The Zodiac

WINTER EDITION "Understanding comes with ZODIAC"

THE ZODIAC

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THE ZODIACÂ MAGAZINE

LYBA ZAKI AAIZ EESHA LAIBA UMAR DUAA RAFAY HASSAN SAIFULLAH GHAZI MINAAL HELI ARYAN

Editors and Publishers Publisher

ZAKI HASSAN

Designer

LYBA FARRUKH

EDITORS

AAIZ

LAIBA

II

STORIES and Reports Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

1

THE ZODIAC MAGAZINE

Wizarding Wheezes (THIS IS A SMALL PEEK AT THE NEXT STORY THAT WOULD BE RELEASED SOON) This is a story about twins named Fred and George who were famous for their extraordinary inventions in the wizarding world. And the hilarious thing is they were born on "April Fool's Day" which is one way to imagine how wild their personalities were back then. But sometimes things just don't go the way you expect. During “The Battle of Hogwarts” many innocent lives were lost, many families were broken and sacrifices were made. One of the innocent ones was Fred; he died in the explosion made by Antonin Dolohov. George was devastated by that incident, and he felt as if someone had ripped his soul in half. But he never gave up inventing something that would make communication possible between the user and the dead. One fine day George visited the Forbidden Forest; the place where Voldemort killed Harry. He was just strolling around and taking in the view of the remains of the battle. He took off his shoes and felt the dry leaves which indicated the welcoming of autumn. At that moment his eyes caught on a glint of an object not far from where he was standing. He approached it and hesitated before picking it up. And unfortunately, it didn't take much time for him to figure out what it was. The object was none other than The Resurrection Stone.

EESHA

"There is no certainty. there is only adventure"

SAIF ULLAH

Greek Cities Greek Cities The history of Greece was one of the hundreds of independent poleis spread all around the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea and its shores. The Greeks considered themselves part of an area called Greece, or Hellas in their language. In ancient Greece, the population of the Greeks stood on a small number of people. Most often, the new rules or news were announced by gathering all the people in the city hall. The expansion of the population then leads to the expansion of cities. The planning of Greek cities was different from the planning of our cities today. They built houses differently from the houses being built today.

Travelling from city to the other was difficult because they had no roads, and forging roads was a difficult task.

Ancient Greece wasn't but poor cities spread in different directions that shared the same beliefs and traditions, but suffered from economic problems and cultural recession. Those cities were ruled by kings that were originally tribesmen. The Greeks developed in small groups each settled in their own city-state called Polis.

Once the 8th Century was on the doors, Greece started to arrange itself towards a political system, and so did its people; except those who were from the mountainside. The Greeks decided that the "polis system" would be their political policy. The city's polis was the light that brightened all sides of Greek knowledge. Each polis had a rural area for planting around it, and the biggest one was the piece of land in Athena that was 1,660 Km square.

That was considered to be almost as big as a humble English state. Every city-state was an independent political entity with its own government, an army to defend it, and a population between 5 and 10,000 people.

When a city grows and expands by joining the rural area that surrounds it (where the food was grown), its people would then receive the rights of citizenship. The Greeks called that system by "Synoikismos". The citystate was made up of the fortified city (with high walls encircling it). Many philosophers supported that system because it was the essential part of their cities, life, and history; and it reflected the mental, economic, and social problems, and fixed the relationship between any Greek member and his polis as a worker in it.

By the expansion of the Greek civilization, the polis policy then quickly started to spread, not only on the Greek lands, but beyond that to tribes that accepted the way the Greeks lived, and the way they spoke. The polis policy, or in other words, the fundamentality of the Greek civilization, wasn't a geographical or racial one but was a way of a special life by all its aspects whether it was social or educational. That specialized the Greeks among all the other people. The main part of the city may be the castle in which the villagers would head to during the war because we find for each city an Acropolis which was the heart of an ancient Greece city. Inside those castles were the temples that gathered the people around a sacred room to attend sacred occasions.

After the wars were finally over in Greece, and the city had peace from war, the temples moved to center the Agora which was the main place for the economic and social life of Greeks. The Agora was surrounded by Stoa, a building with columns and capitals, to shade the Greeks from the sunlight.

Today in Greece we can see many ruins of temples, houses or even cities, and within that, our geographers today can determine the planning of ancient Greek cities and the way they used to live before. Looking back through all these pieces of information makes us conclude a lot about ancient Greek cities. Although some of the Greeks still abide by their polis policy, their cities have now changed from what it used to be before. Ancient Greece was the environment of a small, and limited poleis where the civilians gathered as families and tribes that had a bond between its members and felt equal in their rights and duties for their country and their common benefit.

Hely Almaini

THE BIG WRITE TOPIC: MEMORIES

Memories Memories, as vivid as they seem to be at the time, sooner or later they fade away as time flies; the memories that you have stored become rusty and opaque and sometimes when a person cannot remember a memory from a long time ago he tries really hard to find it somewhere in their brains; the brain makes up a memory to fill up the space of the lost memory and creates a memory that never existed and us, mere and gullible humans, start believing that the made-up memory actually existed. Some memories stick with us for an unreasonably long time and the reason for that is very simple; it’s because those memories are special and hold a special place in our heart and even if we want to forget them we can’t because our unconscious mind knows that they are important in one way or another. Some traumatic or sad memories never go away even if it ends up making us depressed and sad, why do they never go away if they only emit negative emotions and energy? It’s because our brain tries to draw on past experiences to use this information in the present and to prevent us from repeating the same old mistakes repeatedly. But there are quite the negative effects of this memory trait, for example, some of those traumatic memories can leave a hole in our personality and the past experiences can make or break your mental stability. For instance, if you keep recalling your traumatic memories repeatedly, you could fall into depression or even worse, develop a mental disorder. In other cases of traumatic memories, our brain can re-invent or distort our painful memories to make them less painful and more tolerable thus reducing the risks of depression and mental disorders. As likely as not, storing memories of the host is one of the toughest and one of the most important roles the brain has. Memories help you in all kinds of situations for example, education: everything we learn in school must be stored in our brain as memories and for us to pass in our exams, we need memories.

The brain acquires this important task because it is one of the smartest and vital organs our body has and has a storage capacity of virtually infinite. Once a memory is created, it has to be stored in our brains no matter how briefly. Most scientists believe there are three stages of storing memories; First, the memory is in the sensory stage: the registration of information during the brief sensory stage lasts only a fraction of a second. It's your sensory memory that allows a perception such as a visual pattern, a sound, or a touch to linger for a moment after the stimulation is over. Second is short-term memory, ultimately if the memory is deemed of any importance or knowledge it ends up in the long-term memory storage. Memories also play the important role of molding our personality. Any type of event or incident that leaves a huge impact on our memories, and are able to remember it vividly even after a long period of time indicates that that specific memory holds a lot of meaning to you and was a molding factor of your personality. Likewise, if a little incident occurred not to0 long ago and you’ve already forgotten it indicates that it held no meaning to you whatsoever.

Our brain tries to make more space for more meaningful and important memories by erasing or forgetting the useless and un-meaningful memories even if it has the capacity of virtually infinite. Given how much we seem to forget on a daily basis and how our brain tries to get rid of useless information, it may seem strange but it’s completely true that our brains have an essentially unlimited ‘storage capacity’ for learning. A large part of the reason we seem to forget so much may as well be that, while our long term memory is virtually limitless however our short-term, or ‘working’ memory has a much, much smaller capacity. The original research into short term memory says we can only remember 5 to 9 pieces of information there at any given time, though more recent experiments suggest it may even be as low as 4! It’s easy to think of the brain as a ‘magic box’ where your thoughts, memories and emotions are kept, but when it comes down to it, the brain is a part of your body just like the heart and your muscles. Thus, ‘exercising’ your brain in specific ways, just like your other organs whether its learning a new skill such as a musical instrument or a new language, or simply learning new things from a book, produces physical changes in its structure. Thanks to modern imaging techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), scientists are able to visualize these changes before and after ‘learning’ takes place. They have not only found significant increases in activity, which is measured by blood flow in specific areas of the brain associated with those activities, but long-lasting structural changes in terms of white and grey matter. The picture to the left demonstrates these changes in the case of video games, but experiments have shown this in a huge variety of methods such as, taxi drivers learning new navigation routes but this structural change is larger during childhood. It’s great being able to access almost any piece of information in a few seconds, and resources such as Google, Wikipedia and YouTube have clearly been major parts of a revolution in how we find information. But studies suggest that there is an interesting twist to being able to access information so conveniently.

If the brain knows it can just access it again so easily, it’s less likely to bother remembering the information itself thus, being able to access information easily makes it less likely for you to remember it. We don’t attempt to store information in our own memory to the same degree that we used to because we know that the internet knows everything, but who knows, there might be tons of other things we could discover in the world but are just unable to because our brain is lazy! Similarly, with smartphones, constantly looking at the world through the lens of our smartphone camera may result in us trusting our smartphones to store our memories for us resulting in greater memory loss percentage as we grow older and age. If this keeps happening eventually we could forget the faces of our friends and family. We would start relying on our smartphones to tell us who’s who and after tens of thousands of years, everyone will start losing all their memories and will forget basic knowledge and everyday information and then, the world will be forced to go back to its stone-age phase.

DUAA

"Every sunset is an opportunity to reset..."

AAIZ

Memories Before coming to Dubai and becoming a part of this great campus, I used to live in Abu Dhabi and lived there for 5 years. When I first came to Abu Dhabi, it was a new environment. I saw new people and different nationalities. I was relatively shy and wasn’t the most talkative boy in class or bus at the time as I was new and didn’t really know anybody. But then as the year past, I grew older and a lot of different people came into my life and so were great memories created. In fact, I made some really good friends that stayed with me through out the whole time I spent in that school. The teachers were friendly, we obviously treated them as our parents but also, our friends. I was having a great time as I considered that school "my second home” and the boys and girls as my brothers and sisters. Each day just kept getting better and better. We helped each other no matter what. That could be in our homework. If I didn’t understand something my friends were always with me even in the years we had field trips. Being in that school, the time I spent there and the people I met, is a memory now. But field trips created more memories than ever. The great time I spent with my friends on those trips were truly amazing and I just wish I could go back to them again and again but I can’t go; whatever we did are saved in a special place, in my heart. So, this was the first trip. I went to Ferrari world in year 8. It was a great especially because I went there with my friends which made the trip much more better. I sat on the world’s fastest roller coaster with my friends because I didn’t want them to call me a scared cat at the end of the day so I accepted the challenge and went on the Formula Rossa. It is known to be the fastest roller coaster in the world and as expected, it was fast. Me and my friends had a good time. It was crazy and scary but it was worth it as now I have experienced how it feels like to go on the world's fastest roller coaster.

Luckily, they had recently opened a new ride called Flying Aces at the time. It’s also a roller coaster but there is a huge loop and a twist. Its hard to explain how it was in words! Me and my friends were kind of terrified but after the ride we had a good laugh at each other on how we were screaming during the ride. Then we went on some other mini rides. After that, it was lunch time and the food was delicious and mouth-watering. Me and my friends had a great time during this field trip.

Now that I look back to it, it reminds me of all the good times we had during the trip. Just like how every normal school day gets better and better every single day, these trips kept getting better and better and we started to make more memories out of each trip. You know what they say, make as many memories as you can because you never know if you will see your friends tomorrow or if something will happen to you. Then after that trip, we headed back to school and talked to each other about what we did today and on the bus ride. The next year, in year 9, we went to Yas Water world, a water park located in Abu Dhabi. There was a big variety of slides and a huge swimming pool where you could just float around if you don’t feel like going on the rides. The first ride I went on was called Falcon Falaj. It’s a 5-seater ride in which you go down a slide with twists and turns. Some of my friends were screaming but I don’t know if they were screaming for fun or for real. Then, me and my other friend went to this roller coaster called Bandit Bomber and yes, it was just like any other roller coaster! It, obviously, went up and down but there was no floor under our feet! It took some sharp turns which were really frightening. Our feet were just floating in the air while we were being shocked to death. I was screaming but so was my friend but, it was a good experience. After that ride, we went to the enormous swimming pool; there were other people in the swimming people as well who were just chilling. One of my friends brought a Go-Pro camera so we took some amazing underwater pictures and videos.

I still have them with me till now. When I look back at them it makes me feel how time flies, those moments feel like yesterday.

Whenever I feel sad or lonely, I look at those pictures and it feels like I went in the past, lived that moment again and again. I start getting those visions of me with my friends. I can imagine it in my head but it just can't be the same. I sometimes start to see my friends in front of me but in reality, they are not there. When I dream I see myself in the same school, same friends, same teachers and it feels like I am a part of them again like playing football or basketball with my friends just like the good old days. But then, I wake up and realize it was all a vision. Most of the memories I made and I currently have been happy; nothing was sad until I left my friends and school and this is why I think you should make memories because if you get separated, at least you have something to remember your loved ones or friends. The only things left with me now are memories that I have collected over the years which I will never forget. They are saved in a special place in my brain and heart where they can't be ever forgotten as I keep moving on in life. No matter what place I am, these memories will stay with me. Forever.

M.HASSAN

CREATIVE mini sagas If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it

Zemblanity

The daughter starving, the son thirsty, the wife all cold in the snow, yet no one shared a dime. The husband committed crimes just to get shelter and food in jail yet everyone called him a tramp; a dirty hobo. Can't we see the world through their eyes for once.

MINAAL FATIMA

"it's time to start living the life you've only imagined"

SAIF ULLAH

El-Dorado Walked through thundering storms, pouring rain and the cold of winter.

Walked through the drought and the heatwave of summer. Sustained by his dream and his will to fight. He walks for hours, for days, for months, to only find one thing, to only ever find one place; The El-dorado. Nescient Worked hard every day and every night just to get food on my plate, I fought with life just to get through the day; however, it all seems hopeless. Does no one see what I am going through? Why can I not live lie? I just wish people could see LYBA FARRUKH

MINAAL FATIMA

SUNDAY

GRADE 10 A

8 PM

MAGAZINE

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