The origins of tobacco

Brian Cox explains how Christopher Columbus was involved in the beginnings of tobacco.

Self-study activity:
Watch the video and answer the questions.



1 Apart from beads, what did the natives give Columbus?
2 What destination did Columbus think he had reached when arriving in Cuba?
3 How did the natives feel after inhaling the dried leaves?
4 How long ago did the tobacco Columbus knew originate?
5 Who did the native Americans believe had created tobacco?

On the 11th of October, 1492, on a Caribbean island that no European had ever seen before, Christopher Columbus carried out one of history's most baffling and pointless transactions. He and his landing party had met some natives who were blissfully unaware that Columbus had renamed their island San Salvador, and had claimed it on behalf of the Spanish monarchy.
The natives gave Columbus beads, fruit and some dried leaves. In return, Columbus gave them a pair of red hats. The beads and the fruit needed no explanation. The leaves were just confusing. Columbus had them thrown overboard, and sailed on. What the natives did with the red hats is not recorded. And it wasn't just the leaves.
Geography was confusing too. Columbus thought he was here, or hereabouts, near China. Actually, he was here, on the other side of the world, amongst the islands of the Caribbean, near to his next discovery. We should forgive Columbus for being bad at navigation. After all, no-one else was any better.
Yet, when his ships arrived at what we now know as the island of Cuba, Columbus, still thinking he was near China, sent two members of the crew ashore with letters for the Chinese Khan.
When they returned, it was to report that the Great Khan was nowhere to be found, but they had met several more natives on the road with some more of those mysterious dried leaves, and these natives had rolled the leaves into tubes, lit them, sucked them, inhaling the smoky fumes. The two men had tried some and liked it. It filled them with a sense of energy, wellbeing.
Tobacco, the natives called it. At least, that's the word Columbus's men had heard. The name stuck. And so did the habit. What Columbus's men had seen and smoked was a kind of tobacco as domesticated as any dog. It only survives as a pure strain through cultivation, and archaeologists have traced its cultivation all the way back to the highlands of Peru in 2000BC. It's part of a plant family, the nightshades, that includes deadly poisons, spicy peppers, chillies, aubergines and potatoes.
From Peru, it had spread throughout the Northern and Southern Americas, that Columbus would have called the Caribs. In common with all other Native Americans, the Caribs believed that the gods had made tobacco as the very first step in the creation of the whole world.

Key:
1 fruit and some dried leaves
2 near China
3 with a sense of energy and wellbeing
4 2000BC
5 the gods

Are vegetarians healthier or should I eat meat?

Michael Mosley compares the difference between a meat lunch and a vegetarian lunch to find out whether or not it is actually healthier to be a vegetarian?

Self-study activity:
Watch the video and answer the questions below.



1 What percentage of Adventists are vegetarian and what meat-eaters?
2 What is the advantage of using Adventists for health-related studies?
3 How many subjects have participated in Dr Gary Fraser's studies?
4 What's the difference in dietary habits between the reporter and Dr Fraser?
5 What do cardiovascular risk factors involve?
6 How much beef do you need to eat to have massive risk to your health?
7 What's the difference in life expentancy between meat-eaters and vegetarians?

What makes Adventists of particular interest to scientists is that although about half are vegetarian, around half eat meat so the two groups can be compared. And unlike the wider population, Adventist meat-eaters tend not to be heavy smokers or drinkers, factors which can influence any comparisons between vegetarians and more red-blooded Americans.
Since the 1950s, scientists at Loma Linda University have been conducting numerous health studies on Adventists. The most recent have been trying to identify the health habits of the long-livers. I am here to meet Dr Gary Fraser, who's been leading this research for three decades covering over 150,000 Adventists. These huge epidemiological studies track people's diets and lifestyles and look for associations between what they eat, their overall health and what eventually kills them.
Hello.
Hi.
Hi, Mike Mosley, hello. Nice to meet you.
I'm joining the good doctor for lunch and as I'm on a high-meat diet, our choices couldn't be more different.
OK, so differences in what we've got here, then.
I've got pulled pork while Dr Fraser has a vegetarian salad with nuts.
I have to confess, I had bacon for breakfast as well.
OK.
I had four rashers of bacon.
Wow! All right. I hope you survive this experiment.
Thank you!
So kind of broadly, what have your studies revealed?
That when you look at cardiovascular risk factors in a broad sense - diabetes, hypertension, being overweight, having increased blood lipid levels - that the vegetarians are doing better than the non-vegetarians. And indeed that has translated in most of the studies to the vegetarians having a lower risk of heart attack and cardiovascular disease, so that whole area, I think, is fairly well established.
Dr Fraser found that men in the study who ate beef at least three times a week had double the risk of fatal heart disease compared to the vegetarians. And this apparently massive risk to health was in people eating under 60 grams a day, which is less than your average Brit and half what I'm currently eating.
So you have found that even eating what some people would regard as quite a modest level of meat makes a difference.
Yes.
I mean, how big a difference?
You know, I don't think we have all of the answers on that to be very precise about it and of course your plate of food there has got some things on there that go beyond the meat that I wouldn't necessarily recommend. So let me put it this way. That plate as compared to this plate, where I have replaced the meat with nuts and with whole-grain bread and so forth, our evidence says that you're probably looking at a difference of five years, four to five years in life expectancy.

Key:
1 half 
2 Adventist meat-eaters tend not to smoke or drink
3 150,000
4 the former is a meat-eater and the latter is a vegetarian
5 diabetes, hypertension, being overweight, having increased blood lipid levels
6 eat beef three times a week / 60 grams a day
7 four/five years

Talking point: Around the globe

This week's talking point is tourism. Before getting together with the members of your conversation group, go over the questions below so that ideas come to mind more easily the day you get together with your friends and you can work out vocabulary problems beforehand.

• Do you prefer travelling alone or with other people?
• What do you usually do while you’re waiting in an airport?
• What are the positives and negatives of going on long jurneys?
• How do you get about discovering a new town -a tourist bus, guidebooks/maps, tours?
• What negative aspects of tourism can you think of?
• Do these negative aspects stop you from wanting to see traditional tourist sights?
• Why do you think we all like visiting the same tourist attractions?
• Do you think it’s important to see all the famous sights and landmarks if you visit a new place?
• How do you think tourism will change in the future?
• Think of some interesting and beautiful things you’ve seen as a tourist. Use these adjectives to describe them:

impressive – remarkable – superb – astonishing – stunning – 

dramatic - exotic - unique - breaktaking - memorable

INTERACTION
Go over these off-the-beaten track destinations and with your partner decide on the pros and cons of visiting each of these places before choosing one to go together.

Uruapan
Uruapan is one of the oldest cities in Mexico. A beautiful river runs through it, and there are spectacular waterfalls on the outskirts of the city. However, the most amazing feature you can see here is the nearby volcano, Paricutin. It really is quite impressive. You can go trekking up the volcano (it's about 420 metres high). The volcano is extinct so it's perfectly safe. So for some history and some really remarkable scenery, Uruapan is a good choice.

Ha Long Bay
Ha Long Bay (Vietnam) is a place where everyone lives on a floating house! On top of that, all around the bay there are astonishing islands made of limestone. Some of them look like beautiful towers - they're really quite breathtaking. And there are lakes and caves on some of the islands, as well as monkeys. Ha Long Bay is dramatic and beautiful. But best of all, there aren't thousands of tourists – not yet anyway!

Kizhi Island
Kizhi Island is in the middle of Lake Onega in Karelia, Russia. In the 1950s, lots of, historic wooden buildings were moved from different parts of Karelia on to the island in order to save them. When you visit the island, you feel transported to another world. Although it's a UNESCO site, not too many people know about it so you won't meet loads of tourists.

A look at Fort Greene

In Fort Greene you can find from historic brownstones on leafy streets to the booming Brooklyn Cultural District.

Self-study activity:
Watch the video and say whether the statements below are true or false.



1 There are not many green areas in Fort Greene.
2 There is a lot of variety as far as housing is concerned.
3 Fort Greene is a quiet neighbourhood.
4 You can watch concerts and sporting events in the Barclays Stadium.
5 The subway and the railroad are the only means of transport in the district.
6 Wealthier and working class communities used to live all together.
7 Fort Greene had a bad reputation in the 60s and 70s.
8 Spike Lee's film company was called 40 Acres and a Donkey.
9 You can buy a mansion in Fort Greene for less than $8m.
10 Atlantic Yards will produce more than 7,000 units of housing in the next eight years.


It's one of the more culturally and ethnically diverse neighborhoods.
The trees, the lushness.
The feeling on the street and the sense of community.
There's such a rich history, whether it goes all the way back to the abolitionist movement to culture, and just in general, to the arts. I mean, it is a really phenomenal neighborhood. And that's what's so unique about Fort Greene.
Living in Fort Greene is kind of magical. It has some of the most beautiful housing stock.
It's one of the older neighborhoods in Brooklyn. You're going to find a lot of brownstones, a lot of short housing.
Fort Greene Park is like this little jewel.
There's peace, there's quiet. You can go in the house, drop your things, walk your dog.
You have the Brooklyn Academy of Music. You have the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts.
You have the Barclays Center which brings in concerts and sports. These are things that people generally thought would just be a Manhattan luxury, and now they're not just a Brooklyn reality, but they're a Brooklyn reality in Fort Greene.
The transportation alternatives vary in Fort Greene. You have 10 to 12 subway lines. You have Long Island Railroad on the peripheral. If you go deeper in, it's challenging.
Growing up in Manhattan the way I did, this is an incredible shock to me that I'm so far away from the subway. But what I am learning is with my son's love of buses, that the buses aren't so bad.
From its earliest developments, Fort Greene had two kinds of communities settling. You had elites building elaborate houses south of the park, and you had working class people settling in the northern part of the neighborhood. For African-Americans, their history in Fort Greene extended from the earliest foundings. The first colored school as it was called, which gradually became part of the public school system attracted black professionals, teachers, and administrators who formed the core of the first black middle class and professional class of Fort Greene.
There were hotels. There were theaters. This was the heart of Brooklyn.
And the whole area fell on bad times as much of the city did in the late 60s and 70s.
In the early 80s one group that began moving in, in somewhat larger numbers was a growing black creative class. One of the most critical artists in this movement was Spike Lee. In 1986 he set up his film company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. The reputation that Ford Greene earned as a place for black artists, attracted a second wave. Fort Greene was a place to be.
The spectrum of people in Fort Greene runs the gamut. Fort Greene is really a microcosm of the larger city. From a housing standpoint, we have the Fort Greene housing projects, and we have mansions that now can trade for upwards of $8 to $10 million dollars.
The real estate market here has become extremely competitive. There's just not enough real estate to go around.
Moving forward in Fort Greene, the Brooklyn cultural district starts with BAM at the center. And the large high-rise rental towers that are being built right now. To the south you have Atlantic Yards. Atlantic Yards is the largest development in all of Brooklyn, that over the next eight years will produce nearly 7,000 units of housing.
There hasn't been planning around schools, hospitals, parks. I mean, in any other part of the country, adding 45,000 people to a neighbourhood would be a new town, right?
One of the things that has always been unique about Fort Greene is the diversity of people and of classes. This is the challenge that I think Fort Greene is experiencing today. The future of Fort Greene depends on the ability of the neighbourhood to sustain working people in the neighborhood.
We all love it here. And you get that feeling whenever you talk to anyone who's been here for five years or fifty years, they're very committed and devoted to this neighborhood. 

Key:
1F 2T 3T 4F (Blarclays Center) 5F (buses also) 6F 7T 8F 9F 10F

Listening test: Fairy tales

Listen to part of a BBC radio programmen on fairy tales and complete the blanks in the sentences below with up to THREE words. 0 is an example.

0 Example:
Dr Jamie Tehrani is an anthropologist at Durham University.

1 The fairy tales Dr Jamie Tehrani has studied are between _______________ thousand years old.

2 Stories like Beauty and the Beast go back to the _______________ Age.

3 Fairy tales weren’t written down until the _______________ centuries.

4 Phylogenetic comparative methods enable anthropologists to reconstruct the past in the absence of _______________.

5 We don’t have physical written records of the earliest fairy tales because we’re talking about a time before the _______________.

6 _______________ have been passed down from generations.

7 Anthropologists compare folk tales from different cultures and make inferences about the stories that would have been told by _______________.




We know fairytales are very old, but it seems some are even older than we thought, much older. Dr Jamie Tehrani is an anthropologist at Durham University and he’s written this latest study on fairytales. So how old, Dr Tehrani?
Well good morning, thanks for having me on the show. I would like to just start by saying that I was a co-author on the study with a wonderful researcher in Portugal called Sara Graca Da Silva who did a fantastic job on this project, she actually got the funding for it. So, these fairytales that we’ve looked at we’ve been able to trace back really thousands of years, probably sort of four to six thousand years is the origin of many famous European folk tales, stories such as Beauty and the Beast.
What six thousand years?
Yes, going right back to the Bronze Age. We’ve been able to trace the transmission across generations of these stories, much further back than is generally recognised.
So obviously transmitted orally?
Yes, for the large part, yes. So, it’s only fairly recently that these stories have been written down.
And by recently you mean?
Well, it’s early modern times, 16th/17th centuries when you see the emergence of the literary fairytale. And there’s been some debate among scholars about whether perhaps these stories actually originated at that time, maybe they were literary inventions that then spread to these rural areas which folklorists have studied and that these oral folk tales are actually corruptions of literary stories.
Right, because I have to ask you, if they weren’t written down six thousand years ago obviously, how do you know?
Well, we used a set of methods, a toolkit that we actually borrowed from evolutionary biology called phylogenetic comparative methods and these methods enable you to reconstruct the past in the absence of actual direct physical evidence. So, if you think in biology you’ve got this very patchy fossil record, the same is true of culture. Archaeology is a very incomplete record of our cultural past but…
But at least you’ve got something physical there?
Yes, that’s right, and of course you do have something physical in the written record that we can look at some stories going back, you know, a certain period of time.
Yes, but not six thousand years?
Not six thousand years because we’re talking about a time before the origins of writing.
Exactly.
So the way in which we’ve done that is we’ve excavated information about the past, about our storytelling history using information that’s been preserved through the mechanism of inheritance, so these storytelling traditions have been passed down from generations, so in that sense they embody their own history, and by comparing the folk tales that we find in different cultures and knowing something about the historical relationships among those cultures, we can make inferences about the stories that would have been told by their common ancestors, and that’s the approach that we’ve used.
Well, it’s lovely to think that Beauty and the Beast might have been being told to children six thousand years ago, what a wonderful thought. Dr Jamie Tehrani, thanks a lot.
Thank you.

Key:
1 four to six
2 Bronze 
3 sixteen or seventeen
4 direct physical evidence
5 origins of writing
6 storytelling traditions
7 (their) common ancestors

Extensive listening: Why you think you're right -- even if you're wrong

Perspective is everything, especially when it comes to examining your beliefs. Are you a soldier, prone to defending your viewpoint at all costs, or a scout, spurred by curiosity?

Julia Galef examines the motivations behind these two mindsets and how they shape the way we interpret information, interweaved with a compelling history lesson from 19th-century France.

When your steadfast opinions are tested, Galef asks: "What do you most yearn for? Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can?"

You can read a full transcript of the talk here.

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