Studio Classroom- October 5- [Viewpoints] Which Do You Prefer: a Mac or a PC?

【Grammar on the Go】

• 本日討論例句：
  I think PCs are better computers, and they cost about half as much as Macs do.
• "half as much as..." is a very useful phrase when we are making comparsions, in the case of today's sentence, the speaker is comparing the price of PCs to the price of Macs, and basically the cost of getting a PC is about half the cost of getting a Mac, is half as much.
• ex:
  1. Janice's new job allow her to earn 3 times more than her previous job.
  We can say: Janice's new job lets her earn three times as much as the other job.
  2. Last year's class budget was 6 hundred dollars and this year is only 2 hundred.
  We can say: This year's class budget is a third as much as last year's.

【Chat Room】

• Are all computer systems created equal?
  → This phrase sounds very familiar with : All men are created equal. 人人生而平等。
  源自於美國獨立宣言(Declaration Independence)；林肯總統在蓋茲堡演講(Gettysburg Address)中亦有引用此名言。
• grammar:
  Why isn't "All men are created equally"?
  If you say: "All men are created equally", your focus is on the verb "to create", or the process of the creation- how all men are created, that's not the meaning of the phrase.
  使用equally，則重點在於create創造的過程。
  We say "All men are created equal" because talking about the results of creation, how the created man are all equal, and not one man ... to another.
  使用equal，便是指人被創造出來後所擁有的地位，與其它的人是平等的。

【Lanugage Tips】

1. avid adj. 熱心的，衝勁十足的
   ex:
   1. Mark is an avid baseball fan. He collects so many baseball cards.
   2. Sean made an avid effort to impress his future mother-in-law.
   - make an avid effort to~ 使盡全力去作某事
   - impress someone 使某人有好印象
   - future mother-in-law 未來的岳母
2. in the market for (something) [idiom] adj-phr. 想買某樣東西
   (market 市場)
   ex:
   1. Dad is in the market for a van.
   - van 休旅車
   2. Althrough this house is really nice, we're not in the market for such a big house.
   - be not in the market for~ 沒有要買某物的打算
3. platform n. 平台；舞台；(本文)電腦介面
   ex:
   1. This kind of graphic software can be used with almost any Windows platform.
   2. This program runs(運作) on Macintosh system platforms.