Dark Tourism
Emotional Hygiene
Work Life Balance
What is work-life balance?
Do you think you have a good balance between work and life?
Was that a conscious decision that you made?
Click on the following link below to read the following article.
Work-life Balance News Article
watch the following video and prepare to discuss and answer questions
When did Nigel decide to quit work?
How long did he quit work for?
What did he learn after this period?
What are the issues that he talks about?
What is an 'office rat'?
What is dress down Friday?
Who is responsible for our lives according to Nigel?
Who will organise our lives if we don't do it ourselves?
How many children does he have?
What was the defining moment for Nigel when he reaslised that things needed to change in his life? (What's the story that he tells us at the end of the video)?
Saving the Rainforest
What do you know about the importance of the world's rainforests?
What do you think the underlined words and phrases mean? In pairs, match them to their correct meaning below:
Task 1
1. The sounds of the forest were overwhelming there was a constant cacophony of noise.
2. Illegal logging is threatening the existence of the rainforests.
3. There is a sanctuary for animals in the rainforest.
4. The ranger gave us a tour of the forest.
5. Deforestation results in the emission of greenhouse gasses.
6. I couldn't see the monkey. It was hidden by the tree canopy.
7. Nobody noticed the sound it was so faint.
8. We need to find a deterrent to stop illegal logging.
a. a loud mixture of different unpleasant sounds
b. a person in charge of managing and protecting part of a public forest
c. a place where wildlife is protected
d. gases which cause a gradual warming of the surface of Earth
e. not very clear
f. something that discourages someone from doing something (the opposite of `incentive')
g. the activity or business of cutting down trees
h. the highest branches of a tree, which provide cover from the sun
Task 2
You are going to watch Topher White talk about how a simple technological solution can be used to
save the rainforests from illegal logging using a used cell phone (British English: `mobile phone') and
people on the ground (rangers). What do you think the simple solution is? Now watch the video to find out.
Task 3
What do you remember?
Choose the best answer for each question.
1. What is difficult to hear in the Boreo rainforest?
a. birds b. insects c. chainsaws
2. What was the `big surprise' about the rainforest?
a. There was a cell phone network.
b. There was no technology.
c. There was illegal logging.
3. What is the second highest contributor to climate change?
a. deforestation b. cars c. industrial processes
4. What percentage of rainforest logging is illegal?
a. 20% b. 50% c. 90%
5. Why is it a good idea to use cell phones to detect the sounds of chainsaws?
a. They are cheap and full of sensors.
b. They have the right shape.
c. They are quiet.
6. Why was it challenging to build a solar panel to power the cell phones?
a. There are too many clouds.
b. Tree canopies block sunlight.
c. Solar power doesn't work.
7. Why was it important to hide the devices up in the tree canopy?
a. to protect them from the sun
b. to stop monkeys from eating them
c. to keep them hidden from loggers
8. How did people around the world respond to the news of this operation?
a. They started sending their old mobile devices.
b. They started singing.
c. They wanted to personally get involved in the operation.
Task 4
Look at the transcript of the talk. Complete the definitions below with the infinitive forms of phrasal
verbs in the transcript.
1. be very noticeable (P1) stick out
2. emerge, become known (P2) _____________
3. find by chance (P3) ______________
4. bring to activity, start (P4) _________________
5. suggest or think of an idea or plan (P5) _______________
6. bring within range of hearing (P6) ___________________
7. form the total of something (P8) __________________
8. appear, arrive (P9) _______________
9. get rid of something that you do not want any more (P10) ______________
10. suddenly leave (P12) __________________
Now complete the sentences below with the phrasal verbs in their correct form:
1. Advertising costs account for 40% of the company's total expenditure.
2. My mobile device's sound recorder managed to ___________a faint noise in the distance.
3. The meeting starts are 3pm. What time are you going to _______________ ?
4. I decided to ______________my old laptop as I didn't need it anymore.
5. I ______________ these old photographs while I was tidying my desk.
6. We need to ______________with a new plan to make money.
7. Nobody knows what happened to John. He just ___________without telling anyone.
8. The government wants to hide it, but I believe the truth will ____________one day.
9. With his orange hair, Patrick tends to ______________ in crowds.
10. I couldn't ___________________the gas heater because it was faulty.
Transcript
1 (0:20) In the summer of 2011, as a tourist, I visited the rainforests of Borneo for the very first time, and as you might imagine, it was the overwhelming sounds of the forest that struck me the
most. There's this constant cacophony of noise. Some things actually do stick out. For
example, this here is a big bird, a rhinoceros hornbill. This buzzing is a cicada. This is a family
of gibbons. It's actually singing to each other over a great distance.
2 (0:58) The place where this was recorded was in fact a gibbon reserve, which is why you can hear so many of them, but in fact the most important noise that was coming out of the forest that time
was one that I didn't notice, and in fact nobody there had actually noticed it.
3 (1:13) So, as I said, this was a gibbon reserve. They spend most of their time rehabilitating gibbons, but they also have to spend a lot of their time protecting their area from illegal logging that
takes place on the side. And so if we take the sound of the forest and we actually turn down the
gibbons, the insects, and the rest, in the background, the entire time, in recordings you heard,
was the sound of a chainsaw at great distance. They had three full-time guards who were
posted around this sanctuary whose job was in fact to guard against illegal logging, and one
day, we went walking, again as tourists, out into the forest, and within five minutes' walk, we
stumbled upon somebody who was just sawing a tree down, five minutes' walk, a few hundred
meters from the ranger station. They hadn't been able to hear the chainsaws, because as you
heard, the forest is very, very loud.
4 (2:03) It struck me as quite unacceptable that in this modern time, just a few hundred meters away
from a ranger station in a sanctuary, that in fact nobody could hear it when someone who has
a chainsaw gets fired up. It sounds impossible, but in fact, it was quite true.
5 (2:20) So how do we stop illegal logging? It's really tempting, as an engineer, always to come up with a high-tech, super-crazy high-tech solution, but in fact, you're in the rainforest. It has to be
simple, it has to be scalable, and so what we also noticed while were there was that everything
we needed was already there. We could build a system that would allow us to stop this using
what's already there.
6 (2:42) Who was there? What was already in the forest? Well, we had people. We had this group there that was dedicated, three full-time guards, that was dedicated to go and stop it, but they just
needed to know what was happening out in the forest. The real surprise, this is the big one,
was that there was connectivity out in the forest. There was cell phone service way out in the
middle of nowhere. We're talking hundreds of kilometers from the nearest road, there's
certainly no electricity, but they had very good cell phone service, these people in the towns
were on Facebook all the time, they're surfing the web on their phones, and this sort of got me
thinking that in fact it would be possible to use the sounds of the forest, pick up the sounds of
chainsaws programmatically, because people can't hear them, and send an alert. But you have
to have a device to go up in the trees. So if we can use some device to listen to the sounds of
the forest, connect to the cell phone network that's there, and send an alert to people on the
ground, perhaps we could have a solution to this issue for them.
7 (3:37) But let's take a moment to talk about saving the rainforest, because it's something that we've
definitely all heard about forever. People in my generation have heard about saving the
rainforest since we were kids, and it seems that the message has never changed: We've got to
save the rainforest, it's super urgent, this many football fields have been destroyed yesterday.
and yet here we are today, about half of the rainforest remains, and we have potentially more
urgent problems like climate change.
8 (4:04) But in fact, this is the little-known fact that I didn't realize at the time: Deforestation accounts
for more greenhouse gas than all of the world's planes, trains, cars, trucks and ships
combined. It's the second highest contributor to climate change. Also, according to Interpol, as
much as 90 percent of the logging that takes place in the rainforest is illegal logging, like the
illegal logging that we saw. So if we can help people in the forest enforce the rules that are
there, then in fact we could eat heavily into this 17 percent and potentially have a major impact
in the short term. It might just be the cheapest, fastest way to fight climate change.
9 (4:43) And so here's the system that we imagine. It looks super high tech. The moment a sound of a
chainsaw is heard in the forest, the device picks up the sound of the chainsaw, it sends an alert
through the standard GSM network that's already there to a ranger in the field who can in fact
show up in real time and stop the logging. It's no more about going out and finding a tree that's
been cut. It's not about seeing a tree from a satellite in an area that's been clear cut, it's about
real-time intervention.
10 (5:10) So I said it was the cheapest and fastest way to do it, but in fact, actually, as you saw, they
weren't able to do it, so it may not be so cheap and fast. But if the devices in the trees were
actually cell phones, it could be pretty cheap. Cell phones are thrown away by the hundreds of
millions every year, hundreds of millions in the U.S. alone, not counting the rest of the world,
which of course we should do, but in fact, cell phones are great. They're full of sensors. They
can listen to the sounds of the forest. We do have to protect them. We have to put them in this
box that you see here, and we do have to power them. Powering them is one of the greater
engineering challenges that we had to deal with, because powering a cell phone under a tree
canopy, any sort of solar power under a tree canopy, was an as-yet-unsolved problem, and
that's this unique solar panel design that you see here, which in fact is built also from recycled
byproducts of an industrial process. These are strips that are cut down.
11 (6:04) So this is me putting it all together in my parents' garage, actually. Thanks very much to them for allowing me to do that. As you can see, this is a device up in a tree. What you can see from
here, perhaps, is that they are pretty well obscured up in the tree canopy at a distance. That's
important, because although they are able to hear chainsaw noises up to a kilometer in the
distance, allowing them to cover about three square kilometers, if someone were to take them,
it would make the area unprotected.
12 (4:34) So does it actually work? Well, to test it, we took it back to Indonesia, not the same place, but another place, to another gibbon reserve that was threatened daily by illegal logging. On the
very second day, it picked up illegal chainsaw noises. We were able to get a real-time alert. I
got an email on my phone. Actually, we had just climbed the tree. Everyone had just gotten
back down. All these guys are smoking cigarettes, and then I get an email, and they all quiet
down, and in fact you can hear the chainsaw really, really faint in the background, but no one
had noticed it until that moment. And so then we took off to actually stop these loggers. I was
pretty nervous. This is the moment where we've actually arrived close to where the loggers
are. This is the moment where you can see where I'm actually regretting perhaps the entire
endeavor. I'm not really sure what's on the other side of this hill. That guy's much braver than I
am. But he went, so I had to go, walking up, and in fact, he made it over the hill, and interrupted
the loggers in the act. For them, it was such a surprise -- they had never, ever been interrupted
before -- that it was such an impressive event for them, that we've heard from our partners
they have not been back since. They were, in fact, great guys. They showed us how the entire
operation works, and what they really convinced us on the spot was that if you can show up in
real time and stop people, it's enough of a deterrent they won't come back.
13 (8:00) So -- Thank you. (Applause)
14 (8:08) Word of this spread, possibly because we told a lot of people, and in fact, then some really
amazing stuff started to happen. People from around the world started to send us emails,
phone calls. What we saw was that people throughout Asia, people throughout Africa, people
throughout South America, they told us that they could use it too, and what's most important,
what we'd found that we thought might be exceptional, in the forest there was pretty good cell
phone service. That was not exceptional, we were told, and that particularly is on the periphery
of the forests that are most under threat. And then something really amazing happened, which
was that people started sending us their own old cell phones. So in fact what we have now is a
system where we can use people on the ground, people who are already there, who can both
improve and use the existing connectivity, and we're using old cell phones that are being sent
to us by people from around the world that want their phones to be doing something else in
their afterlife, so to speak. And if the rest of the device can be completely recycled, then we
believe it's an entirely upcycled device.
Talking point
Discuss any of the questions below.
1. What do you think of Topher's solution?
2. How important is it to save rainforests?
3. What environmental problems are common in your country?
The Selfie Revolution
Awesome Facts
INTRO Write a list of 10 reasons as to why the world is awesome. Discuss your lists.
WARMER Look through the gap fill exercise below and try to guess the missing words in numbers 1,2, 13, 17 and 20.
Now listen to the audio and fill in the missing words.
LISTENING
1. There are approximately _____________ bacteria living on every square centimetre of our skin.
2. On average, your skin renews itself every _____________.
3. Frogs shed their skin on a regular basis to ______________________. Some do it every day. And after they’ve pulled it off, they _____________________ it.
4. But frogs can’t swallow without _____________________ because they use their _____________________ to help push food into their stomachs.
5. The stomach of many starfish is actually ______________ out of their mouths, then they _______________ their prey, pre-digest it, and suck the whole thing back in again.
6. Starfish are not actually _____________.
7. And killer whales are not ___________ either, they are ___________________________.
8. And believe it or not, dolphins can call _________________________________________.
9. Dolphins can also ___________________ themselves in the __________________, as can elephants, chimpanzees, and their close relatives bonobos.
10. Who resolve their differences through sex rather than _____________________.
11. Bacteria ___________________ by _______________________________, and they can do it so fast, that theoretically a single bacteria could produce more _______________________ than there are protons in the entire universe.
12. If this 5p was the sun, then this __________________________ would be the earth, and they’d be about that far apart.
13. There are thought to be ________________________________ stars in our galaxy.
14. If this 5p were the sun, and this 5p were the next nearest star, they’d be ___________________ apart, that’s 250 miles.
15. NASA estimates that one object of space junk returns to the earth _______________________. 16. If this 10p coin was our _________________, the Milky Way, and this 10p coin was our nearest big neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, they’d actually only be about that far apart.
17. It’s thought that there’s a ________________________ stars in the observable universe. that’s a followed by ________________ zeros.
18. It’s estimated that there are _____________________________ atoms in every human cell.
19. And there’s thought to be _______________________ cells in the average human body.
20. We lose about __________________________________ skin cells every single minute. But while it’s a waste product for us, dead skin is the main food source for mites.
Now watch the rest of the video and list as many of the remaining 40 facts as you can.
Can you fill in the blanks from the expressions below.
IDIOMS DEFINITION
There ___a world of difference There are 2 things that are very different from each other
To ____ a world of difference To make a great effect, to improve something
To be _______ to the world Deeply asleep
To be worlds ________ To be completely different
To do somebody a world of ________ To make someone feel much better
To _________ the world of something To be very fond of something or someone
________ of this world Wonderful and exciting
Half a Million Secrets
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