Music can connect people everywhere. It can cross languages, countries and cultures. It can raise your mood, calm you down or give inspiration. But have you ever wondered when your music taste was formed?
A recent New York Times analysis of Spotify found out that the music we listen to when we are teenagers sets our musical preferences for the rest of our lives.
According to the Harvard Business Review, asking for a promotion can be nerve-wracking. How do you prepare for that conversation with your boss? What information should you have at the ready? And how exactly do you make your case?
Our world is unequal. The distribution of the vaccines shows that. Rich countries have more doses than they need, while poor countries can’t buy enough. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says that this situation is slowing global economic recovery. Economists predict that low-income countries will lose at least $38 billion of their GDP in 2021 because of low vaccination rates.
Low vaccination rates also put a lot of pressure on the healthcare systems of poor countries. Hospitals can’t treat other illnesses because of Covid.
New smartphones come on the market at least every year. Each model has its own pros and cons, giving that company the opportunity to beat out its nearest competitors for a share of the market. But it's a tough market! If you were going to introduce a new phone, you'd need to make it pretty special.
That's exactly the task required here: you and your teacher are going to come up with a new phone and create an ad that will persuade consumers to buy it.
Try to include two or more of the following power words:
In the year 794, Naomi Hasegawa's family started Ichiwa, a mochi shop, next to the Imamiya Shrine in Kyoto to feed pilgrims who had traveled to pray for pandemic relief. Over a millenium later, the shop still sells mochi to people struggling with a pandemic. How has it survived so long, through pandemics, wars, natural disasters, and the rise and fall of empires? By putting tradition and stability over profit and growth.
Dr. Nhung Tran-Davies was only five years old when she needed to flee home because of the Vietnam War. She and her family spent eight months in a refugee camp in Malaysia. Then an Alberta church sponsored their immigration to Canada.
Nhung arrived in Canada on a boat with 300 other refugees. She remembers it was nauseating and suffocating.
At the airport gate, a little Canadian girl called Adrienne gave a doll to Nhung.
Did you watch the 93rd Academy Awards ceremony this year? Chances are you didn’t, and you weren’t alone. The 2021 edition was the least viewed and lowest rated in the award show’s history, according to Nielsen Ratings. Take a look at this graph from CNBC below:
Dogs have already been trained to smell drugs, cancer, and even blood sugar changes in people with diabetes. Now they're learning how to smell Covid-19. In trials, dogs detected the virus over 95% of the time, more accurately than rapid blood or swab tests. The dogs have even been able to detect Covid in people who aren't showing symptoms yet, which taking temperatures can't do.
Around 18 billion cigarettes are sold around the world every day. In the United States alone, it is estimated that cigarette-related healthcare costs exceed USD $300 billion per year. However, the sale of cigarettes in the US has had an interesting history over the past century.
Please have a look at the chart below and discuss what you see with your teacher.
Decoding cryptograms is a great way to sharpen your English. A cryptogram with a simple substitution code is fairly easy to decipher, but it forces you to think carefully about spelling and vocabulary. As your English improves, you can move on to harder codes, like ones that don't put spaces in between the words so you have to figure out yourself where one word ends and the next begins.
This simple code uses the English alphabet. Letters are swapped for letters:
When computer games appeared, men were their target consumer. Games were created for men, and the main characters in games—protagonists—were mostly men too. Women were mostly presented as characters who needed help. For instance, Mario and Princess Peach.
Recently, the gaming industry has started targeting women too. More female protagonists are appearing.
Look at the graphs below and discuss them with your teacher.
Since smartphones first connected us to the Internet, the time we spend on our phones has been increasing.
Vaccines can be a controversial issue in some cultures. For instance, according to the Washington Post, in the United States, 9 per cent of adults oppose vaccinating children against measles. Also, many people believe that the coronavirus vaccines are not safe.
Countries have different policies regarding whether it should be mandatory to vaccinate children. Have a look at the map below and discuss what you see with your teacher.
According to the Japan Times, the Japanese government plans to encourage firms to allow their employees to choose to work four days a week instead of five, aiming to improve the balance between work and life for people who have family care responsibilities.
The coronavirus pandemic has helped the idea of a four-day workweek gain traction as the health crisis has caused people to spend more time at home.
According to The Guardian, the renowned Swiss architect Le Corbusier developed a system that has shaped much of the world. It dictates everything from the height of a door handle to the scale of a staircase. But the system, Le Modulor, developed in the 1940s, was created with a handsome six-foot-tall British policeman in mind. So all sizes are governed by the need to make everything as convenient as possible for Le Corbusier’s ideal man.
Vaccination against the COVID-19 virus started in December 2020. It has progressed at an unequal rate around the world. As of late April 2021, only a few million people had received a vaccination in the whole of the African continent, while over 200 million Americans had been vaccinated.
However, for some smaller countries, the situation can change very quickly.
Please take a look at the graph below and discuss what you see with your teacher.
Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas has designed a high-tech face mask that looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. Called Xupermask, it has three dual-speed fans to keep you cool, and a design to keep you looking cool. The real money-grabbers are noise-canceling headphones, LED lights for nighttime, and Bluetooth capability. You can listen to music, take and make calls, and put on your own light show while wearing this thing. It doesn't come cheap, but at $299, it costs less than a set of Bose headphones, and a lot less than a mobile phone!
Bloomberg News reports that according to Microsoft's Work Trend Index, which polled 30,000 people from a variety of companies in 31 countries and used trillions of data points, the majority of workers feel they are struggling or just surviving in pandemic work conditions and a large percentage are considering leaving their employer this year.
Here in Melbourne, Australia, we are heading into the colder months.
Daylight Saving has just ended, so we moved our clocks back an hour. On the plus side, we all got an extra hour of sleep over the weekend. But it also means the sun sets an hour earlier.
If I want to catch the daylight, I have to walk the dog earlier. I also have to put better lights on my bicycle because I'm cycling more often around twilight and dusk.
"Prepare for warp speed." If you're a Trekkie or Star Wars fan, and maybe even if you're not, you've heard about warp drives and probably dreamed of being able to travel faster than the speed of light. It seemed like the stuff of fantasy—until now. Physicist Erik Lentz has come up with a theoretical model of a warp drive that would shorten a trip to the star Proxima Centauri, the closest star beyond our solar system, from 50,000–70,000 years using rocket fuel, or 100 years using nuclear fuel, to just 4 years and 3 months.
