Unit 3: Selection Vocabulary 4

I descend from mobile and village peoples, interracial, ingenious, adventurous, and bold.

None famous, none of any more than humble means, though in this great ancestral river thoroughly bloodstreamed true, I am born from those so devoted to their beliefs and way of living they would eagerly choose to be memorialized through songs or stories of honorable doings...

None famous, none of any more than humble means, though in this great ancestral river thoroughly bloodstreamed true, I am born from those so devoted to their beliefs and way of living they would eagerly choose to be memorialized through songs or stories of honorable doings...

I could barely reach the surface of what seemed then to be an enormous gate-leg table to work, so I propped myself up higher by sitting with my feet and knees tucked under me on the light-brown vinyl chair seat.

Named Allison Adele, my first name acknowledging a character in a book who, though slightly crippled herself, helped people who had special needs, the second honoring my mother’s aunt Ivy Adele.

Crossing the ceiling corners are cobwebs that my father saves for blood coagulants in case we get cut or step on nails barefoot.

He made Rahel and Estha look up Anglophile in the Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopaedic Dictionary. It said: Person well disposed to the English. Then Estha and Rahel had to look up dispose.

Estha and Rahel had no doubt that the house Chacko meant was the house on the other side of the river, in the middle of the abandoned rubber estate where they had never been.

After the suicide, the property had become the subject of extensive litigation between Kari Saipu’s cook and his secretary.

Then, to give Estha and Rahel a sense of Historical Perspective (though Perspective was something which, in the weeks to follow, Chacko himself would sorely lack), he told them about the Earth Woman.

It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought, Chacko said (Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world), that the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge—was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye.

As for us, we stayed. Not just out of fatalism. If there was to be a future, in my parents' eyes, that future was linked to my French education. And Tehran was the only place I could get it.

Some people, more circumspect, took shelter in the basements of big hotels, well-known for their safety.

Our currency had lost all its value.

We were in the midst of shopping euphoria, when suddenly...BOOM!!!

It's true that they weren't very observant.

Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her—a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine.

The cytoplasm buzzes like a New York City street. It’s crammed full of molecules and vessels endlessly shuttling enzymes and sugars from one part of the cell to another, pumping water, nutrients, and oxygen in and out of the cell.

Inside every nucleus within each cell in your body, there’s an identical copy of your entire genome. That genome tells cells when to grow and divide and makes sure they do their jobs, whether that’s controlling your heartbeat or helping your brain understand the words on this page.

Just one enzyme misfiring, just one wrong protein activation, and you could have cancer. Mitosis goes haywire, which is how it spreads.

Their chromosomes and proteins have been studied with such detail and precision that scientists know their every quirk.