Hello there,
Today we worked on word formation and you’ll most definitely have some homework on that. 
We talked a bit about science and its fields of influence. Any thoughts on that? We read the article which has just been published on the previous post. I myself found it pretty interesting – what about you guys?
HOMEWORK
- Coursebook:
Cheers!!
Cleanliness is next to godlessness
Nov 20th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Soaping away your outer dirt may lead to inner evil
PUBLIC displays of untidiness, such as graffiti, may promote bad behaviour, but when it comes to personal cleanliness the opposite appears to be true. A study just published in Psychological Science by Simone Schnall of the University of Plymouth and her colleagues shows that washing with soap and water makes people view unethical activities as more acceptable and reasonable than they would if they had not washed themselves.
Dr Schnall’s study was inspired by some previous work of her own. She had found that when feelings of disgust are instilled in them beforehand, people make decisions which are more ethical than would otherwise be expected. She speculates that the reason for this is that feeling morally unclean (ie, disgusted) leads to feelings of moral wrongness and thus triggers increased ethical behaviour by instilling a desire to right the wrong. However, as the cleanliness and purification rituals found in many religions suggest, physical cleanliness, too, is linked to moral behaviour, so she decided to investigate this as well.
To do so, she conducted two experiments. The first asked 40 volunteers to unscramble sentences. Half were given sentences containing words associated with purity and cleanliness, such as “pure”, “washed”, “clean”, “immaculate” and “pristine”. Those given to the other half contained only neutral words. The volunteers were then asked to describe how they would rate a series of acts on an ethical scale ranging from zero (perfectly okay) to nine (very wrong). These varied from taking money found in a lost wallet, via eating a family’s dead dog to avoid starvation, to using a kitten for sexual arousal.
The second experiment exposed 44 volunteers to a three-minute clip from “Trainspotting”, a film that is well known for eliciting feelings of disgust, to make them all feel unclean. The volunteers were then asked to describe how they would rate the same series of acts as in the first experiment. However, after watching the clip and before being exposed to the ethical questions, half of the participants were told that the room in which they were to do the rating was a sterile staff space that needed to be kept clean. They were therefore asked, please, to wash their hands with soap and water when entering.
The researchers report that those who were given the “clean” words or who washed themselves rated the acts they were asked to consider as ethically more acceptable than the control groups did. Among the volunteers who unscrambled the sentences, those exposed to ideas of cleanliness rated eating the family dog at 5.7, on average, on the wrongness scale whereas the control group rated it as 6.6. Their score for using a kitten in sexual play was 6.7; the control group individuals gave it 8.3. Similar results arose from the handwashing experiment.
Physical purification, in other words, produces a more relaxed attitude to morality. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Pontius Pilate is portrayed in the Bible as washing his hands of the decision to crucify Jesus. Something to think about for those who feel that purification rituals bring them closer to God.
Hello there,
As you know, we’ll only have two more classes to go. I hope you had a profitable semester and that you’ve also learned a thing or two.
Homework for your next class:
- Coursebook: p. 111 (Grammar 2) and 112
- Maximiser: p. 69, 71, 72 and 73 (check your answers!!!)
- Paper 1 and 3: Go over your two mock tests at home. Don’t forget to bring PAPER 3 next class so we can talk about it, OK?
Enjoy the weekend!
Rick
Hello there,
Today we worked on PAper 1. How did you like the test?
Don’t forget your homework for next class, ok?
Coursebook – p. 106 (ex. 1 & 2), 107 (ex. 1) and 108 (Vocabulary 2 – ex. 1)
Mock test – Have a closer look at it at home, please. Make sure you go over any unknown vocabulary and alike.
Cheers!
Hello there,
Today we worked on the writing part of unit 3 – an information sheet. We also worked on question 1 of the unit 3 review and watched a couple of Jeff Dunham sketches. Hope you enjoyed it. After all that, we had a Paper 3 mock test. How was it?
HOMEWORK:
- Go over your reading paper (paper 1) to check your mistakes.
- Finish Unit 3 review (coursebook)
- Finish Unit 3 (exam maximiser) – check your answers!!!
Cheers!
‘I didn’t lose any work in the first recession I experienced," says Zaha Hadid, "because I didn’t have any work." This was the early 1970s, the time of the three-day week, when the lights of Great Britain Ltd appeared to be switching off for good. "I was drawing with freezing cold hands in rooms lit by candles. It seems almost unbelievable now. If I learned something, it was that anything can happen. We’re doing well today, but this is partly because so many of our projects are in places like Dubai, which seem immune from recession. But you never know."
You certainly don’t. Last week, Frank Gehry’s first major project in Britain was ditched, making it the first big victim, architecturally, of the credit crunch. Plans for a dramatic development of 750 flats facing the sea at Brighton were dropped when the developer, Karis, failed to find fresh funds, three months after Dutch bank ING pulled out. If Gehry – creator of the famous "Bilbao effect", by which thrilling architecture triggers urban regeneration – can be tossed aside by recession-wary banks, what about less celebrated architects?
"Housebuilders are in such a hurry to drop projects," says Amanda Baillieu, editor of Building Design magazine, "they’re text-messaging architects to tell them to stop work. At the same time, banks are foreclosing on loans made to small architectural practices set up over the past few years, in the hope of cashing in on the housing boom. The prediction is that one in five will go bust."
Some 40% of architects lost their jobs in the last recession, says Sunand Prasad, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. "It was very hard for young architects in the early 1990s. Luckily, architecture encourages broad thinking. Many found new careers in law, academia, catering and so on. But, when the good times came again in the lead-up to the millennium, it seemed an entire generation had gone missing. It took some time to find them again."
Older architects are no strangers to recession. The current slump, though, is likely to be very tough indeed. Why? Because in the past, the public sector – whether in Britain, continental Europe or the US – was able to step in when housebuilders and developers pulled in their horns. Take President Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority. Between 1933 and 1944, some 16 magnificent dams with hydro-electric power stations were built along the river, giving thousands of jobs to architects, engineers and contractors, not to mention bringing irrigation, power and economic growth to the poor farming communities of seven southern states.
Today, not only is the TVA the biggest energy producer in the US, its mighty structures remain tourist attractions. Closer to home, the superb architectural and engineering work accomplished by the London Passenger Transport Board, a public corporation established in 1933, proved what could be achieved when the going was tough: extensions to the tube, new stations and rolling stock. Such work was inspiring; it also created many jobs.
Today, though, the public sector in Britain has increasingly been privatised. Schemes such as PFI and PPP – private finance initiative and public-private partnerships, which fund new public buildings, especially hospitals and schools, and the renovation of the London underground – have turned out to be as ill-conceived as critics said they would be a decade ago. With banks and markets floundering, public projects are feeling the squeeze, and there is certainly nothing around the corner as grand and bold as Roosevelt’s awe-inspiring TVA.
"About three-quarters of our work is in the public sector," says John Pringle of Pringle Richards Sharratt, architects of the Millennium Galleries, Sheffield. "But, as we can’t be sure what will happen to PFI and PPP, we can’t rest easy. I feel for the many young practices that were hoping to design intelligent new housing. Aside from the sudden fall-off in work, they’re up against new layers of bureaucracy." Pringle is referring to increasingly complex building contracts and the rocketing numbers of quangos and regeneration agencies poking their noses into the business of architecture. The simple client-architect relationship of yore – there’s a building I need and I’d like you to design it – has been buried beneath jargon-laced red tape.
"The bureaucracy is bloody awful," says Will Alsop. "To get jobs beyond house extensions, young architectural practices have to show satisfactory accounts for the past three or four years to prove they’re a safe pair of hands. How the hell are they going to be able to do that during a recession? There wasn’t any work at home when I set up in the late 1970s. We went to Germany and got some good work without anyone asking us about our finances – zilch! – or even our track record. What the Germans wanted was imaginative new architecture."
In times of recession, architects may well need to follow commissions around the world. "If I tell you we’ve got work in 22 countries," says Norman Foster, "it’s not to brag, but to underline how you can only really beat a slump – unless you’re a one-man band with minimal overheads – if you have commissions spread internationally. Foster and Partners is not 100% recession-proof, but we’ve always been prepared to go where the work is. Today, we’re also known as urban planners and product designers, so we’re not hostage to sudden drops in the building market. We were lucky to win the commission to design the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank headquarters in 1979, when there was little work at home. In fact, this was about the only job in the office. So we gave it our all."
This building, one of Foster’s finest, opened in 1986, when the British economy was beginning to pick up. It stood Foster and his team in good stead, setting a new standard for corporate HQ. Foster has never looked back. In a curious way, the recession served him well.
Yet, as Nigel Coates, professor of architecture at the Royal College of Art, tells his students: "You don’t choose architecture for the money. You should only do it if you love the idea of being an architect. But I’ve also been saying that recession isn’t altogether a bad thing. Of course, I don’t want people to lose their jobs, but there’s been a lot of boring and plain bad new building during the boom years – frumpitecture, I call it. Young architects are unlikely to find an interesting job, or any job, in the coming months, so it’s a good time for them to study, think and dream of what a next generation of architecture might be."
What might post-recession architecture be like? Alison Brooks, an architect whose practice shared the 2008 Stirling prize for the design of the much-feted Accordia housing development in Cambridge, says: "So much housing raced up in recent years has been mean and transitory. No one wants to lay down roots in homes that are pokey, fast-buck products. What’s the point of building houses no one really wants just because they’re low cost and meet official targets?"
A new housing scheme Brooks designed at Newhall, Essex, shows what might be done. It is a fine balance of modesty and ambition, modernity and tradition. Timber-framed family houses, with generous rooms, offer a fresh take on traditional local styles. They use every square inch: roof spaces are family dens, while courtyard gardens are like outside rooms. As for energy conservation, they meet current guidelines, or even exceed them.
Indeed, what we may see is a swing towards a less showy architecture, with invention squeezed into pint pots. Some of Christopher Wren’s most inspired buildings, after all, were the gem-like City of London churches he built around St Paul’s. Clamber up the steps of St Stephen Walbrook and, behind modest ragstone walls, you find yourself beneath a magnificent dome that might belong to one of the great baroque churches of Venice. Or visit Le Corbusier’s Petit Cabanon and see how a tiny building can be highly charged. "I have a chateau on the Côte d’Azur," he wrote to a friend. "It’s for my wife. It’s extravagant in comfort and gentleness." It is less than four metres square.
The years following the Wall Street Crash saw in "Depression deco", a sort of late-flowering art deco. While we might not see anything as distinct as that, we could yet discover a likable new modesty: offices gathered around courtyards with rooftop gardens, rather than look-at-me skyscrapers; supermarkets dug underground rather than swaggering over historic towns; schools doubling as performing arts centres. And, if the Olympic Delivery Authority cares to take up the offer of a low-cost, take-apart sports building, as suggested by Dipesh Patel, a director of Arup Associates, we may yet see the 2012 Games proving that swanky buildings are not the only way of going for gold.
Still, if you happen to be an architect hooked on wildly adventurous design and are willing to travel (and work competitively), then Dubai, Abu Dhabi, India, Russia and South America beckon. In Britain, meanwhile, the recession, while painful, might spark fresh debate and instill new ideas, readying us for the next building boom when the money flows again.
source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/nov/17/architecture-recession-credit-crunch
Hi there guys,
So, today there was a paper 3 mock. We also worked on a couple of spoken phrases.
For next class, all you have to do is catch up on anything that’s been left behind and go over the mock test again.
Enjoy your weekend!
Hello there,
So, today I finally showed you those websites we’d talked about. I hope you make good use of them. Make sure you download at least one podcast to listen to regularly, ok?
Next class we’ll have a PAPER 2 mock test, which means you won’t have to bring your books as the test will take up all of the class.
HOMEWORK (for next Monday)
- Coursebook: p. 104 & 105
Cheers!
Dear students,
As the end of the semester draws nearer, it’s time for us to have our mock tests again. Today we had Paper 2 and next Friday it’ll be Paper 1.
Homework:
- HANDOUT: Bananas are best!
Cheers!!
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