From March 15, 2010 on, the Canadian citizenship test is based on a new study guide: ‘Discover Canada”. Compared with the old study guide ‘A Look at Canada’, it is a more comprehensive document. If you have studied the old book but now you are required to take the new test, here is a list of the new content that you should pay attention to:

1. More details about the Canadian history. It has a section of more than 10 pages about the history of Canada and 4 pages about Modern Canada. It describes the Aboriginal peoples, British and French as the founding people of Canada. Canada’s role in two world wars is detailed. Many histroic people are introduced so you may have more names to remember before sitting for the test. It is interesting to see that the study guide admits the historic wrongdoings of the Canadian government, such as the “Head Tax”, wartime wrongs inflicted on Japanese and education of Aboriginal children.

2. There are wording changes about the Canadian government, though the concepts are mainly the same. In the old book, it states Canada’s government has a system of parliamentary government. It is now in the new book as “a federal state, a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy.”

3. The concept of Sovereign is emphasized in the new book. A bill must be finally approved by ‘royal assent’.

4. The section about federal election is mostly unchanged except for the election cycle. In 2007, new laws passed to force a general election at least every 4 years and has a fixed date. The new book reflects this lastest change in legislation.

5. Justice System is the new content not seen in the old book, so you must know about it.

6. Canada Regions are now in more details. The new book covers each province/territory separately. Therefore, you must know at least the region you are in.

7. Canadian symbols now include “Coat of Arm and Motto”, honours to Canadians, sports and holidays.

If you are preparing for the Canadian citizenship test after March 15, 2010, you can use a good online practice web site which provides practice questions of the New Canadian Citizenship Test.

Related Links:
US Citizenship Application for people to apply for their American citizenship and prepare for the US Citizenship Test.

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Last year, the USCIS( United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) had changed the US citizenship test format. This citizenship test is part of the naturalization process for immigrants to get their American citizenship.

The test usually contains two parts. The first part is a test of English skill, which includes reading, writing and speaking English. The second part is the civics test, which a USCIS officer asks the applicant 10 questions about the United States. The applicant must answer at least six questions in order to pass this interview exam.

In the new citizenship test, there are 100 possible questions which the USCIS officer may ask. So it is very important that the citizenship applicants practise enough before going for the interview. One of the best citizenship web sites provides a free online citizenship test practcing system. This practice system randomly generates 5-50 questions. It provides very good practice for people to get familiar with the test format and background knowledge.

This web site also provide excellent products such as DIY US citizenship application kit and American immigration application kits for family class. If you understand English, you probably need only these application kits to apply for your citizenship, or help your family members to reside in the United States.

Other Links:
US Citizenship Application and Test Questions
Canadian Citizenship Test Questions
UK Citizenship Online Test
Free Online Canada Citizenship Test
New Citizenship Test Questions of Australia
Life in the UK: British Citizenship Test
US American Citizenship Practice Test
US Citizenship Application Package

Recently, some Canadian friends asked me how to apply for their citizenship in Canada. Here are the advices I gave them:

For one to apply for the Canadian citizenship, there are some basic requirements:

1) be a landed immigrant(permanent resident ) in Canada;
2) be 18 years of age or older at the time of application submission;
3) have resided in Canada for a total of three years out of the four years on the day before you apply. You may count half of the time for the time you resided in Canada before you became a PR. The time you resided in Canada after you became a permanent resident counts as full time;
4) know enough English or French for a simple conversation; and
5) know enough about Canada’s geography, politics, history, and the rights and responsibilities of a citizenship to pass a test.

If all the above requirements are meet, one can pay the citizenship fees which are $200.00 in total. The fees can be paid at most financial institutions such as a bank. After that, send the application to the CIC case processing center. Things to send in:

a) Receipt of payment of citizienship fees;
b) Completed application form;
c) Two photos taken within the last 12 months.
d) Supporting document such as Permanent Resident Card(Maple Card) and two personal IDs.

Canada Citizenship Test on iphone ipod
Free Online Canada Citizenship Test
Canadian Citizenship Application and Test
New Citizenship Test Questions of Australia
Life in the UK: British Citizenship Test
Online American Citizenship Test
US Citizenship Application

After a few weeks’ hard work, I finally came up with an Online Practice for the Canadian Citizenship Test. Many of my friends are Canadians and they find my online practice system very interesting and helpful.

This online system has a database of more than 120 practice questions. What makes it different from other systems is that it contains province-specific questions. For example, for citizenship applicants in Ontario, the questions will be like “What is the Premier of Ontario?”. This system can also keep track of practicing time and give a score based on the number of correct answers. After the test taker finishes a practice test, he/she can re-do the test for more practice.

So far, more than 400 daily visitors use this online practice system. I am very happy with it and will continue to work on it for improvement. More on Canadian Citizenship Practice Exam .

News came today from the government that 533,000 jobs were cut in November. Forbe’s statistics also indicated that 31,387 job losses in December so far were from top 500 public companies. The unemployment rate jumped to almost 7%. In total, more than 10 million people were unemployed as of November, while the number of employed was roughly 144 million.

Employers are slashing jobs to cut costs and cope with the contracting economy. Many of my friends are worrying about the security of their jobs, while frustrated by tanking stock prices and home values. This in turns results in more shrinking in consumer spending. And the cycle of even more job losses.

The most important thing for now is to get enough cash to at hand to survive this winter. Investment should be really conservative for most. Refer to Safest Investment .

Last night, the US government rushed to rescue Citigroup and agreed to put billions of dollars into the stricken bank and to plow a whopping $20 billion into it.

Again, Citigroup is “too big” to fail, just like that AIG is “too big” to fail, BoA and lots of other banks, too. And despite the posturing in Congress right now, we can bet the “Big 3″ automakers are too big to fail, too. They are going to get a voucher of $30, $60 or even $100 billion soon. In total, about a trillion tax dollars will probably end up in smoke.

However, the government does not even give a damn about our personal investment losses. The meltdown of the markets wiped off our hard-earned money. Who will bail us out? Mr. Obama, do you listen to us?

During the financial crisis, what is the safest investment today?

The answer is probably the Treasury bill(T-bill). This investment instrument is backed by the government. As long as the government remains alive, your T-bill will be paid back with a interest. If the country goes bankrupted, like Iceland, the T-bill will probably be worthless. Recently, a T-bill pays you 1.x% of interest.

The next safest product maybe is the savings bond at 2.x%. A corporate bond usually pays out about 3.x%. A corporate bond has more risk than a Treasury bill. A friend told me that there is an instrument that can get him a 14% annual interest. Though I don’t know what the actual investment is, I am sure this kind of return should be associated with extraordinarily high risk based on the risk/return ratio. So I advice him avoid such kind of investment because we are in a time that cash is the King, or perserve your capital and wait for the right time to invest.

So let’s wait and see…

People visit a web site mostly for useful information, especially frequently updated content. The home page of your site is the most crucial one which you should pay more attention to. When visitors come to your web site, you have about 10-20 seconds to convince them that your site is what they are looking for. So the content of your front page is really important.

To run a successful web site, content is the king. Your content should be accurate, interesting, and reader-friendly. You can either write your own content or purchase from some one else. If you are writing your own articles, make sure know the content well. If you are buying from others, you should carefully pick the authors with a good reputation in the domain. Usually, images/photo content are easy to find, many free resources online. Unless you have a very high budget, do not buy a lot written content. Only a few good articles can help building your web site’s credit in the area.

We know that the U.S. stock markets won’t come back any time sooner. So where can we put our money to work?

I think China is a candidate that we can put safe money into. China’s growth rate will drop to around 8-9% in 2009, but it is still much higher than the US, which is going towards a recession. So you do not have to be a mathematician to figure out where the big money flows to in the coming few years.

Furthermore, it is seldom known to us that the Chinese banking system is much safer now - with less than 0.1% of the asset exposure to the subprime mess. Chinese banking system is dominated by four big state-owned banks, which can hardly get bankrupted. With more than $1.4 trillion in cash sitting in the banks, there’s no liquidity crisis in China.

Therefore we are sure that the smart money is flooding into China at light speed, with investors cherry-picking world-class Chinese companies for pennies on the dollar.

Based on the above reasoning, I suggest we buy into some Chinese index funds, such as ETFs for a long time gain. To name a few, FXI and PGJ.

Last week, I joined a seminar of internet marketing. It was a good one and I learnt quite a few techniques to promote an online business. Sum up as below:

1) Use Distinguished Product Description

When we are putting up our product pages, we can use key attributes such as product ID, item number. This will make your products or pages unique in search engines like google and help increasing the visibility of relevant keyword search.

2) Use Right Descriptions

The description is where you want to provide accurate details of your products. Be sure to avoid ambiguity, so that your customers won’t come back for a refund simply because they misunderstood your products’ features.

3) Apply Creative Titles

This is the common rule that should be applied to titles of blogs, articles, forum post subjects, etc. You should try your best to get visitors’ attention with the title before they get bored and leave your site.

4) Keep Updating Your Feeds

It is a good practice to update your feeds once a day. This should give you an exceptional boost in exposure to potential buyers.

A friend of mine is putting a property for sale. Last year, he found his house was worth $820,000. This year, the house was reassessed for only $740,000. He checked the listings around the area the price range from $600,000 to $860,000. So he decided to sell his house for $700,000. My friend wants to cash out the house, but no offer for his listing for 2 months.

He is asking me for advices. As I told him for a few times this year, I do believe the housing market to reverse more than it should. Because it went up much higher than it should have and the correction in price is inevitable. Whatever the house was worth last year is irrelevant now. His property is offered in today’s market conditions. I let him look over what are for sale and what were actually sold. This is all that matters. Go checking out the listings in the same area. Compare them to his house, and after that, relist it below the averaged offering price( for he wants to get out of the property). I am sure in this way it will be sold faster than before.

Ok, Barack Obama won the election, stock markets cheered and rebounded. Then what?

Though Mr. Obama won the election, doesn’t mean this credit crisis ends, that housing prices will rebound quickly, or that the stock market will hit new heights soon.

On the contrary, it is going to get worse and there’s not much that Obama can do to reverse it. Let me explain a bit more.

The financial crisis and the meltdown of housing market has sent investors rushing out of U.S. stocks. The result has smashed the U.S. financial system, and led to the death of many big financial institutions. The banking crisis has now spreaded over to the global markets. So do you believe Obama can help anything here?

Almost every internet user is a member of some sort of an online community.
An online community is usually a public place where people’s internet identity to “gather” virtually and “interact” with each other. Some examples of an online community are bulletin boards, newsletters and photo sharing web sites.

So why are online communities important for marketing purposes? Because it draws many people together so that people can discover new information, share ideas and have fun in it. Though having an online name, people are actually anonymous in a community. This encourage people to speak out something they would not say to someone they know. “Nobody knows who you are and anyone can talk to you” makes it attractive to all.

Why should we make use of online communites to do our marketing? A good approach to start is to find the targeted audience of your web site and locate their community. Take part in the community and find out what people are discussing. This gives you knowledge of the community and allows you to understand what they need. You can build your credibility by interaction with people in the community such as sending posts on a message board or chatting with others. If you have a good reputation in a community, you will find it easy for subsequent marketing events.

References:
Effective Content Marketing
Online Marketing Techniques

After a multi-year process, the USCIS has finally finished a redesign of the citizenship test, or the naturalization test. This test is usually taken by people who apply for the U.S. Citizenship. The redesigned test put more focus on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and the fundamental understandings of American democracy. It encourages citizenship applicants to identify the basic values shared by Americans.

I took a look at those new sample questions of the test. I don’t think there is much change in the questions and the probably won’t make much difference for applicants.

Starting from Oct 1, 2008, the new test will be used. So applicants must get to know whether they are going to take the new or old test.

One common misunderstanding of banner ads are to reach the greatest number of audience. In fact, the right focus should be reaching as many as possible targeted people, who are related to your web site’s content. So having your targeted banner ads is the first rule.

Since most banner ads are cost you money, you should make sure your budget is well controled. This is especially important for small business site owners. When buying banner ads, try to confirm the placement of your ad. You should make sure the content is related to your ad. The more deep down to the site, the more effective your ad is. And you can save money while reaching your targeted people.

Of course, if you have a large budget of online marketing, banner ads should be placed on the pages of the most traffic. Be careful to use click through ads because this could eat up your budget without getting the result you want.

Marketing strategies are almost the same for small and big business. You need to consider these aspects:

1) your product name,
2) your target readers
3) convert visitors to buyers
4) build repeat customers

A successful internet marketing should be good for managing all above elements.

On-line marketing contains tasks such as communicating with your readers, promoting your topics online, and having a website with current and helpful content.

An advantage of on-line marketing is that you do not have to spend a large amount of money to put together a marketing campaign. So, to be successful in online business, you must master the techniques of marketing online.

What is online marketing? How to have successful online marketing?

If you own a business, and want to perform marketing online, you need to be a creative thinker and think outside of the box.

The Internet is the ideal place for small businesses(such as home business) to roll out their marketing campaign. Using the web for advertising is very effective because it is highly targeted towards the people you want to reach and the cost is relatively low.

The goal of online marketing is that you need to turn your website into a place that your readers or customers trust. You also need to get more people to visit your site. Therefore, online marketing should be carefully planned for these items:

1) Build an attractive web site
2) Broaden your reader base by e-mail marketing
3) Choose a good online partner
4) Customize your site to have readers visit frequently
5) Setup your site as an authority of your domain

Starting from mid September, panic selling has set in again …

Many of my friends are rushing to sell stocks or mutual funds. We can see scared investors are cashing out left and right. Hedge funds hit with redemptions started their massive selling. Margin calls are hitting large and small investors forcing more selling. Year-end tax selling has started to lock-in tax loses.

When every one around you is losing their head … Is this the best time to step in and buy stocks? I don’t think so.

I’m not a raging bear—that would only make me a raving lunatic! But all is NOT well on Wall Street and with our global economy. And with the stock market tanking—and taking your dreams with them … I don’t see the buying opportunity in stocks … not yet!

So what should we do?

It’s not too late to join the party and play the downside. Challenging times call for bold strategies, and if you can focus on short-term trading opportunities you can actually profit from the pain.

In a down trend, we can profit in a lot of ways. We can buy put options, buy the DXD ultra short fund, or even short the DIA ETF. Bullion is also a good choice. Wait for pull back to $700 and get in some position.

I watched some business television programs recently to get more ideas of what people think.

When I heard people from the asset management industry(namely mutual funds) say that “The bottom is close and it’s time to buy stocks,” I get a little sick.

I’m sickened because I know that there are lots of investors out there who listened to these “experts” for the past months. These investors are looking at 30%-80% losses, and need 100-200% gains or more to break even. Very sadly, many of those may not have that much time left in their life.

Riding in a down market fully invested is an totally insane way to invest when it costs so little to be defensive, when so many individuals have lost carryforwards that make these moves tax-free.

I have been telling people I know that they should hold on buying any stocks or mutual funds now, esp. for those have little knowledge on the markets. Put your cash in a few banks for CDs and similar. When the markets find their bottom, they can then get back in buying.

Every year, many people obtain their citizenship of United States through the naturalization application process. If you want to go through the process of Naturalization for US citizen, a good place to start naturalization is the US Citizenship Application web site.

Before you get approved for the US citizenship, you need to have an interview with the citizenship officer. To prepare for the USA citizenship test or interview is not a simple task, you need to get familiar with American Citizenship Test questions, mostly about US government, history, geography and culture. I recommend you use some free citizenship practice test software.