twentyfour - Ex libris

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Fri, 17 Jun 2016 13:00:00 +0000

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on.” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, but why do we think we know better? What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Can we go back in time? Recent breakthroughs in physics, made possible in part by fantastic new technologies, suggest answers to some of these longstanding questions. Someday these answers may seem as obvious to us as the earth orbiting the sun – or perhaps as ridiculous as a tower of tortoises. Only time (whatever that may be) will tell.
As long ago as 340 BC the Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his book On the Heavens, was able to put forward two good arguments for believing that the earth was a round sphere rather than a Hat plate. First, he realized that eclipses of the moon were caused by the earth coming between the sun and the moon. The earth’s shadow on the moon was always round, which would be true only if the earth was spherical. If the earth had been a flat disk, the shadow would have been elongated and elliptical, unless the eclipse always occurred at a time when the sun was directly under the center of the disk. Second, the Greeks knew from their travels that the North Star appeared lower in the sky when viewed in the south than it did in more northerly regions. (Since the North Star lies over the North Pole, it appears to be directly above an observer at the North Pole, but to someone looking from the equator, it appears to lie just at the horizon. From the difference in the apparent position of the North Star in Egypt and Greece, Aristotle even quoted an estimate that the distance around the earth was 400,000 stadia. It is not known exactly what length a stadium was, but it may have been about 200 yards, which would make Aristotle’s estimate about twice the currently accepted figure. The Greeks even had a third argument that the earth must be round, for why else does one first see the sails of a ship coming over the horizon, and only later see the hull?
Aristotle thought the earth was stationary and that the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars moved in circular orbits about the earth. He believed this because he felt, for mystical reasons, that the earth was the center of the universe, and that circular motion was the most perfect. This idea was elaborated by Ptolemy in the second century AD into a complete cosmological model. The earth stood at the center, surrounded by eight spheres that carried the moon, the sun, the stars, and the five planets known at the time, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

VOCABULARY

superior - превосходный
elongated - вытянутый
estimate - оценить
elaborated - тщательно разработанный

Global Philosophy: What Philosophy Ought to Be

Sun, 05 Jun 2016 08:03:00 +0000

These essays are about education, learning, rational inquiry, philosophy, science studies, problem solving, academic inquiry, global problems, wisdom and, above all, the urgent need for an academic revolution.

Despite this range and diversity of topics, there is a common underlying theme. Education ought to be devoted, much more than it is, to the exploration real-life, open problems; it ought not to be restricted to learning up solutions to already solved problems - especially if nothing is said about the problems that provoked the solutions in the first place. There should be much more emphasis on learning how to engage in cooperatively rational exploration of problems: even five year olds could begin to learn how to do this. A central task of philosophy ought to be to keep alive awareness of our unsolved fundamental problems - especially our most fundamental problem of all, encompassing all others: How can our human world - and the world of sentient life more generally - imbued with the experiential, consciousness, free will, meaning and value, exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? This is both our fundamental intellectual problem and our fundamental problem of living.

As far as the latter is concerned, we are at present heading towards disaster - as our immense, unsolved global problems tell us: population growth, destruction of natural habitats and rapid extinction of species, vast inequalities of wealth and power around the world, pollution of earth, sea and air, our proclivity for war, and above all global warming. If we are to resolve our conflicts and global problems more intelligently, effectively and humanely than we have managed to do so far, then we have to learn how to do it. That, in turn, requires that our institutions of learning, our universities and schools, are rationally designed and devoted to the task. At present they are not. That is the crisis behind all the others. From the past we have inherited the idea that the basic intellectual aim of inquiry ought to be to acquire knowledge. First, knowledge is to be acquired; then, secondarily, it can be applied to help solve social problems. But this is dangerously and damagingly irrational, and it is this irrationality that is, in part, responsible for the genesis of our current global problems, and our current incapacity to solve them. As a matter of supreme urgency, we need to transform academia so that it becomes rationally devoted to helping humanity learn how to make progress towards as good and wise a world as possible. This would involve putting problems of living - including global problems - at the heart of academia, problems of knowledge and technological know-how emerging out of, and feeding back into, the central task to help people tackle problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways. Almost every department and aspect of academia needs to change. We need a new kind of academic inquiry devoted, not just to knowledge, but rather to wisdom - wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, wisdom including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides.

So, this is what these essays seek to provoke: a concerted effort to transform our institutions of learning so that they become rationally and effectively devoted to helping us learn how to create a wiser world.

With these essays before me, I can see that there is one crucial element of learning about which they say nothing - or nothing explicit. The vital role of play in learning. All mammals - or at any rate almost all mammals - learn by means of play. Cats, tigers, foxes and other predators learn to hunt by means of endless mock fights when kittens and cubs. Deer, sheep and antelope learn to escape by means of playful leaps and bounds when young. We are mammals too. Almost certainly, we learnt how to be adult human beings by means of play during the millions of years we evolved into homo sapiens living in hunting and gathering tribes. Children today, out of school, learn by means of play. Learning by means of play is almost certainly fundamental to our makeup. Education needs to exploit it. Schools and universities need to become places of play. Successful problem solving is often likely to be playful in character. The youthful Einstein called doing physics "getting up to mischief".

But our most serious problems of living are so grim, so imbued with suffering, wasted lives and unnecessary death that the idea of approaching them in a playful spirit seems sacrilegious. We need to keep alive tackling of intellectual problems so that playful capacities can be exercised - if for no other reason (and other reasons there are, of course, aplenty). There are two really worthy impulses behind all rational inquiry: delight and compassion.

VOCABULARY

encompassing - охватывая
immense - огромный
inherited - унаследованный
incapacity - недееспособность
mammals - млекопитающие

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss

Sat, 28 May 2016 18:39:00 +0000

The first thing to know about sugar is this: Our bodies are hard-wired for sweets. Forget what we learned in school from that old diagram called the tongue map, the one that says our five main tastes are detected by five distinct parts of the tongue. That the back has a big zone for blasts of bitter, the sides grab the sour and the salty, and the tip of the tongue has that one single spot for sweet. The tongue map is wrong. As researchers would discover in the 1970s, its creators misinterpreted the work of a German graduate student that was published in 1901; his experiments showed only that we might taste a little more sweetness on the tip of the tongue. In truth, the entire mouth goes crazy for sugar, including the upper reaches known as the palate. There are special receptors for sweetness in every one of the mouth’s ten thousand taste buds, and they are all hooked up, one way or another, to the parts of the brain known as the pleasure zones, where we get rewarded for stoking our bodies with energy. But our zeal doesn’t stop there. Scientists are now finding taste receptors that light up for sugar all the way down our esophagus to our stomach and pancreas, and they appear to be intricately tied to our appetites. The second thing to know about sugar: Food manufacturers are well aware of the tongue map folly, along with a whole lot more about why we crave sweets. They have on staff cadres of scientists who specialize in the senses, and the companies use their knowledge to put sugar to work for them in countless ways. Sugar not only makes the taste of food and drink irresistible. The industry has learned that it can also be used to pull off a string of manufacturing miracles, from donuts that fry up bigger to bread that won’t go stale to cereal that is toasty-brown and fluffy. All of this has made sugar a go-to ingredient in processed foods. On average, we consume 71 pounds of caloric sweeteners each year. That’s 22 teaspoons of sugar, per person, per day. The amount is almost equally split three ways, with the sugar derived from sugar cane, sugar beets, and the group of corn sweeteners that includes high-fructose corn syrup (with a little honey and syrup thrown into the mix). That we love, and crave, sugar is hardly news. Whole books have been devoted to its romp through history, in which people overcame geography, strife, and overwhelming technical hurdles to feed their insatiable habit. The highlights start with Christopher Columbus, who brought sugar cane along on his second voyage to the New World, where it was planted in Spanish Santo Domingo, was eventually worked into granulated sugar by enslaved Africans, and, starting in 1516, was shipped back to Europe to meet the continent’s surging appetite for the stuff. The next notable development came in 1807 when a British naval blockade of France cut off easy access to sugar cane crops, and entrepreneurs, racing to meet demand, figured out how to extract sugar from beets, which could be grown easily in temperate Europe. Cane and beets remained the two main sources of sugar until the 1970s, when rising prices spurred the invention of high-fructose corn syrup, which had two attributes that were attractive to the soda industry. One, it was cheap, effectively subsidized by the federal price supports for corn; and two, it was liquid, which meant that it could be pumped directly into food and drink. Over the next thirty years, our consumption of sugar-sweetened soda more than doubled to 40 gallons a year per person, and while this has tapered off since then, hitting 32 gallons in 2011, there has been a commensurate surge in other sweet drinks, like teas, sports ades, vitamin waters, and energy drinks. Their yearly consumption has nearly doubled in the past decade to 14 gallons a person. Far less well known than the history of sugar, however, is the intense research that scientists have conducted into its allure, the biology and psychology of why we find it so irresistible. For the longest time, the people who spent their careers studying nutrition could only guess at the extent to which people are attracted to sugar. They had a sense, but no proof, that sugar was so powerful it could compel us to eat more than we should and thus do harm to our health. That all changed in the late 1960s, when some lab rats in upstate New York got ahold of Froot Loops, the supersweet cereal made by Kellogg. The rats were fed the cereal by a graduate student named Anthony Sclafani who, at first, was just being nice to the animals in his care. But when Sclafani noticed how fast they gobbled it up, he decided to concoct a test to measure their zeal. Rats hate open spaces; even in cages, they tend to stick to the shadowy corners and sides. So Sclafani put a little of the cereal in the brightly lit, open center of their cages—normally an area to be avoided—to see what would happen. Sure enough, the rats overcame their instinctual fears and ran out in the open to gorge.

VOCABULARY

bud - бутон
zeal - рвение
esophagus - пищевод
entrepreneurs - предприниматели
gorge - обжорство

History of music world: 100th Sinatra. 80th Presley. 75th Lennon 70th Marley. 50th Pink Floyd. 50th Doors. 50th Who. 45th Queen" by Francesco Primerano

Fri, 15 Apr 2016 16:17:00 +0000

Artists of music we've had so many throughout history and in the middle of our beloved company, but it has never happened that were re- counted all together in a single manual, where anything can be grant- ed, even the unimaginable. The whole world revolves around myths and legends that have made a time of concerts, festivals, records, festi- vals, embracing all possible genres from Rock to Pop, from Country to Blues, from Soul to Rap, from Swing to Hip hop, from Jazz to Hard Rock, dall'Haevy Metal, punk, grunge to Wave, Reggae by the Black-Music, Electronic Music at the Nu-Metal. This is a good time to enjoy them all, until the last note. In 2015 we want to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Frank Sinatra (The voice), 80 Elvis, Bob Marley 70 and 75 of John Lennon. That same Lennon, 35 years after his tragic murder, wants to be, in this delicious feast, one of the pioneers of our friend Music. A very special year be- cause it wanted to remember the 50 years of Pink Floyd, with their 250 million records sold worldwide, the 50th anniversary of The Doors & The Who and 45-year career of Queen, with their 200 million albums sold planet. E 'own with their new collec- tion, output recently around the world, that you can see at last the return of the fabulous duet Mercury- Jackson who, in more than 30 years since that magical meeting, wants to revive the song "There must be more to life than this ", written by Freddie in 1981 and published in its solo album" Mr. Bad Guy "in 1985. In the course of 2015 will be released also the film" Thriller "in 3D version for joy Fans of Michael Jackson. Speaking of anniversaries, we can also speak of the queen of jazz-blues Billie Holiday that would compiuto100 years as The Voice. You may also remember Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, 45 years after their tragic death. Discs of Beatles and Rolling Stones concerts of Vasco Rossi and Ligabue, live historical groups such as Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple and talents as Bob Marley and Kurt Cobain, they find themselves together in this volume, to celebrate the true essence of the music, the same music that made us love, dream and taste the best nectars of our precious existence. It can be seen, in fact, a fabulous pantheon of Stars to follow, a firmament decided timeless myths, from the class of Frank Sinatra to Rock'n'Roll Elvis Presley, from the myth of John Lennon to that of Fred- die Mercury, notes Beatles to those of the Rolling Stones, from the sound of the Queen to the Pink Floyd, from concerts to those of Vasco Rossi Lig- abue, the voice of Michael Jackson with George Michael, by the talent of Bob Marley to the genius of Kurt Cobain, by the determination of the Madonna to the grace of Whitney Houston, from Radiohead's talent to that of the Muses, from Rock to Pop Pelù Jovanotti. This is the legendary world of Music Generation, the true collectors, the skillful acrobats and those who appreciate everything that is music, the music that always governs and accompanies our wonderful lives from curious eternal beauty. This is basically the biggest musical show that we have had the pleasure to know and admire in the paths of our existence, from swing to Sinatra to the masterpieces of Lennon, the Rolling Stones from Rock to Pop Michael Jackson, the legendary admired and followed through with it.

Brainstorming By Hall Houston & Gerhard Erasmus

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 13:55:00 +0000

The concept of brainstorming was originally invented by Alex Osborne, an advertising executive in the 1950s. His goal was to guide his employees in developing a greater number of unique ideas. A brainstorming session follows several rules, many of which are probably familiar to you:

Create a large number of ideas.
Write everything down.
Don’t judge the ideas.
Employ the ideas of others to make better ideas.

Brainstorming is a fantastic way to generate a lot of useful ideas quickly and easily. It’s now a well-known creative activity that is popular in many fields, such as business, art and education.

In this book, we’re going to share some simple brainstorming activities that you can use in your classroom today. These activities can be used in a myriad of ways: to expand on a topic that came up in class, to give students extra fluency practice, to use as fillers when your lesson doesn’t go as planned, or to provide a change of pace.

In the next section, we provide a few guidelines to successful brainstorms, as well as tips for avoiding problems that sometimes accompany idea generation exercises. We also list some useful problem statements that will get your students brainstorming fast.

Tips for using brainstorming in class

It can be helpful to divide your brainstorming session into clear parts. This allows you to follow a prepared lesson plan or incorporate it into your lesson with ease. Here are some ideas for accomplishing a successful brainstorming session.

1. Set the stage

Make sure the atmosphere is relaxed and conducive to brainstorming. Your students are unlikely to come up with many ideas if they are stressed, or if the atmosphere in the classroom is too formal.

2. Define the problem

To ensure that the activity is focused, be sure to define the problem clearly. Make sure there are clear criteria that guide students towards successfully defining the problem statement.

3. During the ‘idea generation’ stage

Be sure to avoid any form of negative feedback during the brainstorming process. The aim of this part is purely to generate as many ideas as possible. Decide whether the generation of ideas will be done in groups, individually, or both.

4. Guide the discussion

Decide how much you, as the teacher, will be involved in the brainstorming. Will there be a group leader? How will you guide the brainstorming and subsequent discussion, and how will you help students to move towards an outcome?

5. Remember the objective

Be sure that you are not just brainstorming in class for its own sake, or because you are going along with some kind of fad. Make the activity purposeful and meaningful. We brainstorm to generate ideas that we then use to solve real-world problems. Remember to always have an objective. Make sure the activity has some practical application, and allow students to explore solutions. Again, be sure to decide whether they will be working individually, in groups, or both.

Problem statements

One central element of a brainstorming session is the problem statement, that is, a clear description of the situation that students will address (for example, ‘How can I improve my ability to network?’). Sometimes it’s a dilemma, sometimes it’s a situation that could be improved on. The best problem statements are easy to understand and motivate students to generate lots of ideas.

VOCABULARY

executive - руководитель
field - поле
come up - подойти
pace - темп
ease - легкость
accomplishing - достижения
sake - ради
fad - прихоть

The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 10:39:00 +0000

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover. In the last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and they did not spread any more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country. In the watercut gullies the earth dusted down in dry little streams. Gophers and ant lions started small avalanches. And as the sharp sun struck day after day, the leaves of the young corn became less stiff and erect; they bent in a curve at first, and then, as the central ribs of strength grew weak, each leaf tilted downward. Then it was June, and the sun shone more fiercely. The brown lines on the corn leaves widened and moved in on the central ribs. The weeds frayed and edged back toward their roots. The air was thin and the sky more pale; and every day the earth paled. In the roads where the teams moved, where the wheels milled the ground and the hooves of the horses beat the ground, the dirt crust broke and the dust formed. Every moving thing lifted the dust into the air: a walking man lifted a thin layer as high as his waist, and a wagon lifted the dust as high as the fence tops, and an automobile boiled a cloud behind it. The dust was long in settling back again. When June was half gone, the big clouds moved up out of Texas and the Gulf, high heavy clouds, rain-heads. The men in the fields looked up at the clouds and sniffed at them and held wet fingers up to sense the wind. And the horses were nervous while the clouds were up. The rain-heads dropped a little spattering and hurried on to some other country. Behind them the sky was pale again and the sun flared. In the dust there were drop craters where the rain had fallen, and there were clean splashes on the corn, and that was all. A gentle wind followed the rain clouds, driving them on northward, a wind that softly clashed the drying corn. A day went by and the wind increased, steady, unbroken by gusts. The dust from the roads fluffed up and spread out and fell on the weeds beside the fields, and fell into the fields a little way. Now the wind grew strong and hard and it worked at the rain crust in the corn fields. Little by little the sky was darkened by the mixing dust, and the wind felt over the earth, loosened the dust, and carried it away. The wind grew stronger. The rain crust broke and the dust lifted up out of the fields and drove gray plumes into the air like sluggish smoke. The corn threshed the wind and made a dry, rushing sound. The finest dust did not settle back to earth now, but disappeared into the darkening sky. The wind grew stronger, whisked under stones, carried up straws and old leaves, and even little clods, marking its course as it sailed across the fields.

VOCABULARY

avalanche - волна
bayonet - штык
crusted - покрытый коркой
erect - вертикальный
fluf - пух
pale - огораживать, бледнеть
rivulet - ручей
stiff - жесткий
weed - сорняк

My week with Merilym by Colin Clark

Fri, 12 Feb 2016 13:30:00 +0000

All my life I have kept diaries, but this is not one of them. This is a fairy story, an interlude, an episode outside time and space which nevertheless was real. And why not? I believe in magic. My life and most people’s lives are a series of little miracles – strange coincidences which spring from uncontrollable impulses and give rise to incomprehensible dreams. We spend a lot of time pretending that we are nor- mal, but underneath the surface each one of us knows that he or she is unique.

This book sets out to describe a miracle – a few days in my life when a dream came true and my only talent was not to close my eyes. Of course I didn’t realise quite what a miracle it was at the time. I had been brought up in a world of ‘make believe’. My earliest memory of my parents is of remote and wonderful beings, only seen late at night, wearing full evening dress. All their friends seemed to be exotic too. Actors, artists, ballerinas and opera singers filled our house with a wonderful feeling of excitement and unreality.

And there was my older brother, Alan. Alan’s imagination knew no bounds, even then. My twin sister and I were completely under his spell, and he led us into a succession of fantastical adventures and games. It was hardly surprising that by the age of twelve I had decided that ‘show business’ would one day be the life for me; and so it has been ever since.

I got my first job in the summer of 1956, at the age of twenty-three, working on a film called The Sleeping Prince, starring Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe. I had just come down from university, and I had no experience whatever. I was only employed because my parents were friends of Olivier and his wife, Vivien Leigh. The Oliviers had been frequent visitors to our home, Saltwood Castle in Kent, and they had be- come part of my extended family.

The news that Olivier, the best-known classical actor of his generation, was going to make a film with Marilyn Monroe, the famous Hollywood film star, caused a sensation. Marilyn was to play the part which had been taken by Vivien herself in the play by Terence Rattigan on which the film was based. Up to then she had only played strippers and chorus girls, in very limited roles. In 1955, after a terrific struggle, she renegotiated her contract with Twentieth Century-Fox and announced her intention to do more serious work. Typecasting is never easy to escape, especially in films. Her first new role had been that of a stripper (in Bus Stop), and the second, chosen for her by Milton Greene, her partner in the newly formed Marilyn Monroe Productions, was that of a chorus girl. The only ‘serious’ element was that both films were by so-called ‘serious’ writers. Bus Stop had been based on a play by William Inge, and The Sleeping Prince on a play by Terence Rattigan.

Filming The Prince and the Showgirl, as it was finally called (it was decided that the title should include a reference to Marilyn’s character), went badly from the very beginning. Olivier patronised Monroe and treated her like a dumb blonde. This was exactly what she was trying to escape, and she resented it intensely. It also drastically affected her self-confidence, and as a result she constantly relied for advice on her ‘dra- matic coach’, Paula Strasberg, whom Olivier distrusted. Paula’s hus- band Lee Strasberg, the head of the Actors Studio in New York, was trying to control Monroe from across the Atlantic. At the same time he was extracting a huge salary for his wife, which made him very unpop- ular. Monroe’s new husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, was treat- ing her like a difficult child, and this also undermined her. Milton Greene was desperate to retain control of ‘his’ star, and was letting her take more prescription drugs than was perhaps wise. But Monroe was determined to show that she could act, despite her feelings of inade- quacy when faced with Olivier and the super-professional English team that had been assembled specially for the film.

From my first day on the production as third assistant director – the lowest of the low – I kept a journal of everything that I observed. I intended to transcribe it when the film was over, but my notes became messy and hard to read, and I simply put the volume away and forgot it. Forty years later I dug it out and read it again, and it was subse- quently published under the title The Prince, the Showgirl, and Me.

One episode, however, was not recorded in my diary.

For nine days in the middle of filming, I made no entries at all. Suddenly, and completely unexpectedly, something happened which was, to me, so dramatic and so extraordinary that it was impossible to in- clude it in my daily chatterings. For a short time the attention of the major participants – Olivier, Greene and, above all, Marilyn – seemed to be focused on me. It was as if a spotlight had swung round, for no particular reason, and singled me out as the hero or villain of the piece.

When normal life resumed, I continued to write my diary as before. I made notes on what I felt had been the key events of those ‘missing’ days, but that is all. It was not until the filming was over that I could go back and write down what had happened, in the form of a letter to the friend for whom I was keeping my journal.

This, then, is the story of those missing nine days. Of course it goes much further than the letter (the text of which is reproduced as an appendix to this book), but I make no apology for that. The whole episode is still as fresh in my mind as if it had happened yesterday.

I could never have written this account while Marilyn was alive. I produce it now as a humble tribute to someone who changed my life, and whose own life I only wish I could have saved.

VOCABULARY

chorus - хор
dug it out - выкопать, вырыть, достать
incomprehensible - непонятный
playwrigh - драматург
renegotiated - пересмотрены
swung - качнулся

Language is Music. Over 70 Fun & Easy Tips to Learn Foreign Languages by Susanna Zaraysky

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:29:00 +0000

We’ve all heard the word “globalization.” The phenomenon has various effects in our lives. One of them is the necessity to be able to communicate with people in different parts of the world. As traveling, working, immigrating, and living abroad become more common, increasing numbers of people are multilingual. Government jobs pay a bonus for each foreign language an employee can speak.

On January 30, 2012, the BBC’s Newshour interviewed me for a segment concerning the shortage of foreign language speakers to service export markets, which is costing the British economy between 11 and 26 billion dollars a year in exports. The British Education and Employers Taskforce had published a report, titled “The economic case for language learning and the role of employer engagement,” showing that many British employers had unfilled vacancies in various professional sectors for people with foreign language skills. Unlike their peers in mainland Europe, British youth were neither motivated nor forced to learn foreign languages, despite the fact, in the words of the report, that “more languages grad- uates are in work or study than their peers who studied Law, Architecture, Business or Computer Science, and earning high average wages.”

The reality is we have to be multilingual to thrive in this globalized economy. Young generations see the necessity to learn foreign languages for their careers.

I got my first job out of college because I spoke Russian. The local division of the Department of Commerce’s Export Assistance Program was going to help host a summit between United States Vice President Al Gore and the Russian Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin in Silicon Valley. The office needed a Russian speaker to help the Russian VIPs attending the summit. I had to get a special security clearance to participate. Not only was I the Russian speaking guide, I also listened to presentations by the CEOs of major Silicon Valley companies. I was only 21 years old. Without my Russian knowledge, the doors to this highpowered summit meeting would have been closed.

A few months later, my Spanish skills were in demand. The Argentine Secretary of Communication was visiting Silicon Valley on a trade visit, and I was the only completely fluent Spanish speaker in our office. Even though I wasn’t even old enough to legally rent a car, my boss convinced the car rental company to let me drive the Argentine Secretary of Commerce and his entourage around in a rented van! Like with the Russian delegation, I attended meetings with top Silicon Valley executives whom I would otherwise not have had the opportunity to meet. Being in an Argentine environment was wonderful practice for me because I was going to Argentina the following year as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar.

Neither of these opportunities would have been available to me if I didn’t speak Russian or Spanish.

Even if you don’t engage in international business, being multilingual is important. According to United States Census data, 20% of US households speak a language other than English. Politicians and companies are targeting their messages to non-English-speaking communities. One of the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary debates was telecast in Spanish. In the 2006 California Democratic Gubernatorial Race, the candidates’ Chinese speaking family members made campaign announcements in Mandarin.

If the professional reasons for being multilingual have not convinced you yet, please consider that speaking another language keeps your brain healthy and helps children be more confident.

A research study by Viorica Marian, Ph.D. and Anthony Shook of North- western University, published in Cerebrum Magazine in September/October 2012, showed that “the bilingual brain can have better attention and task-switching capacities than the monolingual brain, thanks to its developed ability to inhibit one language while using another. In addition, bilingualism has positive effects at both ends of the age spectrum: Bilingual children as young as seven months can better adjust to environmental changes, while bilingual seniors can experience less cognitive decline.”

Actively speaking another language throughout your life may delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease because your brain is used to task-switching, going from one way of thinking to another.

The January 2013 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience reported that, “Recent behavioral data have shown that lifelong bilingualism can maintain youthful cognitive control abilities in aging.”

If you raise your children in a bilingual or multilingual environment, the benefits of this upbringing will go far beyond just the ability to speak in different languages. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s report on a study done by Wen-Jui Han, Ph.D. (Columbia University) and Chien-Chung Huang, Ph.D. (Rutgers University School of Social Work), “Being able to speak two languages likewise seems to reduce, in children, negative internalizing states such as anxiety, loneliness, and poor self-esteem, and negative externalizing behaviors such as arguing, fighting, or acting impulsively.” Han and Huang hypothesized that when bilingual youngsters understand two cultures, they can better appreciate diversity and get along with their peers and teachers.

Speaking more than one language is like a mental juggling act for your brain. Join in the fun!

Imagine foreign languages are like keys, both in the musical and physical sense. The more keys your voice can produce equals more physical keys you have to open doors to new horizons. Let me open up your world to the sounds of other languages. It will open doors you never knew existed!

VOCABULARY

anxiety - тревога
capacitie - мощность
decline - снижаться
demand - спрос
diversity - разнообразие
likewise - также
loneliness - одиночество
maintain youthful - поддерживать юношеский...
multilingual - многоязычный
necessity - необходимость
peers - сверстники
self-esteem - самооценка

Umberto Eco "The Prague Cemetery"

Wed, 30 Dec 2015 12:56:00 +0000

A PASSERBY ON THAT GRAY MORNING

A passerby on that gray morning in March 1897, crossing, at his own risk and peril, place Maubert, or the Maub, as it was known in criminal circles (formerly a center of university life in the Middle Ages, when students flocked there from the Faculty of Arts in Vicus Stramineus, or rue du Fouarre, and later a place of execution for apostles of free thought such as Étienne Dolet), would have found himself in one of the few spots in Paris spared from Baron Haussmann’s devastations, amid a tangle of malodorous alleys, sliced in two by the course of the Bièvre, which still emerged here, flowing out from the bowels of the metropolis, where it had long been confined, before emptying feverish, gasping and verminous into the nearby Seine. From place Maubert, already scarred by boulevard Saint-Germain, a web of narrow lanes still branched off, such as rue Maître-Albert, rue Saint-Séverin, rue Galande, rue de la Bûcherie, rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, as far as rue de la Huchette, littered with filthy hotels generally run by Auvergnat hoteliers of legendary cupidity, who demanded one franc for the first night and forty centimes thereafter (plus twenty sous if you wanted a sheet). If he were to turn into what was later to become rue Sauton but was then still rue d’Amboise, about halfway along the street, between a brothel masquerading as a brasserie and a tavern that served dinner with foul wine for two sous (cheap even then, but all that was affordable to students from the nearby Sorbonne), he would have found an impasse, or blind alley, which by that time was called impasse Maubert, but up to 1865 had been called cul-de-sac d’Amboise, and years earlier had housed a tapis-franc (in underworld slang, a tavern, a hostelry of ill fame, usually run by an ex-convict, and the haunt of felons just released from jail), and was also notorious because in the eighteenth century there had stood here the laboratory of three celebrated women poisoners, found one day asphyxiated by the deadly substances they were distilling on their stoves.

VOCABULARY

amid - среди
cupidity - алчность
distilling - дистилляция/винокуренный
emerge - появляться
felons - преступники
paseerby - прохожий
peril - опасность
verminous - отвратительный