Unit 2: Part 2 Vocabulary

Their spines straighten out. The bones in the spine and the disks between them spread apart and relax.

If astronauts don't force themselves to exercise, their muscles become so feeble that when they return to Earth they can’t even walk.

Appetites return (though astronauts always say that food tastes blander in space).

Instead, big balls of milk will form. You can drink these by taking big bites out of them, but you’d better finish them before they slam into a wall, splattering apart and covering everything with little tiny milk globules.

And they all readapted to Earth gravity without problems, proving that voyages to Mars are possible...even if it feels like you are hanging upside down the whole time!

In the course of my lifetime I have lived in two distinct cultures.

I was born into a culture that lived in communal houses.

It is hard to understand a culture that justifies the killing of millions in past wars, and is at this very moment preparing bombs to kill even greater numbers.

It did not look on privacy as a thing to be clung to, for privacy builds up walls and walls promote distrust.

My culture did not prize the hoarding of private possessions; in fact, to hoard was a shameful thing to do among my people.

Soon it will be too late to know my culture, for integration is upon us and soon we will have no values but yours.

But much remains to be done, and the answer does not lie in more legislation. We have the legislation we need; we have the laws.

What we need now is soul force—the efforts of people working on a small scale to build a truly tolerant, harmonious society. And parents can do a great deal to create that tolerant society.

The movement culminated in 1963 with the March on Washington.

President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which remains the fundamental piece of civil rights legislation in this century.

The best way to get this country faithful to the American dream of tolerance and equality is to start small.

I'm an incurable optimist. For the rest of the time that I have left on this planet I want to bring people together.

My courage was not adequate to inquire whether they were thrown in loose and might be expected to appear between our feet.

Big Prairie is a desolate cattle country, half marsh, half pasture, with islands of palm trees and cypress and oaks.

At that time of year the cattlemen and Indians were burning the country, on the theory that the young fresh wire grass that springs up from the roots after a fire is the best cattle forage.

The sun was bright overhead, the sky a translucent blue, and it seemed to me that it was warm enough for any snake to do as it willed.

I don’t know whether this is because they scent or sense the presence of other snakes, or whether in this arid area they come to the car for shade in the heat of the day.

Again, because I was ashamed, I took the snake in my hands. It was not cold, it was not clammy, and it lay trustingly in my hands, a thing that lived and breathed and had mortality like the rest of us.

We flushed a covey of quail under a high clay bank with overhanging brush and I killed two as they went out of sight over the top of the bank.

I noticed other differences, none of them very reassuring.

A mechanical contraption screwed to the top shut it behind us quietly.

Then Miss Hopley did a formidable thing.

This was a light epidemic of flu and there was no danger if you avoided pneumonia.

He was evidently holding tight on to himself about something.