Stanford University linguist and MacArthur Fellow Dan Jurafsky dives into the hidden history of food. Why do we eat toast for breakfast, and then toast to good health at dinner? What does the turkey we eat on Thanksgiving have to do with the country on the eastern Mediterranean? Can you figure out how much your dinner will cost by counting the words on the menu? In The Language...(展开全部)

Stanford University linguist and MacArthur Fellow Dan Jurafsky dives into the hidden history of food. Why do we eat toast for breakfast, and then toast to good health at dinner? What does the turkey we eat on Thanksgiving have to do with the country on the eastern Mediterranean? Can you figure out how much your dinner will cost by counting the words on the menu? In The Language...(展开全部)

From crime figures to health scares, election polls to stock market forecasts, numbers make the news all the time. But are they accurate? John Allen Paulos, travels through the pages of an average newspaper, revealing how mathematics is at the heart of the articles we read everyday - even horoscopes and the sports pages - and how often they mislead us. By understanding simple c...(展开全部)

With the same user-friendly, quirky, and perceptive approach that made Innumeracy a bestseller, John Allen Paulos travels though the pages of the daily newspaper showing how math and numbers are a key element in many of the articles we read every day.From the Senate, SATs, and sex, to crime, celebrities, and cults, he takes stories that may not seem to involve mathematics at ...(展开全部)

Comprehensive and balanced, this classic exploration of the history of the English language combines internal linguistic history and external cultural history-from the Middle Ages to the present. Students are encouraged to develop both an understanding of present-day English and an enlightened attitude toward questions affecting the language today.