How Slang

Endowment is called the act and the result of endowing: granting, contributing, equipping or assigning something. Endowment is also that with which the action of endowing is specified.

For example: “The local government announced that it will increase the amount of pensions”, “The firefighters arrived at the scene of the accident immediately”, “The winner of the tournament will receive an economic award of 100,000 pesos”.

The idea of ​​endowment can be used to name the group of individuals who are assigned to the service of some type of unit (police, health, fire, etc.). In this context, the crew concept is often associated with the notion of crew. According to Abbreviationfinder, IE stands for Income Endowment.

An economic endowment, on the other hand, is an amount of money that is contributed for a certain purpose. This may be a prize or a reward given to the winner of a contest or tournament. The writer who wins the Cervantes Prize, to cite one case, receives an economic endowment of 125,000 euros.

A government can allocate economic endowments to various undertakings or areas. The authorities, through this type of decision, intend to favor the development of a project or assist organizations or individuals that need support. A city council, in this framework, can increase the endowment of the scholarships that it grants to university students.

The endowment can be of goods or objects: a supply of books that is delivered to a library, a supply of medical supplies for a first aid room, a supply of balls and sports clothing for a club, etc. This is formally called a financial endowment, and is usually conditional on the property or money being invested and the main fund remaining intact for a certain period or else forever.

The financial endowment to colleges and universities can represent large sums of money for a country, as is the case in the United States, where the annual amount in universities such as Harvard amounts to more than one billion dollars. Endowment is usually focused on well-defined areas, such as fellowships or endowed chairs (also called endowed chairs, and are permanent positions that are paid for with income from a specific fund).

The concept of genetic endowment is defined as the set of instructions that we inherit from our parents and that determine our biological potential. In technical terms, it is the number of genes and their valence, which modifies the value of the genetic material. If we take corn as an example, its triploid tissue called endosperm can have a number of y+ genes ranging from one to three, and this directly affects its yellowish color; the amount of carotene is proportional to that of y+ genes.

If we focus on our species, that each individual can develop this potential to one hundred percent depends largely on certain environmental factors, such as our diet, the study or work environment, the quality of the air, the microorganisms present around us, and so on. Doctors often say that “our health depends on our zip code, rather than our genetic endowment”, referring precisely to the importance of the characteristics of the place in which we live.

This statement makes special sense when allergy-related diseases come into the equation, since they combine a genetic component with an environmental one: we inherit the predisposition to certain allergies from our parents, but our environment considerably conditions the development of an allergy. Allergic diseases can be triggered by food, certain plants in our environment, or certain substances in the air we breathe, among other factors.