These are the earths major continental and oceanic plates.

Today in science we were assigned the homework of writing one “good” sentence on five types of plate movements. We also had to include what was happening in each movement. The first type of movement that I wrote about was when two continental plates slide past eachother. When this occurs there is a lot of friction made.  This can be dangerous because when this happens it creates earthquakes which can be deadly. A deadly earthquake occured on the San Andreas fault. The next type of plate movement is when two oceanic plates move apart. When this happens the magma under the ocean floor is pushed up and when this hot lava hits the cold water, it starts to cool. This makes new land when it turns to rock overtime. You can see the result of this at the Mid Atlantic ridge. When two oceanic plates collide, one is pushed under the other and this forms trenches. The Aleutian trench was formed by this movement. If two continental plates collide they keep pushing up against eachother and this force literally folds up the land which forms mountains. The Himalayas where formed this way when the Indian plate collided with the Eurasian plate. Lastly, there is the movement of a oceanic colliding with a continental plate. When this occurs the oceanic plate will go under the continental plate which wrinkles up the sea floor causing underwater mountains to be formed. An example of underwater mountains is the Cascades that are located on the Washington and Oregon coastline.

          Today in social studies we went over our second questions sheet on China. This country is in a communist state. This is when the government hasstrong control over the economy and society. Also, China has a free enterprise system. The people can choose what job they want, where to start their businesses, and they can keep all of their profits. China’s economic growth is very rapid and this has helped the chinese people in many ways. More people can get jobs in manufacturing and service industries, wages have increased, more and more goods are ready to buy, and people can now afford consumer goods such as T.V’s, radios, cars, and motorcycles.  Today we also learned about the Three Gorges Dam. The government began a 17 year long project to create the massive dam. It will be 1.5 miles long and more than 600 feet high. It is being built between Chongqing and Wuhan. The dam will result in many benifets like controling flood waters, the system of locks will allow large ships to travel inland, and it will create electricity using turbines. But this dam will also have it’s down sides. The dam would make a deep resevoir about 400 miles long that will flood over 100 homes and force 1.2 million people to move from their homes and farms. It will also wash away more than 1,000 historical sites. Specialists caution that the dam may even cause some pollution because the industrial sites that were once underwater may leak poisonous chemicals and sewage from communities surrounding the dam might flow into the dam to the Yangtze River. The fast moving waters could cause it to move quickly to the sea.

             White Blood Cells

                              Today in science we mainly focused on the lymphatic system so we made a graphic organizer on it. The organs included in this system are the spleen, tonsils, adenoids, thymus, and the lymph nodes. There are 3 types of white blood cells that fight of pathogens which are germs, viruses, diseases, and bacteria. They are the leukocytes, lymphocytes, and the macrophages. The macrophages are very special because when bacteria is sent to the macrophages in the lymph nodes, they swallow them up and kill any foreign particles. The thymus gland in the sternum area is sort of like a computer because when you get a pathogen(bacteria) in your body that it has never seen before, your body sends the white blood cells to the pathogen to fight it off. When your body does fight it off the thymus keeps a memory of the pathogen so that the next time you are exposed to the same germ, your body can kill it easily. Since your body works that way, scientists create vaccinations which are small bits of a certain bacteria that has been killed already that is injected into your body. When your body sees the new pathogen, it rushes the white blood cells to the dead pathogen to fight it off. When its done fighting the bacteria off, your body now has a memory of the pathogen so that the next time you get it your body can fight it off easily and you don’t get sick. After you get injected with the vaccination, you may have a small fever. This is because your body is rushing the white blood cells to fight off the already dead pathogen and the body is working very hard. That is all a fever is.