Adverbs

Adverbs

Adverb is one of the parts of speech that modifies a verb or adjective. It is used to explain where, when, why and how something is done. In short, it displays the manner and circumstances where a person does the action. Thus, the form of adverb can be the name of places, time or any words ended with -ly.  

Look at these examples:

What an adverb explains...

1. Manner. It describes how an action is done. My brother has studied to use the software design actively. The word actively displays how the person studies the software design,
2. Place. It describes where an action is done. My college professor usually teaches his students in the library. 
3. Time. It describes when an action is done. We moved into our new house yesterday.
4. Frequency. It describes how many times an action is done. The students always come early to their school. 
5. Quantity/ degree. It describes how much or in what degree or to what extent an action is done. I am rather busy. He was driving carelessly.


Find the adverbs in the text below and explain their functions.

Text 1

We have the great Greek philosopher Plato to thank for the ongoing obsession with the lost city of Atlantis. Around 360 B.C., Plato wrote that Atlantis was a great and wonderful empire destroyed some 11,000 years before by earthquakes and floods during a 24-hour period.

Here are just some of the many theories advanced over the years about where and what Atlantis was:

In the 19th century, several researchers suggested that ancient Mayan hieroglyphs spoke of a lost continent, and therefore, the site may have been near Mexico. The theory went that the Mayans had interacted with the ancient Egyptians, who, in turn, passed the tale of Atlantis down to the ancient Greeks, which is where Plato got it. But that theory lost steam when it became clear that early Mayanologists didn't fully understand the culture's complex hieroglyphs.

In 1912, the public caught Atlantis fever, thanks to an article titled How I Found the Lost Atlantis in William Randolph Hearst's New York American. It was written by a man claiming to be the grandson of Heinrich Schliemann, the archaeologist who excavated Troy. He'd alleged that Trojan artifacts revealed Atlantis' true location, submerged in the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and the United States. The Azores were supposedly the tips of Atlantian mountains. But the author disappeared soon after the article was published, and it's now widely viewed as one of the great yellow journalism hoaxes.

Other 20th century accounts placed Atlantis off the coast of Portugal, on a Greek island and even in the Brazilian rain forest, although the British explorer who went to prove that theory was never heard from again. Not to be outdone, the early 21st century has seen a flurry of Atlantisitis.

In June, a German physicist claimed the lost city was actually a region in southern Spain. Also this year, a Swedish geographer proposed that Atlantis wasn't near the Mediterranean at all but was, in fact, Ireland. He says the size of the Emerald Isle syncs up nicely with Plato's estimate and that the destruction myth was inspired by the submerging of a North Sea shoal around 6100 BC.

Text 2

A couple of months ago, I got to my local airport and discovered I did not have my suitcase. Don't ask me why I forgot my suitcase. I forgot it. It wasn't there. I called my wife and asked her to bring it to the airport. She was not surprised — disgusted, but not surprised. I told her the next flight out. The agent at the airport told me that it would be at my hotel in Utah that evening.

I got to the hotel late at night. No luggage. I called the airline. The flight was canceled. It would be at the hotel by 9 the next morning. With what little sense I had left, I washed out my shirt and underwear and hung them close to the heater and turned on the fan.

The next morning, 9:00 a.m., no luggage. I called Delta, and I talked with Darryl. He asked me why I had forgotten my baggage. I tried to be polite.

"Were you in a big hurry?" he asked.

"Yes," I admitted, "I was in a big hurry. Where is my baggage?"

"Well," he said, "We're trying to find it right now. It's got to be somewhere."

Darryl, like all spiritual teachers, was master of the obvious.

"But what am I going to do?" I said. "I don't have my bags."

Darryl asked: "Well, Bill — Can I call you Bill? — do you have enough clothes for the day?"

"Yes," I said.

"Well, what you need to do is make it through the day. If you can make it through the day with what you got, we'll find it for you. Go get yourself a toothbrush and razor."

I was out all day. I got to the hotel very late that night. No bags. I called the baggage claim office. They didn't have them. The woman said, "What's your claim number?" I told her I didn't have a claim number, since I didn't hand in the bag. She said that was impossible; they never took bags without a passenger.

"Where's Darryl?" I asked.

"He's gone home," she said. "We'll put a search on it, although I don't know what to do if it doesn't have a claim check. We can't be sure you gave it to us. Call tomorrow."

I called the next morning. Darryl was there.

"Darryl," I said, "where's my bag?"

"Is this Bill?" he asked.

"Where's my bag?"

"Well, they didn't find it, huh?"

"No," I said. "I don't have my bags. They say they don't have it. They don't have a record. They don't even believe I gave it to them."

He said, "Bill, I believe you. There's just a difference between what is true and what we can prove. Do you have enough clothes for the day?"

"Yeah, but ?"

"OK, get through the day. If you have enough for the day, then everything is all right. Call me if you want to see how things are going."

That day, somebody gave me a shirt and a pair of socks out of the blue. The next morning, I called Darryl.

"Bill," he said, "good news. We have your bag."

"Great," I said. "When can I get it?"

"No, no, no. Don't get ahead of me. I said we have it. Delta now admits to having your bag. We just don't know where it is. Do you have enough for the day?"

"Yes, I have enough."

"Good."

I said, "Darryl, I'm beginning to think I should yell."

"I'm sure you think that," he said. "But, you know, people come in here, yell all the time. It doesn't really help that much. Give me a call if you need anything."

I left town the next day for Wyoming. By the time I left, I'd been given enough clothes that I actually left some behind. I showed up at the Salt Lake airport a week after I arrived. I walked into the baggage claim office.

"Darryl?" I asked.

"Bill? Here, it is, right here. Little bugger spent the whole week at LaGuardia. Who knows why. Anything else I can do for you?"

"Yeah," I said. "Could I call you again if I've got some trouble, something I want to talk about?"

"As long as you're traveling on Delta or one of its many affiliated carriers."

The next trip I went on, I took half of what I'd taken before. I used a smaller bag. I felt free.

Text 3

An exhaustive, three-year search for some tapes that contained the original footage of the Apollo 11 moonwalk has concluded that they were probably destroyed during a period when NASA was erasing old magnetic tapes and reusing them to record satellite data.

"We're all saddened that they're not there. We all wish we had 20-20 hindsight," says Dick Nafzger, a TV specialist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, who helped lead the search team.

"I don't think anyone in the NASA organization did anything wrong," Nafzger says. "I think it slipped through the cracks, and nobody's happy about it."

NASA has, however, offered up a consolation prize for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission — the agency has taken the best available broadcast television footage and contracted with a digital restoration firm to enhance it, so that the public can see the first moonwalk in more detail than ever before.

But the lost tapes mean that the world will probably never again see the original images beamed back to Earth by the lunar camera that is now resting on the moon's dusty Sea of Tranquility, right where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left it.

Lunar Camera Tapes Were Higher Quality

That special lunar camera recorded in an odd format that was incompatible with the format used for broadcast TV. So when the footage was received on Earth back in July of 1969, it had to be converted for the live television broadcast.

The conversion degraded the images, and hundreds of millions of TV viewers saw dark, murky pictures.

Those pictures were still thrilling — after all, it was "Live from the Moon!" and a human was walking on another celestial body for the very first time — but some experts knew that the lunar camera was capable of doing better.

"It was better. We knew it was better," says Stan Lebar, who worked at the Westinghouse Electric Corporation and led the team that designed and built the lunar camera.

He knew that engineers on the ground did preserve the lunar camera's odd-format footage by recording it onto tapes. So a few years ago, Lebar and some colleagues decided to go back and look at those tapes, to see if today's digital technology could use them to produce a higher-quality video.

"The whole thing started with the idea that this is the one piece of television footage that's going to be played for the next 50 or 100 or 300 years," says Lebar. "Those that follow us deserve better than what we had."

Text source: www.npr.org