Word: grasp
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...readable. Seen in four dimensions -- not least of which is time -- the earth appears as an endless, slow-motion demolition derby. Untangling cause and effect challenges both mind and imagination. Nature has had 4 billion years to jumble the record, and geologists not even two generations to begin to grasp the mechanisms of continental drift...
Kanzi's most noteworthy achievement has been to demonstrate a grasp of grammatical concepts such as word order. Savage-Rumbaugh and psychologist Rose Sevcik created an extended experiment to compare the ape with a two-year-old girl named Alia in responding to commands expressed in 660 spoken English sentences. The sentences combined objects in ways that Kanzi and Alia were unlikely to have encountered before: "Put the melon in the potty," or "Go get the carrot that's in the microwave...
...part, Herman admits that his dolphins are a long way from humans in their use of language. But he vehemently insists that they do have a conceptual grasp of the words they learn. "If you accept that semantics and syntax are core attributes of human language," says Herman, "then we have shown that the dolphins also account for these two features within the limits of this language...
Although most students seem to grasp the information, she says a few do not. And without asking her for further assistance, they simply transfer out of her section...
...different regions of the planet through the middle of the next century. In an era when knowledge is narrowly compartmentalized, Kennedy warrants praise for the breadth of these polymath ambitions, aided though he was by five research assistants. But ultimately what mars Kennedy's book is that his grasp never fully equals his global reach...