Oxford When language learners arrive in Oxford, many ask where the university is, thinking that they will be shown just one building. It’s up to their teachers to explain that Oxford university is made up of a collection of many different colleges and institutions, each with its own history and characteristics. There are many other surprises that learners discover about the city and its university. Katie Jennings is a social organizer at King’s St Joseph’s Hall in East Oxford, and it is her job to organize activities for learners outside of lesson time. She says many learners are surprised to discover that Oxford is a home to a wide variety of nationalities and ethnic groups, and one of the most popular social events is a night out at one of the town’s Latin American dance clubs. After a day spent learning English and absorbing the ancient atmosphere of the university, learners can samba the night away. The city also has a thriving Asian community, and the sight of women in saris is as common in Oxford’s streets as academics in gowns and mortarboards. There is also a mouth-watering selection of Asian restaurants serving curries, as well as shops stocked with exotic vegetables and fruits. The city has attracted such a diverse population not only because of the university, but also because it is an important industrial centre which is known for car manufacturing among other things. In spite of large industrial areas, the old of the city centre has remained surprisingly intact. Carmel Engin, who teaches at the Lake School, says many learners are surprised to find that the city is free from the usual high-rise modern buildings. “From the centre of Oxford, you can see green hills in the distance, and this will make learners deeply feel that they are in a small, friendly town, but not just another modern metropolis.” Some learners will be tempted to explore those green hills—Oxford is surrounded by some of the most beautiful countryside in southern England—but, as Engin admits, with so much to do and see in the city, few learners find the time, to explore its surroundings.
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Parliamentary Elections in Afghanistan For the first time in three decades Afghanistan is holding parliamentary elections. It’s a momentous time for a country still trying to emerge from years of war. There’s been much criticism that these polls will only consolidate the power of the country’s powerful commanders, the warlords with dubious histories. But Lyse Doucet, who’s been covering Afghanistan since the late nineteen eighties, has discovered that in a nation where a new political culture is only slowly taking shape, the very existence of an election process has brought new energy to a lung-stagnant political life: Now there is a veritable forest of signs at every square and roundabout in Kabul and other cities, billboards selling luxury watches, promoting national unity the new Afghan army. But, for the past month billboard, walls and fences across this land have been telling another story. Everywhere you look there are the faces of election candidates, middle aged men in suits and ties, men with turbans and long thick beards as dark as the night or as white as the first Afghan snow, hardly anyone is smiling. Tradition says photography is serious business. Even. wedding photographs here barely coax a smile. And in a country where only 4 years ago, women were largely confined to their homes under an oppressive Taliban rule, there are their faces too: candidates like young Sabrina with a fetching canary yellow headscarf, Shukda with finely penciled eyebrow, gazing into the distance, cradling a pen in her hand. The faces are plastered everywhere, on every available bit of space, sometimes on top of each other. It’s led to Afghan cartoonists sketching someone’s face on top of someone else’s legs. At first glance, these walls are just an unsightly mess of photographs. But, like the carpets of old, if you know this nation’s history, you can read meaning .into what seem like random patterns. These layers of paper form a bright new canvas of a nation’s dark history. General Ulumi who once worked with the Soviet Red Army is running for parliament. There’s also Mullah Khaqsar who used to execute the writ of the Taliban. But there’s also Malalai Joya, the young woman who, a few years ago, bravely condemned the warlords in public. In this election, candidates must run as individuals, not as members of parties. But Afghans know who everyone is. They know their past. They know their father, their grandfather, or at least, they do in most cases. But what if they don’t? In the last month of campaigning, in towns and villages across this country, Afghans, from village elders with wizened faces, to wide-eyed teenagers too young to vote, have sat cross legged in the shades of mulberry tress, or in air-conditioned rooms cooled with electricity powered by generators. They’ve pondered and argued and debated the questions of this time. One dimensional photograph, after all, only tells part of this new story. As one Afghan friend put it, in real life, many candidates with a past are two-faced. If elected to Parliament, it’s still not clear which face they will show. But whatever happens, the opening of Parliament will be the start of a new chapter. And no one here can say with certainty how that Afghan story will unfold.
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Robot Even before the first robot was built, the subject of robotics was controversial. The word "robot" was coined in 1921 by a Czech playwright who wrote about a colony of machines endowed with artificial intelligence that eventually turned against3 their human creators. Although that account was fictional, the first industrial robots were in use by the early 1960s. Today, we continue to be intrigued by robots and their potential for both good and evil. Basically, a robot is any machine that performs work or other actions normally done by humans. Most robots are used in factories to make products such as cars and electronics. Others are used to explore underwater, in volcanoes and even on other planets. Robots consist of three main components: a brain, which is usually a computer; actuators and mechanical parts such as motors, wheels and gears; and sensors for detecting images, sound, temperature, motion and light. With these basic components, robots can interact with their environment and perform the tasks they are designed to carry out. The advantages are obvious — robots can do things humans just don’t want to do, and they are usually more cost effective. Robots can also do things more precisely than humans and allow progress in medical science and other useful advances. But, as with any machine, a robot can break down and even cause disaster. There’s also the possibility that wicked people will use robots for evil purposes. Yet this is also true with other forms of technology such as weapons and biological material. Robots will probably be used even more in the future. They will continue to do tasks where danger, repetition, cost or the need for precision prevents humans from performing. As to whether they will be used for good or evil, that depends on the nature of the humans who create them.
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Water Crisis in Spain There’ve been floods, gales and heat waves across Europe-and some lay the blame for the unpredictable weather on climate change. Spain is undergoing its worst drought for sixty years with many areas in the south of the country not seeing a drop of rain for months. Some reservoirs are nearly empty while the volume of water in some rivers is down to a third of its normal level. Guadalajara, in the centre of the country, used to be a prosperous tourist area. Its old Moorish name, ironically, means "water running through rocks." But when Emma Jane Kirby visited the small town of Buendia, she found an ecological disaster area in the marketing. There’s a strange smell around the lake at Buendia, the sort of smell that greets you when you first open the fridge after a week or two away from home—a putrid stench of salad leaves that’ve begun to turn to compost in their cellophane bag. I’m reluctant to mention this to my companion, Marco ObisP0 because this after are is the place where he has spent every one of his summer holidays and a just few hours ago we were pouting over the family photograph books while he reminisced wistfully about his idyllic childhood. The problem is I don’t recognize this place as being the same one he showed me in the pictures Those images boasted bronzed children racing joyfully down a bank of emerald green grass towards a vast expanse of water so blue that the cornflower sky above looked dazzled. But this landscape is bleached and barren, the banks crusted white, the ponds patchy and the colour of thin ink. Guadalajara in the centre of Spain has been hit hard by drought. The rains haven’t come since spring last year, leaving the soil parched and lifeless, as cracked and scarred as the face of a small pox victim. The sun has sucked the life from anything that once had the energy to be green and stealthily, its hot tongue has lapped away at the lake’s edge reducing the reservoirs to a fifth of the size they were twenty years ago. As quickly as the water’s evaporated, so have the tourists—the holidaymakers from all over Europe with whom Marco played as a child have been lured away to other areas of Spain where swimming or sailing a boat can be done without fear of scraping knees or hulls on the lake bed. If the landscape is crying out for new water management, then it’s weeping with painful dust-dry tears. North east of Buendia, only the ancient Spanish pine forests seem able to sustain life, some atavistic survival instinct wing them triumph over droughts which long ago killed off the weaker competition. But the trees are now so dehydrated and sapless they’ve become irresistible to fire-two weeks ago, thirteen thousand hectares were lost to a spark from a barbecue-an inferno that also claimed the lives of eleven men. As far as the eye can see now, the hills are almost bare.
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Guitar Today we tell about a very popular musical instrument. Listen and see if you can guess what it is. If you guess it was a guitar, you are correct. The Museum of Fine Arts in the eastern city of Boston, Massachusetts, recently began showing a collection of guitars. The exhibit is called Dangerous Curves: The Art of the Guitar. It shows how the instrument developed during the past four centuries. Probably no other musical instrument is as poplar around the world as guitar. Musicians use the guitar for almost every kind of music. Country and western music would not be the same without a guitar. The traditional Spanish folk music called Flamenco could not exist without a guitar. The second of American blues music would not be the same without the sad cry of the guitar. And rock and roll music would almost be impossible without this instrument. Music exports do not agree about where the guitar first was played. Most agree it is ancient. Some experts say an instrument very much like a guitar was played in Egypt more than a thousand years ago. Some other experts say that the ancestor of the modern guitar was brought to Spain from Persia sometime in the twelfth century. The guitar continued to develop in Spain. In the seventeen hundreds it became similar to the instrument we know today. Many famous musicians played the instrument. The famous Italian violinist Niccolo Paganinni played and wrote music for the guitar in the early eighteen hundreds. Franz Schubert used the guitar to write some of his famous works. In modem times Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia helped make the instrument extremely popular. One kind of music for the guitar developed in the southern area of Spain called Adalusia. It will always be strongly linked with the Spanish guitar. It is called Flamenco. One guitar in the Boston Fine Arts display was played by Les Paul. It is a very old electric guitar. Mister Paul began experimenting with ways to make an electric guitar in the nineteen thirties. The Gibson Guitar Company began producing its famous Les Paul Guitar in 1952. The instrument has the same shape and the same six strings as the traditional guitar, but it sounds very different. Listen to a Les Paul recording. It was the fifth most popular song in the United States in 1952. The guitar has always been important to blues music. The electric guitar Mister Paul helped develop made modem blues music possible: There have been many great blues guitarists. Yet, music experts say all blues guitar players are measured against one man and his famous guitar. That man is B-B King. Every blues fan knows that years ago B-B King named his guitar Lucille. Here B-B King plays Lucille on his famous recording of The Thrill Is Gone B-B King’s guitar, Lucille, is so important to American music that the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC has asked for it. They want to display the large, beautiful black guitar in one of the museums because it is a part of American culture. Another famous guitar in American music also has a name. It belongs to country music star Willie Nelson. His guitar is as famous in country music as Lucille is in blues music. Its name is Trigger. Trigger is really a very ugly guitar. It looks like an old, broken instrument someone threw away. Several famous people have written their names on it. A huge hole was tom in the front of it a long time ago. It looks severely damaged. But the huge hole, the names and other marks seem to add to its sound. Listen while Willie Nelson and Trigger play of, Angel Flying Too Close To the Ground.
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The Environment in Perspective:Is Everything Getting Steadily Worse? Much of the discussion of environmental problems in the popular press leaves the reader with the impression that matters have been growing steadily worse, and that pollution is largely a product of the profit system and modern industrialization. There are environmental problems today that are both enormous and pressing, but in fact pollution is nothing new. Medieval cities were pestholes—the streets and rivers were littered with garbage and the air stank of rotting wastes. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a German traveler reported that to get a view of London from the tower of St. Paul’s, one had to get there very early in the morning “before the air was full of coal smoke.” Since 1960 there has been progress in solving some pollution problems, much of it the result of concerted efforts to protect the environment. The quality of the air in most Canadian cities has improved. In Toronto, for example, the concentration of suspended particulates, or soot, in the air has fallen dramatically since 1962. To put this figure in perspective, it should be noted that the current health advisory level for the index is 32. At a level of 58, people with chronic respiratory diseases may be affected. At 100, even healthy people may be affected by prolonged conditions, and those with cardiac and respiratory diseases could suffer severe effects Recently in Toronto, the index has exceeded 32 on fewer than half a dozen days annually. Similar improvements have occurred elsewhere in Canada and in other industrialized countries. Even the famous, or rather infamous, “fogs” of London are almost a thing of the past. There have been two high readings of particular note in the British capital in 1959 (when the index rose to 275 and there was a 10 percent increase over the normal number of deaths) and in 1962 (when the index rose to 575 and there was a 20 percent increase in mortality). But more recently, London’s, cleaner air has resulted in an astounding 50 percent increase in the number of hours of winter sunshine. In short, pollution problems are not a uniquely modem phenomenon, nor is every part of the environment deteriorating relentlessly. Environmental problems do not occur exclusively in capitalist economies. For example, in the People’s Republic of China, coal soot from factory smokestacks in Beijing envelops the city in a thick black haze. Similarly, smoke from brown-coal furnaces pollutes the air almost everywhere in Eastern Europe. It has been estimated that a third of Poland’s citizens live in areas of “ecological disaster”. The citizens of Leipzig, a major industrial city in what was formerly East Germany, have a life expectancy a full six years shorter than the national average. However, we do not mean to suggest that all is well with the environment in market-oriented economies or that there is nothing more to do. While there have been some improvements, serious problems remain. Our world is now subject to a number of new pollutants, most of which are far more dangerous than those we have reduced, even though they may be less visible and less malodorous While environmental problems are neither new nor confined only to capitalist, industrialized economies, these facts are not legitimate grounds for complacency. The potential damage that we are inflicting on ourselves and on our surroundings is very real and very substantial.