Buckets of Wisdom: Observations about life, animals, the weather, time travel, and other things

MsDora grew up, received early education and taught school in the Caribbean. Read her love and pride of the region - people and place. In a previous compilation of Wise Sayings , we observed that Standard English is the official language of Saint Kitts, and that the people sometimes speak their native Creole English for dramatic effect. The least we can do is to help the children read the language. In addition to the previous twenty sayings, all of which had direct reference to animals, here are twenty more general, common sense sayings which offer wise counsel and laughter therapy simultaneously.

In the process, we help keep our language and culture alive. Our non-Kittitian readers can also try saying at least the one they like most. The visitor who can repeat one these sayings in an appropriate setting will become the star of the show. Credit for keeping a record of these creole sayings goes to Creighton Pencheon , former Minister of Culture. Kitts-Nevis has made him one of the foremost authorities on local cultural traditions," according to his professional profile.

Sign in or sign up and post using a HubPages Network account. Comments are not for promoting your articles or other sites. Althea, thanks for your visit and your input. Yes, I have heard that saying; it used to be quite popular and it is still timely for the younger folks today. Hi Ms Dora, I enjoyed reading these. One my Mother used to usePig bin ask he marmie wha mek ih mouth so long. He replied when you come you will see". TeacherJoe, now that you are serving at home in a different capacity, I know that God's favor will continue to surround you. Teacher Joe, what a pleasure to hear from you.

Hope all is well. So encouraged to know that you still pray for me. I think of you occasionally and will be praying for you too. Thank you and God bless! Asharie, glad to help anytime. I appreciate you saying thanks. Hope you score an "A. Thanks for your observation that different cultures teach the same lessons in different words. A group share would be very interesting! MsDora; this second collection of Creole St Kitts sayings is as good as the first!

It is particularly useful that you provide both the original Creole and a literal translation, as well as the wider meaning of the proverb. Many of course are universal sayings which have their own versions in other cultures for example 'What burns you is what sweetens me' - we in the UK might say 'one man's meat is another man's poison'. I particularly like Nos 6, 11 and 18, but all have relevence and value. Hezekiah, hope you can visit your relatives in St. You'll learn even a few.

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Thanks for visiting this article. A magnificent collection of wise sayings! This is a very wise words about life. Thank you Dora for sharing them with us! Ron, thanks for reading. I'm sure that's its okay to translate your personal perception of what these sayings mean. These were fun to read. I could figure out the meaning of a lot of the Creole, but sometimes the meaning I drew was a little different from what you list. I hope such sayings remain part of the living language. Full, thanks for your kind comment. So glad you found the article interesting and valuable.

Interesting and offering great values. I like the combination of the English and the native language. Martie, you encourage me. Thank you, and I hope that you'll have time to read some more of my travel hubs which are mostly about Saint Kitts. Very interesting and cute idioms.

Now I am really curious to know more about Saint Kitts and its native language! Voted up, informative and very useful. Cities and natural features of the landscape such as forests also affect winds. Cooler air over water moving towards land; Air heating over land and rising; Warm air cooling and descending. Warm air over water rising; Air cooling and descending; Cooler air over land moving towards water.

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In the glossary of Canadian winds a Barber does not cut your hair. A Barber is a strong wind which brings precipitation that freezes on contact, especially if the contact is with hair or beard. A Flaw is not a mistake but another name for a Scud or sudden gust of wind. The water and land heat or cool the air above them. This creates large masses of air with roughly the same temperature and moisture content.

These air masses extend for hundreds of kilometres and are often classified according to the region that produced them. For example, air which sits in the Arctic for a few months during the dark days of the polar winter turns cold and dry like the snow and ice below. Meteorologists may call this an Arctic air mass. Similarly, air which sits above the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean Sea during the summer months becomes warm and moist.

This type of air mass is often called tropical. Air masses over North America in the summer. Air masses over North America in the winter. The weather would be easy to forecast if these air masses stayed put. But they do not. They move, pushed by the circulation of air in the upper reaches of the troposphere.

As air masses move, their temperature and moisture content change. For example, an air mass travelling down from the Arctic may warm up as it moves over southern Canada. If the air mass also passes over a large body of water such as Great Slave Lake or Lake Superior, then the air mass may pick up moisture too. Conversely, an air mass may also dry out as it moves inland from the Pacific Ocean.

In this case, the air mass may lose its moisture in the form of rain or snow as it rises and crosses over the Coast and Rocky mountains. There is one other point about air masses, which you have probably noticed. They do not always enter or leave quietly.

A front is the boundary or transition zone between an air mass, which is entering a region, and the air mass, which is leaving it. Usually the two air masses have originated in quite different places, such as the Arctic and the Caribbean. Consequently, they possess different characteristics of temperature and moisture. The interaction between the two air masses may produce dramatic changes in weather, and sometimes, violent weather itself, such as high winds and thunderstorms.

Meteorologists name fronts after the air mass that is entering the region. If cold air is pushing in from the Arctic, displacing the warm air, then the leading edge of the Arctic air mass is called a cold front. If cold air is retreating, allowing warm air to move in, then the leading edge of the warmer air mass is called a warm front.

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A warm air mass will never push a cold air mass out of a region because cold air is heavier and denser. Interestingly, the slope of a cold front is, on average, 4 times steeper than the slope of a warm front. That is because when a cold air mass pushes into an area, there is friction, called surface friction, between the advancing air and the land. This friction causes the leading edge to buckle somewhat. Thunderstorms often develop more quickly along a cold front, because its steeper slope lifts the warm air ahead of it up rapidly, creating ideal conditions for the quick formation of thunderclouds or cumulonimbus clouds.

Cold Front, Warm Front: The slope of a cold front is steeper than that of a warm front because of the friction between the cold air and surface. To show your students why a cold front has a steep slope, ask them to rest their hands flat on their desks with their palms down. Then ask your students to slide their hands forward toward the front edge of the desk, pause, and pull them backward to the original position. What happened to your students' fingers as they pushed their hands forward?

Was there a difference when they pulled their hands back? The students' fingers probably buckled when they pushed their hands forward, as advancing air does, and then flattened when they were drawn back. This is similar to retreating air. One of the tools that forecasters use to identify and locate air masses, pressure systems, and fronts is the weather map. These maps are normally prepared at 3- or 6-hour intervals. Weather observations from hundreds of places in North America are plotted on a weather map like the one on the next page.

As there isn't enough room to write out all the observed information and still have the map readable, a code was developed to condense the information into a smaller space. This code is called the station model. The station model uses a graphical format to fit all of the following information into a space about the size of a dime:. Most weather maps are analysed at least in part by computer but forecasters sometimes do the analysis by hand.

They begin by sketching in isobars, which are curved lines joining places with the same atmospheric pressure. They look much like the contour lines that show elevation on a topographical map. In Canada, isobars are drawn at 4-millibar 0. Normally, the forecaster looks for values close to millibars mb and draws that isobar first. For example, if the pressure at one station is Once the mb isobar is drawn, the forecaster works up to , , etc.

Once the isobars have been drawn, pressure centres will appear. The forecaster will label them as areas of high pressure H or low pressure L , depending on whether the central pressure is higher or lower than the values around it. A surface weather map from the Canadian Meteorological Centre: A weather map from the Canadian Meteorological Centre showing high and low pressure centres, isobars, station plots, and weather fronts across North America.

In this map, high pressure brings fair weather to the Prairies while the North and East are experiencing storms. The forecaster also marks fronts on the weather map. Sometimes, the transition from one airmass to another is so gradual and takes place over such an extended distance that no clear front is identifiable. However where 2 air masses meet and the temperature and humidity change significantly within a short distance, the forecaster will draw either a cold front or a warm front, depending on which type of airmass is moving in.

The forecaster may also choose to shade in areas of cloud and areas of precipitation. The map is then compared to the previous one to determine how the weather systems have moved and whether they have intensified or weakened. The information gleaned from this map analysis is combined with information from other sources such as radar and satellite imagery to give the forecaster a composite picture of what's happening in the atmosphere. Using the weather map provided, have your students study the surface winds near high and low pressure systems. Ask them to describe the difference in pattern of wind circulation around highs and lows.

Their findings should reinforce what they learned earlier in this chapter. Heat is one form of energy. The sun radiates energy in waves, in this case short waves, to the earth. The atmosphere does not absorb short-wave energy readily. The clouds, dust and water vapour in the atmosphere deflect about half of the sun's energy back into space.

What passes through is absorbed by the land and water and converted to heat. The earth radiates this back as long-wave energy, which then warms the air above. In short, the earth acts as a radiator, which you probably know already, if you have ever walked down a long stretch of sidewalk or across a large parking lot on a hot day and watched or felt the heat rise from the pavement. Several factors affect how much of the sun's energy a surface, such as a field, absorbs.

One is its colour.

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This concept is called albedo. The albedo of an object is a decimal fraction that expresses what percentage of the incoming radiation it reflects back to space. Pure white has an albedo of 1. Pure black has an albedo of 0. This comes into play in the earth's energy equation, too. A field covered by snow has an albedo of about 0. The same field covered by crops would have an albedo of 0. The more energy a surface absorbs, the more heat it will eventually release back into the atmosphere.

To show your students that the rate at which energy is absorbed depends on the colour of a material, try Activity number 7. Eventually, all the energy the sun radiates to earth returns to outer space creating the global balance of energy. This prevents the earth from heating up or cooling down. The temperature on your thermometer this morning, however, was probably affected more by the season, the time of day, the latitude, and the geography of your area than by the global balance of energy.

If your students are interested in making a thermometer try Activity number 8. During the day, the earth receives more energy than it radiates back, so it warms up. At night, however, the earth continues to radiate heat, even though it receives no energy from the sun. Consequently, the earth cools down. This cooling process continues until after sunrise, which is one of the reasons why the lowest temperature for the day is often recorded then.

Canadians do not need to be reminded about the effect which the season of the year has on the temperature outside. Canada has its warmest weather when the sun is over the Northern Hemisphere. This is the sun's northern-most position, which it reaches around June From here, the sun starts the slow slide south again to the equator, reaching there about September During the 6 months the sun is in the Northern Hemisphere, its rays shine down on Canada more directly than they do during the country's winter months, when the sun is over the Southern Hemisphere.

With the help of an atlas, have your students locate the spots where these record-setting temperatures were recorded. The latitude of a region also affects how much of the sun's energy an area receives. The countries around the equator receive more of the sun's direct energy than those that lie farther north or south. That is because the sun's rays are almost, but not quite, perpendicular to the earth's surface at the equator.

To reach areas closer to the poles such as Canada, the sun's energy must travel at an angle and pass through more of the atmosphere. Consequently, by the time the sun's rays reach the country, they are weaker, more spread out and diffuse than the rays that hit the earth around the equator.

Finally, the geography of an area plays a role in its heating and cooling. For example, water warms up and cools down more slowly than land does. That is one of the reasons lake shore communities often have lower temperatures in the summer than communities which are farther inland. Similarly, in the winter, communities on the shores of large bodies of open water often have warmer temperatures than those farther inland.

Temperatures also decrease with altitude, which explains why you see snow on mountain tops in July. Temperatures drop with height at an average rate of 1. All these factors along with the characteristics of the air mass over your region - is it cold and dry or warm and moist - affect the daily temperature. Ask your students to choose another school in the Sky Watchers program and prepare a line graph of the temperatures recorded at your school and at the other school. Find out what schools are using the Sky Watchers program. Despite the country's reputation as the land of snow and ice, Canada has heat waves.

Most heat waves in Canada last about 5 or 6 days. The worst heat wave on record was in July The heat rolled into the Prairies from the American southwest in early July and then spread into Ontario. Temperatures climbed to Albans in Manitoba and to Those records stand today. The heat wave lasted a week and was directly or indirectly responsible for killing people in Canada, about people in Ontario alone. But the heat is only part of the story of summer.

The humidity also plays a role in how hot you feel. You can find out what the temperature is by listening to crickets chirp. Crickets chirp faster when it is warm than they do when it is cold. If you count the number of cricket chirps in 8 seconds and then add 4, you will have the current temperature in Celsius degrees. This works 9 times out of Air is made up of a mixture of invisible gases, primarily nitrogen and oxygen.

A small portion of it, however, is water vapour. No matter where you are, the Sahara Desert or the High Arctic, there will be water vapour in the air. The temperature of the air determines the amount of water vapour that can exist in the air. Generally speaking, as the temperature increases, so does the potential for water vapour to exist. When meteorologists talk about the amount of water in the air, the terms they use most frequently are relative humidity and the dew point temperature.

To show your students 2 ways water enters the air, try Activity number 9. The relative humidity is the amount of water vapour that is actually in the air compared to the amount of water vapour that could exist at that temperature. The figure is given as a percentage. For example, a relative humidity of per cent means the air is saturated and cannot absorb any more water vapour.

Similarly, relative humidity of 25 per cent means the air contains only one quarter of the moisture that could be present. Today, humidity is measured with an electronic hygrometer. Not too many years ago, though, humidity was measured with a mechanical instrument that had a long, naturally blond hair as one of the principal components.

As the humidity increased, the hair absorbed moisture and stretched. This caused the indicator arm on the hygrometer to change readings. Blond hair was used because it absorbs moisture more readily than other naturally coloured hair. In , the Swiss physicist Horace de Soussure discovered that hair stretches by about 2. You have probably noticed that dry air readily absorbs moisture from surfaces and moist air does not.

That is why you may have difficulty cooling off on hot, humid days. Your body cools itself when it is warm by perspiring. The process of evaporation requires heat, and in this case, the heat needed to evaporate perspiration is drawn from your body, effectively cooling it off. On days when the relative humidity is low, perspiration evaporates easily and you cool down. On days when the relative humidity is high, though, perspiration does not evaporate as quickly. You have an estimated 2 million sweat glands all working to bring moisture to the surface of your skin where the perspiration evaporates and cools you down.

This process may remove 2 litres of water from the average adult an hour. That is why it is important to drink plenty of water on hot days. Another factor that affects how quickly moisture will evaporate is the wind. For example, on a still calm day, puddles don't evaporate as rapidly as they would on a windy day. That is because, if the air isn't moving, the air immediately above the water puddle will absorb water until it's close to saturation, and then the rate of evaporation slows down.

On a windy day, though, the movement of air over the surface of the puddle means that the water surface is continually exposed to fresh drier air and water will continue to evaporate at a faster rate. Similarly, a breeze will cool you off on a hot day by evaporating the perspiration more quickly. You can use 2 cookie sheets and a small fan to demonstrate this idea to your students. Set the pans at opposite ends of a table or desk and pour one cup of water into each. Set the fan in the centre and turn it so that the air blows across the surface of only 1 cookie sheet. The water will evaporate from that sheet sooner than from the other.

For the same reason, the directions for using the sling psychrometer in Chapter 1 specified that you should swing the psychrometer vigorously in a circular fashion to increase the air flow over the wet bulb and promote evaporation. In contrast to relative humidity, the dew point temperature is the temperature to which the air must cool to be saturated. For example, if the temperature is That is why dew seldom forms on overcast nights when a blanket of clouds keeps the heat close to the earth. When this happens, the air does not cool down to the point of saturation.

Conversely, on clear nights when earth's heat radiates back into space, the air cools down to the dew point temperature and dew forms on objects at the earth's surface such as grass and flowers. Meteorologists use the term dew point temperature even on the coldest winter day, although frost point temperature may be a better name for it. On cold winter days, the water vapour changes from a gas directly to a solid without becoming a liquid first.

If you have a loaf of fresh bread to spare for a couple of days, bring it in to school, show it to the students and then put it in the freezer of the school's refrigerator. Leave the bread there overnight so that it freezes and ice crystals are visible inside the plastic wrapping. Show the bread to your students and ask them how and why the ice crystals formed. The moist air, trapped inside the bag, cooled down to its dew point temperature in the freezer. The water vapour began to condense on the inside of the bag, then froze into ice crystals as the cooling continued.

The humidex is a Canadian invention which was introduced to the country on June 24, The humidex is a comfort index. It is a measure of what hot weather feels like to the average person. The air of a given temperature and relative humidity is equated in comfort to air of a higher temperature which has little moisture in it. That is the humidex reading. How comfortable people feel in hot, humid weather also depends on their age and state of health. If you have a sling psychrometer, use the table provided with it to help your students track temperature, dew point, and relative humidity for at least a 2-week period.

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The highest humidex ever recorded in a Canadian city was in Windsor, Ontario on June 20, Wind chill is an expression of the cooling sensation you feel on your skin when strong winds are combined with low temperatures. Canada's wind chill index uses temperature-like units to compare the wind's effect to the way your skin would feel on a calm day with that temperature. Position a fan on a cabinet at shoulder-level. Have a volunteer stand in front of the fan and turn it on. The student will feel colder because of the wind's cooling effect, although the temperature in the room has not changed.

Now dab some water on one cheek and have the student stand in front of the fan again. The wet skin will feel much colder. This demonstrates how important it is to stay dry when outdoors in winter. In most parts of Canada, the wind chill index is included in Environment Canada's forecasts when it reaches , the point where frostbite becomes a risk. In parts of the country with a milder climate, wind chill warnings are issued at However, wind chill warnings are issued at progressively colder values as you move north.

In extreme northern areas, where people are better adapted to very cold conditions, wind chill warnings are issued for values as low as The wind chill index can help you plan your outdoor activities and decide what to wear. But wind chill is only one of several factors that affect how comfortable you feel on cold winter days. Others include the humidity, your age, your physical condition and how sunny the day is as well as what you plan to do outside. The coldest wind chill in Canada occurred at Kugaaruk in the Northwest Territories. Water is the only substance that can change from a gas to a liquid to a solid at temperatures that are normally found on earth.

What is more, water is everywhere. The air contains water in the form of water vapour, an invisible odourless gas. Clouds form when moist air cools to its dew point - the temperature at which the water vapour condenses - and water droplets or ice crystals form around little particles such as dust, pollution and volcanic ash. Clouds stay up because the water droplets are light and tiny. More than 2 billion of them are needed to fill 1 teaspoon with water. The air may cool to its dew point and form clouds for several reasons.

For instance, cold ground may cool the warm, moist air immediately above it to form low-lying clouds. Clouds may form when a cold air mass lifts up warmer air ahead of it or when air heated by the earth or water rises into the colder reaches of the atmosphere. Clouds also may form when mountains deflect warm, moist air up and over them.

In each case, though, the air must continue to cool until it is saturated for the water vapour to condense and form clouds. Clouds form at different levels in the atmosphere, with the stability of the air and the amount of moisture it contains affecting their size, shape, and type. Air is called stable when it does not rise voluntarily because it is the same temperature as air surrounding it. In fact, stable air has a tendency to stay put unless a range of mountains or a colder air mass forces the air to rise.

If this happens and the air is moist, then clouds form, usually in uniform layers. In contrast, air is called unstable when it continues to rise because it is warmer than the air surrounding it. This parcel of rising air may extend for several kilometres horizontally. It will tend to travel upwards until it reaches the point where it is the same temperature as the air around it. When this happens, meteorologists say the air has reached a balance with the surrounding air.

Stable Air, Instable Air: Stable Air - Stable air does not rise voluntarily; Unstable air - unstable air continues to rise on its own. If air is sufficiently unstable, it may produce clouds which extend high into the atmosphere, some as high as 14 kilometres. These very tall clouds are called cumulonimbus or thunderstorm clouds. In the early years of the nineteenth century an Englishman, Luke Howard classified the clouds according to their appearance and behaviour. Howard was an apothecary or pharmacist with a keen interest in the atmosphere and all that it contained.

He used the scientific language of the day, Latin, to name the types of clouds. Stratus - Stratus means stretched out or layered. Cirrus - Cirrus means curl, lock of hair Cumulus - Cumulus means heap. Nimbus - Nimbus means rain cloud, cloud burst, shower and cloud Oliver Allen. The Planet Earth Series. Time-Life Books, P. Low clouds - The bases of low clouds range from near the earth's surface to about 2 kilometres above it. Depending on the season, these clouds may contain water droplets, ice crystals, or a mixture of both.

Stratus clouds - Stratus clouds are the low, uniformly dull, gray clouds which hang heavily in the sky. Their bases may cover the tops of hills or if you live in the city, high buildings. If it is not drizzling already, stratus clouds are a good sign that precipitation in the form of drizzle may be on the way. Nimbostratus - As the name suggests these are low-lying, dense, gray, clouds which may produce more or less continuous rain, or if is cold enough, snow.

These clouds are thicker or deeper than stratus clouds. Stratocumulus - These clouds have a well-defined rounded appearance and are often organized into rolls with flat bases that have gray or dark gray patches. Stratocumulus clouds are common in the late autumn or in the winter. Cumulus - These little, puffy, fair-weather clouds commonly form on a summer afternoon. They usually cover less than half the sky and produce no precipitation. If a cumulus cloud continues to grow because the air is unstable, it will become either a towering cumulus or a cumulonimbus cloud.

Towering cumulus - These begin as cumulus clouds but grow vigorously into rising mounds or towers. Their tops are well-defined and often resemble cauliflowers. The bases are flat and dark. These clouds may produce showers or flurries. Cumulonimbus - Meteorologists call these clouds CBs. They are thunderstorm clouds, which sometimes produce hail and tornadoes. These clouds can be huge. They are often more than 25 kilometres long and 12 kilometres high with temperatures at their tops as low as oC, even in the summer. If you look at this cloud from a distance, it has a well-defined, whitish, anvil-shaped top and a ragged and low bottom.

When you look at this cloud from below, it has a dark base with curtains made of heavy rain. Ask your students to make a cloud. Then put a few ice cubes onto a baking dish and place that over the opening of the jar. Now watch what happens as the air inside of the jar rises and is cooled by the ice. The water vapour in the air condenses into water droplets making a cloud.

Clouds with the prefix alto are middle-range clouds. Their bases usually range from 2 to 6 kilometres above the earth's surface. Altostratus - These are gray or blue-coloured sheets of clouds with little texture. They cover most of the sky. In some spots, altostratus clouds may be thin enough to reveal the sun. Altocumulus - These are white or sometimes gray clouds with rounded bottoms.

The clouds may look as if they are arranged in rolls, rounded masses or thin layers. The individual rolls of cloud appear smaller than those in stratocumulus clouds because altocumulus clouds are farther away. Sometimes you can see the sky or the sun between the rolls but often these clouds cover the whole sky. Altocumulus lenticularis - These lens-shaped clouds form when a mountain range deflects strong winds upwards on the windward slopes and downward on the leeward slopes.

This creates a giant wave or ripple several kilometres in length. Moist air enters the crests of the waves, cools as it rises and forms a cloud.

When the air descends, it warms up and condensation stops. Groups of these clouds floating along in what appears to be formation may look like a fleet of flying saucers. Stages of a Thunderstorm: Fog and mist are thin layers of stratus cloud that form at ground-level. Like any cloud, fog is composed of millions of tiny droplets of water, or in cold weather, tiny floating ice crystals. The thickness of a fog depends on the concentration of the water droplets.

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Weather observers report fog if the visibility is less than 1 kilometre, and mist if the visibility is 1 to 10 kilometres. The Formation of Altocumulus Lenticularis Clouds: The clouds form at the top of the wave where the air cools and disappears at the bottom of the wave where the temperatures are slightly warmer.

The bottoms of these clouds generally run from 5 to 12 kilometres above the ground. These clouds are composed mostly of ice crystals. Cirrus - These thin clouds may appear as wispy streaks or streamers high in the sky. Extensive cirrus clouds may be the first sign of an approaching warm front.

Cirrocumulus - These are thin, white bands of clouds with tufted bottoms. These clouds often look like the ripples in the sand left by waves. Cirrostratus - This whitish cloud covers the sky in a transparent veil or sheet. The cloud is usually thin enough for the sun to shine through, often producing a halo. One other point about clouds, they move in the direction that the wind at their altitude is blowing. This is why clouds may travel in one direction while the wind at the surface is blowing in another. That also explains why 2 types of clouds which form at different heights, such as cirrus and cumulus clouds, may blow across the sky at one time but from different directions.

Rain, snow, hail, and other forms of precipitation occur when water droplets or ice crystals grow until they are too heavy for the air currents in a cloud to support. This process is slightly different in stable and in unstable air, and produces different types of precipitation.

To show your students how to make a rainbow, turn to Activity number The clouds that form in stable air are called stratiform clouds. These include stratus and nimbostratus clouds. A stratus cloud is a shallow layer cloud which can range in depth from metres to 2 kilometres. In these clouds, the air circulates slowly, providing little opportunity for water droplets or ice crystals to collide, combine and grow. Consequently, the precipitation formed in these clouds is small and tends to fall as drizzle or light snow. A nimbostratus cloud is a deeper cloud than the stratus cloud.

A nimbostratus cloud may form when a mountain range or air mass forces a parcel of air to rise. Such a parcel of air may have an area of hundreds of kilometres and may rise slowly, maybe at the rate of 1 to 10 centimetres a second. In these clouds, the air circulates with slightly more vigour than it does in stratus clouds. As nimbostratus clouds may extend upward for 8 to 9 kilometres, there is more opportunity for water droplets or ice crystals to collide and grow.

This results in larger droplets than those formed in stratus clouds. Nimbostratus clouds are responsible for most of the steady rain and snow which falls in Canada. One million tiny water droplets are needed to form an average rain drop which is about 1 millimetre in diameter. A water droplet needs more than 30 minutes to grow to that size. The rain clouds must be at least 1 kilometre thick for the growing droplets to remain in the cloud long enough to become raindrops.

The clouds that form in unstable air are called convective clouds after the convection currents created by the rising warm air and sinking cold air within them. These clouds include towering cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds. Unlike nimbostratus clouds, the updrafts and downdrafts in towering cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds travel tens of metres per second. The force of the updrafts and downdrafts bounces water droplets or ice crystals around many times giving them ample opportunity to collide, combine and grow.

The strength of the updrafts and downdrafts also allows the water droplets or ice crystals to grow much larger than they do in a nimbostratus cloud before they become too heavy for the air currents to support them. The precipitation formed in these clouds usually falls in bursts or showers. Though short-lived, these bursts or showers may drop a lot of rain or snow in a short period of time. Ask your students to make a list of all the different sounds, they hear from weather, such as the sound of cars on wet pavement or rain on the roof.

Using a tape recorder, ask your students to record a unique sound which they have discovered. When tape is complete, visit other classrooms and have those students guess what it is they hear. Precipitation comes in three forms, liquid, freezing and frozen - and in Canada, sometimes all in one day. More than 5 trillion tonnes of precipitation fall on this country each year.

More than 60 per cent of this precipitation runs off into lakes and rivers. The rest evaporates from the earth's surface or passes back through the plants through the process known as transpiration. If your students are interested in making a rain gauge, try Activity number But water also recycles itself several times between the air and the ground. The water evaporates from soil, lakes, and rivers, rises into the air as water vapour, forms clouds, and then falls elsewhere as rain, drizzle, freezing rain, snow or hail.

Drizzle - Precipitation is called drizzle when the water droplets are less than 0. Drops of drizzle fall at a rate of 1 to 2 metres per second while raindrops reach speeds of 4 to 9 metres per second. Rain - Precipitation is called rain when the water droplets are greater than 0. Some raindrops are as large as 10 millimetres across. To show your students the different sizes of rain drops, try Activity number And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

Hollingdale Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint. First attributed to Twain in s, as in The best things anybody ever said , , Robert Byrne, Atheneum. See talk page for more info. When a child turns 12, he should be kept in a barrel and fed through the bunghole, until he reaches Attributed to Twain but never sourced, this quotation should not be regarded as authentic.

Describing her first day back in grade school after a long absence, a teacher said, "It was like trying to hold 35 corks under water at the same time. See also autobiography, vol. Warm summer sun, shine kindly here; Warm southern wind, blow softly here; Green sod above, lie light, lie light — Good-night, dear heart, good-night, good-night.

Epitaph for his daughter, Olivia Susan Clemens , this is actually a slight adaptation of the poem "Annette" by Robert Richardson ; more details are available at "The Poem on Susy Clemens' Headstone" The minority is always in the right. The majority is always in the wrong. Attributed to Twain, but never sourced. Suspiciously close to "A minority may be right, and the majority is always in the wrong. Often attributed to Twain, but he said it was attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and this itself is probably a misattribution: Twain did, however, popularize this saying in the United States.

His attribution is in the following passage from Twain's Autobiography , Vol. Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. Often attributed to Twain, but of unknown origin. Twain did write, in Roughing It: The climate of San Francisco is mild and singularly equable. The thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round. It hardly changes at all. You sleep under one or two light blankets Summer and Winter, and never use a mosquito bar.

Nobody ever wears Summer clothing. You wear black broadcloth--if you have it--in August and January, just the same. It is no colder, and no warmer, in the one month than the other. You do not use overcoats and you do not use fans. It is as pleasant a climate as could well be contrived, take it all around, and is doubtless the most unvarying in the whole world. The wind blows there a good deal in the summer months, but then you can go over to Oakland, if you choose--three or four miles away--it does not blow there.

Golf is a good walk spoiled.

OTHER SIGNS

Scrivener attributes the aphorism to "my good friends the Allens". Reference from Quote Investigator. I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. Often misattributed to Twain, this is actually by Blaise Pascal , "Lettres provinciales", letter 16,