Word count 5,215

Grade level: 3, 4, 5, e, p, i.

Through the use of humour, fun exercises, and a plethora of innovative and interesting selections from writers such as Dave Barry, Al Franken, J.R.R. Tolkien, as well as from the film 'The Matrix', this text hones students' critical thinking skills.

Stemmatology studies aspects of textual criticism that use genealogical methods to analyse a set of copies of a text whose autograph has been lost. This handbook is the first to cover the entire field, encompassing both theoretical and practical aspects of traditional as well as modern digital methods and their history. As an art (ars), stemmatology’s main goal is editing and thus presenting to the reader a historical text in the most satisfactory way. As a more abstract discipline (scientia), it is interested in the general principles of how texts change in the process of being copied. Thirty eight experts from all of the fields involved have joined forces to write this handbook, whose eight chapters cover material aspects of text traditions, the genesis and methods of traditional "Lachmannian" textual criticism and the objections raised against it, as well as modern digital methods used in the field. The two concluding chapters take a closer look at how this approach towards texts and textual criticism has developed in some disciplines of textual scholarship and compare methods used in other fields that deal with "descent with modification". The handbook thus serves as an introduction to this interdisciplinary field.

A young foster child gets inducted into an elite group of underage spies in this gripping first book in the young adult CHERUB series perfect for graduates of City Spies and Spy School. Following the death of his mother, eleven-year-old James Choke gets separated from his half-sister, Lauren, and sent to a children’s home. James may be a bit of a troublemaker, but he’s also brilliant and soon makes an impression on his roommate—who introduces James to CHERUB. CHERUB is an organization of highly trained, extremely talented spies aged ten to seventeen who tackle sensitive missions where adult agents would draw too much attention. When James passes the entrance exams, his next hurdle is the brutal one hundred days of basic training. From being forced to spend Christmas night outside in his underwear to a grueling three-day solo hike through a rain forest, James gets pushed to his limit and beyond…but he perseveres. James is soon sent overseas with one of his CHERUB mentors to monitor a dangerous group of people, but when deadly compounds enter the mix, will James’s first mission also be his last?