МУНИЦИПАЛЬНОЕ БЮДЖЕТНОЕ ОБЩЕОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНОЕ УЧРЕЖДЕНИЕ
ЩЁЛКОВСКИЙ ЛИЦЕЙ №7
ЩЁЛКОВСКОГО МУНИЦИПАЛЬНОГО РАЙОНА
МОСКОВСКОЙ ОБЛАСТИ
Иностранный язык
“Left – handed people”
The project is done by Martynova Sofia, a pupil in the 7th form
The tutor is V.A. Ryashentseva, a teacher of English
2017
ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ
1. Введение. «Кто такие леворукие?»
2. Из истории леворуких.
3. Современное состояние проблемы левшества.
4. Исследование левшей в классе.
5. Интересные факты их жизни левшей.
6. Заключение
Left-handeders, or lefties as the radicals refer to themselves, are people who
work with their left hand instead of their right hand, like most people. It is agreed
nowadays that most cases of Left-Handedness are made up by ordinary people to
feel special.
Some of the biggest problems lefties have to face today are sitting in a bench
designed for right-handers, having to use a circular saw and telling stories that only
1 in 10 people can relate to.
Unfortunately all had not gone as chicken had intended, as the lefties were hated
by the warring right-handed majority. The hatred of the right-handeders meant that
the minority of left handeders could not take their rightful place as the leaders of
the free world so that they could bring peace and harmony to the world. The
majority right handeders waged a treacherous war against the left handers and
eventually won by deceit and brutality until a clever right-handed princess took
pity upon a left-handed handicapped and married him. They later had a child who
went by the name of Ambidexter, who later tried to bring peace to the world. The
right handed population being the majority took the world over eventually by sheer
force bringing discrimination to all of the superior left handers. After their
suppression the right handed decided that they would form a religious cult of
Christians, using the creative of their left handed prisoners who were forced to
write a book called the Bible and had to read it to the illiterate right handed. The
right handed population attempted to permantly remove lefthandedism from the
world by punishing and discriminating against children who showed signs of being
left handed, luckily their plan did not work completely and the left handed
survived and continue to live amongst the inferior right handed majority.
For the religious among us who choose to believe lies, the so-called experts at
Wikipedia have an article about Left-handed People. Today lefties continue to
laugh at the foolish right handers, who continue to blindly follow the Bible today,
knowing full well that their clever ancestors had written it. The right handed
people who read this information will attempt to forget it or fool themselves into
disbelief due to their ignorance and blind faith. Please also note there are a good
number of religious nuts like Pat Robertson who are left handed, but most left
handed people refuse to believe it. Most lefties live among us, almost never being
discovered; except for a few telltalеs characteristics of intelligence at stuff like art,
math, and multitasking. Because of their fantastic skills, righties feel threatened
and try to fool themselves into believing they are smarter. Don’t worry. According
to tests, lefties have a better chance of being of higher intelligence with 4 of the 5
original designers of the Macintosh computer being left-handed and 1 in 4 Apollo
astronauts being left-handed - 250% more than the normal level. Left-handed
people are always in their right mind.
Due to their inability to use scissors or computer mice, the presence of such objects
is offensive to most left-handers, which will cause an angry mob of lefties to chase
you down with left-handed nose flutes. This has been proven to be an effective
method of trolling. Despite the harsh—I mean DIPLOMATIC efforts Ambidexter
took to interbreed humanity there is a cult of purist lefties called the Autists.
Although persecuting right-handers dissolved the group long ago, a group of them
has reformed the group, which is now called Autistic Culture. The primary aim of
this group is to make the world a better a place to live in. It strives to bring peace,
wisdom and harmony to the world and educate the dim-witted right handers.
Are you a lefty or a righty? No matter what your answer is, it will certainly be
given with a lot of confidence because we are talking about something that feels
very natural to you. It feels as natural as doing most of your daily routine with the
other hand may feel unnatural. But have you even wondered what determines the
use of one hand over the other?
Left-handed people use their left hand for most of their daily tasks. In many
cultures, being a left-handed person used to be regarded as being generally clumsy.
The word “lefty” can even have this negative meaning in many languages. Even
so, lefties make for good sportsmen, great artists, most US presidents, and they
even get their own day on August 13th. Roughly one person in ten is left handed
meaning that 10% of the Earth’s population is left handed. Also, studies have
shown that there are more left-handed men than women. It is said that since our
brain’s hemispheres are crossed (the right side of the brain controls the left part of
the body and the left side of the brain controls the right side), lefties are more
prone to having the characteristics dictated by the right side of the brain. This
means that they should be more creative, more intuitive, better at expressing their
feelings, better at visualization and 3D perception. Also, the dominance of the right
side of the brain and a prevalence of emotional intellect could make lefties more
susceptible to a wider range of emotions, meaning that they live more intensely.
Studies regarding the dominance of the right brain and these characteristics of lefthanded people are not yet conclusive in all aspects.
Right-handed people make up the majority or 90% of the entire human
population. They are said to be left-brained, meaning that they will have higher
abilities in mathematics, logical thinking and organizing, memorizing, computing
and technical information processing, discovering patterns and applying them. The
world is built around right handed dominance. Even the expression of “being one’s
right hand” is illustrative in this respect. In terms of religion, Christianity is most
biased in this respect as the sign of the cross can only be made with the right hand
and the right hand alone can be placed on the Bible when being sworn in.
So what is the difference between left-handed and right-handed people?
Apart from the fact that they each use a different dominant hand, we can say the
deduced differences can be those resulting from the use of the corresponding brain
hemisphere. We say that left-handed people are more creative, more emotional and
better at sports than right-handed people are. In the case of the latter, it is mainly
because left-handed people compete against right-handed people more often,
which makes for great exercise. They can also switch hands during the game,
which can put off the opponent. Left-handed people have a tough life living in a
world designed for the 90% of right-handed people. This means that most items,
tools and gadgets are created for right handed users. However, there are industries
which take notice of their left-handed customers and make special items for them,
guitars and watches, for example.
Not so long ago teachers in school considered left-handedness a handicap and
would try to correct it. But the years have shown that forcing left-handed children
to use their right hand has traumatic long-term effects such as poor concentration,
bad memory, physical tiredness, bad handwriting, stuttering, nail-biting, etc. All
this was due to coercion which disregarded the natural cross-wiring of the brain
and a situation in which the child did not feel natural and at ease.
Comparison Chart
Left-handed people
Right handed people
Use their right hand as a dominant
Use their left hand as a dominant hand
hand
Make up 90% of the Earth’s
Make up 10% of the Earth’s population
population
The right hemisphere of the brain is
The left hemisphere of the brain is
dominant
dominant
Should not be forced to use the other
Should not be forced to use the other hand
hand
There are special items created for leftMost items are created for righthanded people
handed people
Today marks the 22nd annual International Left-Handers Day. To celebrate, let's
look at why only around one in ten people is left-handed. Why, pray tell, are lefties
are so rare – or, said another way, why are most of us righties? It seems like a
simple question, but it's actually one of the biggest mysteries in all of science.
Is the ascendancy of right-handedness due to the way our brains are organized,
how ancient humans gripped tools, or is it simple anti-lefty prejudice? Nobody
knows for sure, but scientists have come up with theories that are alternately
intriguing, persuasive, and a little bonkers. Let's take a look at the often baffling
science of handedness, running from how the development of language in early
humans might have helped cause the evolution of handedness...to how all the
world's languages seem to have it in for lefties.
Why does handedness exist?
Handedness - the idea that one hand is better able to perform certain tasks than the
other - is, if not exclusively a human trait, then certainly a mostly human one. After
all, how could you tell if a dog was left-handed or a lion was right-handed? Their
paws aren't evolved to handle complex tasks like our hands are, and there's no
evidence that non-primates favor one limb over any other. But exactly why humans
favor different hands, or why most people tend to be right-handed, remains
mysterious. The most common answer is that handedness is determined by the
structure of our brains, which are divided into two hemispheres. Our brains are far
more specialized than those of other animals, with different regions of the brain
responsible for different specific tasks. Admittedly, these are only general
guidelines, and most neural activities are shared between the hemispheres to some
extent, but we can definitely say that many functions are primarily handled by one
hemisphere as opposed to another. This is known as brain lateralization. Two of
the most energy-intensive human activities are language and the use of our fine
motor skills - in other words, the use of our hands. One theory suggests that it's
more efficient for the brain to cluster control of these two major tasks in one
hemisphere rather than having it spread throughout the brain. Since the vast
majority of people have their language functions centered in the left hemisphere, it
follows that most people's fine motor skills would be controlled by the left
hemisphere too. Each hemisphere generally controls the opposite side of the body,
so the end result is that most people are right-handed.
However, the opposite does not hold true - being left-handed does not mean the
language centers are located in the right hemisphere, which is fairly rare. Certainly,
lefties are more likely than righties to have their right hemisphere responsible for
language, but it's still not a common arrangement. Between 61 and 73% of lefties
have their language centers in the left hemisphere, compared to over 90% of righthanded people. This doesn't necessarily invalidate the division of labor theory.
After all, between 70 and 90% of people are right-handed, and well over 90% of
those people do indeed cluster language and fine motor skill control in the left
hemisphere. What we're looking at here is the evolutionary equivalent of a rule of
thumb. People's brains are generally organized to maximize energy efficiency, but
a reasonably large minority of people - including most lefties - get along just fine
with a less efficient arrangement.
But why are most people right-handed?
As we've discussed, another possible way of phrasing that is, "Why is the language
center usually in the left hemisphere of the brain?" After all, if the energy intensive
language centers happened to evolve so that they were usually in the right
hemisphere, then most people would probably be left-handed instead. To that
point, there's no reason why our brains couldn't have evolved that way - it's simply
a historical fact that they didn't. But that hasn't stopped scientists from attaching
great significance to the fact that we evolved as righties instead of lefties. In the
January 1, 2002 issue of Discover Magazine, Jocelyn Selim describes a particularly
spectacular theory. In most primates and other animals, the hemispheres of the
brain divide the processing of tasks somewhat equally. But in humans, the
hemispheres tend to specialize: Nearly all righties process language in the left side
of the brain, while many lefties process language on the right. Because handedness
and language both seemed uniquely human traits, biologists long assumed that they
were closely linked. One Oxford neurobiologist went so far as to argue that righthandedness could be traced back 200,000 years to a single mutation-a sort of
genetic Big Bang that created hemispheric specialization, language, and higher
cognitive functioning in one go. Right-handedness, to this way of thinking, is the
most obvious mark of the genetic instructions that separate us from speechless,
symmetric beasts. While some of that that might be going a bit far - if nothing
else, it doesn't seem to leave a lot of room for lefties - the root of handedness quite
possibly is a random genetic mutation that pushed the language centers to the left
hemisphere as the ancient human brain became more specialized. Without this
particular genetic mutation, our brains still might have evolved to their present
levels of sophistication, but our language hemispheres would be chosen at random,
meaning handedness would be more evenly split. In fact, a second major gene
mutation might have had precisely that effect, at least in a subset of the population.
University College London neuropsychologist Chris McManus suggests that
sometime between 20,000 and 100,000 years ago, a second mutation entered the
human gene pool that canceled out the brain's natural bias towards righthandedness, allowing for the emergence of more left-handers. People who carry
this second mutation are also more likely to have unusual patterns of brain
organization, which neatly explains why lefties are more to have both high
intelligence and mental disorders.
So is it really all about language?
Well...that's just one theory. It's a pretty good one, as theories go, but it doesn't
explain everything, and - as we've just seen - it very easily gets wrapped up in
grand triumphal stories of humanity's brilliant evolution. Certainly, we should be
careful in saying the development of language centers in the left hemisphere
caused the rise of handedness. The two appear linked, but it may not be quite as
direct as we might have imagined. One issue is that we're not the only other
animals to use a particular hemisphere of the brain to create noises. Birds and
frogs, for instance, process the noises they make in one particular side of the brain,
and there's no evidence of handedness in the way they use their limbs. University
of Auckland researcher Michael Corballis suggests an alternative explanation for
our handedness in the Discover article: "It's quite possible that what set humans
apart was that speech began from gestures, which would explain an indirect
association with handedness. But it's one of those mysteries that refuses to resolve
itself. Think of it this way: Primates do have very symmetrical brains, but then
again, so did Einstein." The division of labor theory and the two genetic mutations
don't need to be thrown out - instead, we can roll them into a larger picture of the
evolution of handedness. It's possible that the specialization of our brains was
already pushing our species toward handedness, but this process was accelerated
by the activities of ancient humans, in particular their use of tools. In a 2009 blog
entry for Science, Michael Balter details one possible explanation for the rise of
handedness. The "technology-dense lifestyles" of early hominins might have
required our ancestors to more or less make up their minds about what hands they
were going to use to perform complex tasks. Moreover, such hand bias could have
aided the learning process as hominins taught each other toolmaking and other
skills; a number of studies have shown that people learn manually difficult tasks,
such as knot-tying, more easily when they use the same left- and right-hand
movements as their teachers. We can also add into the mix the development of
longstanding, pervasive social prejudices against left-handedness, which I'll
discuss in more detail in a little bit. These prejudices likely influenced countless
children who otherwise would have developed into lefties to essentially force
themselves to be right-handed, effectively inflating the proportion of the righthanded population.
What does it actually mean to be right-handed or left-handed?
After everything we've already discussed, that may seem likely a stupidly easy
question, but it's surprisingly controversial. The everyday answer to that question
is probably this: if you write with your right hand, then you're right-handed. It's a
straightforward enough popular definition, but translating that into scientific
terminology is trickier than you might think. Even simply saying that handedness
is determined by which hand you prefer to use doesn't actually help us that much.
Let's consider some of the problems here. Should a person's dominant hand be
determined by the hand they prefer to use, or the hand that performs better in tests?
In other words, is handedness primarily psychological or physiological? Even if
you can sort that out, there's still the question of how to categorize all this. Should
left-handed and right-handed be considered precisely equal, or does the fact that
such a vast majority of people are right-handed suggest that the people are simply
either right or non-right? That's a bit of a charged way to look at things, but it does
have some popularity in scientific literature. And how about people who use
different hands for different tasks? I write and throw with my right hand but bat
and play(ed) hockey with my left hand - should I be considered primarily righthanded, a mix of right- and left-handed, or ambidextrous, meaning I feel equally
comfortable using both hands? (Yeah...I'm probably not ambidextrous.) And
should we look at handedness as something that can be lumped into only a very
few categories - say true right-handed, more right-handed, ambidextrous/mix, more
left-handed, and true left-handed - or something that exists on a broad spectrum?
Indeed, the very idea that one hand is "dominant" might be a complete
misunderstanding of how our hands divide up tasks.
What exactly do people have against lefties?
For reasons that can probably best be described as "stupid", people have
historically held left-handers in contempt. You can find evidence of an anti-left
bias throughout the world's languages. The word "left" itself comes from the
Anglo-Saxon word "lyft", which means "weak." We get the word "sinister" from
the Latin word for "left", and that double meaning persists in the modern Romance
languages. It really is an insanely long list - English, French, Chinese, Korean,
Finnish, Irish, Hungarian, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, and most
of the Slavic languages all either link the word "right" with goodness, the word
"left" with wrongness and impropriety, or both. That's not even getting into all the
expressions and customs that have sprung up against left-handed people. In Ghana,
even gesturing with the left hand can be considered taboo, and a common form of
19th century bigotry was to say minority groups such as homosexuals and Roman
Catholics were left-handed. As to why these prejudices exist - well, it does appear
that majority right-handedness has been around at least since modern humans first
emerged 200,000 years ago. This may simply be a case of a natural majority
picking on a minority, perhaps out of an embarrassingly human fear of what's
different. There's also at least one possible vaguely practical reason for this
animosity. As any lefty will be happy to tell you, tons of everyday objects that
right-handed people take for granted are a pain in the ass to use if you're a lefty.
There's spiral notebooks, can-openers, stick shifts...and that's just what I remember
from the Simpsons episode on the subject. It's possible that ancient tools were
similarly designed with right-handed users in mind, and the natural difficulties a
lefty would have with such implements could draw social scorn and, over time,
build up negative associations towards lefties. That all sounds fairly fanciful,
honestly - although a few languages do have words that mean both "left" and
"clumsy", suggesting a linked meaning somewhere along the line. Ultimately,
we're probably just looking at good old-fashioned fear of the unusual. There's
really no definitive evidence either way that righties are better than lefties or vice
versa - they just happen to hold their pencils differently. And while there have been
a bunch of attempts to tease out specific differences between the two groups including a recent study that basically suggested left-handedness is a form of
cognitive impairment - there's way too much conflicting data out there to say much
for certain.
The fact is that left-handed people are the ones who suffer as they have to live in
the world designed for right-handed people. A lot of things and machines of
everyday life can be inconvenient, painful or even dangerous. Just try to iron, cut
something with scissors or open the door with your left hand and you will see and
understand the problems lefthanders face every day.
In the world
Lefthanders
Righthanders
In class
Left-handers
Righthanders
Some scientists believe that handedness is a genetic feature and children inherit it
from parents while others think it is individual. I carried out a survey among the
lefthanders of my class and found out that only one girl`s mother was left-handed.
In other cases parents, brothers and sisters of my left-handed classmates were
right-handed. So, personally, I think that left-handedness is not a thing of genetic.
Genetic factors
Pupil 1
Mother
left-hander
Father
righthander
Pupil 2
Pupil 3
Mother
Mother
Righthanded
righthanded
Father
Father
Righthanded
Righthanded
There are some interesting facts of the left-handedness:
1) 4 of 5 original designers of the Macintosh computer were left-handed.
2) There is a high tendency in twins for one to be left-handed.
3) 5 of the last 7 US Presidents were left-handed…..
Some of the biggest problems lefties have to face today are sitting in a bench
designed for right-handers, having to use a circular saw and telling stories that only
1 in 10 people can relate to.
In the past the lefties were hated by the warring right-handed majority. The hatred
of the right-handeders meant that the minority of left handeders could not take their
rightful place as the leaders of the free world so that they could bring peace and
harmony to the world.
Thus, we can conclude that today people have understood the problem of lefthanded people and began to treat it differently, with understanding. I hope that
their life will become easier and more convenient.
List of literature
1. Hardyck C, Petrinovich LF (1977). "Left-handedness".
2. Coren, Stanley (1990). Left-handedness: behavioral implications and anomalies
3. "My Left Foot". The Kingdom. July 24, 2003.
4. Семенович А.В. «Эти невероятные левши» - М. Генезис, 2007
5. Безруких М.М., Князева М. Г. Если ваш ребенок - "левша". - Тула: Актоус,
1996.
6. Безруких М.М. Леворукий ребенок в школе и дома. - М.: Просвещение,
1995.