1. Pascolena Florry
When Namibia gained independence in 1990, teenager Pascolena Florry was herding goats in the country’s dry, desolate northern savannah. Her job, unpaid and dangerous, was to protect her parents’ livestock from preying jackals and leopards. She saw wildlife as the enemy, and many of the other indigenous inhabitants of Namibia’s rural communal lands shared her view. Wildlife poaching was commonplace. Fifteen years later, 31-year-old Pascolena’s life and outlook are very different. She has built a previously undreamed-of career in tourism and is the first black Namibian to be appointed manager of a guest lodge. Her village, and hundreds of others, have directly benefited from government efforts to devolve wildlife management and tourism development on communal lands to conservancies run by indigenous peoples. “Now we see the wildlife as our way of creating jobs and opportunities as the tourism industry grows,” she also says. “The future is better with wildlife around, not only for jobs, but also for the environment” (Florry 2004).Sample Answer
The establishment of conservancies, run by local communities and assisted by the government and NGOs, has been proved successful to help developing countries to decentralize natural resources, create jobs and improve the economy.
2. Children Watch TV
Why and to what extent should parents control their children’s TV watching? There is certainly nothing inherently wrong with TV. The problem is how much television a child watches and what effect it has on his life. Research has shown that as the amount of time spent watching TV goes up, the amount of time devoted not only to homework and study but other important aspects of life such as social development and physical activities decreases.Television is bound to have its tremendous impact on a child, both in terms of how many hours a week he watches TV and of what he sees. When a parent is concerned about the effects of watching television, he should consider a number of things: what TV offers the child in terms of information and knowledge, how many hours a week a youngster his age should watch television, the impact of violence and sex, and the influence of commercials.
What about the family as a whole? Is the TV set a central piece of furniture in your home! Is it flicked on the moment someone enters the empty house? Is it on during the daytime? Is it part of the background noise of your family life? Do you demonstrate by your own viewing that television should be watched selectively?
Since television is clearly here to stay. it is important that parents manage their children’s TV viewing so that it can be a plus rather than a minus in the family situation.
Sample Answer
Watching too much television has negative effects on important aspects of children’s life and it is not television but the way that parents manage their children’s TV watching, including the time they spend on, the programs they watch and even how the family deal with the TV, that matters.
3. SLP Officer
Armed police have been brought into NSW schools to reduce crime rates and educate students. The 40 School Liaison Police (SLP) officers have been allocated to public and private high schools across the state.
Organizers say the officers, who began work last week, will build positive relationships between police and students. But parent groups warned of potential dangers of armed police working at schools in communities where police relations were already under strain.
Among their duties, the SLPs will conduct crime prevention workshops, talking to students about issues including shoplifting, offensive behavior, graffiti and drugs, and alcohol. They can also advise school principals. One SLP, Constable Ben Purvis, began to work in the inner Sydney region last week, including at Alexandria Park Community School's senior campus. Previously stationed as a crime prevention officer at The Rocks, he now has 27 schools under his jurisdiction in areas including The Rocks, Redfern and Kings Cross.
Constable Purvis said the full-time position would see him working on the broader issues of crime prevention. “I am not a security guard,” he said. “I am not there to patrol the school.
We want to improve relationships between police and schoolchildren, to have a positive interaction. We are coming to the school and giving them the knowledge to improve their own safety.”
The use of fake ID among older students is among the issues he has already discussed with principals.
Parents’ groups responded to the program positively but said it may spark a range of community reactions.
“It is a good thing and an innovative idea and there could be some positive benefits,” Council of Catholic School Parents executive officer
Danielle Cronin said. “Different communities will respond to this kind of presence in different ways.”
Sample Answer
School liaison police have been brought into NSW schools to reduce crime rates and improve students’ safety by conducting workshops and some people believe it a good thing while others not.
4. Cow and Grass
The co-evolutionary relationship between cows and grass is one of nature's underappreciated wonders; it also happens to be the key to understanding just about everything about modern meat. For the grasses, which have evolved to withstand the grazing of ruminants, the cow maintains and expands their habitat by preventing trees and shrubs from gaining a foothold and hogging the sunlight; the animal also spreads grass seed, plants it with his hooves, and then fertilizes it with his manure. In exchange for these services, the grasses offer ruminants a plentiful and exclusive supply of lunch. For cows (like sheep, bison, and other ruminants) have evolved the special ability to convert grass— which single-stomached creatures like us can't digest—into high-quality protein. They can do this because they possess what is surely the most highly evolved digestive organ in nature: the rumen. About the size of a medicine ball, the organ is essentially a forty-five-gallon fermentation tank in which a resident population of bacteria dines on grass. Living their unseen lives at the far end of the food chain that culminates in a hamburger, these bacteria have, just like the grasses, coevolved with the cow, whom they feed. Truly this is an excellent system for all concerned: for the grasses, for the bacteria, for the animals, and for us, the animals' eaters.
There is a co-evolutionary relationship between cows and grass as the cows, which is one of the ruminants that has a rumen to digest the grass into high-quality protein even though the grasses already evolved to against the grazing of ruminants, can help the grass spread seed by their hooves and also provide manure to it.
Sample Answer
There is a co-evolutionary relationship among cows, grass, and bacteria as cows have rumen where bacteria could digest grass into high-quality protein while they help the grass spread seed by their hooves and also provide manure to it.
5. Australian Education
When Australians engage in debate about educational quality or equity, they often seem to accept that a country cannot achieve both at the same time. The lecture will present compelling international evidence that there are countries which do, though Australia is not among them.
Curriculum reforms intended to improve equity often fail to do so because they increase breadth or differentiation in offerings in a way that increases differences in quality. Further, these differences in quality often reflect differences in students’ social backgrounds because the ‘new’ offerings are typically taken up by relatively disadvantaged students who are not served well by them. Evidence from New South Wales will be used to illustrate this point.
The need to improve the quality of education is well accepted across OECD and other countries as they seek to strengthen their human capital to underpin their modern, knowledge economies. Improved equity is also important for this purpose since the demand for high-level skills is widespread and the opportunities for the low-skilled are diminishing.
Improved equity in education is also important for social cohesion. There are countries in which the education system seems primarily to reproduce existing social arrangements, conferring privilege where it already exists and denying it where it does not. Even in countries where the diagnosis might be less extreme, the capacity of schooling to build social cohesion is often diminished by the way in which schools separate individuals and groups.
Sample Answer
Although improved educational equity increases differences in quality so that educational equity and quality can’t be achieved at the same time, improved educational equity and quality are still important because they could strengthen human capital and social cohesion.
6. NATIONAL PROHIBITION ACT
In 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was enacted, creating yet another serious setback to the American wine industry. The National Prohibition Act, also known as the Volstead Act, prohibited the manufacture, sale, transportation, importation, exportation, delivery, or possession of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes, and nearly destroyed what had become a thriving national industry. In 1920 there were more than seven hundred wineries in California. By the end of Prohibition, there were 160.
If Prohibition had lasted only four or five years, its impact on the wine industry might have been negligible. But it continued for thirteen years, during which time grapes went underground literally and figuratively, becoming an important commodity in the criminal economy. One loophole in the Volstead Act allowed for the manufacture and sale of sacramental wines, medicinal wines for sale by pharmacists with a doctor’s prescription, and medicinal wine tonics (fortified wines) sold without a prescription. Perhaps more importantly, Prohibition allowed anyone to produce up to two hundred gallons of fruit juice or cider each year. The fruit juice, which was sometimes made into concentrate, was ideal for making wine. Some of this yield found its way to bootleggers throughout America who did just that. But not for long, because the government stepped in and banned the sale of grape juice, preventing illegal wine production. Vineyards stopped being planted, and the American wine industry ground to a halt.
Sample Answer
In 1920, the Volstead Act came into effect and lasted for 13 years to prohibit the manufacture, sale, transportation, importation, exportation, delivery, or possession of intoxicating liquors and almost destroyed this industry though its loophole allowed for the production of some kinds of wine and fruit juice which later on was banned by the government.
7. IT’LL NEVER FLY: THE CITY OF LONDON
Who would have thought back in 1698, as they downed their espressos, that the little band of stockbrokers from Jonathan's Coffee House in Change Alley EC3 would be the founder- members of what would become the world's mighty money capital?
Progress was not entirely smooth. The South Sea Bubble burst in 1720 and the coffee house exchanges burned down in 1748. As late as Big Bang in 1986, when bowler hats were finally hung up, you wouldn’t have bet the farm on London surpassing New York, Frankfurt, and Tokyo as Mammon's international nexus. Yet the 325,000 souls who operate in the UK capital’s financial hub have now overtaken their New York rivals in the size of the funds managed (including offshore business); they hold 70% of the global secondary bond market and the City dominates the foreign exchange trading. And its institutions paid out £9 billion in bonuses in December. The Square Mile has now spread both eastwards from EC3 to Canary Wharf and westwards into Mayfair, where many of the private-equity ‘locusts’ and their hedge-fund pals now hang out. For foreigners in finance, London is the place to be. It has no Sarbanes-Oxley and no euro to hold it back, yet the fact that it still flies so high is against the odds. London is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, transport systems groan and there’s an ever-present threat of terrorist attack. But, for the time being, the deals just keep on getting bigger.
Sample Answer
London has surpassed its rivals and has dominated global financial markets to become the world’s mighty money capital due to its judicial and currency advantages even though the expansion progress was not smooth.
8. ASKING QUESTIONS
All non-human animals are constrained by the tools that nature has bequeathed them through natural selection. They are not capable of striving towards truth; they simply absorb information and behave in ways useful for their survival. The kinds of knowledge they require of the world have been largely pre-selected by evolution. No animal is capable of asking questions or generating problems that are irrelevant to its immediate circumstances or its evolutionarily-designed needs. When a beaver builds a dam, it doesn't ask itself why it does so, or whether there is a better way of doing it. When a swallow flies south, it doesn't wonder why it is hotter in Africa or what would happen if it flew still further south.
Humans do ask themselves these and many other kinds of questions, questions that have no relevance, indeed make little sense, in the context of evolved needs and goals. What marks out humans is our capacity to go beyond our naturally-defined goals such as the need to find food, shelter or a mate and to establish human-created goals.
Some contemporary thinkers tend to believe that there are indeed certain questions that humans are incapable of answering because of our evolved nature. Steven Pinker, for instance, argues that "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness or to answer any question we are capable of asking. We cannot hold ten thousand words in our short-term memory. We cannot see a ultra-violet light. We cannot mentally rotate an object in the fourth dimension. And perhaps we cannot solve conundrums like free will and sentience."
Sample Answer
Unlike animals that could only absorb information pre-selected by nature, humans can ask themselves questions which are irrelevant to naturally-defined needs and goals and some people believe that humans are also incapable of answering some questions due to the evolved nature.
0 Comments