The 1931 Central China Floods know as the yellow river floods Research Paper

The 1931 Central China Floods know as the yellow river floods - Research Paper Example The region began to experience heavy snowfall due to cooling of the warm winds from the north, which were deposited majorly in the mountain areas close to the Yellow River basin (Chen, pp.184). As the spring of 1931 approached, the weather started to change coupled with the high temperatures. The high temperatures led to the melting of the snow that flowed into the three major rivers causing a rise in water levels. At the same time heavy rains stroke Central China due to cyclones that increased from the normal two to about nine cyclones causing storm surges in the region. These storm surges increased further the rising water levels of the three rivers especially the Yellow River. For several centuries, farmers had built dikes along the river banks to prevent it from bursting. In turn, this caused accumulation of silt along the riverbed and hence reduced the porosity of the soil around the riverbed and further increased the rising water levels (Shiyang, pp.175). The increasing water levels alongside the heavy rains overcame the dikes in Huayankou around Zhengzhou city in Henan province causing the river banks to burst leading to a massive flood of the central China plains. The drainage routes of the melting snow in the North, West and East Mountains were the three rivers that burst their banks. The water levels rose so high and by August, 1931 the capital city of China by then, Nanjing City was surrounded by an island of water of about a hundred thousand square kilometers. The two major rivers were also affected by the rising snow storms and heavy rains. Yangtze water levels rose to its worst between July and August due to high rainfall in this period, which was recorded to be around 24 inches of rain. On the other hand, Huai River burst its banks and led to an average rise in flood levels at an average of 5.6 ft above Shangai Bund. By

Psychology can help us understand ourselves and others. Discuss with Essay

Psychology can help us understand ourselves and others. Discuss with reference to two of four main topics. a] personality, b] Intelligence, c] emotions, d] cognition - Essay Example Cognition is the process or act of knowing and able to make some judgment about it. It is very broad which include a complicated mental process encompassing functions like perception, memory, learning, and problem solving. Cognition includes more than few elements or processes which all work to describe the manner by which knowledge is built up and also how judgments of people are made. The elements related to these processes are: perceiving, recognizing, reasoning, problem solving, conceptualizing, learning, memory, and language (Scienceclarified, 2008). The individual’s ability to comprehend or the cognition ability is necessary for a scientific understanding what human behavior is all about. According to the investigations of various experts, mental processes like association, recall process, and understanding about language are based on the physical relations or interactions of people with their environment, instead of the body which supports the mind; it is basically viewing the body as a support system for a mind. Cognitive structures advance from perception and action like a software (Turing, 1950) which can run on different hardware systems. Human mind can manipulate abstract symbols based on the interactions of people around via his sensory organs as well as greatly coordinated effectors. Wilson (2002) has six various claims about cognition: 1) cognition is situated; 2) cognition is time pressured; 3) cognition is off-loaded onto the environment; 4) the environment is a component of the cognitive system; 5) cognition is for action; 6) an offline cognition is body based. He further emphasized that, sensorimotor functions which evolved for action as well as perception have been preferred for the application of offline cognition. Therefore, it is logical to say that, cognition is based on the functions of human body and interdependent with the environment. Some current experiments have demonstrated that perceptual as well as motor