Physical education

Physical education, Phy. Ed., or PE, also known in many Commonwealth countries as physical training or PT, is an educational course related to the physique of the human body. It is taken during primary and secondary education and encourages psychomotor learning in a play or movement exploration setting to promote health.

Physical education in different countries

Physical education in Asia

In South Korea, it is mandatory for pupils to take a total of 3 hours of physical education through primary and secondary level schools

In Singapore, pupils from primary school through junior colleges are required to have 2 hours of PE every week, except during examination seasons. Pupils are able to play games like football, badminton, captain's ball, and basketball during most sessions. Unorthodox sports such as touchball, fencing, and skateboarding are occasionally played. In more prestigious secondary schools and in junior colleges, sports such as golf, tennis, shooting, and squash are played. A compulsory fitness exam, NAPFA, is conducted in every school once every year to assess the physical fitness of the pupils. Pupils are given a series of fitness tests (Pull-ups/Inclined pull-ups for girls, standing broad jump, sit-ups, sit-and-reach and 1.6 km for primary [10- to 12-year-olds]/2.4 km for secondary and junior college levels [13- to 18-year-olds]). Students are graded by gold, silver, bronze or fail. NAPFA for pre-enlistees serves as an indicator for an additional 2 months in the country's compulsory national service if they attain bronze or fail.

Star

A star is a luminous sphere of plasma held together by its own gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Other stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth during the night, appearing as a multitude of fixed luminous points in the sky due to their immense distance from Earth. Historically, the most prominent stars were grouped into constellations and asterisms, and the brightest stars gained proper names. Extensive catalogues of stars have been assembled by astronomers, which provide standardized star designations.

For at least a portion of its life, a star shines due to thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in its core, releasing energy that traverses the star's interior and then radiates into outer space. Once the hydrogen in the core of a star is nearly exhausted, almost all naturally occurring elements heavier than helium are created by stellar nucleosynthesis during the star's lifetime and, for some stars, by supernova nucleosynthesis when it explodes. Near the end of its life, a star can also contain degenerate matter. Astronomers can determine the mass, age, metallicity (chemical composition), and many other properties of a star by observing its motion through space, luminosity, and spectrum respectively. The total mass of a star is the principal determinant of its evolution and eventual fate. Other characteristics of a star, including diameter and temperature, change over its life, while the star's environment affects its rotation and movement. A plot of the temperature of many stars against their luminosities, known as a Hertzsprung–Russell diagram (H–R diagram), allows the age and evolutionary state of a star to be determined.

Stars (Simply Red album)

Stars is the fourth album by British-based pop/soul/jazz band Simply Red, released in September 1991. Five singles were released from the album, including the UK top ten hits "Stars" and "For Your Babies". The album was a worldwide success, particularly in the band's home country where it has been certified twelve times platinum and was the best-selling album of the year in the UK for both 1991 and 1992, the first album to be the best-seller in two consecutive years since Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Water in 1970–71. As of February 2014 it is the 14th best-selling album of all time in the UK.

Stars was also the last album to feature member Tim Kellett, who started his own band Olive after touring. It is the only Simply Red album to feature Fritz McIntyre singing lead vocals, on the tracks "Something Got Me Started" and "Wonderland".

It was on the shortlist of nominees for the 1992 Mercury Prize. In 2000 Q placed Stars at number 80 in its list of "The 100 Greatest British Albums Ever".

Stars (M. C. Escher)

Stars is a wood engraving print created by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher in 1948, depicting two chameleons in a polyhedral cage floating through space.

Although the compound of three octahedra used for the central cage in Stars had been studied before in mathematics, it was most likely invented independently for this image by Escher without reference to those studies. Escher used similar compound polyhedral forms in several other works, including Crystal (1947), Study for Stars (1948), Double Planetoid (1949), and Waterfall (1961).

The design for Stars was likely influenced by Escher's own interest in both geometry and astronomy, by a long history of using geometric forms to model the heavens, and by a drawing style used by Leonardo da Vinci. Commentators have interpreted the cage's compound shape as a reference to double and triple stars in astronomy, or to twinned crystals in crystallography. The image contrasts the celestial order of its polyhedral shapes with the more chaotic forms of biology.

Archery butt

A butt is an archery shooting field, with mounds of earth used for the targets. The name originally referred to the targets themselves, but over time came to mean the platforms that held the targets as well. For instance Othello, V,ii,267 mentions "Here is my journey's end, here is my butt". In medieval times, it was compulsory for all yeomen in England to learn archery; see for example An Act concerning shooting in Long Bows, passed in the 3rd year of Henry VIII.

Several English towns have districts called "The Butts", but they may not always take their names from archery. The Middle English word "butt" referred to an abutting strip of land, and is often associated with medieval field systems. An example is Newington Butts in south London where contrary to popular belief, the 1955 Survey of London published by London County Council could find no historical reference to archery butts. It concluded that the name probably derived from the triangle of land between the roads, as the word "butts" is used elsewhere in Surrey to refer to odd corners or ends of land.

Japanese pagoda

Pagodas in Japan are called tō (塔, lit. pagoda), sometimes buttō (仏塔, lit. Buddhist pagoda) or tōba (塔婆, lit. pagoda) and historically derive from the Chinese pagoda, itself an interpretation of the Indian stupa. Like the stupa, pagodas were originally used as reliquaries but in many cases they ended up losing this function. Pagodas are quintessentially Buddhist and an important component of Japanese Buddhist temple compounds but, because until the Kami and Buddhas Separation Act of 1868 a Shinto shrine was normally also a Buddhist temple and vice versa, they are not rare at shrines either. The famous Itsukushima Shrine, for example, has one.

After the Meiji Restoration the word tō, once used exclusively in a religious context, came to mean also "tower" in the western sense, as for example in Eiffel tower (エッフェル塔, Efferu-tō).

Of the Japanese pagoda's many forms, some are built in wood and are collectively known as mokutō (木塔, lit. wood pagoda), but most are carved out of stone (sekitō (石塔, lit. stone pagoda). Wood pagodas are large buildings with either two stories (like the tahōtō (多宝塔, lit. Tahō pagoda), see photo below) or an odd number of stories. Extant wood pagodas with more than two storeys have almost always either three storeys (and are therefore called sanjū-no-tō (三重塔, lit. three-storeyed pagoda)) or five (and are called gojū-no-tō (五重塔, lit. five-storeyed pagoda). Stone pagodas are nearly always small, usually well below 3 metres, and as a rule offer no usable space. If they have more than one storey, pagodas are called tasōtō (多層塔, lit. multi-storied pagoda) or tajūtō (多重塔, lit. multi-storied pagoda).