Chapter Three   Writing Three Other Categories
                                     Of Prose
 
 
Prose has usually been divided into four categories known as narration, description, exposition, and persuasion. The categories are not sharply differentiated, and many combinations are possible. The distinctions are useful nonetheless. Each category has a different purpose, and as we have seen, writers organize their materials according to purpose. This chapter will discuss the purpose and characteristics of each of the modes of discourse in turn except the expository writing.
Expository writingis writing that shows, explains, informs, or teaches. Exposition is the kind of writing most often used in magazine articles, college textbooks and term papers, essay exams, research papers, business reports, business letters, and so on. Since the major principles and methods to write an expository paper were discussed in Chapter Two, the pages will be saved for the 3 other categories: narration, description and persuasive writing, and the comparison of the four types of writing.
 
 

·Narrative writing
·Descriptive writing
·Persuasive writing
·Comparison of four types of writing
 
 

I.  Narrative writing
 
The purpose of narration is tell a story or relate an event. “Once upon a time ...” is known as the beginning of a story to many readers. This form began before language was written down, in the form of folk tales and legends passed from the generation to the next. There are also narratives that have other purposes: to reveal personal history (biography or autobiography), or to report events (news story or history).
When planning a narrative, the writer should consider these five aspects: context, plots (selection of details), climax, purpose and organization.
 
 
 
 

·Context:   the introduction of the time, place, characters
and happenings
·Plots (selection of details): selecting the details (events)
to form a carefully planned sequence of plots
contributing to the main idea of the narrative
       ·Climax:    the turning points of events, the highlights of
                            the narrative
·Purpose:  to prove a theory, to illustrate a concept, etc.
·Organization: usually in chronological order
 
 

1.    Context. When, where and to whom the action in a narrative happens are often made clear at the beginning of the narrative. This provides the reader with a context or circumstances, to help him understand the whole narrative.
 
2.    Plots (selection of details). A narrative is made up of details. There should be enough details so that the reader knows what is happening, but there should not be too many of them, or the reader will be confused and lose the interest in the story. Only relevant details or things that contribute to bringing out the main idea of the narrative are useful and effective. When selecting details, therefore, the writer should bear in mind his purpose in writing the narrative.
 
3.      Climax. Novels, short stories, and anecdotes are usually organized to build to a climax, and the writer includes only those details that move narrative toward that end. The curve usually goes like this:
 
                                                                               ← Climax
       
 
 
 

       
 
Let us read the following paragraph and see how the writer organizes the details to build to a climax.
 

                                   One Good Turn Deserves Another

 
One evening Mr. Green was driving in his car along a lonely country road. He had been to London where he had drawn £50 from the bank, and he was now returning home with the money which he had put in his pocket book. At the loneliest part of the road a man in shabby, badly-fitting clothes stopped him and asked for a lift, Mr. Green told him to get into the car and continued on his way. As he talked to the man he learned that he had been in prison for robbery and broken out of prison two days ago. Mr. Green was very worried at the thought of the £50 that he had put in his pocket book. Suddenly he saw a police-car and had a bright idea. He had just reached a small town where the speed limit was 30 miles an hour. He pressed down the accelerator and drove the car as fast as it would go. He looked back and saw that the police-car had seen him and begun to chase him. After a mile or so the police-car overtook him and ordered him to stop. A policeman got out and came to Mr. Green's car. Mr. Green had hoped that he could tell the policeman about the escaped robber, but the man had taken a gun out of his pocket and put it to Mr. Green's back. The policeman took out his notebook and pencil and said he wanted Mr. Green's name and address. Mr. Green asked to be taken to the police station but the policeman said, "No, I want your name and address now. You will have to appear at the police court later." So, Mr. Green gave the policeman his name and address. The policeman wrote it down, put his pocket book and pencil back in his pocket and gave Mr. Green a talk about dangerous driving. Then Mr. Green started up his car and drove on. He had given up all hope of his £50, but just as he reached the outskirts of London the passenger said he wanted to get out here and said "Thanks for the lift. You've been good to me. This is the least I can do in return." And he handed Mr. Green the policeman's notebook.
        While the policeman was talking to Mr. Green, the thief stole the notebook.
 
Clearly the climax in the story is “Thank you for the lift. You've been good to me. This is the least I can do in return.” Then the puzzle is going to be solved in the last few sentences, thus, bringing the story to the end. But the climax doesn't always appear in one paragraph but in the following paragraphs in a longer story.
 
4.      Purpose. There must be a purpose in telling a story. The writer may want to prove a theory, illustrate a concept, to praise a virtue, to condemn a vice, etc. He should make sure that the total effect of his narrative, or the final impression it leaves on the reader, is in agreement with his purpose. To achieve this, he has to choose details and design the plot of his story carefully. In the above example, the purpose is to prove the truth “One good turn deserves another.” The plot of the story was so well designed that the reader was anxious to know the final result. Let's analyze the following narrative writing about its composition.
 

                                            A Downhill Experience

Context
 
 
 
                  Event 1
       My first experience down "the great slopes" was one to remember.Snow skiing looked so effortless; I knew it would be on time before I was swiftly traversing from top to bottom. Was I ever in for a shock! My first rude awakening was trying to get on the ski
 
 
 
 
              Event 2
 
 
 
Climax:Event 3
 
 
 
 
 
Purpose
 
 
 
lift.The chair came around so quickly it swooped me off my feet, plopped my rear in the seat, and left my poles in the snow behind me. Thank goodness the skier behind me was kind enough to carry them up with him. The second catastrophe was my exit from the chair. I collided with two skiers who were attempting to pick themselves up after their great fall from the chair. After collecting myself, I began to have doubts about my journey down "the great slopes." As I cautiously snowplowed down the mountain, the tips of my skis crossed over each other, forcing me back down on my rear. This event was repeated until I had almost reached the bottom. "The great slope" was now a mere 15-degree decline, so I pushed myself the rest of the way in with my poles. I stood at the end of the ski run, soaking wet. I then came to the conclusion that a beginning skier should take a skill lesson before attempting a run down "the great slopes."

 
The context:       the first sentence though it's not detailed.
                     The detail: Janet has selected only those experiences which contribute to her main idea — that an overconfidence beginner may be courting disaster.
“My first rude awakening was trying...”
“The second catastrophe was my exit...”
“As I cautiously snowplowed...”
The climax:The third disaster might be the climax.
   The purpose:To state the fact that a beginner skier should take a ski lesson before attempting a run down "the great slopes."
The organization:  Janet has used the chronological order.
 
5.   Organization. Narratives are usually told in chronological order (that is, in the sequence in which they occurred in time, though sometimes written in process order. For example:
 
On Friday, March 2, a Boston ropemaker named William Green, busy with his fellows braiding fibers on an outdoor "ropewalk" or ropemaking machine, called to Patrick Walker, a soldier of the Twenty-ninth [Regiment] who was passing by, and asked if he wanted work. "Yes," Walker replied. "Then go and clean my shithouse," was Green's response. The soldier answered him in similar terms, and when Green threatened him, he departed, swearing to return with some of his regimental mates. Return he did with no less than forty soldiers, led by a big Negro drummer.
                                             — Page Smith, “A New Age Now Begins”
The writer reports these events as they followed one another in time, and his use of dialogue — of Green's actual words — makes this moment in American history come vividly alive.
But it is also possible, and sometimes preferable, to start from the middle or even the end of the story with the event that is most important or most likely to arouse the reader's interest, and then go back to the beginning by using flashbacks, such as in news reports. So, the writer may need to change the original sequence, moving backward and forwarding time. For example:
 
In June 1964 ... two Italian fishing boats, working in tandem with a crew of 18, were dragging their nets along the bottom of the Adriatic. Toward dawn, as they pulled up the nets after a long trawl, the fishermen realized their catch was unusually heavy. ... When they finally swung the nets inboard they saw an ungainly, Prehistoric-looking figure missing both feet. It was, in fact, a 500-pound Greek statue covered with nearly 2,000 years of sea encrustations.
In November 1977, this life-size bronze fetched the highest known price ever paid for a statue — $3.9 million. The work is attributed to the fourth century B.C. Greek artist Lysippus. ... Professor Paolo Moreno of Rome University, author of two books on Lysippus, identifies the statue as the portrait of a young athlete after victory and suggests that it may have been plundered by ancient Romans from Mount Olympus. The ship bearing the statue was probably sunk in a storm and there may well have been other treasures on board. Pliny the Elder tells us Lysippus made more than 1,500 works, all of them bronze, but it was doubted that any of the originals had survived — until this one surfaced.
The fishermen stealthily unloaded the barnacle-covered masterpiece in Fano, near Rimini, and took it to the captain's house, where it was put on a kitchen table and propped up against a wall.
                                                        — Bryan Rosten, “Smuggled!”
 The first paragraph tells the story of how a statue was discovered in June 1964. To explain what makes this story important, the writer flashes forward to 1977, when the statue was sold for nearly four million dollars. Then she flashes back to ancient times, when the statue was lost. After these forward and backward flashes, she returns to the original in the third paragraph.
 
II.        Descriptive writing
 
 

·To describe a scene, a place
·To describe a person
·To describe an object
·To describe an abstract idea
·To describe a graph
 
 

Descriptive writing is word painting. Whereas a painter uses oils, pastes, or watercolors to communicate his impressions, the writer uses words. All writing is word painting, but descriptive writing is the most visual. Like narration, description must be selective. The purpose of a descriptive paragraph is to create a single dominant impression on a scene, place, person, object, abstract idea, or graph and thus it should include only those details that contribute to that impression. Details are essential. Details can employ any or all of the five senses — sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Here the writer uses carefully selected words in order to convey a particular image. For example:
 
       I saw a bird this morning.(direct narration)
I saw the first ribbon of spring this morning — a plump male — his red breast glowing in the sun.     (description)
 
The first sentence just lets the readers imagine any bird they want. But reading the second one, the readers receive a clear picture.
When describing a scene, especially, you have to employ all your faculty of selecting details, commanding your words and utilizing imagination. For instance, in A Winter Walk, the author, Henry David Thoreau, with his words, paints a vivid scene of winter, full of content, rich in imagination, appealing to the readers’ heart and firing the hope of life.
 

Full of content
       Wind
 
       Animals
 
 
 
 
       The earth
 
       Street sign
       Woodhouse door
Rich in imagination
Appealing to the heart
 
Firing the hope of life
 
 
 
 
 
 
       The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The meadow mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls. The earth itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when some street sign or woodhouse door has faintly creaked upon its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work —the only sound awake ’twixt Venus and Mars —advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together, but where it is very bleak for men to stand. But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grains over all the fields.
       —Henry David Thoreau, “A Winter Walk”

 
The focus or organization in a descriptive paragraph or essay is space. Whether one is describing a favorite person, a food, or an emotion, there must be a logical arrangement of ideas. When describing a bedroom, for example, the writer might lead the reader on an imaginary tour through the door and around the room in a single direction, pointing out the furniture, carpeting, curtains, and accessories along the way. For example:
 
The hotel room was designed to be both luxurious and practical. There were two elegant queen-size beds platform beds covered with soft beige suede coverlets. The sleep sofa in the sitting corner of the enormous room was covered with the same material and so were the drapes framing the huge picture window looking out onto the manicured flowerbeds. Aside from the sofa and round glass coffee table, there were two comfortable leather armchairs and a taller round table for dining in the sitting area. A small refrigerator was carefully concealed in a corner between the sofa and the wall. The modern triple dresser with a color television sitting on the right end, and the night table between the beds were covered with a burl veneer that complemented the beige tones in both the thick shag carpet and the glossy wallpaper. The panel on the night table allowed a guest to control the color television, the lights, and radio from either bed.
 
When describing a place, you need to describe its location, special features and impression on you. In the following the author describes Wyoming, a state in the United States, as two distinctly different Wyomings. Read the following and appreciate the way the author uses to depict two different Wyomings in his eyes.
 
We saw two distinctly different Wyomings. We crossed the first Wyoming between the Black Hills and the Big Horns. Wide-open grassland, fenced and colorless, with red rocks and sweet-smelling shrubs scattered about, it was typical of a hard-used land. Cattle grazed on it. Oil rigs pumped on it and power lines zigzagged all over it. Freight trains labored across it, hauling coal from strip mine to power plant, hauling uranium and other minerals to refineries. This Wyoming, clearly, was booming. The other Wyoming started some miles east of Buffalo, an unexpectedly graceful community in the foothills of the Big Horns. On one side of town, antelope abounded by fours and fives in the hills, and yellow wild flowers lined the roads. On the other side rose the Big Horns and nearly 10,000 feet up, Powder River Pass cut through them.
                                                        —Jim Doherty, “Journey West”
 
Describing a place
    
Location:     down by the river/railway-station/on the river
                            (very) near the bus-station                     in the center
                            on the outskirts/in the suburbs       a few miles away
                            in the (surrounding) countryside     between … and …
                            about a 100 years away                   to my right
                            on the right-hand side                    
                           
        Existence:   there is/are
                                   there has/have (always never) been
                                   it has been/stood there for/since
                                   you can find/discover
                    
        Special features:      … is booming
                                                 … of special interest is/are
                                                 one of the really/most interesting parts/places
                                                 the … is famous/popular/etc.
                                                 you shouldn’t miss seeing/going to
                                                 tourists should/ought to see/visit
 
When describing a person, the writer should not merely give details of his physical appearance. He should try to reveal the person's character, thoughts, feelings, habits, and abilities which may be shown in what the person does and says. So it is important to grasp his characteristic features which distinguish him from all other people. The following is an excerpt from an article that describes the life and work of the famous British physicist Stephen Hawking who is a victim of a fatal disease but is considered one of the greatest minds of our time.
 

Status

Physical appearance:
Build
Height
Weight
 
 
His mental capabilities
&
His handicap
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
        Born in 1942, Dr. Hawking now is professor of mathematics at Cambridge University in England. One’s first glimpse of Dr. Hawking is ofa small figure in an electric wheelchair. He appears to be of medium height; at a guess, he doesn’t weigh as much as 120 pounds. For almost all of his professional life Stephen Hawking has suffered from a progressively worsening incurable nerve disease. His mental capabilities have not been harmed, but one of the few things he can still do for himself is control his electrically powered wheelchair. His speech —for many years difficult to understand —can now be interpreted only by those closest to him. He cannot take a book down from the shelf, leaf through it, or even hold it in his hands. He can’t take notes, either. A recent interviewer asked him if he had a photographic memory. “Not a photographic memory, no. I don’t remember all the details, but I can remember the basic ideas.”

 
The paragraph above mainly describes Hawking’s physical appearance. Here is another example of a description of a person, but it focuses on the personality.
The paragraph is taken from The Monster, a description of Richard Wagner, a German composer of operas. He wrote thirteen operas and music dramas, eleven of them still holding the stage, eight of them unquestionably worth ranking the world’s greatest music-dramatic masterpieces. Anyhow, just from the following description can you sense that he is a kind of monster?

 
Personality:
His doings
His feelings
     &
His thoughts
 
His abilities
 
His habits
 
 
 
 
His character
 
 
 
 
He was a monster of conceit.Never for one minute did he look at the world or at people, except in relation to himself. He was not only the most important person in the world, to himself; in his own eyes he was the only person who existed. He believed himself to be one of the greatest dramatists in the world, one of the greatest thinkers, and one of the greatest composers. To hear him talk, he was Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Plato, rolled into one. And you would have had no difficulty in hearing him talk. He was one of the most exhausting conversationalists that ever lived. An evening with him was an evening spent in listening to a monologue. Sometimes he was brilliant; sometimes he was maddeningly tiresome. But whether he was brilliant or dull, he had one sole topic of conversation: himself. What he thought and what he did.
                     —Deems Taylor, “The Monster”

 
The paragraph describes his personality: conceit, by relating his doings, his thoughts, his feelings, his abilities, his habits and his characters. It is all these that distinguish him from all other people and reveal that he is a monster of conceit.
 
Describing a person
 
              Physical appearance:      face
                                                 figure, body and gait
                                                 typical clothes
              Inward personality: facial and bodily expressions
                                                  habits and abilities
                                                  moods
                                                  general character
 
Useful expressions
 
He is tall/ short /of medium height.
He is fat/ thin/ of medium build.
He is in his early-forties/mid-forties/late-forties.
He has a/an … on                            He’s wearing …         He’s dressed in …
It looks/seems as though he            He looks as if he’s     He looks …
 
He is always …          He has the habit of …                     He has the +adj. + habit.
 
To describe a thingis to say how it looks, feels, sounds, smells, or tastes. So we need to mention its size, shape, color, texture, taste, and smell. For example, when Mr. Denis saw a flying saucer, he described it as follows:
 
It was long, cigar-shaped, and had several curious markings on the bottom. It seemed very bright, and hovered about 20 feet above the ground …
                                                                                           —David Jolly
It is also necessary to tell how it is used if it is useful, what part it plays in a person's life if it is in some way related to him. But emphasis should be placed on only one aspect of the object, such as its most important characteristic. The following is a description of a baseball:
 
It weighs just over five ounces and measures between 2.86 and 2.94 inches in diameter. It is made of a composition-cork nucleus encased in two thin layers of rubber, one black and one red, surrounded by 121 yards of tightly wrapped blue gray wool yarn, 45 yards of white wool yarn, 53 more yards of blue-gray wool yarn, 150 yards of fine cotton yarn, a coat of rubber cement, and a cowhide (formerly horse-hide) exterior, which is held together with 216 slightly raised red cotton stitches. Printed certifications, endorsements, and outdoor advertising spherically attest to its authenticity. Like most institutions, it is considered inferior in its present form to its ancient archetypes, and in this case the complaint is probably justified; on occasion in recent years it has actually been known to come apart under the demands of its brief but rigorous active career. Baseballs are assembled and hand-stitched in Taiwan (before this year the work was done in Haiti, and before 1973 in Chicopee, Massachusetts), and contemporary pitchers claim that there is a tangible variation in the size and feel of the balls that now come into play in a single game; a true peewee is treasured by hurlers, and its departure from the premises, by fair means or foul, is secretly mourned. But never mind: any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal in design and utility.It is a perfect object for a man's hand. Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance — thrown hard and with precision. Its feel and heft are the beginning of the sport's critical dimensions; if it were a fraction of an inch larger or smaller, a few centigrams heavier or lighter, the game of baseball would be utterly different. Hold a baseball in your hand. As it happens, this one is not brand-new. Here, just to one side of the curved surgical welt of stitches, there is a pale-green grass smudge, darkening on one edge almost to black — the mark of an old infield play, a tough grounder now lost in memory. Feel the ball, turn it over in your hand; hold it across the seam or the other way, with the seam just to the side of your middle finger. Speculation stirs. You want to get outdoors and throw this spare and sensual object to somebody or, at the very least, watch somebody else throw it. The game has begun.
                                                                                           —Roger Angell
 
This paragraph contains a little exposition, i.e., the few sentences on how the ball is made. It may be said that the description moves from the objective to the impressionistic: the writer first describes the ball itself, and then the player's feelings.
When you describe objects you need language in the following categories:
 
Measurements (e.g. width/height/length/depth/area/volume/weight)
Shape(geometric, e.g. triangular, oval; informally-expressed, e.g. egg-shaped)
Colour(pure, e.g. yellow, purple; combinations, e.g. reddy-brown)
Texture of surfaces (e.g. smooth, ridged, bumpy)
Pattern and decoration(e.g. floral, striped)
Material(e.g. wooden, brass)
Physical properties(e.g. transparent, hard, combustible)
Position(e.g. bottom, end, upper-edge)
Other categories that could be useful concern the notions of value, quality, use, and sensory impressions.
 
When a description deals with an abstract idea, the organization is not spatial. Rather, the organizing principle is the author's dominant impression of whatever he is describing. Thus, if he were to describe his fear of heights, he might talk about the different physical sensations that he has (heavy perspiration, rapid heartbeat, dizziness) as well as the emotional reactions (fear of falling, helplessness, dependence). The following paragraph involves a delightfully subjective description of the writer's experience with a microscope.
 
I passed all the other courses that I took at my University, but I could never pass botany. This was because all botany students had to spend several hours a week in a laboratory looking through a microscope at plant cells, and I could never see through a microscope. I never once saw a cell through a microscope. This used to enrage my instructor. He would wander around the laboratory pleased with the progress all the students were making in drawing the involved and, so I am told, interesting structure of flower cells, until he came to me. I would just be standing there. “I can't see anything,” I would say. He would begin patiently enough, explaining how anybody can see through a microscope, but he would always end up in a fury, claiming that I could too see through a microscope but just pretended that I couldn't. “It takes away from the beauty of flowers anyway,” I used to tell him. “We are not concerned with beauty in this course,” he would say. “We are concerned solely with what I may call the mechanics of flars [flowers].” “Well,” I'd say, “I can't see anything.” “Try it just once again,” he'd say, and I would put my eye to the microscope and see nothing at all, except now and again a nebulous milky substance — a phenomenon of maladjustment. You were supposed to see a vivid, restless clockwork of sharply defined plant cells. “I see what looks like a lot of milk,” I would tell him. This, he claimed, was the result of my not having adjusted the microscope properly, so he would readjust it for me, or rather, for himself. And I would look again and see milk.
 
No one could confuse Thurber's reminiscence with a clinically objective description.
 
Description is more often interwoven with other modes, such as narrative, argument, or exposition. In fact, it is difficult to think of any essay that does not contain descriptive detail.
Students sometimes think that description should be flowery and poetic, full of adjective and pretty figures of speech. But skillful descriptive uses a minimum of these, depending instead on specific details to make the impression vivid.
Here is a paragraph by college student Tara Ross, describing her visit to the Los Angles Olympic Games in 1984. Notice that she includes details that appeal to various senses — not only what she saw but also what she heard and felt. Although she combines her description with narration, the emphasis is on her observation rather than on the events that occurred.
 

 

 

What she felt

 
 
 
 
 

What she smelt

 
 
 
 
What she saw
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 [page]
A Day at the Olympics
 
As we finally reached the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, I could feel the excitement of the 1984 Olympic Games in my bones.I am not quite sure what intensified the event the most — the buzzing traffic zooming in all directions, the people of all races scurrying to reach their final destination, or perhaps just the hot, smogfilled air that powdered the sky a dusty gray. Because we were among the scampering tourists, the journey to the reach and field event was a long one hampered by pushing and shoving duels, but we finally forced our way through the main gates. When we sat down, I looked all around, and there were people from all walks of life. They were all sweating as much as I was, but they waved the flags of their countries with big, proud smiles carved on their faces. There were Europeans with big fancy cameras dangling around their necks and little Disneyland hats propped high on their heads, but the
 
 
 
 
What she heard
 
 

Topic sentence

 
 
ones that amazed me the most were the people from the Near and Far East, who wore turbans around their heads the sweat running down their bodies. The people packed around me talked many different tongues: Italian, French, and my very favorite one of all, Australian. When the day was over, I realized what the Olympics were all about, different people sharing an ancient and momentous occasion.

       
        Tara has organized these details by moving from observations about the general setting (a hot day in Los Angeles with traffic and smog) to the problems of getting to the Coliseum, to visual impressions of the people attending, to auditory impression of the language being spoken. She links the hot day to individuals by mentioning the sweating, a detail that involves the sense of touch. And she wraps her varied observations in the final sentence, which could be considered her topic sentence which a descriptive paragraph may or may not have.
 
        When you are to write a description dealing with a graph, before staring to do it, you should familiarize yourself with the data as presented in the graph, try to find the general trend, and then see if there are any special features worthy of mention. Besides describing the data in a graph, you may analyze them to find out some possible causes contributing to them and you can also predict the future tendency.
 
             
·To familiarize yourself with thedata presented in the graph
·To find the general trend
·To find some specific features
·To find some possible causes
·To predict the future tendency
 
 

The following is a graph showing the circulation of different categories of books in a local library during the period 1958 — 1988. The description of it may begin as follows: The graph shows the circulation of different kinds of books in a local library.

                     CIRCULATION OF DIFFERENT CATEGORIES
                            OF BOOKS IN LOCAL LIBRARY
 
 

Description:
General trend
 
 
 
 
 
Typical example
 
 
 
 
Different specifics
 
 
 
 
 
 
Other specifics
 
 
 
The graph shows the circulation of different categories of books in a local library.The general trend in the past four decades is quite obvious. The number of copies in circulation dropped to their lowest level in 1968 and gained sharply during the period 1968 — 1978. Among the four categories of books listed (natural science, literature and art, foreign languages, and social science),the circulation of books in foreign languages is typical. It started at about thirty thousand copies in 1958, dropped to only five thousand copies in 1968, and rose sharply to fifty thousand in 1978. From 1978 to 1988, it showed a steady increase. The circulation of books on social science, however, is a bit different from that of the other three categories. During the 1958 — 1968 period, its drop was not quite so sharp (from about fifteen thousand to ten thousand). From1968 to 1978, it had the same sharp increase as that of other books. But staring from 1978, it began to level off at about thirty-five thousand copies. It is also worthy of note that the circulation of books in the literature and art category rose steeply during the 1978 —1988 period, from forty thousand in 1978 to sixty-five thousand in
 
 
 
 
1988, a 62.5 percent increase in ten years, even higher than its 50 percent increase during the 1968 — 1978 period.
                                                        —Wang Deming

 
       The following table is taken from China Daily.
 
                                   Overseas companies heed 'go west' call
 

Some foreign firms' projects in west

Company              Businesses             Location           Time                                                           (launched or contracted)

Enron                   A power plant           Chengdu           1999

Shell                     Gas field               Ordos Basin          1999

Siemens             Signaling corp                 Xi'an                  1995

Siemens             Optical fibre             Chengdu          1997

Siemens         Industry, energy,      Chongqing         2000                 Transportation,                 Information, etc.

Vivendi-Generale des Eaux            Tube water plant           Chengdu           1998

Coca Cola              3 bottling plants            Xi'an                   1995                                                              Chengdu           1999                                                              Kunming         2000

Motorola        Telecommunication     Chengdu          2000

 
 
Description of data:
      General trend
Names of companies
 
 
Fields invested
 
 
 
 
 
 

Analysis