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"We could all use a crash course in personal finance. Two-thirds of people around the world failed a short test of basic financial concepts. The five-question test-created by Standard & Poor's, Gallup, the World Bank, and George Washington University-was posed to 150,000 people in more than 140 countries last year. It tests understanding of risk, inflation, interest, and compound interest. To pass, people had to demonstrate competency in three out of four topics. Yet just 33% of people were able to do that. See how you fare on this slightly modified version of the quiz. After each question, we'll tell you how various countries did on it, too."

Children can no longer afford to be ignorant of how complex financial products work. The world of finance and money is becoming rapidly more complex and requires an integration of education and safe financial products to ensure children grow up knowing how to manage money and debt. From this year, financial literacy will be included in the national school curriculum and will be rolled out across a range of subjects during the next three years.

Through the Lens of Social Justice: Using the Change Agent in Adult Education, a recently-published book, celebrates The Change Agent paper's first 10 years of providing social justice resources to adult educators. The book is both a gathering of its best and most timeless pieces and a guide for educators in how to use the paper. It addresses the needs of both new and experienced ESOL, ABE and GED practitioners.

Practical literacy skills for adults. Choose a topic area.

Right now, Luke Neff and I are adding prompts and using labels. Eventually, we want to create a page where you can search based upon subject, type of writing or Common Core standard. We also plan to add some lesson plans and maybe some student samples in the long run. Our goal is to provide a free resource that teachers can use in their classrooms or that individuals can use as inspiration for writing.

Portal Sumber Digital Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia. The Malaysian National Library (PNM) is beta testing the website which will allow ALL Malaysian citizens FREE access to the Britannica Encyclopedia that includes e-books, encyclopedia, journals, articles, etc.

"How to Read a Book", a Zaytuna Faculty Lecture by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf.

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding. Inspired by Nigerian history and tragedies all but forgotten by recent generations of westerners, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novels and stories are jewels in the crown of diasporan literature.

Length: <1 hour. A short lecture on education, educating the youth and comparisons between contemporary and classical approaches towards institutionalized learning.

Length: approx 1 hr 40 mins a Zaytuna Faculty Lecture by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf.

This blog is about sharing best practices in ELT and continuous personal and professional development.

Quickly find the best teaching resources, homework help and educational websites for use in the classroom.

Link to some useful writing tips.

Eight rules for writing short fiction: 1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.4. Every sentence must do one of two things - reveal character or advance the action.5. Start as close to the end as possible.6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them - in order that the reader may see what they are made of.7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages. The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that. - Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1999), 9-10.

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style. These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful --- ? And on and on. Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you're writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead --- or, worse, they will stop reading you. The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don't you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No. So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.