for both math and literacy. Some of the questions in math session I haven’t learned about it yet. So during the math class, we went over some of the questions and we started to do some practices of the math unit that we struggle with during the test. Moreover, we just KhanAcademy to practice our SAT and prepare to learn the unit that is essential to the test.

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Coming of Age Narrative essay

In the literacy class, we learned in the unit of coming of age so I wrote the essay about my personal story that related to the topic of changing life moment. At the beginning of the essay, I started to form the sketch, since the beginning of the unit I had created the outline for my essay. In addition, in my outline, I just list down everything on top of my head to give me some ideas that I could include in the essay. Furthermore, one of my favorite part of the whole story was to include descriptive language with my writing. I enjoyed using different descriptive phrases and the word to paint the picture that I wanted to deliver to the readers. “It was an early morning, the sun rises up and the clear blue sky appears which illuminated the whole community. The white cloud moved slowly from one direction to another over the rusty clay roof. The birds flew around the old wooden house, around the trees, upon to the sky, it seemed like they were having too much fun with their families and friends. Today, my gramma house was really crowded. Everything was covered by the white and black fabric.”