Talking point: Future gazing

This week's talking point is a follow-up of the topic we dealt with two weeks ago, The future, although today's topic has a slant towards technology, economy and e-business.

This post is very much based on a lesson from issue 125 of the extinct It's Magazine.

Before getting together with the members of your conversation group, go over the questions below, so that ideas flow more easily the day you get together with your friends and you can work out any vocabulary issues beforehand.

How has life changed in the last fifty years? Look back on what you know about life fifty years ago and describe how life was different in the following fields compared to today.

LEARNING LANGUAGES  – EDUCATION – MEDICINE AND HEALTH – SCIENCE – TECHNOLOLGY – EMPLOYMENT – TRAVEL AND TRANSPORT – FREE TIME – SPORT – FOOD AND COOKING – LIFESTYLE – THE MASS MEDIA – SHOPPING – JUSTICE AND SOCIAL ISSUES – THE ENVIRONMENT

Example:
Fifty years ago students used to go to school on Saturday (education)
Fifty years ago the national service was compulsory for men in Spain (society)
Fifty years ago English wasn’t taught at school. It was mainly French, and people didn’t speak the language, it was just grammar and translation.

What sensible progress do you expect humankind to have made in 50 years from now?  Use the categories below. Try to think of logical advances and be prepared to give reasons for your ideas.

LEARNING LANGUAGES  – EDUCATION – MEDICINE AND HEALTH – SCIENCE – TECHNOLOLGY – EMPLOYMENT – TRAVEL AND TRANSPORT – FREE TIME – SPORT – FOOD AND COOKING – LIFESTYLE – THE MASS MEDIA – SHOPPING – JUSTICE AND SOCIAL ISSUES – THE ENVIRONMENT

Example:
Human cloning will be part of the health care system, which will allow doctors and surgeons to make spare parts for patients in need.
Space missions to Mars will be run regularly with a view to making this planet habitable.
Home schooling will be usual, as computer assisted learning will make it possible for students not to go to school to keep in touch with teachers and classmates alike.

The following may be representative of some aspects of today’s life style. What do they all have in common? What do you know about them? How often do you use them? How have they changed life in 21st century?

• Have you ever used Amazon? 
• What do you think of the site?
• What do you like or not like about it? 
• Does it provide a good service?
• Amazon’s strategy of selling books at a discount has had a negative effect on publishers and bookshops, many of which have closed down. Do you think Amazon’s influence on book publishing has been positive or negative?
• When you use the Amazon site, the site gathers information about you and recommends things you might want to buy based on your preferences. Amazon doesn’t sell this information but it can share it with certain businesses. Do you think this is a good or bad thing?
• Amazon allows users to submit reviews of the products they buy. Reviewers must rate the product from one to five stars and can also leave comments. However, some authors have admitted to writing their own reviews. Can you trust reviews and comments that are posted at sites such as Amazon?

To gain further insight into the topic, you can watch the NBC video below about the way Amazon organizes its business. You can activate the Closed Captions to fully understand everything that is being said in the video clip.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Speakout Advanced: Time

There are very few episodes of our Speakout series left. As a matter of fact, this video podcast about time is the last one but two.

This week passers-by are asked the following questions:

In what ways do you feel different today than you did ten years ago?
What’s the best time of life do you think?
In what ways has ageing affected your life?



Now it's over to you. Go over the questions above and answer them about yourself. Try and use some of the expressions you heard in the video.

You can read the transcript here.

Cicadas -video activity

Why were there so few sightings of cicadas in New York City this year? This New York Times video gives us all the details about it.

Self-study activity:
Watch the video and answer the questions about it below. The activity is suitable for intermediate 1 and intermediate 2 students.



1 How often do cicadas appear?
2 What feature of the cityscape stops cicadas from getting into town?
3 What are the typical spots where cicadas are usually found?
4 And some unusual ones?
5 What is the main reason why cicadas have only been found in specific places this year?
6 What does '300' refer to?
7 What specific ability are cicadas lacking in?

For correction, you can read the transcript below.

Many people feel disappointed that in the seventeenth year cicadas didn’t appear in their neighbourhood this year. But the cicadas were out there. You just had to be in the right spots. Central Park in Manhattan are no good. Too many skyscrapers in the city block the way in from the suburbs for insects not well-known for its flying abilities. And while the Bronx had a few, Queens and Brooklyn seemingly had none. By far, the cicada hot spot for New York City this year was Staten Island.
Here they can easily be found in all the usual spots, in woodlands, parks and backyards. However, they can also be found in unusual locations, such as on the beach just a few feet from the ocean, and even in the ocean if they have chosen an unfortunate spot on which to land.
So why were the cicadas this year only found in patches, sometimes miles apart, rather than in a continual blanket across the landscape from North Carolina to Connecticut? One part of this puzzle is to understand how we’ve changed the landscape over the past several centuries. Once, the eastern United States was almost entirely forested and periodical cicadas were quite possibly found everywhere if there were appropriate types of trees. But after 300 years of agricultural and urban development, the forests nearly everywhere have been cut down at least once one time or another, and without enough trees eventually you lose the cicadas. Even where enough trees remained to support them, like Robinson Crusoe shipwreck on island, the cicadas often became marooned on forested fragments scattered across the larger landscape.
And because they are not the best of flyers, even when they trees grow back, it can take a long time for the cicadas to return. Able to fly no more than a few miles every seventeenth year, it will be centuries before the cicadas can spread back across the landscape that they once occupied. And even then, continued development always has the potential to remove them from the Ardmore of their habitat. In the end, all we can do is enjoy them where they are currently found and hope that enough trees and forests remain and grow back in the future so that one day the seventeen-year periodical cicadas will once again be heard everywhere. Maybe even in Central Park.

Extensive listening: Heathrow Airport documentary

Airport Live is a documentary series looking behind the scenes at Heathrow Airport. It was aired by the BBC in June this year.

The programme shows air traffic control in action and explains the logistics behind every flight.



You can read a transcript for the first twelve minutes here.

Improving your listening

A few months ago a post by MCargobe under the title Improving your listening drew my attention. In that post, she mainly went over another post from PhraseMix with the title How to improve your English listening comprehension.

The short PhraseMix article touches on the reasons why English is so difficult to understand, to go on to give some practical advice for students to improve their listening skills.

Please, do make a point of going over the PhraseMix article. It's very short and you'll find valuable advice.

Along these lines you can also find the video below really interesting. It is from Anglo-Link  and MCargobe included it in her above-mentioned post. The video mainly goes over the same ideas set out in the PhraseMix article, but much more thoroughly and with many more examples. It is quite easy to understand, and viewers get a lot of help to understand with lots of on-screen information. The YouTube captions are also really accurate.

The European Union explained

C.G.P. Grey explained to us in July the ins and outs of the European Union.

Self-study activity:
This is a five-minute video delivered at a develish speed for intermediate students, with some added vocabulary difficulties. Make a point of listening to it several times before you attempt the activity.

If you find the video beyond your listening skills, read the transcript below as you listen to it, and them give the activity a try.



What is said about the following?
1 Your rights if you are from a member country.
2 Can a Norwegian citizen live in any EU country?
3 What is the European Economic Area?
4 What is the position of Switzerland?
5  What is the Schengen Area?
6 What do you need to visit Britain and Ireland?
7 What is the Eurozone?
8 What is special about Andorra, San Marino, Monaco & Vatican City?
9 What are the Outermost Regions? And the Overseas Territories?

Where, is the European Union? Obviously here somewhere, but much like the the European continent itself, which has an unclear boundary, the European Union also has some fuzzy edges to it.
To start, the official members of the European Union are, in decreasing order of population:
Germany; France; The United Kingdom; Italy; Spain; Poland; Romania; The Kingdom of the Netherlands; Greece;Belgium; Portugal; The Czech Republic; Hungary; Sweden; Austria; Bulgaria; Denmark; Slovakia; Finland; Ireland; Croatia; Lithuania; Latvia; Slovenia; Estonia; Cyprus; Luxembourg; Malta

The edges of the EU will probably continue to expand further out as there are other countries in various stages of trying to become a member. How the European Union works is hideously complicated and a story for another time, but for this video you need know only three things:
1. Countries pay membership dues and
2. Vote on laws they all must follow and
3. Citizens of member countries are automatically European Union citizens as well
This last means that if you’re a citizen of any of these countries you are free to live, work and retire in any of the others. Which is nice especially if you think your country is too big or too small or too hot or too cold. The European Union gives you options.
By the way, did you notice how all three of these statements have asterisks attached to this unhelpful footnote? Well, get used to it: Europe loves asterisks that add exceptions to complicated agreements.
These three, for example, point us toward the first bit of border fuzziness with Norway, Iceland and little Liechtenstein. None of which are in the European Union but if you’re a EU citizen you can live in these countries and Norwegians, Icelanders, or Liechtensteiners can live in yours.
Why? In exchange for freedom of movement of people they have to pay membership fees to the European Union — even though they aren’t a part of it and thus don’t get a say in its laws that they still have to follow. This arrangement is the European Economic Area and it sounds like a terrible deal, were it not for that asterisk which grants EEA but not EU members a pass on some areas of law notably farming and fishing — something a country like say Iceland might care quite a lot about running themselves.
Between the European Union and the European Economic Area the continent looks mostly covered, with the notable exception of Switzerland who remains neutral and fiercely independent, except for her participation in the Schengen Area.
If you’re from a country that keeps her borders extremely clean and / or well-patrolled, the Schengen Area is a bit mind-blowing because it’s an agreement between countries to take a ‘meh’ approach to borders.
In the Schengen Area international boundaries look like this: no border officers or passport checks of any kind. You can walk from Lisbon to Tallinn without identification or need to answer the question: “business or pleasure?”.
For Switzerland being part of Schengen but not part of the European Union means that non-Swiss can check in any time they like, but they can never stay.
This koombaya approach to borders isn’t appreciated by everyone in the EU: most loudly, the United Kingdom and Ireland who argue that islands are different. Thus to get onto these fair isles, you’ll need a passport and a good reason. Britannia’s reluctance to get fully involved with the EU brings us to the next topic: money.
The European Union has its own fancy currency, the Euro used by the majority, but not all of the European Union members. This economic union is called the Eurozone and to join a country must first reach certain financial goals — and lying about reaching those goals is certainly not something anyone would do. Most of the non-Eurozone members when they meet the goals, will ditch their local currency in favor of the Euro but three of them Denmark, Sweden and, of course, the United Kingdom, have asterisks attracted to the Euro sections of the treaty giving them a permanent opt-out. And weirdly, four tiny European countries Andorra, San Marino, Monaco & Vatican City have an asterisk giving them the exact reverse: the right to print and use Euros as their money, despite not being in the European Union at all.
So that’s the big picture: there’s the EU, which makes all the rules, the Eurozone inside it with a common currency, the European Economic Area outside of it where people can move freely and the selective Schengen, for countries who think borders just aren’t worth the hassle. As you can see, there’s some strange overlaps with these borders, but we’re not done talking about complications by a long shot one again, because empire. So Portugal and Spain have islands from their colonial days that they’ve never parted with: these are the Madeira and Canary Islands off the coast of Africa and the Azores well into the Atlantic. Because these islands are Spanish and Portuguese they’re part of the European Union as well.
Adding a few islands to the EU’s borders isn’t a big deal until you consider France: the queen of not-letting go. She still holds onto a bunch of islands in the Caribbean, Reunion off the coast of Madagascar and French Guiana in South America. As far as France is concerned, these are France too, which single handedly extends the edge-to-edge distance of the European Union across a third of Earth’s circumference. Collectively, these bits of France, Spain and Portugal are called the Outermost Regions — and they’re the result of the simple answer to empire: just keep it.
On the other hand, there’s the United Kingdom, the master of maintaining complicated relationships with her quasi-former lands — and she’s by no means alone in this on such an empire-happy continent.
The Netherlands and Denmark and France, again, all have what the European Union calls Overseas Territories: they’re not part of the European Union, instead they’re a bottomless well of asterisks due to their complicated relationships with both with the European Union and their associated countries which makes it hard to say anything meaningful about them as a group but in general European Union law doesn’t apply to these places, though in general the people who live there are European Union citizens because in general they have the citizenship of their associated country, so in general they can live anywhere in the EU they want but in general other European Union citizens can’t freely move to these territories. Which makes these places a weird, semipermeable membrane of the European Union proper and the final part we’re going to talk about in detail even though there are still many, more one-off asterisks you might stumble upon, such as: the Isle of Man or those Spanish Cities in North Africa or Gibraltar, who pretends to be part of Southwest England sometimes, or that region in Greece where it’s totally legal to ban women, or Saba friends who are part of the Netherlands and so should be part of the EU, but aren’t, or the Faeroe Islands upon which while citizens of Denmark live they lose their EU citizenship, and on and on it goes. These asterisks almost never end, but this video must.

Catalan restaurant offers unpaid work for the unemployed

This is a short BBC clip about an entrepreneurial idea to cope with the recession in Spain.

Self-study activity:
Watch the video clip by clicking on the BBC link above or on the picture below and answer the questions about it.

1 What do most of the restaurant workers get in return for their work?
2 How long has Jose been unemployed?
3 How many paid staff members work at the restaurant?
4 How much do customers pay for a meal?
5 What does '60,000€' refer to?
6 What is the unemployment rate in Spain, according to the video?

You can check your answers by reading the transcript below.

Lunch time in Tarrasa, a Catalan town, and this is a restaurant with a difference. Nearly everyone working here is unemployed. They don’t get paid for the work they do here, but in return they eat for free.
28-year-old Lanuta has been out of work for 18 months. 23-year-old Jose for two and a half years, and then there’s Jaume.
It’s a project, to help us…
How long have you been looking for a stable job?
Six years.
Estafania is also one of the 6.2 million unemployed people in Spain, and 58-year-old Dolores has been looking for work for three years.
It’s made me feel useful working here, she tells us. Before I felt isolated at home and I got depressed, she says.
Including the two cooks, the restaurant has four paid members of staff. A three-course meal plus wine and water costs just 6.50€. Some of the customers like Alfonso and his wife pay, others like Andres are also unemployed. He sometimes works here for free, so he can eat here for free too.
Now despite the fact that some of the customers here work to cover the cost of their food, the overall cost of running this restaurant in this its first year is expected to be 60,000€ more than the income generated by paying customers, so it does raise the question of how even a novel social project like this one can be sustainable in the longer term.
The managers are asking local companies for sponsorship, and might even increase the price for paying customers. The project, they say, gives people back their self-esteem.
They are much more happy. They are even getting achieving new friends, so they are well recuperating them for the common society, for Spain, because we are giving them some additional tools to cope with this huge crisis.
It’s a crisis which is now into its sixth year. Projects like this can only help cut the massive rate of unemployment in Spain which stands at a record 27%.
Tom Burridge, BBC News in the town of Tarrasa, in Cataluña.