The Work of one Christian Relief Agency Essay Example for Free

The Work of one Christian Relief Agency Essay Christian Aid is an organisation that supplies aid to those in need. It is generally considered to have been the first missionary agency to support indigenous mission boards in countries all over the world. It all began in 1945 when Bob Finley was asked to speak at a rally of Youth for Christ in a Chicago stadium. His testimony was so fresh, unique and powerful that the 25,000 people in the stadium interrupted him several times with spontaneous applause. His words were broadcasted all over the continent and he was sent to speak at rallies throughout the U. S. and Canada. Along with his close friend, Billy Graham, they were enlisted as field evangelists with the Youth for Christ and spoke at youth rallies, churches, public schools, seminaries, colleges and Bible institutes. Between 1948 and 1950 Bob Finley traveled the East China, Korea and Asia preaching the word and lead Korea in the spiritual awakening that took place there in early 1950. Bob Finley returned to America determined to arouse the churches about the need for reform in foreign missions. He said the best way to plant a Christian witness in closed countries was to reach people who were away from home. Then when they would go back to serve Christ in their homelands; get behind them with financial assistance. Following the presentation of his honorary doctors degree, in 1953 he started International Students, Inc. to reach foreign students all over the U.S. and Canada. In 1972 the headquarters of ISI was moved to Colorado Springs, while the AID (Assisting Indigenous Developments) division was spun off as Christian Aid and remained in Washington D.C. with Bob Finley as the President. A competent staff was assembled to travel all over the world searching out indigenous ministries in every country, especially those that were closed to missionaries from America. Christian Aid grew and grew, with a number of new buildings built in co-ordination with the agency. They had a new headquarters with a conference center and more offices. It continued making contact with indigenous missionary groups in closed countries all over the world. Bob Finleys goal was to have a part in planting a witness for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ among every unreached people group on earth. Christian Aid is governed and staffed by evangelistic, Bible believing, born again Christians who uphold the fundamental doctrines of historic evangelical Christianity. The work of Christian Aid is felt in over 60 countries where they try to fulfill its aims of helping people in the long-term. This is achieved in various ways. The first is to raise money that is needed in order to help these people. They gain an income of around 48 Million Pounds a year, which they can use. This is done throughout the whole year where churches may hold collections or some sort of fund raising events where donations go to charity. A considerable amount of this money is collected during one particular week, annually. This is called Christian Aid Week. In 1995, 8.6 Million Pounds was raised in this one-week. Christian Aid has two main policies of donations. They give Emergency Aid and Long Term Aid. Emergency Aid 10% to 15% of their money is when people are in need of some sort of aid, straight away. For example, if there has been a natural disaster, or an influx of refugees to a country then they are in need of emergency aid in order for them to survive. We can see the work of Christian Aid in the Caribbean Sea islands where a 140mile-per-hour Hurricane battered the islands, leaving 20 dead and numerous others in desperate need of attention and shelter. Christian Aid went to the islands to help the suffering people get their lives back on track. Long Term Aid is when Christian Aid helps to set up funds in communities to help them in the future. This is done through churches and community centers. We can see this in place in Bangladesh where Christian Aid workers have been living there to help administer drugs to the people in need of it. They get their money to do this by Christian Aid and have helped many hundreds of people. Bob Finley has now completed 53 years of ministry as an evangelist, pastor, missionary, Bible teacher and Christian statesman. During these years he has traveled over four million miles and preached face to face to more than 20 million people. Additional millions have heard his message through radio, TV, films and videos. His published articles have touched thousands of lives and played a major role in changing the methodology and direction of Christian missions throughout the world. His influence and financial support has been used of God to further the cause of Christ among more than 2000 tongues, tribes and nations. Christian Aid continues to reach out to those who are in the remotest countries and have not heard of our Lord Jesus Christ. They continue to help other struggling ministries to preach the word of our Lord.

History of Tobacco Laws

History of Tobacco Laws Coffins of Black In 1775, Percivall Pott, a surgeon at St. Bartholomews Hospital in England, noticed a marked rise in cases of scrotal cancer in his clinic. His patients were mostly chimney sweeps, who spent a lot of time in contact with grime and ash. He noted that the minute invisible particle of soot could be found under their skin for days, and that scrotal cancer bust out of a superficial skin wound called a soot wart. Based on these observations, Pitt suspected that it was the chimney soot that caused the scrotal cancers. That would mean that the cancer was potentially preventable. But removing the carcinogen was perhaps difficult to achieve. But with the embarrassing plight of chimney sweeps exposed, social reformers sought to create laws to regulate the occupation. The Chimney Sweepers Act was passed in 1788 to prevent master sweeps from using children under eight. In 1834, the age was increased to fourteen. By 1875, the use of young climbing boys was forbidden. In 1761, an amateur scientist in London, John Hill, claimed that he had found one carcinogen tabacco could cause lip, mouth, and throat cancer. In England, tobacco was rapidly escalating into a national addiction. Cigarette smoking soon spread through Europe and across the Atlantic to the United States. As cigarette consumption became a national addiction, it would be difficult to discern an association with cancer. The Emperors Nylon Stockings In the United Kingdom, government statisticians alerted the Ministry of Health in January 1947 that an unexpected epidemic of lung cancer was emerging in the country: Lung cancer morbidity had increased fifteen-fold in the prior two decades. In February, the ministry asked the Medical Research Council to organize a conference of experts to study this inexplicable rise of lung cancer rates and to find the cause. The experts at the conference pointed to every breathable form of toxin except cigarette smoke. Without any consensus, the council appointed Austin Bradford Hill, an eminent biostatistician, to devise a systematic study to identify the risk factor for lung cancer. Hill recruited Richard Doll, a 36-year-old medical researcher who had no experience in performing a study of this scale. *** In the United States, a medical student name Ernst Wynder encountered a case of 42-year-old man who died of cancer of the airways of the lung. The man was a smoker with tar-stained bronchi and soot-blackened lungs. Wynder had never seen such a case before, so he applied to the medical school for money to study the connection between smoking and lung cancer. But he was bluntly told that the effort would be futile. He wrote to the U.S. Surgeon General, but was told that he could prove nothing. So Wynder approached his mentor Evarts Graham, the great heart surgeon in St Louis. Graham was a heavy smoker and didnt believe the connection between cancer and smoking. But he agreed to help Wynder with the study in part to disprove the link and lay the issue at rest. The Case-Control Studies In St Louis, Wynder and Graham followed a simple method. They recruited a group of lung cancer patients and a control group without cancer and asked them about their smoking habits. They used smokers to nonsmokers ratio within each group to determine the smoking-cancer connection. In the UK, Doll and Hill followed a similar method in their study. They asked social workers in the hospital to interview the two groups of patients in and around London. To counteract biases, they included other questions such as how often they eat fried fish into the survey. By May 1, 1948, the result of their study was: The one and only statistical association with lung cancer was cigarette smoking. They published their study in September 1956. Meanwhile, Wynder and Graham in St Louis had also arrived at the same conclusion. The published their studies a few months earlier. The Prospective Cohort Study It might appear that Doll, Hill, Wynder and Graham proved the link between lung cancer and smoking. But they had proved something else. In a case-control study, the risk is estimated post hoc by asking lung cancer patients whether they had smoked. The interviewer could have unconsciously probed lung cancer patients about their smoking habits more aggressively than control group. In the early 1940s, an Oxford geneticist named Edmund Ford faced a similar notion. The solution was to follow a cohort to capture the change over time. Doll and Hill followed Fords work with deep interest. There was a centralized registry of all doctors in Britain that could be used for a cohort study. Every time a doctor in the registry died, the registrar was noticed with a detail description of the cause of death. On October 31, 1951, Doll and Hill sent out survey letters to about 60,000 doctors. About 41,000 of them responded. Doll and Hill used the data to create a master list, dividing it into smokers and nonsmokers. Each time a death was reported, they found out the cause of death from the registrars office. Between October 1951 and March 1954, 789 deaths were reported, and 36 were attributed to lung cancer. All these 36 deaths had occurred in the smokers category, showing a strong correlation between lung cancer and cigarette smoking. A thief in the Night In 1956, the percentage of smokers in the US adult population had reached an all-time peak of 45 percent. Cigarette sales had climbed to stratospheric heights and the tobacco industry had transformed their advertising by targeting their advertising to selected segments of the population. By the early 1960s, an average American consumed eleven cigarettes per day, nearly one for each waking hour. In the mid-1950s, public health organizations in America were undisturbed by the link between tobacco and cancer. But the tobacco industry was worried that the link would scare consumers away. In 1953, three years before Dolls prospective study was public, the heads of several tobacco companies met in New York to prepare a counterattack. They saturated the news media in 1954 with an advertisement titled A Frank Statement, obfuscating facts and creating doubts about the connection between lung cancer and tobacco. They had already formed a committee called Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) to act as an intermediary between the hostile academy, the embattled tobacco industry, and the confused consumer. The director of the committee was Clarence Cook Little, who the Laskerites had deposed as president of ASCC. Little was a strong proponent that lung cancer was hereditary. Studies had shown a strong correlation between smoking and lung cancer. But correlation, Little argued, could not be equated with cause. To counter that argument, Bradford Hill prepared a list of nine criteria that could prove a causal relationship. No single item in that list proved causality, but scientists could pick criteria from the list to strengthen or weaken the causal relationship. In the February 1957, Evart Graham died from bilateral bronchogenic carcinoma. Two weeks before he died, Graham wrote to his friend Alton Ochsner: à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦bilateral bronchogenic carcinoma sneaked up on me like a thief in the nightà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦You know I quit smoking more than five years ago, but the trouble is that I smoked for 50 years. In 1954, in a book entitled Smoking and Cancer, Graham had wondered whether it was time for the US Public Health Service to at least issue a statement of warning. A Statement of Warning In the summer of 1963, a team of three men visited the laboratory of Oscar Auerbach in East Orange, New Jersey. Oscar Auerbach was a lung pathologist who believed that cancer grew from a precursor lesion precancer to its full-blown form slowly, and methodically, over a long period of time. Long before lung cancer became symptomatic, he found, the lung tissues contained layers of precancerous lesions in various stages of development. He had recently completed a monumental study comparing lung specimens of nonsmokers and smokers, which was considered a landmark in the understanding of the genesis of lung cancer. The three visitors were William Cochran, Peter Hamill, and Emmanuel Farber. They were three of the ten-member advisory committee appointed by the US surgeon general. The   mandate (of the committee) was to review the evidence connecting tobacco to cancer so that the surgeon general could issue an official report. US Surgeon Generals Report In 1961, the American Cancer Society, the National Tuberculosis Association and the American Heart Association had sent a joint letter to President Kennedy urging him to appoint a national commission to investigate the link between tobacco and cancer. Kennedy assigned it to his surgeon general, Luther Terry. Terry appointed ten members to his advisory committee. Each member brought insight to a unique piece of the puzzle. Piece by piece, a consistent picture emerged. The committee found the relationship between smoking and lung cancer was one of the strongest in history. Luther Terry released his 387-page report on January 11, 1964. The report was released on a Saturday in part to minimize its effect on the stock market. It was front page news and a leading story on every television and radio stations in the United States and abroad. The FTC Action The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was a federal agency whose mandate was to regulate advertisements and claims made by various products. Given the link between cigarettes and cancer, as acknowledged by the surgeon generals report, the FTC recommended that cigarette makers would need to acknowledge this directly in advertising their products. The FTC recommended to imprint the message into the product itself. Cigarette packages and all advertisements were to be labeled with Caution: Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Health. It May Cause Death from Cancer and Other Disease. The proposed action from the FTC spread panic through the tobacco industry. Rather than being regulated by the FTC, the tobacco industry voluntarily requested regulation by Congress. In Congress, the FTCs recommendation was diluted as it changed hands from hearing to hearing, leading to an amended bill called the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act (FCLAA) of 1965. It changed the FTCs warning label to Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health. The words cancer, cause, and deaths were removed from the original label. Battle on Cigarette Advertising In late 1966, a young attorney named John Banzhaf asked a local television station to provide airtime for anti-smoking announcements. The station refused. In the summer of 1967, Banzhaf filed a complaint with the FCC. The FCCs fairness doctrine required public media to provide free air time to opposing viewpoints on controversial issues. The FCC announced responded that its fairness doctrine applied to the request for anti-smoking announcements. With the FTC consent, Banzhaf sued the TV station. The suit went to trial in 1968. The court ruled that proportional airtime had to be given to pro-tobacco and anti-tobacco advertising. In February 1969, the FCC announced that they would rigorously police the proportional air time clause.   A barrage of anti-smoking advertisements appeared on television. In late 1970, faced with the daily brunt of negative publicity, tobacco manufacturers voluntarily withdrew cigarette advertising from broadcast media. Lawsuits Against Tobacco Manufacturers Rose Cipollone started smoking when she was a teenager in 1942. She tried to quit, but relapsed later with greater dependency. In her quest for the safe cigarette, she had switched brands and tried new filters periodically. In 1981, Cipollone was diagnosed with lung cancer. By August 1983, the cancer metastasized all over her body. She started chemotherapy, but had a poor response. She died on October 21, 1984 at age 58. Marc Edell, a New Jersey attorney, heard of Cipollones diagnosis in the summer of 1983. He sued for the Cipollones against three tobacco manufacturers whose products Rose had used Liggette, Lorillard, and Philip Morris. In previous lawsuits against the tobacco companies, the tobacco industry had all declared victory. Edell acknowledged that Rose Cipollone had read the warning labels and knew of the risks of smoking. But what matter was what the cigarette manufacturers knew, and how much of the cancer risk they had revealed to consumers. Edell asked the courts for unprecedented access to the internal files of the three tobacco companies. These documents showed that the tobacco companies knew smoking was linked to cancer, and the struggles within the industry to conceal the risks. In 1987, after four long years, the court decided that Rose Cipollone was 80 percent at fault. Only Liggett was liable for the remaining 20 percent, as Rose Cipollone smoked their cigarettes before the 1966 warning labels. Lorillard and Philip Morris got off without punishment. The jury awarded $400,000 in damages to Antonio Cipollone. Lawsuits by the States In 1994, Mississippi was the first state to sue the tobacco industry to recover its public healthcare outlays linked to smoking. Several other states soon followed. Faced with the prospect of defending multiple actions nationwide, the four largest cigarette makers proposed a global agreement in June 1997. In 1998, 46 states signed the Master Settlement Agreement with the four companies. Since 1998, an additional 47 cigarette makers have joined the agreement, making it one of the largest liability settlements in the United States.

Smoking Cigarettes :: Argumentative Persuasive Example Essays

Deduction and Induction Analysis of Cigarette Smoking Smoking: Deduction Cigarette smoking causes cancer, which leads to death. Nicotine is one of the many chemicals found in the tobacco plant used in cigarettes. It reacts with the brain resulting in addiction. Nicotine enters the body and is transported to the brain; chemically, it stimulates the brain to produce more adrenaline, which in turn gives the body a surge of energy. One the effects of nicotine lessen, the brain functions are disrupted and therefore it counter acts by sending out signals to obtain more. The craving for the same level of adrenaline during nicotine activity can only increase and thus becomes an addiction. In its natural state, nicotine is a clear liquid but when burned acquires a brown color resembling tar. Cancer is the results of a malfunction in cells. In the working cell cycle, cells that are incorrectly produced or are damaged will end up in the stage of apoptosis or cell death. If there is a malfunction with the p53 gene and it cannot recognize the damage within a cell, the cell does not go into apoptosis and is left to replicate. Over time the damage cells proliferate in such a great number and do not died resulting in a mass or â€Å"clump† of cells that is dangerous to the tissue. This clump of cells interferes with the function of the tissue, which can lead to the death of healthy cells surrounding them. This area is known as the cancer site. Smoking cigarettes introduces the chemical nicotine into the body, raising the adrenaline levels to over work the body. The tolerance level of nicotine increases, as more of the chemical is consume which leads to addiction. The addiction of this chemical increases the amount of cigarettes smoked. The inhalation of the chemical along with other harmful substances that are trapped within the cells walls. The substances disturb the normal function of the cells and damage the p53 gene. These damage cells do not go through apoptosis and proliferates endlessly. The large amount of tissues affects and kills the working cells thereby damaging the tissue. Therefore, smoking cigarettes is the direct caused of death due to lung cancer. Smoking: Induction   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The NIDA quotes that â€Å"Tobacco kills more than 430,000 U.S. citizens each year-more than alcohol, cocaine, heroin, homicide, suicide, car accidents, fire, and AIDS combined.†[1] Many researches have found that the tobacco substances found in cigarettes are carcinogens that cause cancers.

Essay --

Smoking Smoking is an addicting habit on the rise worldwide. Smoking across the globe has many different forms from cigarettes and cigars to pipes and shisha’s. There are many different reasons for smoking whether it is for medicinal reasons or recreational use. Smoking has been around for a very long time and in this essay I will discuss the origins of smoking, the serious health risks, economical burdens, the addicting materials as well smoking among teenagers. Despite efforts from governments and organizations to bring awareness to people across the globe of the serious dangers and implications of smoking, the number of smokers worldwide generally remains on the rise. Brief History Of Smoking Smoking in one form dates back to as early as 5000 BC. It was used in shamanistic rituals to allow the users to achieve a state of trance and connect with the spirit world. Cannabis smoking quickly spread through Africa and the Middle East almost 3000 years ago. Smoking was sighted in England as far back as 1556 and then spread to France in 1560. Tobacco was then brought into Africa by French traders in the early 1600’s. Tobacco at that time was chewed or smoked. Around that time many religious leaders banned smoking and considered it immoral and even blasphemous. The first machine made to produce cigarettes was made by James Bonsack in 1881 after the civil war. The negative effects of smoking were brought to public attention in 1929 by the paper published linking cancer and smoking. During the Great Depression and in Nazi Germany, Hitler viewed smoking as unnecessary and a waste of money and also that woman who smoked as unsuitable to be mothers and wives. After the Second World War, anti-smoking groups lost popularity and smoking increas... ...lic places including universities, shopping centers, cafes and restaurants. This bans includes shisha’s (Kuwait Bans Smoking, 2012). Also many governments have set up a â€Å"quit smoking† number and website to assist in quitting smoking.                   Conclusion Smoking has been prevalent worldwide for thousands of years and according to the World Health Organization looks to increase even more. Currently over 1 out of 7 people are smokers. There are many health risks associated with smoking and deaths due to smoking are more than 5 million people every year and has a large economic impact globally. This is more than double the deaths due to natural causes. Smoking is more and more prevalent in teenagers in today’s world due to advertising through the internet and peer pressure. Many anti-smoking organizations were set up to help people quit smoking and to raise awareness.

New Zealand Early Childhood Curriculum Essay -- Education, elementary

Fleer claims â€Å"there are many theoretical voices within Te WhÄ riki,† the New Zealand Early Childhood Curriculum document (Nuttall, 2003, p.254). However two are predominant and stand symbiotically on the pages and in the intent of the curriculum. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological, system’s theory, which emphasises how the quality and setting of the child’s environment influences the child (Ministry of Education, 1996; Paquette, & Ryan, 2001) and Vygotsky’s ‘sociocultural theory,’ which describes learning as a social process originating in society or culture and passed through generations (UNESCO, 2004). Discussed within this essay will be a review of these theoretical perspectives illustrating their explanations for how each influences the child, how the child learns, how development is explained, and how these theories are reflected within Te WhÄ riki. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological, system’s theory describes how the child and their immediate surroundings are in an innermost layer surrounded, embedded and influenced by layers from the larger environment all impacting upon the child (Ministry of Education, 1996; Paquette, & Ryan, 2001). Of particular interest are the effects to the child of two way relationships towards and away from the child, as defined by Bronfenbrenner as bi-directional influences, these are particularly influential in the child’s inner layer. For instance: the impact to the child of attentive or non-attentive parents affects how the child reacts to a given situation, which in turn affects how the parent behaves. Notwithstanding, the impact of bi-directional influences on the child’s world continues into the outer layers, as in the example of a parent’s workplace demanding more input into the workplace, which means... ... social aspects have a huge influence on these surroundings. This is demonstrated when whÄ nau are involved and supportive in a child’s life, sharing the family’s and their culture’s funds of knowledge, resulting in the positive effect to the child’s environment which will have vast social and educational impacts by ensuring connections are made to children’s lives and experiences. Adding to this is the socio-cultural philosophy of peer tutoring and where knowledge is actively constructed through modelling and scaffolding, with teachers facilitating the learning process. While through the building of relationships between the family and the centre, Te WhÄ riki advocates the importance of the involvement of whÄ nau and family, which encourages a learning community which has interchangeable reciprocal advantages in a safe, positive, fun, caring, learning environment.

Language as a badge of identity Essay

Language is used every day to communicate with one another but beneath that conversation lies another message. The speaker’s use of language gives listeners insight as to who they are, like a badge of identity on their chest. Australian English’s unique phonology and lexicon is recognised globally and distinguishes it from other accents, giving the speaker a clear national identity. Ethno-lects are spoken by a specific group of people who have the same cultural background. These â€Å"ethno-lects† not only help express an individual’s identity and separate themselves from the rest, but also assist in bringing together speakers from similar backgrounds; much like a football jersey. Text speak is constantly evolving as lexemes are taking on new changes. Many teenagers and younger children have begun to adopt this in an attempt to identify with others and fit in. Through language, we can get a glimpse of a person’s identity but they can use the same me dium to change that identity as well. Australian English is unlike other Englishes in many different aspects, especially phonetically morphologically and semantically. Phonology plays a great role in national identity as it is what creates different accents. The broad, ocker Australian accent with its trademark nasal, flattened vowels is one of the key elements of Australian linguistics that sets it apart from the rest of the world. Diphthongs in lexemes like â€Å"high† are more rounded, resulting in /hoÉ ª/. Phonetic features such as these are easily identified as Australian. Slang is another feature of Australian English that sets it apart from others. Replacing suffixes with vowels is a good example of this. â€Å"Afternoon† becomes â€Å"arvo†, names like â€Å"Barry† becomes â€Å"Bazza† and by replacing the last element with an ‘-o’, the adjective â€Å"povo† has undergone a word class shift from the noun â€Å"poverty†. Popular culture has also influe nced Australian English, with ABC television series J’amie, Private School girl introducing a semantic and word class shift of ‘quiche’ (a noun meaning a savoury open-faced pastry) to an adjective to describe an attractive individual. Australia’s linguistic innovation displays individuality and opposes claims that slang is borrowed from America.  Australian English shows both national pride and identity. Teenagers are at the age when they are starting to establish their identity. Neologisms are created by teenagers to claim a different identity from that of children or adults. As adults become more familiar with these lexemes and their use, teenagers abandon them or alter the semantics and use to maintain a linguistic barrier. A good example of this is the well-known acronym â€Å"lol† which stands for Laugh Out Loud. As more adults become aware of this lexical item and start to include it in their daily texts, teenagers have brought it into speech as an exclamatory and discourse particle. The case of the letters now also alters the semantics; when typed in lower-case, â€Å"lol† is sarcastic whilst â€Å"LOL† in capital letters shows true amusement. It is evident that this constant changing of terms by teenagers is a sign of rebellion and an effort to keep a linguistic barrier between themselves and adults, thus maintaining a separate identity. The malleability of the lexicon is taken advantage of by teenagers to form a linguistic barrier between themselves and unwanted people such as adults and other teenagers who don’t belong in their group. Thus, a unique identity is maintained. While teenagers are constantly seeking to separate themselves from children and adults, they are also pressured to conform to the teenage group. Acronyms such as â€Å"idek† (I don’t even know) and â€Å"tbh† (to be honest) are now frequently used lexicon in a teenager’s text vocabulary due to connotations of â€Å"cool† and â€Å"modern† being associated with them. Similarly, whatever was once popular amongst a teenager’s discourse. In time, it was shortened to â€Å"whatevs† and this trend spread quickly amongst them as a result of peer pressure and the need to be fashionable. Professor Steven Pinker suggests the reason for this is because â€Å"the coolest kids decide to talk that way and it spreads like wildfire†. Individuals who wish to associate with others who sit higher on the â€Å"social pyramid† will pick up their speech habits and wear it as a new badge of identity. Having their own exclusive vocabulary allows teenagers to relate to each other and share the same identity, giving them a sense of belonging to a group. Language can be worn as a badge of identity, giving speakers national,  interpersonal and intrapersonal identity. The phonology of Australian English gives the speaker a distinct accent and, paired along with its unique slang, makes it identifiable across the globe. In order to separate themselves from adults and children, teenagers build a linguistic barrier by creating neologisms and maintaining that barrier by constantly altering lexicon to avoid adults becoming too familiar with them. On the other hand, inside the teenage group is a drive to conform and use similar language in an attempt to fit in with peers and to have a sense of belonging. Language is used as a badge of identity regardless of what that identity is. Bibliography Das, S, 2005. Struth! Someone’s nicked me Strine. The Age, 29 January. 34. Seaton, M, 2001. Word Up. Guardian, 21 September. 46.

Financial Analysis of Amazon.com Inc.

This paper seeks to analyze the financial statements of Amazon. com Inc. for the years 2005, 2006 and 2007 by interpreting its profitability, liquidity, leverage and activity ratios and comparing the same with industry averages. This will also analyze the company’s growth rates, valuation ratios (price) and dividends and will employ horizontal and vertical analysis in process as needed. 2. Analysis and Discussion 2. 1 Profitability Return on equity of Amazon. com Inc. shows many things about the past performance of the company in the past five years.The continued decrease from 2005 through 2007 appears noticeable but the rates are still very high. . From 145. 93% in 2005, it has hugely decreased to 44. 08% in 2006 and further to 39. 77% in 2007. Such level of profitability is still very for purposes of determining a company’s profitability. Compared to industry average of 24. 9%, the company’s ROE is still higher. See Exhibit I in the Appendix. The range of 39% t o 145% return on equity encourages investors as it would mean that for every $100 investment, the investors expect returns of about $39 to $145. These rates could be viewed as something unprecedented for a company like Amazon.com Inc.. Its level of ROE is something that must be the envy of many other companies such as EBay Inc. , Enable Holdings and Friendly Auto Dealers, Inc (Yahoo Finance, 2008). It may be noted that return on equity is solved under the formula where net profit is divided by the total stockholders equity. When compared to an average rate of 1. 5% US base rate (Housepricecrash, 2008 ) if money was invested in a bank, the company’s would seem to offer more than twenty fold and it is something very difficult to find and would therefore make it very attractive to investors.The company’s return on assets for the years 2006 through 2008 ranges from 4% to 9% and which appears to be obviously lower that its ROE. The same may be observed in relation to the co mpany’s net profit margin for last three years and has not even exceeded 5% in any period. However, ROE must be superior in declaring the profitability of Amazon as compared to all other profitability ratios. Operating margin which measures within the range of 3 to 5% for the three years, represents the margin after deducting cost of sales or services and operating expenses.Things to be added or deducted still are other income(s). The ratios mean that the management of Amazon. com Inc. is doing well that it must thank its employee’s participation of employees in delivering value to customers. The net margins of the company for the three years are lower than operating profit margin, due to the additional deductions of interest expenses. The profitability ratios such as return to equity, operating profit margin and net profit margin have the capacity to show historical profitability but investors would base also their decision on estimates of the future.Since conditions change, wise users of financial information may just give more values to estimated cash flow in the future for valuing their investments in terms of dividends to be received from the company. This appears to be found in the case of Amazon as proved by high debt equity as would be discussed later in relation to its profitability. 2. 2. 2 Liquidity Liquidity enables a company to meet its currently maturing obligations. It is measured using the current ratio and the quick asset ratio.Current ratio calculation uses current assets to be divided to current liabilities while quick assets ratio is almost the same except that the inventory and prepaid expenses are being removed from the current assets to have a new numerator but the denominator is the same. Quick assets therefore normally include cash, marketable securities and accounts receivable and the use of quick asset ratio is very much relevant for one intending to have higher form of measuring liquidity. In such case, one would prefe r quick asset ratio over that of the current ratio.As applied now, the current ratios of Amazon. com Inc reflected 1. 39, 1. 33 and 1. 54 for the years 2007, 2006 and 2005 respectively while the quick asset ratios for same years are 1. 02, 0. 95 and 1. 19 for the same years respectively. See Exhibit I in the Appendix. Both ratios showed fluctuating trend where decreased was first noted and then increase followed after. The company’s liquidity may be considered to be still very high since current ratios average more than 1. 3 while quick asset ratio averages about more than 1.0 for the last three years. It current ratio for 2007 is very close to industry average of 1. 8 while its quick ratio of 1. 02 is not very far from industry average of 1. 6. Both its liquidity ratios are better when compared with S&P 500 index. See Exhibit I in the Appendix. The good liquidity appears to be a result also of good profitability of the company as observed earlier in terms of very high return on equity. 2. 2. 3 Leverage ratios Financial leverage or solvency refers to the company’s capacity to keep it stability over the long term.Generally measured by the debt to equity ratio, with the formula of having the total debt of the company divided by its total equity; a good financial leverage assures investors that the company is not to just to exist in the short term but it must also have a long life to recover long term investments which takes years to produce the needed returns. The debt to equity ratios of Amazon. com Inc. are 4. 42, 9. 12 and 14. 02 for the years 2007, 2006 and 2005 respectively. These ratios are however not as good as industry average of 0. 32. See Exhibit I in the Appendix .The ratios are indeed very high since the ratio of more than 4. 0 means that the value the company investments is not matched by what it borrows by about more than 400%. Remarkable Improvement were however recorded from 2005 through 2007. This must be due to its very high prof itability. This could mean that the company is expanding business as noted its net fixed assets reflecting growth rates of 25. 06%, 22. 53% and 67. 91%, the years 2007, 2006 and 2005 respectively. See Exhibit I in the Appendix. In other words, expansions are getting financed hugely from operations which is a sigh of a healthy company.Good solvency is a proof of good capital structure and for Amazon. com Inc. the same could be attainable as shown in the very remarkable improvement if its debt to equity ratio which cut more than half that on 2006 in 2007. Given also its very good liquidity as analyzed earlier, the company must be declared to have clean bill of health in financial terms. 2. 2. 4 Efficiency ratios The company’s profitability is being supported by its good efficiency ratios. Inventory turnovers for three years are very much higher than industry average and such efficiency is indicative of its better performance than competitors.Even its collection period and recei vable turnover are definitely above industry and S&P 500 index. No wonder the massive improvement in leverage ratio for two years is more than justified. 3. Conclusion Amazon. com is growing very remarkably in term of revenues, fixed assets, and net income. The increase in net income of more than 60% in 2007 is not easy to disregard and the fixed assets growth averaging more than 20% for the last three years could only mean an expanding company under a very favorable condition in the industry.Its profitability ratios, liquidity ratios, leverage ratios and activity ratios are very favorable to the company. Its profitability is sustaining not only its liquidity by keep improving is highly leverage financial condition. Although, 2007 liquidity and leverage ratios are not as good as industry averages, the chance that they could be improved soon by company’s profitability is very big given its higher than industry average ROE for the last three years. The activity ratios in terms of inventory turnover and receivable turnover in 2007 are higher than industry average which could only support for the company’s very high profitability.