HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Back next semester....

End of semester...

The semester is about to finish. Here's a summary of what we studied during this course. Hopefully it will help you focus in preparation for Thursday's exam.

- Eurozone crisis
- Nuclear Power debate
- Fossil energy vs. renewable energy
- Arctic oil exploration
- Multicultural differences
- English as a corporate standard... or not

Grammar:
- Do not forget the "s" for he/she when using the simple present.
- I expect to see in your essays a variety of expressions reflecting condition, contrast, opposition, addition  as seen in the grammar highlights. Only where needed of course!
- Remember to use these expressions the correct way:
IN my mind (not necessary anyway)
ON the one hand... ON the other hand
- "pour" is often translated as "to" in English, not "for".

To start a new paragraph, the easiest remains:
First / First of all
Secondly / Then
To conclude / To summarise / Finally

A new theme to close the semester: multicultural differences in the workplace

Getting a job in a French company serving only French customers and sourcing only from French suppliers is no longer realistic today. So chances are you will have to communicate in English with colleagues, customers and partners from different cultures and backgrounds.

What does it mean? What are the hurdles? How do you overcome them? Here’s a selection of articles from the Harvard Business Review on this topic.

Beforehand, let's have a look at HSBC advertising "the world's local bank"...

What about your own experience?

To drill or not to drill...

And more interesting material to prepare for the trial class debate..
A video this time, summarising pretty well the two sides of the story.

So what do you think?
And how would you hold a debate like this: This House would allow Arctic drilling.

Text 3b: Oil exploration under Arctic ice could cause 'uncontrollable' natural disaster

BY MICHAEL MCCARTHY , ENVIRONMENT EDITOR

  

TUESDAY 06 SEPTEMBER 2011

Any serious oil spill in the ice of the Arctic, the "new frontier" for oil exploration, is likely to be an uncontrollable environmental disaster despoiling vast areas of the world's most untouched ecosystem, one of the world's leading polar scientists has told The Independent.

Oil from an undersea leak will not only be very hard to deal with in Arctic conditions, it will interact with the surface sea ice and become absorbed in it, and will be transported by it for as much as 1,000 miles across the ocean, according to Peter Wadhams, Professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.

The interaction, discovered in large-scale experiments 30 years ago, means that the Arctic oil rush, which was given a huge boost last week with a $3.2 billion (£1.9bn) investment from Exxon Mobil, is likely to be the riskiest form of oil exploration ever undertaken, said Professor Wadhams, who is a former director of Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute.

"If there is serious oil spill under ice in the Arctic it will be very hard, if not impossible to stop it becoming an environmental catastrophe," he said. "It will be very much harder to deal with than a major spill in open water."

The world's oil companies are now turning to the Far North as supplies elsewhere across the globe start to run out or become harder to extract, and both the potential profits from Arctic oil, and the fears about the damage that extracting it may do, are enormous.

The area north of the Arctic Circle is thought to contain as much as 160 billion barrels of oil, more than a quarter of the world's undiscovered reserves. Some of it is under land, as in Alaska's North Slope field, but large amounts of it are known to lie under the seabeds of the Arctic Ocean and Baffin Bay off Greenland, which are ice-covered for all or part of the year, depending on the region.

It is this offshore oil which is now the focus of a new exploration rush, with Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon among the strongest contenders, focusing on the Arctic Ocean itself, while the first wells in the sea off Greenland are already being drilled by Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy.

However, many observers are seriously alarmed about the spill risks in the extreme conditions, especially in the wake of BP's calamitous leak at the Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico last year, which could not be controlled for three months, released as much as five million barrels of crude, and came close to wrecking the company.

"A spill in the Arctic would essentially make dealing with something like Deepwater Horizon look almost straightforward," said Ben Ayliffe, polar campaigner for Greenpeace.

"There are problems with ice encroachment, the remoteness of the Arctic, darkness, extreme weather, deep water, high seas, freezing conditions and icebergs. Basically it would mean that responding to a Gulf of Mexico-style spill off somewhere like Greenland would be impossible."

Yet Professor Wadhams, who was the first civilian scientist to travel under the Arctic ice in a submarine, in 1971, and who has made five more under-ice trips, is spotlighting an even greater level of concern with his knowledge of how oil and ice interact – with potentially calamitous consequences.

It stems from large-scale experiments he took part in off the coast of Canada in the 1970s, in which substantial quantities of oil were deliberately released into the frozen sea, to see how it behaved. "What we found, and one of the great difficulties, is that spilled oil becomes encapsulated in the ice and is then transported around the Arctic by it," he said.

"The oil is caught underneath the ice, so you can't get at immediately to clean it up or burn it off. You don't know exactly where it is, and then it gets encapsulated in the new ice which grows underneath, so you then have a kind of oil sandwich inside the pack ice.

"And that's being transported around the Arctic and isn't released until spring, when it may be several hundred or even a thousand miles from the source of the spill, so you can have a huge area of the Arctic becoming polluted by oil without initially it being clear where that oil is."

He added: "Once it is released in springtime, it's very toxic, because the encapsulation in the ice preserves the oil from weathering, so that instead of the lighter fraction evaporating and the heavier fraction becoming just tar balls, you have fresh oil being released exactly where the ice is melting, usually round the edge of the pack ice where you've got a lot of migratory birds.

"Not great for the environment. In fact, I think the appropriate word would be 'terrible'."

Professor Wadhams is so concerned that he is helping to organise a high-level scientific workshop on the subject of oil spills in sea ice, in Italy later this month.

While companies such as Cairn Energy stress that they will be drilling exploratory wells only in the summer months, in areas of sea which are ice-free, it is likely that once oil production actually begins, it will be a year-round business and continue through the winter when production facilities are ice-bound. "We would need to produce all year round, in order to make the whole thing worthwhile," a spokesman for Shell said at the weekend.

The oil companies insist that they are aware of the risks and have prepared detailed oil spill response plans, but Professor Wadhams, who has read several of them, said they did not amount to comprehensive plans for dealing with oil in ice.

The expert

* Professor Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, is an oceanographer and glaciologist and one of the world's leading experts on polar ice. He is celebrated for submarine voyages beneath it.

His concern about how sea ice will interact with oil from a spill as the Arctic is opened up for drilling is so great that he has helped to convene an international high-level academic seminar to discuss Oil Spills in Sea Ice – and Future at Italy's Polar Geographical Institute in Fermo, Italy, from 20-23 September.

Source : http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/oil-exploration-under-arctic-ice-could-cause-uncontrollable-natural-disaster-2349788.html

Debating activity

WHAT IS A DEBATE:

This is what they say on idebate.org...

"I may be wrong and you may be right and, by an effort, we may get nearer the truth." Karl Popper

 Debate is a formal contest of argumentation between two teams or individuals. [...] Debate is, above all, a way for those who hold opposing views to discuss controversial issues without descending to insult, emotional appeals or personal bias. A key trademark of debate is that it rarely ends in agreement, but rather allows for a robust analysis of the question at hand. Perhaps this is what French philosopher Joseph Joubert meant when he said: “It is better to debate a question without settling it, than to settle a question without debating it.”

WHAT IS THE DEBATE PROCESS FOR THIS CLASS:

4 people usually debate on a topic (2 pairs). If there are 5 members in the team, one will act as MODERATOR. One team consists in proposers (people who are arguing to support the motion) and the other is made up of opposers (people arguing against the motion).

STRUCTURE

Introduction and initial attitude of the audience regarding the motion
==================
Proposer 1.1 argument (1 min minimum)
Opposer 2.1 argument (1 min minimum)
Cross fire / cross examination between the 2 speakers
==================
Proposer 1.2 argument (1 min minimum)
Opposer 2.2 argument (1 min minimum)
Cross fire / cross examination between the 2 speakers
==================
Proposer 1.1 summary (1 min minimum)
Opposer 2.1 summary (1 min minimum)
Cross fire / cross examination all 4 speakers
==================
Audience questions (mandatory)
Answers given by proposer 1.2 and opposer 2.2
==================
Vote from the audience

Length of debate: 10 minutes. Max 30 minutes including audience intervention

It accounts for 25% of the continuous assessment.

Skills involved:

Research and analysis
Speaking skills

Active listening skills (listen and take notes)

HOW TO WRITE THE DEBATE QUESTION OR MOTION

To write a debate question or MOTION, you will need to pick a topic that you feel that you can defend. Research the topic to see what others have said about it, and prepare a defense against any who speak against you, foreseeing any arguments that your opponents might raise, and dismantling them before they are ever presented as legitimate evidence.

The majority of debate motions, and most of those used in large international competitions, take the form of policy motions. A properly worded motion should be one that identifies or at least hints at a problem with the world at present (known as the "status quo") and introduces a clear proposal to solve this problem (known as a "policy").

e.g. This house would legalize drugs.

Status quo: it is currently illegal

Policy: legalization is a solution

THW = This house would...

THBT = This house believes that...

==================================

RESEARCH METHOD FOR THE DEBATE

EXAMPLE OF TOPIC:  GLOBAL WARMING

KEYWORD SEARCH:  causes of global warming

CRITICAL THINKING STRATEGY: 

Expand:   What is global warming?  (look up and paraphrase facts)

Compare/Contrast:   How do today‘s climate patterns compare with past patterns to decide whether or not there really is global warming?

Critique:   What actions by society and/or nature have contributed to global warming?

Predict:   What will happen in the future if nothing is done to reverse global warming?  

Persuade:   What must the U. S. and world governments regulate and create incentives                  for action to help to reverse global warming? 

Evaluate:   How effective have the past actions taken by governments and/or business been in reducing global warming? 

It is not enough to develop 4 ideas for the debate. You also need to prepare for any potential questions from the audience. As such, you will have to collect facts and opinions from different sources in order to be prepared for the debate.

You will hand out or send me your sources to me before the debate (author, website or work title, date, pages if necessary). Debaters may select proper visual aids, either powerpoint, a poster, photos, objects, or videos.

=====================================================================

Advice to prepare for the debate:

http://www.acdu.org.au/archives/actein_site/basicskills.html#selector

http://www.paulnoll.com/Books/Clear-English/debate-advice.html

For more information and examples of debates:

http://www.youtube.com/user/FrenchDebatingAsso?ob=5

http://www.facebook.com/pages/French-Debating-Association/129091423814283

Text 3: Cold calling: the lure of Arctic oil

As Shell admits defeat this year, Russell Lynch looks at the risks and rewards for explorers

RUSSELL LYNCH

TUESDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2012

Miles beneath the wilderness of the Arctic Circle lies a potentially huge prize – but the risks are also huge. In an unforgiving climate where temperatures regularly drop as low as minus 50C, geologists reckon there are 400 billion barrels of oil and gas for the taking – enough to meet the world's energy needs for the next 125 years.

Getting it out is the problem. Royal Dutch Shell became the latest oil major to suffer a serious setback to its Arctic ambitions this week, as it was forced to postpone drilling until next year because of failings with its safety equipment.

An environmental lobby determined to protect the Arctic from invasive exploration also poses a major complication for Shell and its rivals BP and Gazprom, with safety concerns already to the fore following BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010.

Shell's decision to postpone drilling off the coast of Alaska in the Chukchi Sea was met with unalloyed triumph by Greenpeace, whose activists have been trailing the company's drill ship Noble Discoverer since it left New Zealand six months ago. Campaigners – with support from the likes of the actress Penelope Cruz and Sir Paul McCartney – say Shell's "Arctic misadventure is an expensive and risky mistake". The group managed to shut down more than 70 Shell petrol stations in London and Edinburgh in July, at a cost of 24 arrests.

Ironically, it is the receding ice-cap in recent decades caused by global warming which has opened up the Arctic for this latest plundering of its natural resources. Arctic exploration will also be under the political spotlight on Thursday when the parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee's report on protecting the region is published.

While Shell still plans to launch full-scale oil and gas drilling next year when it has corrected the mechanical faults in its spill containment system and gained the necessary permits, the latest delay effectively shuts off Shell's attempts to explore in the Chukchi Sea until next July because the drilling season ends next week. The delay will add millions to Shell's $4.5bn (£2.8bn) bill in the Arctic so far, having earlier faced delays when it had to shift its drill ship out of the way of a 30-mile by 12-mile ice floe.

Shell will continue to work off the coast of Alaska but will only drill the top parts of wells – so-called "top holes" extending down about 1300ft – before temporarily closing the holes and returning to them next year, creating a "strong foundation for 2013". The bullish statement to investors stated unambiguously that the exploration programme "remains critically important to America's energy needs, to the economy and jobs in Alaska, and to Shell".

But there are plenty of far less confident signals from the industry when it comes to Arctic exploration. In July BP shelved a $1.5bn offshore oil project in Alaska due to cost overruns and technical setbacks. The decision came after an 18-month review concluded that the Liberty project – an offshore field with about 100 million barrels of recoverable oil – was no longer viable. This was the second time in ten years that Liberty has been shelved due to cost concerns.

Russian behemoth Gazprom's Shtokman gas project in the Barents Sea has also fallen victim to cost overruns and falling gas prices in a slowing European economy. Gazprom – the major partner in the joint venture with France's Total and Norway's Statoil – came to the conclusion that "the financing is too high to be able to do it for the time being". The remote field is estimates to hold gas reserves of almost 4 trillion cubic metres.

Meanwhile Statoil itself is holding off from Arctic exploration until 2015 while it waits to see how Shell copes with the challenges. A spokesman said the firm was taking the "prudent step" of observing the outcome of Shell's efforts before finalising its own exploration timetable.

Unofficially, Shell is playing down the delays. Sources say the company is there for the long haul because its offshore Alaska wells are not due to produce commercial oil and gas until 2017. But analysts point out that the vast estimated reserves of oil and gas under the Arctic – 22 per cent of the world's recoverable oil and gas is supposed to be down there, according to the US Geological Survey – are just that: estimates. At the current oil price of $117 a barrel there is an economic case, but if prices fall steeply, that case could come under pressure.

Seymour Pierce oil analyst Sam Wahab said: "Compared to the cost of drilling a well in the Falklands – say around £80m – Arctic exploration is much more expensive. It depends what's down there but you may need an oil price of $75 a barrel-plus." With pressure from environmentalists unlikely to ease, it's now up to Shell to make the numbers stack up and hold its nerve where rivals are losing theirs.

Source:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/cold-calling-the-lure-of-arctic-oil-8145167.html

For more info and opinions :

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7c50d102-00bc-11e2-8197-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2B34nfbjA

http://www.wwf.ca/conservation/arctic/oil_exploration/

The one-minute a day commitment...

Improving your English doesn't take much time or effort if you include it in your daily routine.

Start following the News in English by subscribing to a podcast or a video summary every day.

                   For example:

                  The one-minute world news video - EASY

                   http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/

                   World update daily commute podcast

                   VERY  EFFICIENT

                   http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/worldupmc

                   Listen to it or download to your iPod / phone.

There is no shortage of podcasts / short videos on the web for you to follow the News on a daily basis (CNN, France24, Guardian, etc...).

Now, as an advanced leaner, you should listen to podcasts not only to understand the words or get used to different accents, but to learn about relevant topics and transfer this knowledge into daily communication.

"Hey, do you know what I heard on the BBC this morning? India wants to build solar-panelled carparks in order to provide enough power to 6 million electric cars by 2020, isn't that a future-looking idea?"

And alternatively (additionally should I say), forget the dubbed episodes of your favorite American series, watch them in their original language!

DEBATE: Does the world need nuclear energy?

Source: TED

TED is a non-profit organisation devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. They hold two annual conferences -- the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh UK each summer --

Debate from Feb 2010 - Long Beach California - 23 min

Nuclear power: the energy crisis has even die-hard environmentalists reconsidering it. In this first-ever TED debate, Stewart Brand and Mark Z. Jacobson square off over the pros and cons. A discussion that'll make you think -- and might even change your mind.

Since the counterculture Sixties, Stewart Brand has been a critical thinker and innovator who helped lay the foundations of our internetworked world. Full bio »

At Stanford, Mark Z. Jacobson uses numerical models to study the effects of energy systems and vehicles on climate and air pollution, and to analyze renewable energy resources. Full bio »

If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear [energy], the waste from that lifetime of electricity would go in a Coke can.” (Stewart Brand)

And you, what is your position?

Text & Video 2 - Will the eurozone collapse?

The head of the European Central Bank has warned that the currency union has become unsustainable.

Source: Al Jazeera Inside Story - 02/06/2012

Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank (ECB), has told European politicians that they should do a lot more to tackle the debt crisis.

He says the current setup is unsustainable and has urged member states to take immediate action towards developing a clear vision for the next few years.

Draghi warned that the structure of the euro currency union has become unsustainable and criticised political leaders, who, he said, had been slow to respond to a European debt crisis now well into its third year.

"Can the ECB fill the vacuum or lack of action by national governments on the structural front? And again the answer is no, structural reforms don't have much to do with monetary policy," Draghi said, adding: "Can the ECB fill the vacuum left by the lack of euro area governance? And the answer is no. So, let's ask: What can we do now? What is the next step? The next step is basically for our leaders to clarify what is the vision for a certain number of years from now."

And it appears that Spain has replaced Greece as the epicentre of the eurozone crisis, for now at least. New data shows that worried investors are pulling a record amount of money out of Spain. The Central Bank says that around $120bn has left the country in the first three months of this year. But Spain has denied talk of a bailout from the IMF.

All of this has taken a toll on the value of the euro currency. It fell to its lowest level in almost two years against the dollar. The euro has also slid for the seventh day versus the yen - the longest losing streak in four months and its lowest level in more than a decade. It all spells a growing lack of confidence in the single European currency.

So, is the eurozone really facing disintegration? Can it survive or is a complete collapse looking more likely? And is it realistic for all 17 members to remain in the eurozone?

Inside Story, with presenter Hazem Sika, discusses this with guests: Jessica Chamba, the vice-president of the European Movement, a group that aims to promote European integration; Robert Oulds, the director of the Bruges Group, a leading Eurosceptic cross-party think tank; and Charles Davis, the head of Macro Economics at the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

Link to video (24 min): http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2012/06/201261183736530374.html

2 books you should have next to you when studying English...

If you don't have those yet, here are 2 books you should really consider buying:

- Grammaire anglaise de l’étudiant or Grammaire pratique de l'anglais, edited by Ophrys.

- Collins Cobuild Advanced Learner's English Dictionary, by Collins Cobuild. I think the last edition also includes a CD-Rom.

Why use a monolingual dictionary: it stops you from translating systematically into your own language, therefore making it easier to think naturally in English after a while. Moreover, you will learn to explain subjects and concepts directly in English, contributing to a more fluent conversation.

I have been using those references for 15 years...

Text 1: Apple, iPhone and innovation

Viewpoint: Apple's iPhone launches no longer excite

By Dan Lyons Creator of the 'Fake Steve' blog

Apple unveils the latest version of its iPhone this Wednesday*. It will be the first since the death of Steve Jobs. To mark the occasion the BBC asked Dan Lyons, Newsweek magazine's technology editor and creator of the satirical blog, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, to pen an article about the firm's progress over past year. This is his provocative view.

Somewhere up there, I can hear Steve screaming.

Back in 2006 I launched a blog where I pretended to be Apple CEO Steve Jobs. My alter ego, "Fake Steve," had a good run, but I shut it down in January 2011 when it became apparent that Jobs was in poor health. Nevertheless, even now, I'm constantly wondering what Steve would think about whatever Apple is doing.

This week it's the the iPhone 5. Everyone pretty much accepts that Apple will introduce it, and there have been so many leaks that everybody pretty much seems to know what it's going to be. Word is it will look a lot like the last two versions of the iPhone, except a bit thinner and a bit taller, with upgraded guts and a refreshed operating system.

Resources online

English is everywhere on the web; and I am not referring to American series only!
Go beyond and learn from different perspectives.

News & business

US resources
Harvard Business Review. www.hbr.org
The Wall Street Journal. www.online.wsj.com
The New York Times. www.nytimes.com
Forbes magazine (business). www.forbes.com
CNN International. www.cnn.com
Al Jazeera English. www.aljazeera.com

UK resources
Good old BBC. www.bbc.co.uk
Financial Times. www.ft.com
The Economist. www.economist.com
The Times. www.thetimes.co.uk
The CIM magazine. www.themarketer.co.uk

Rest of the world
France24. www.france24.com
Euronews. www.euronews.com

Other interests

Conde Nast Traveller. www.cntraveller.com/
National Geographic. www.nationalgeographic.com/

Online resources to improve your English
Learn English with BBC. www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/
British Council. www.britishcouncil.org/france-english-learn-english-online.htm

Don't hesitate to share your own references.