Harry
What does "making baptismal records unreliable indicators of age." mean? It’s not the fountain of youth, but a lot of very old people have suddenly become much younger thanks to anthropological detective work. In the mountain village of Vilcabamba, Ecuador, reports have stated that many inhabitants live to extraordinary ages, with nine centenarians in a population of 819, some as old as 140, according to a 1971 census. A study presented at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda now indicates that no one in Vilcabamba is older than 96. Carried out by Dr. Sylvia H. Foreman and Dr. Richard B. Mazess, the study was sparked by an American researcher’ discovery that a man reputed to be 122 in 1971 had become 134 by 1974. The study attributed increased longevity chiefly to the repeated use of identical names by a small population, making baptismal records unreliable indicators of age. What does "making baptismal records unreliable indicators of age." mean? please.. I don't know what it is talking about.
Jul 26, 2014 5:08 PM
Answers · 4
Terry, you are continuing this trick of just copying a passage here and asking participants here to provide answers without attempting to write your own explanations at all. Anyone checking your records of posts can see the pattern. You repeat it many times within a day. We are happy to help if you yourself try, but If you just copy passages and give instructions to others to do the work, everyone will see through the trick after a while. You could be too lazy to do your homework for school or.higher vocational studies. You could be a paid hand to help a publisher compile a commercial exercise book for learners. You could be a paid hand to generate traffic here. Whatever the motive, your pattern seem to indicate that you are on some kind of disingenuous scheme.
July 26, 2014
Baptismal records are the records which the church has kept of baptisms. Usually, these are helpful documents, because they record the names and dates of birth of everyone in the village. This means that usually a researcher can check how old someone is simply by looking at the records. However, in the case of Vilcabamba, these records aren't so useful, because many of the people in the village have identical names.
July 26, 2014
"making baptismal records unreliable indicators of age." means to cause baptisimal records to not tell you how old a person is. - The baptismal record, notes the name and date of the baptism, which usually happens when the person is a baby. - So if 'Lucy Murphy' is old now in 2014, and a baptismal record says 'Lucy Murphy' 1924, then we know she is probably 90 years old. The text says the population used the same names again and again, so it is difficult to know which baptismal record is for which person. -> So we can't use them to find a persons age.
July 26, 2014
Today, in developed countries, governments have formal systems for recording "vital records." Births are registered, birth certificates are issued, everything is computerized and centralized. In older times this is not the case. Researchers probably can't check government records for people born in Vilcabamba in 1840 because in 1840 births in Vilcabamba probably weren't recorded by the government. In the Christian tradition, babies are baptized, a ceremony that involves sprinkling them with water, by a clergyman at a church. At the same time, the baby is "christened"--given a name. This is an important ceremony and an important event in a Christian's life, so the clergyman keeps records of it at the church. If you are trying to find out when someone was born, and there are no government records to look at, you might look for "baptismal records." Families like to name children after beloved grandparents or other family members. It is common for identical names to occur within the same family. It is common even from different families, if the first and last names are both popular. My own name is "the same" as the name of a famous musician, a bassoonist. Government "vital records" systems are designed so that you can tell two people apart even if they have the same first and last names. Let us say that in Vilcabamba a "Pedro Garcia" was born in 1830, and a different "Pedro Garcia" was born in 1850. The researchers are saying that "baptismal records [are] unreliable indicators of age." The reason is that there may not be any way of telling from the baptismal records whether someone named Pedro Garcia who died in, say, 1950 was the Pedro Garcia born in 1830 or the Pedro Garcia born in 1850. They are saying that baptismal records may be accurate with regard to names and dates of birth, but not accurate in distinguishing between people with duplicate names.
July 26, 2014
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