Christmas

It was Christmas 2002, and I was appearing in an opera in London. My career as a singer has always been at the centre of my life, but because my mother had just died, I decided to do what she had asked: I took a year’s sabbatical. I also made another decision. I’d fly to Peru to meet a young man called Nick López.

Ten years earlier, a friend had told me about a charity organization called EveryChild. By giving $20 a month, you could help a young person in a developing country. Nick was five years old, living with his parents and two brothers in a shanty town above Lima. We exchanged letters. I enjoyed reading about his life, although it became clear that his family had to struggle to get by. When he was eight he sent me my favourite photograph, which I still keep in my office. Nick was growing up fast.

So here I was on my way to Lima at last to meet him in person. It was an experience that I’ll never forget. The poverty shocked me. Nick and his family live in a two-roomed house, but Nick was a sweet, shy 15-year-old boy with beautiful manners and real dignity, who kept chickens and sold them to help his family. I had been told that giving him too many presents would single him out from the rest of his community, so I brought T-shirts for him and his brothers, and books about caring for chickens. Meeting Nick has given my life a new perspective.

Anti-smoke campaign

What seems to have surprised the health authorities most about the current anti-smoking campaign is the fact that it appears to be having very little effect on the younger sectors of society. However, this is hardly surprising. You can certainly frighten older people with cancer, imminent slow death and other such dangers, but most under twenty-year-olds can’t even conceive what this means. They can’t see far enough ahead to fear death: if they imagine their own funeral, it is a self-indulgent vision, with all their favourite friends sobbing and saying how unfortunate and gorgeous they were. Young people live in the right now, and what they are really afraid of, right now, is smelling bad and looking ugly. You can frighten 16-year-olds with an exaggerated threat of smoker’s halitosis, that sickly smell that no amount of chewing gum can get rid of. You know – the smell that other people detect even when you can’t; the kind that makes members of the opposite sex turn away when you try to kiss them for the first time.

In the 1980s, public health advertisements in Britain tried to extract the attraction from heroin with the slogan "Heroin screws you up" and a picture of a teenager with a really dreadful skin.

The slogan may not have been very effective, but the acne worked well. I suggest that different anti-smoking campaigns should be designed for different age-groups, and that those for young people should show what it does to the living, and forget about threats of death.

The safety of handsets

Experts say there are still large gaps in scientific knowledge about what radiation is doing to users’ bodies and brains. The results of a three-year study highlighted continuing uncertainty over the safety of handsets. Parents were urged to limit mobile phone use by children because of the potential damage. Campaigners have long feared that users of Britain’s 50 million phones are risking cancer, brain damage, Alzheimer’s disease, sleeping disorders and memory loss because of radiation emitted by handsets directly into the head. Now the report says there may be other hidden problems because mobiles have been in widespread use among British people for only a few years.

Professor Anthony Simons, who led the study, said: ‘We cannot be sure what will be found and the possibility of an effect still remains’. ‘It’s still early days, particularly on the use of handsets,’ he added. ‘There could still be effects we don’t know about. We can’t predict what we are going to learn tomorrow. In the meantime, excessive use of mobile phones by young children should be discouraged. While children are growing and developing, they are more susceptible to all sorts of things. About a quarter of mobile phone users are under 18, with many having been given them by their parents so they can easily stay in touch. Those under ten are thought to be particularly vulnerable because their skulls are thinner and may allow radiation to penetrate deeper into the brain. Also their nervous systems are still developing’.

Job interviews

Some employers recruit graduates after a half hour personal interview. This is done in a formal setting, between two people, one of whom controls the conversation. There are always parts of interviews which are different from what is expected. The interviewer may not start at the beginning, and this can be difficult. You will have to order and clarify your thoughts quickly as the interviewer jumps from one point to the other. "Situational questions" are where the interviewer describes a work situation and asks for your solution. Generally you are recommended to think aloud - identify the key points and clarify the information, adding a dash of common sense.

In some cases, you will encounter panel interviews, where you will meet two, three or more interviewers at the same time. It is usual in such cases for the question topics to be split up between the interviewers, so that for example one will cover your academic record, the second concentrating on your reasons for wanting the job, and so on. You will have to build up rapport with each interviewer, adapt to his/her style, and concentrate on the abrupt change of topic. You should try and remember who is who - not their names, but their job or position, so that your answers are given at an appropriate level.

Remember that an interview is a two way process, and you should use the opportunity to ask questions. At the end of the interview you should have enough information to make a decision, if the job is offered to you.

Turism

Some tourists prefer to travel in groups, with their holiday planned in advance for them, on what are known as .package tours.. However, the advantages of planning your holiday yourself are considerable. You are free to choose exactly where and when you want to go, how you want to travel, and how long you want to stay. You can avoid the large resorts, whereas holidaymakers on package tours are often trapped among crowds of other tourists. You can eat the food of the region at reasonable prices in local restaurants, while they are served with "international" dishes and chips with everything.

Moreover, although most people return from package holidays reasonably satisfied, this is not always the case. Take the nightmare experience of a Frenchman who went on a package to the Caribbean. The hotel in the small port was overbooked and he had to wander round the streets looking for a bed and breakfast place. While doing this he was arrested by the police for vagrancy. He was taken to court, where he told the magistrate it was the hotel.s fault, but the magistrate was the hotel manager.s brother and he charged the tourist with making false accusations.

He was sent to prison for eight days, by which time his return flight had left. He did not have enough money left for a return ticket so he went to a post office to send a telegram to his family in France asking for money. He was arrested even before he could send it and charged with illegal immigration, as he could now no longer be considered a tourist, having missed his flight. He now needed a work permit in order to stay, which he of course did not have. He was fined 500 dollars for this offence, and another 500 dollars when he again blamed the hotel. All things considered, a package holidays is no guarantee of satisfaction. I think I'd rather plan my holiday independently, or stay at home.

Television

I don’t think that television has contributed much to our lives; in fact it gives us by its own nature a wrong slant. Perhaps the cardinal weakness in its development arose from its concern with entertainment rather than with information. Pictures on the screen have been used more to affect than to instruct. Even the news programmes set out to encourage more reaction and less reflection. Pictures shown briefly do not make you think, they merely invite you to look for the sequel, the next picture. The more you see the less you remember; you see too much to remember anything specific. The process of viewing is passive and the result of viewing is passive, too. One of the most effective documentaries shown on TV was a programme
about the plight of a homeless family. The papers and radio programmes were full of it but it didn’t change anything. Today the problem of homelessness is worse; things have not got better. TV transmits vicarious feelings. I mean, you are persuaded to react to experiences which are unfamiliar to you in your everyday life. And persuasion is an important word here because you are persuaded also to react in certain ways and to a degree that will not disturb you or your expectations too much. Words are also used for their affective rather than informative properties, witness terms like chaos, confusion, fundamental, this moment in time, profile. However, words have more chance of forcing thought upon us than pictures have, and
more so if they are not illustrated by pictures.

What should you eat?

Eating the right foods in the right amounts is called having a balanced diet. This is very important because your body needs daily amounts of different things and no one food has all the things that your body needs to stay healthy and work properly. Most people know that eating the right food is important for physical health. But what a lot of people don´t realise is that food can affect your mental health too.

The things obtained from the food you eat can be grouped according to what they do. Body-building foods are called proteins and provide the substances which make us grow. They help repair parts of the body such as the skin and the tissues inside the body when they are worn out*. Energy foods, fats and carbohydrates, give you energy. They are the fuel your body needs. Too much and they will be stored as fat in the body and you´ll become overweight.

In the past, people sometimes got sick even though they ate a lot of body-building and energy foods. Scientists then discovered that the body needs other substances to protect it against disease. These are protective foods: vitamins and mineral salts. Vitamins and mineral salts also help our bodies to make the best use of the food we eat.

(From: Starting Out-A Life Skills Record Book, Collins:1994)

*Worn out: old, damaged.

Music TeleVision

Just after midnight on August 1st, 1987, a new television channel was born. This channel has turned out to be one of the most significant influences on international youth culture in the last 20 years. MTV was broadcast for the first time from the Roxy Club in Amsterdam to 1\'6 million households. Today, MTV reaches over 250 million homes across five continents. MTV is a youth entertainment channel on cable networks operating 24 hours a day. It offers young people music, videos and a wide variety of programmes. This channel also has the latest graphics and it mirrors the varied lifestyles of the world´s youth. MTV is not only the largest TV channel in Europe, but is actually the biggest in the world.

MTV´s influence has also spread into the social and political arena. Surprising the public with the slogan \"Rock the Vote\", it is said that MTV brought an estimated two million young people to the polls in the 1992 American elections. Most of them voted for Clinton. MTV aims at 16-to 25-years-old people across the world and has tackled social issues like AIDS, drug abuse, drunken driving and the environment. The purpose of their campaign is to raise awareness, not to preach sermons to young people.

MTV is not without its critics, however. In the UK, for example, where people are proud of the quality of British television, MTV has been accused of being shallow with hardly and investigative reporting -a light weight channel exporting American culture. Such criticism had been vigorously rejected by representatives of MTV, who argue that the programmes reflect the tastes and culture of local audiences across the world and bring less well-known performers and music onto a global stage.

Whatever your opinion is, one thing is certain: youngsters today are making their own choices. Judging by the viewing ratings, MTV is their choice.

Glossary:

has turned to be: has become
households: homes
has tackled: has spoken about
shallow: superficial
awareness: knowledge

A FAMILY AFFAIR-BENETTON.

http://www.benetton.com/html/index.shtml

In the mid-1950s, Guliana Benetton made her elder boy Luciano a multi-coloured pullover. “It was the pullover which started the whole thing”, Luciano tells me as we sit in his villa near Treviso in north-eastern Italy, where he was born. “The colours were more exciting than the ones normally used in the men´s sweaters at that time: I saw that my friends liked it and I thought that it had marked potential”. And so Benetton was born. The bright, vibrant colours in wich the original sweater was knitted became its trade mark. Today the gigantic multinational clothing empire is one of the world´s biggest suppliers of casual clothes.

In the 1960’s the two younger brothers, Carlo and Gilberto, joined Giuliana and Luciano to build what is probably the most remarkable family venture of the late 20th century, a corporation which has now diversified into banking, supermarkets, sporting equipment, restaurants and Formula One racing cars. Of the four founders, Carlo, the youngest, is the production director of Benetton Group worldwide. He also supervises the sheep ranches in Patagonia where ten per cent of Benetton wool is produced. Gilberto, vicepresident, is the financial expert. Giuliana is the design director, the creative genius behind Benetton clothes. The eldest, Luciano, is the president of Benetton Group and responsible for the company´s long-term and global strategies. .
.
The firm´s success depends on a family structure which is now rare in Italy and rest of Europe. Luciano is convinced that Benetton could never have taken off without the family partnership. “The crucial pillars of the operation were my sister and two brothers” he says. “Undoubtedly, the success of this relationship depended on a division of work and on our total trust in what each of us is doing”.

Evolution

In the classification of animals there is an order called Primates. In their appearence the primates resemble the human being more than any other animals do. It is natural to deduce that they are more closely related to human beings than any other animals are. In fact, the human being must be included as a primate, if any sense at all is to be made of animal classification.

Once evolution is accepted, one must come to the inevitable conclusion that the various primates, including the human being, have developed from some single ancestral stem and that all are to varying degrees cousins, so to speak.

The resemblance of other primates to human beings is both endearing and repulsive. The monkey house is always the most popular exhibit in a zoo, and people will watch anthropoid apes with fascination. Congreve wrote in 1695, however, “I could never look upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections”. It is not hard to guess that those “mortifying reflections” must have been to the effect that human beings might be described as large and somewhat more intelligent monkeys.

Cigarettes have 600 additives

Tobacco firms have admitted putting 600 secret ingredients and additives in cigarettes, the Healt Secretary disclosed yesterday. Alan Milburn promised that the list would be published in full within weeks so that consumers, for the first time, would “know that they are smoking”.

His comments at a meeting of the Commons Health Comittee came ahead of a European directive on tobacco, that will put new ceilings on nicotine and carbon monoxide levels, increase the size of warnings and restrict the use of “mild” or “low tar” to describe cigarettes brands. Although tobacco companies had promised the previous Government that they would provide the Department of Health with a full list of additives, Mr. Milburn said that he had only just received the dossier.

The ingredients include sucrose, cocoa, citric acid and ammonium which speeds up the nicotine “hit”. Mr. Milburn said that “until very recently nobody knew about any of these ingredients”, adding that he was demanding further information from the tobacco companies so that they could show which brands contained the additives. “It is our intention to put that information on the Health Department´s website before too long”, he said.

Glossary:

tar = alquitrán
sucrose = sacarosa

Children on the mines

Among the saddest aspects of old time mining were the accidents suffered by boys -some of quite tender years- and by the young girls employed in surface operations. Before the invention of automatic machinery to carry out the various refining processes, every mine required a large amount of this kind of poorly-paid, unskilled labour; and the general poverty prevailing at the time compelled parents to send children into this kind of employment to raise the family income.Many of the resulting accidents to children were caused by their disobedience or playfulness. A grim example of this occurred at Dolcoath in Wales, in April 1869. During the previous summer, the boys had begun the practice of climbing on to the wooden roofs of the houses in the mine to eat their dinner. They preferred this airy and elevated place to the room provided for them; but as this open-air dining injured the roofs and put the kids in danger, they were scolded and fined for this offence by the owners.One day a little boy of eight was released at twelve for his dinner. Half an hour later he was found crying for help from the top of a cottage: the roof was so damaged that it could not stand the weight of his body.

Leaving home

So you’re about to leave home and go to university or college. Afraid ? No doubt youve had advice from parents and teachers. But what you really need is to hear it from the experts - the students themselves. So here are some tips from students who volunteered to pass on their strategies for getting through that awful first term.

Paul: “The thought of everything I would be leaving behind got me worried: Mum’s cooking. Mum doing the washing and ironing. Dad lending me money (maybe) ! At first, takeaways and launderettes seemed the easiest option, but soon pasta and beans on toast took the place of takeaways, and doing my own washing and ironing replaced the launderette. It works out better on your wallet. You soon settle down, and parents are only a phone call away.”

Claire: “The best thing about my first term was the wonderful feeling of living with my friends and having no one to tell us when to go to bed or get up. The problem was that there was also no one to clean up after us, and it got to the point where you couldn’t use cutlery or a plate without having to wash up first. One day we decided enough was enough. We drew up a chart listing household jobs and dividing it so no one got lumbered with doing everything.”

Catherine: “When I was shown my room on my first day, my heart sank and my mother cried. It had grey walls, no carpet and a lumpy grey mattress. Then I remembered some advice a friend had given me. Pack a rug in case there’s a stain on the carpet, and a poster to cover cracks in the wall. Once I’d got these things out, it looked better already. As I got to know people, I realized I wasn’t the only one who felt awful. My advice is not to worry about feeling homesick: it’s totally normal.”

A big thank you to all the graduates and undergraduates who wrote to us.

Dear Alice...

Dear Alice,

How are you? I thought I’d better drop you a line from Ireland before I get home this weekend. I am having such a wonderful holiday here that I haven’t had much time for writing, but I’ve taken three films of photos already! I hope they turn out so that I can show you how nice Ireland is.

Do you remember how worried I was before I came, when you tried to calm me down? Well, I am glad I listened to your advice. Ellie is so nice and friendly -you’d love her. She hasn’ got red hair or freckles- so much for stereotypes! She is really funny and she loves to show me around Dublin. We’ve had a tour of Trinity College and yesterday we went to the Irish Writer’s Museum which is well worth visiting! It is the nicest café I’ve ever been in and there’s a great atmosphere. It’s the only place here in Ireland where you can drink proper coffee-Bliss!

Ireland is really one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited. It is as green as they say. Mind you, it does rain a lot here! The people are really friendly and that makes up for the weather! We went on a tour of southern Ireland last week but we couldn’t do much camping because of the rain.

We visited the National Parks in Connemara and Killarney and I went to Jameson’s Distillery to see how whisky is made. I was going to get some for my dad, but alcohol is much more expensive here than in Spain and so it wasn’t worth it.

I’ve already decided that I’d like to come back to Ireland. How do you fancy coming with me? Anyway, we can talk about it next week and then once you meet Ellie in October, I’m sure you’ll be convinced.

I’ll see you very soon. Love. Luisa.

Couples

If you do not get legally married, the law will almost never treat you as if you were, no matter how long you live with someone. If it is a choice between marrying someone or living with them longterm, then marriage wins when it comes to financial security, especially for women. It may be the twentyfirst century, but it is still women who earn less, stay at home more and generally look after any children.

They are usually financially weaker when a relationship ends. If you are married, both partners normally have a right to a share of the marital home and its contents, whether they have contributed financially or not. A spouse who has been left, especially with children, may get it all. An ex-spouse may be entitled to personal maintenance, quite apart from any other maintenance paid for the children, plus the right to a share of the other's pension fund. An unmarried partner has no such rights.

Widows and widowers also get more financial protection from the law than live-in partners. If you die without a will, your widow or widower will automatically inherit - a lover will not, and a spouse has the right to challenge a will if they or any children are not provided for. And, married or not, there exists a strange concept in law called "joint and several liability", whereby, as far as debt is concerned, what's hers is his and what.s his is hers. In other words, you both owe all the money.

Suppose you buy a TV and DVD player costing £1,000. You take out a loan over two years. Then, love being love, one of you decides to move out and stops paying the bills, but takes the TV and DVD. Who has to pay the debt? The finance company can sue either of you, no matter who actually has possession of the property. And if you are the one left behind, you are easier to find. One way out is to choose who buys what. Take it in turns so you know exactly who owns what.

Electricity

Electricity is so much taken for granted in modern city life that we rarely think twice when turning on the light, when waiting for the traffic lights to change, or when using the many household devices that surround us. We rarely bother to think about this “wonder” of modern science until something goes wrong.

In the summer of 1959, something did go wrong with the power station that provided New York with electricity, so that for many hours normal life ground to a halt. Electric trains refused to move, the people in them being forced to sit helpless in the dark. Lifts in skyscrapers left their occupants stranded between floors for hours, or otherwise they had to walk down hundreds of stairs in the dark. Broadway and Fifth Avenue in an instant became gloomy and uninviting, and people couldn’t leave their homes for fear of being robbed in the dark streets, for although the police had orders to stand by in case of emergency, they were just as isolated and confused as everyone else.

Meanwhile, in the homes, disorder prevailed as well. New York can be stifling in the summer and this year was no exception. Cool, air-conditioned apartments became furnaces, cakes and joints of meat remained uncooked in cooling ovens, and people sat impatient and frightened in the dark as if an unseen enemy had arrived from Mars. The only people who remained untroubled by the darkness were the blind. One of the strangest things that happened was when some fifty blind people led many sighted workers home from the factories. When the lights came on again, hardly a person in the city could have turned on a switch without reflecting how great a servant he had at his fingertips.

Hello Dolly

When the most famous lamb in history emerged into the world in 1996, she brought with her a host of ethical and scientific dilemmas. The modest shed where she was born near the Roslin Institute in Scotland, may prove to be one of the most significant sites of scientific history.

Today, Dolly lives inside a locked concrete building. She has never eaten grass or been in the open air for fear that she might get ill, and questions still remain about her true age: “Is she her chronological age, or the age of the sheep from which she was cloned?”.

Cloning raises a huge number of pressing questions and some ethical dilemmas. Firstly, it has raised the possibility of deliberately altering parental chromosomes to favour selected creative talents, a resistance to disease and ageing, or even a predisposition towards crime, that is to say, engineering another Mozart or Al Capone.

Secondly, cloning challenges our sense of ourselves in a more ambiguous way. In fact, our belief in our unique selves is all we have, the one reassurance that our lives have some kind of special meaning simply simply by being unique. Even when we shrink into virtual anonymity, at a football match or political rally, we still sense that our own particular bundle of quirks and reflexes give us our chief reason for being alive at all.

Finally, cloning interferes with the process of nature and in some way seems to threaten our idea of the soul. As parents we are delighted when our children resemble us, but do we want them to be our replicas, with our same dreams, ambitions and fears?

Books

Books and audio-visual media should not be seen as opponents but rather as interaction to which young people should be introduced. The mass media offer .educational impulses.: they stimulate imagination, arouse curiosity and the desire to learn more, but what is heard and seen must be supplemented with books.

Let us give one practical example: a television programme is announced about developing countries. The teacher or youth group leader draws the attention of the students to it and announces that the programme will be discussed (or preferably the programme is viewed by the group). The young people are then asked to find books in the library on the subject and read about the problem. The television programme arouses interest and puts forward questions.

Books on the subject are read with interest and in the hope of learning more. Another possibility: in a programme, mention is made of appropriate books for supplementing it and the opportunity is announced for participating in a discussion on the subject, to be held on radio or television or in centres for popular education where everyone can take part actively.
Endeavours of this kind have had very positive results.

USA

The United States is a relatively young country that occupies over 9 million square kilometres between Canada and Mexico. Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, Wake and Midway form part of the overseas territories of the country as annexed or as associated free states with internal self-governing bodies.

Originally inhabited by about one and a half million American Indians, the country became a nation of immigrants who came first from West and Northern Europe, then from Asia and Latin America, in search of land, freedom and better living conditions. Spanish explorers, attracted by gold, established themselves in Florida, Texas and the western part of the country, the French set up as fur traders, and the British were the first to colonise on a large scale, followed by waves of Irish, Germans, Dutch and Swedes. From Africa, people were taken against their will to provide slave labour for the southern colonists.

In order to survive, immigrants had to learn to organise and govern themselves, which wasn't easy for people who came from different cultural backgrounds and who had to undergo periods of famine, diseases, Indian attacks and unfavourable weather conditions. White people took away the Indians. land through treaties, war or threat.

The white man's civilisation cut down forests, built railways and big cities. Indians were displaced and confined to reservations. Groups such as the Chinese, Russians, Jews and Rumanians, who arrived later, were not welcomed by the older immigration groups, who felt the newcomers were overcrowding their cities and taking away their jobs. The newcomers were greeted with hostility and prejudice. Therefore, they formed their own ethnic neighbourhoods where they maintained their languages and customs.