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What makes us who we are? This is about identity. Usually people forma n idea of a person based on what they do, in order to put them in a category that it easy to understand. Other people like to define themselves and the others in other ways, for example their background, values, hobbies, character, beliefs and sometimes of course their work. But it seems that our identity is about the experiences that shape us. Someone could choose family over work by doing something not too risky and that allows him to spend time with the family. Others’d rather be free and travel, picking up bits and pieces of work as and when they can. So while there are many ingredients that go into making us what we are, it seems that what defines people first and foremost is experience. How did you get into that? There are 6 different dialogues in which people get to know each other. Everyone has its own whay to do so, using different topics in order to start a conversation. First, we hear a person talking to a new girl in college about how is the first day going. Number two is about how one of the two people speaking got the job. Third one is about two people that get to know each other through a common friend from secondary school. Number four we hear two girls talking about a jacket and where one of them bought it. Number five is about something more general: New Year’s Resolution and wether or not people manage to keep them. In number a girl asks a guy where is he from and how that place is. Tell me a bit about yourself Katy presents herself to a carreer advisor who asks her about herself. She explains her origins and studies and then she says that she tried to get into journalism. In the meanwhile she got some work experience but now she is looking for a more permanent job. She wouldn’t mind doing a basic job to start, then she would like to do something related to radio, music, TV or print. Her degree in history could be helpful because she has a different background from all the other journalists. She had also been wrting a blog while in university. She considers herself a good writer and good at spotting stories. She is focused and conscientious. She is aware that she is only 23 and she might not have some skills that old journalists have and of course she has done just few experiences so far. A letter of application This is a man’s letter of application for a Trainee Marketing Assistant. He explains why the job attractes him and he explains his skills and his currently activity. Then he summarize his CV, he writes about his education and tells about his two proudest achivements as a proof of being someone who believes in getting results. He explains which characteristics requie in the advertisement he owes and he offers his disponibilità for interview. It is a good example of how an application letter should be written or at least the main points it has to contain. Creating a buzz This audio is an interview to Sarah Palmer, from the e-marketing consultancy firm “Excite”, who trie sto explain how a company can create a buzz, which means a positive interest in a product or service that boosts sales. She sais that costumers have to be passionate about what a company does, so that they want to share that with other people. People have to be involved and companies have to create a loyal following and try to catch as much passing costumers as possible. You have to make people interact and teach us something interest about what you are doing and about your products, with no exception. This should be done for each product: priority must be given to educating or involving costumers in a way that is fun and only then you’ll see a boost in sales.
Living off the sea The article talks about the Moken people, who live among the Island dotted across the Andaman Sea. In recent years, with the industrialization of fishing, the number of people living off the sea has declined and the Moken came to public attention in 2004, when many of them escape the tsunami that devastated the coastal settlements around the Indian Ocean because they had felt it coming long before others. The lite rally live off the sea and they are able to dive under water for up to six minutes at a time. This fascinated scientists and Anna Gislen found out particualr changes in childern once they enter the water. The Moken have been pressed by the authorities to settle on the land and if 10 years ago they were able to lead a traditional seafaring life, in another 10 years their skills and way of life will probably have disappeared. Smokejumpers Here i san interview to a woman who is a smokejumper. Smokejumpers are firefighters with parachute who are dropped into inaccesible areass to takle forest fires. This woman, Katy sais that they have to weight around 70-80 kilos in order to land in the right point and not being carried from a strong wind or desending too fast. Their main thought is not personal safety. First they see how bad the fire is and they relaye the information back to the base, then once they get near the fire they get dropped in with tools. Usually the best way to break a fire is finding a natural firebreak, which means finding roads orsomething else that the fire ha sto cross before it continues on its path. Katy sais that in her job being a woman is nota n issue, because everyone ha sto be trained before and those who make it have a natural respect for each other. Daring, defiant and free The text is about a man trying to climb the north-west face of Half Dome, a sheer wall of granite in Yosemite Valley. Honnold, that’s his name, is attempting the route free-solo and without aids in less than an hour. Confidence is everything, he has to believe in his own ability, otherwise he would fall and die. In the end he reaches the summit, everyone was stunned and he became a climbing legend. Yosemite creates heroes, but all the climbers want is to do what they love. Jimmy Chin, who took a photograph of Honnold, is also an accomplished mountaineer and he works closely with other climbers, taking pictures as he climbs. Combining a natural gift for photographic composition with his mountaineering skills, Chin has become a specialist of the so called partecipatory photography: he is able to take pictures while climbing where few dare to go. Climbing Yosemite In the first part of the video Jimmy Chin describes his job as something phisically difficult, slow, methodical. You have to keep control even when you are scared because the consequences could be brutal (fall and die). In the second part he says that in college he was part of a ski team and after that he went looking for a job in the professional realm. He couldn’t do that, so he took a year off and climbed and skied full time. All that was supposed to be temporary, but seven years later he was still kinda surviving more than living properly and he was spending most of his time in Yosemite (he was actually enjoying it), where he found his community(Yosemite=home). He was always climbing and after spending a loto f time there he decided to visit the greater ranges of the world. In Yosemite he took a photo which a friend sold for 500 dollars and he realized that that could have helped him continuing what he was doing (he was used to living with a small amount of money, he didn’t need to be payed a lot). Thanks to Yosemite, his passion and the casuality of that picture he was able to launch his carreer. Towns with character The text is about two cities and their particolar aspects: Granada and Billund. As far as the first one is concerned, it is the oldest colonial town in Latin America and it isn’t a huge city. It’s not scruffy but not particularly smart either and it’s a genuine working town with lots of markets where farmers sell their products. Outside the commercial areas, life is pretty quiet, but whith the increasing tourism in Nicaragua, Granada becomes attractive to tourists. The other quite ordinary town is in Denmark and it’s the place
The mother of invention The interviewer is asking whether waht we have nowadays but we didn’t have before were droven by necessity or just commercial profit. He asks Martha Kay, a business historian. She sais that something (telephone) might seemed useless in the past, but the nit has become a necessity. According to the interviewer some inventions such as vaccines fil lan urgent need, but others are just aboout convenience or making our life more comfortable, for example the tv or the online shopping an so on. Martha also sais that onther formo f innovations consists in turning something that’s at first expensive into a more affordable tool (computers, telephones). In the past, the motor car was thought to be a luxury for the wealthy and it was tought not to come into common use. It’s more about wants rather than needs. Bbut what about all those things that we really don’t need? Talking dictionaries About half of the world’s languages are endangered and may disappear soon, mostly because of social pressure and attitudes that devalues those small languages. The small language communities are using technology to sustain themselves through social media, text messaging: they use technology as a way to survive. Talking dictionaries have been built in order to give endangered languages a first-ever presence on the internet. An example is the one from Oregon, which has only one fluent speaker. Words have been recorded and made into a talking dictionary (by some students). The rich vocaboulary helps you appreciate the cultural knowledge. The dictionary can then be used to revitalize a language and help young generations to aquire some knowledge. They also build a dictionary for a language spoken by six hundred people in Papua New Guinea. The community had already heard about this thing on the internet and they asked themselves to put their language there. The following year they got electricity, internet connection and they were able to see the talking dictionary. The main message is that each language has its importance even though no one has ever heard of it. The very first talking dictionary the speaker built was for a nomadic people in Siberia and he also launched it a san iPhone application. It is all important to talk about language diversity, which is one of the most important parts of our human heritage (history, culture, brain functions). We have to work together and avoid these languages extinction. The shoe giver Blake Mycoskie is a self-confessed entrepreneur who set up his first business when he was still at college. By the age of 29 ha had set up and sold lots of activities already and he decided t ogive it a break and went to Argentina for some rest. But there, shocked to see how many children didn’t have any shoes, he came up with another idea: he firstly decided to set up a charity to donate shoes to the children, but then he came up with the idea of TOMS: one fot one shoes. He sold the old shoes as high-fashioned items in America and for each pair he sold, another pair would be donated to villahge children. At first, as he knew nothing about manufacturing, he made a poor job, but he learned fast and added a vital element: passion. His business went well and it is now supplying shoes not only to children in Argentina, but also other parts of the world where foot diseases are a problem. For a long time TOMS didn’t show a profit, because it had to be built in from the beginning, but he now has a big profit and he diverts it into other companies. He knows that giving alone is not the answer and that people have to be educated to improve their own lives. However , TOMS is his greatest hit and it helped millions of poor children around the world. This man risked it all The boy speaking made a journey to go visit his mother and on his way home met his kid sister carrying wood (she was tired and started crying). Kids carry wood in Uganda because that’s what their famiglie use to cook. He got an education and he couldn’t stand seeing his sister missing that opportunità, so he started thinking of an alternative source of fuel. He quit his job, went back to Kampala looking for a solution. He was running out of money so he started selling what he got and his girlfriend sent him away. He believed in his dream and now he is the CEO of Eco Fuel Africa, which turns farm waste(sugar,coffe husks, corn waste) into clean coking fuel that burns cleaner and longer and is 65% cheaper. EFA has a network of 2500 farmers and 460 women retailers; it supplies 10000 households. Its ambition i sto supply 16.6 million households in the next 10 years. EFA prevents deforestation and indoor air pollution an it also provides a living for
farmers and women and makes sure children get an education. He got married and has a baby and he is proud of himself. How we travel This guy talks about the different way he and his father travel. When he was young they spent the summer in India in their grandparents’ home town and this is what Indians living in big cities still do. For his father is the same, he has the money to travel but he’d rather spent his holidays visiting his relatives. And even when he goes away to visit his son and daughter in S francisco and Delhi he doesn’t act as a common tourist. He thinks people just pretend doing thins they don’t actually want to do when they travel. But this guy has a different point of view and he tells us about his last trip in Chile which he defines as the trip of a lifetime. He enjoyed everything he did and he would do it again. At the end of the text he comes up with the conclusion that they he and his father both know what they like about travel but it’s just how they travel that is different. The adventures of Hergè The text is about a guy who spent his childhood travelling around the world just through the eyes of the investigative journalist Tintin, in the pages of the graphic novels of Hergè, the belgian author and cartoonist. The creator never travelled to those places either, he just made accurate researches from his studio and provided us an accurate representation of them. The speaker attests to the incredibile accuracy of Hergè’s works, beacuse he visited one of those places and realized that it was exactly how it was described in the book. His greatest triumph is probably the two-part story Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon which gave a realistic account of what would be involved in sending a manned rocket to the Moon. Few people at that time (1955) could imagine what it was like to be looking down at the heart from outer space. Hergè’s true girt was probably being able to understand and communicate something he didn’t know, or what a place was like without having travelled there. On the road: Andrew Mc Carthy This i san interview to the travel writer Andrew Mc Carthy. The trip that changed his life was about 18 years ago, he walked the Camino de Santiago (Spain). He didn’t actually planned it, but he casually bought a book written by Jack Hitt (who did the Camino)for a magazine. He read it once he was on a plane and he decided to do that. As there was no internet to research places in those days, he called the guy and asked him informations about how to go about doing this trip. Then Andrew went to Spain and walked across it for a month and he had a transformative experience. He felt miserable, lonely and frightened but then something happened (not a religious experience, but some kind of experience that just changed him) and for the first time he felt unafraid in the world. He stayed in little pilgrim hostels. They weren’t very comfortable so sometimes he stayed in pensiones (inns) and justified it by saying that that was the way to meet locals The enigma of beauty The text is about Sheli Jeffry, a scout foro ne of the world’s top model agiencies, searching for a definition of beauty. How do we define beauty? Beauty is hard to define, often depending on individual preferences, however it seems certain points are valid across cultures. Scientists have found that simmetry, averageness, strenght and good health indicate beauty, and it is not a question of aesthetic but of the ability to produce healthy children. The idea of beauty is different from country to country; long necks are admired in Myanmar, small feet in China and Japan. Moreover, in a lot of cultures we observe that people with a dark complexion desire a fair skin and fair-skinned people want a tanned skin. Perceptions of beauty also change over time. Historically a dark complexion belonged to those who were forced to work outside, whereas fair skin was a symbol of status and beauty. Nowadays is pretty much the other way round, tanned people are those who can afford vacations. The idea of the perfect body shape has changed as well, from little fat as a positive trait to a slim figure. Also personality and charm contribute to attractiveness, but mosto f us still care more about how we look, because it seems that we get satisfaction from looking nice.
Healing music Music affects us, it activates many parts of the brain and it has the power to release endorphins to help us deal with stress or pain and produce feelings of happiness. Moreover, people with musical training have improbe their brain’s ability to distinguish not only musical but also spoken sounds.music could also help people with dyslexia or language disorders. A neuroscientists (Gottfried Schlaug) treated people who were unable to speak properly after suffering a stroke with music therapy. The results were impressive. Music therapy is also important for dementia and memory loss, which are an increasingly problem. We need to find a solution so as not to let it get any worse. Diamond Shipwreck It is now possible to talk about this story thanks to a company geologist that discovered a copper ingot in 2008 in the beach sands of Namibia. In the spring of 1533, the ship the Bom Jesus set off from Portugal with other ships headed for the East Indies. They were on a mission to bring back pepper and spices from distant palces that were familiar ports of call. The ship was stong and capable but at some point it hit a storm and was wrecked near the Cape of Good Hope. The crew either died in the sea or in the desert. The irony is that they were searching for riches, and unknown to them the ship was wrecked on a coast with millions of diamonds. In 1900s Ernst Reuning took only 10 minutes to fill a cup with gems found in the sand. Collecting the past A private Chinese collector collects antiques originally belonged to China. He wants to bring back all the pieces that were taken away and repatriate pieces from China’s imperial past. There is an increasing number of private Chinese collectors who would like to bring back objects that have ended up overseas. So they buy up pieces al lover the world and bring them back to China. It is often Chinese versus Chinese versus Chinese (one million millionairs in China, originally were the Japanese) with all the European or American collectors being left behind, sometimes not even being able to raise their hand at the auction. Prices have risen considerably, but dealers say there is also a market for more affordable decorative pieces which people buy either as an investment or to help preserve their country’s heritage. What makes us who we are? This is about identity. Usually people forma n idea of a person based on what they do, in order to put them in a category that it easy to understand. Other people like to define themselves and the others in other ways, for example their background, values, hobbies, character, beliefs and sometimes of course their work. But it seems that our identity is about the experiences that shape us. Someone could choose family over work by doing something not too risky and that allows him to spend time with the family. Others’d rather be free and travel, picking up bits and pieces of work as and when they can. So while there are many ingredients that go into making us what we are, it seems that what defines people first and foremost is experience. Learning from the past The article is about learning from what happened in the past, both correct actions and mistakes that were made, in order to know how to behave in the future. In China the government is trying to remind people Confucius’ lessons, because there is the feeling that the traditional values are being lost and people are becoming selfish and individualistic. Confucianism offers stability and order in a society that is rapidly developing. Another example could be Nelson Mandela, who tried to reconciliate two sides in South Africa; he thought that the only way to do that was to make the two sides talk to each other to rebuilt measure of trust. Nowadays few people are able to follow his example, because they are just too selfish and not to be selfish seems to be the hardest lesson of all to learn.
A co-operative society The text deals with the theme of cooperation between ants. They are small animals that together weight about the same as all of mankind; there are around 20000 different species and they are almost everywhere. Known to be sophisticated creatures, each of them has a specific role in a group: the queen/queens reproduce with fertile males, who dye right after. All the other ants are sterile and they are the workers. They communicate through 10 or 20 pherormones, chimica signals, that are picked up by the group. That’s also why they are unrivalled in the art of war: they can “call” other ants to save them through these pherormones. They also are fearless and attack in large groups. Ants are unselfish and community- minded and thanks to these characteristics they had flourished on Earth and they have a collective intelligence greater than the sum of its individual parts. The power of play Playing doesn’t seem to be something necessary, but more like a luxury to indulge in when we have spare time, but it actually is an important part of our well-being and our social interactions. It helps us relaxing and relieving tension, it increases our ability to solve problems and to think outside the box. It is good for our health and laughter, which is a natural product of play, improbe blood circulation and increases the body’s resi stance to disease. Third, with play there is just a shared feeling of enjoyment and letting go, relax. Play has the power to break down barriers between people and it keeeps us in the present moment. A loto f time, our minds wander and we find ourselves thinking about things in the past, but when we are engaged in play this doesn’t happen and we remain in the present, where true pleasure is found. In conclusion, play doesn’t have to be a specific activity and it is also a state of mind. Living free? The text talks about the Hazada community, hunter-gatherers of Tanzania who have a nomadic, foraging lifestyle. With the spread of agriculture and the growth of population, this kind of lifestyle disappeared almost everywhere, but the Hazada were able to keep it. They doo not engage in warfare, they are too few and too spread out to get diseases and they have a more adaptable diet. They have almost nothing and they can easily carry with them the few things they own. They have a lot of spare time becuase gathering food takes only 4 to 6 hours a day and they eat almost anything they can kill. There is no official leader, everyone has the same importance and there are no social obligations. They do pretty much what they want. The main reason the Hazada have been able to maintain this lifestyle is that their land in not inviting, is poor and water is scarce. Recenty some people arrived to that land and the Hazanda didn’t fight for the land, but theysimply accepted to share their territory. The most enviable thing is probably that they are free spirits and have no obligations, but at the same time their lifestyle is very risky and hard to cope with. Probabily soon they wont’ be able to keep living that way. Thinking fast and slow Thinking fast and slow is the book of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who found out that what seemed like rational decisions were often based on irrational thought processes. His research was simply based on asking people questions in order to understand how emotions can affect our logical decisions. We are given one open question and three with two options each; after having answered we are given the solutions. What the psychologist is trying to demonstrate is that out intuition can be unreliable and irrational and he imagines our brain as two Systems. The first one form intuitive responses, in system two more conscious and deliberate though occurs. The problemi s that system one is always trying to help system two and that’s why the results are often imperfect. If we were more aware of this influence, we would make better decisions, particularly the financial ones.
Three years and 6000 miles on a horse We hear Tim Cope speaking. At 21 he found himself in the Gobi Desert and he came across nomadic people. His idea was to get up on a horse and ride through many places in the world and learning to look at the world through a nomad’s eyes. At first, he wasn’t able to ride a horse and within five days the horses were stolen. Life on Steppe without a horse was like being on the ocean without a yacht: he was in trouble. He found the guy who had his horse and understood that the horse had escaped. That Mongol taught him a lesson: if you ever have to rush in life, rush slowly. That was a turning point on his trip, he accepted his plans and that humans don’t get to dictate, it’s the environment that decides when you can leave, when you can go. Time is more measured by the rise and fall of the sun, the Seasons, the nature in general. The journey was supposed to last 18 months and it turned out to be a three and a half year long, when he arrived on the Danube (from Mongolia). Now he can’t live without horses and there’s no turning back after a journey like the one he made.
