German Words

In German today, me, Chloe, Henry and Cameron - with the occasional help from Iqra - were looking up German words. I won't say what most of them are (what kind of words do you think we looked up?) but 'farbentferner' is not a word in some German dictionaries. At least it's not what we thought it was. My current favourite is faustdick (not quiiiite sure how to spell it) which means 'crafty one'.

We did this SOSCA test thingy today. Two tests actually, and the first one was in Chemistry this morning. It was one on the computers. When you gave your details and logged into the thing, it said
"example questions; click on the bird." there was a crocodile, an ostrich, a cat and something else on the page.
The real questions, however, were a bit different.
"What is an abiotic factor?" is one of the ones I remember. I'd never heard the term before today - that's like Year 11 stuff.

Did another one in Maths as well. That was really confusing - the questions were phrased weird as well, like
"20% is 8." and then an answer box next to it. That took all my logic to work out what the question meant (though working it out was quite easy mentally. The number is 40 I think (8/2= 10%. 10%=4 so 4x10=40) right?) We still have an English one to do. I'm bursting with joy.

In RS we were doing morals again, and how a person's ethics and upbringing affects what they judge as moral or immortal. The teacher was telling us a story to prove how you can't expect to know all the details. I'll tell you what I remember of it:
There is a disease called SARA spreading through the world. It kills you after 7 days if you catch it, and one doctor and his wife invent a suppository cure called BEN, with an 100% success rate. The only problem is that the cure is in short supply, because it takes 14 days to make and costs £1000 to make. the doctor is selling his cure for £100,000.
One day, a man goes to the pharmacists' to buy the cure, because his wife has just caught SARA. He talks to the doctor, but the doctor informs him that there is only one cure left until the next batch comes - the last pill is on a cushion in the window. The man says that he can give the doctor £50,000 right now if he sells everything he owns. The doctor says no.
The man goes out doing all the jobs he can find, even the really sick and nasty ones that nobody would willingly do. He comes back on the third day of his wife's sickness and tells the doctor he has £60,000 now. The doctor still refuses him. The man goes back out and does more jobs, but the doctor won't let him take it for £89,000 even though he's promised to keep on doing all the jobs he's doing to get the last £11,000.
So on the night of the fifth day, the man has had enough. He goes to the pharmacists at night, and breaks in because the doctor and his wife are upstairs having a row and making alot of noise. He steals the pill, goes home and gives it to his wife, who is completely cured by the next morning.

Then we were asked if we thought if it was right or wrong for the man to steal the pill. I said yes, it was morally right, because most people would do anything to save their loved ones. The teacher told us some more of the story.

The next morning, the man is driving to work when he sees a man sat in the road, crying his eyes out. The man gets out of his car and gets the crying man off the road. He asks what's wrong and the crying man replies that he had been going to get the last BEN pill for his sick daughter, but the pharmacy had been robbed and he was going to have to tell his daughter that she was going to die.

We were asked again. I still said it wasn't bad for him to have stolen the pill, because sure it's bad that some kid had to die, but he'd never known these people in his life had he? When people die every day, and it's your flesh and blood against a stranger, you're more likely to want to save your own. He didn't know about the other family. We got told the last bit of the story then.

The man goes home to his wife that evening, acting normal. She tells him that she's so happy to be cured so that she can have the last two months of her life back - he is 60, and his wife is 89 and dying of cancer.
the man also actually heard the row between the doctor and his wife. The doctor's wife had just announced that she had SARA. The doctor wanted to get the pill from downstairs for her, but she told him that he had promised the pill to the man with the six-yeaar-old sick daughter. The doctor replied that his wife needed it more, because she had nearly finished her work on a cure for cancer. The man heard all of this and still stole it.

Alot less people sided with the man this time. If he knew that his wife wouldn't live that long anyway, and that he was condemning a child and a woman who could save millions of other people to death, I would think that's wrong. Even when it's a loved one, when millions of other people are at stake everything changes a bit.

And I've already told you about German. Did some work on the Treaty of Versailles and people who lost land after WWI in History.

I've finished that The Way of Shadows book. I realised I'd been saying the wrong name for a while.