Sufficient evidence?

Last week I asked my class the following question about this chart (taken from The Economist's Daily Chart online feature) :

Do you think these statements are TRUE or FALSE? Do you have enough evidence to verify each statement?

1. DVDs are cheap in China because they are all illegally copied.

2. The average Polish employee has to work longer than the average Indian employee in order to be able to afford a DVD.

3. DVDs are cheaper in Germany than in India.

4. The best films are made in France.

5. The currency used in Australia is dollars.

6. People in Japan like to watch DVDs.

7. The average US worker can earn enough money in 200 minutes to buy 4 DVDs.

Together we agreed that 2 and 7 are true, 3 is false, and we do not have sufficient evidence to comment on the other 4 statements. The students then wrote statements about other charts. Please comment on whether their statements are true, false, or impossible to comment on without further information.

Big Mac Index

1) In Norway a Big Mac costs 7.02 dollars.

2) The Swiss Franc is overvalued against the US dollar by 75%.

3) In Britain a Big Mac is 9p more expensive than in the USA

4) In Japan the cost of a Big Mac is the same.

5) Chinese currency is least expensive in the chart.

6) USA citizens eat more burgers than the rest of the world .

US Border Control

1. The cost per apprehension of illegal immigrants was steady between 1992 and 2000.

2. The total cost per apprehension of illegal immigrants from 1997 to 200 was as high as in 2008.

3. There was a decline in the cost per apprehension of illegal immigrants for the two years following 2003.

4. The average cost per apprehension of illegal immigrants has been increasing since 1992.

Read-e for the masses

1. The line graph shows the sale of e-books in 2008 and forecasts growth from 2009 to 2011.

2. The sale of e-books will grow substantially from 2008 (1 million) to 2009 (5 million).

3. Between 2009 and 2010, e-book sales will experience an incredible increase from 5 to 12 million, followed by modest growth (to 15 million) in 2011.

Foreign Students in America

1. Do you think the percentage of British people who go to study in America is lower because they have English as their first language as well?

2. The percentage of Spanish students studying in America is higher than the percentage of Indian students.

3. Studying in America is cheaper than in the UK.

4. The country that sends the most students to study in America is China.

5. The American people prefer to receive Italian students than Japanese students.

6. People from Japan do not like to study in America.

Countries with most installed wind power

1. China produces more wind power than Spain because China owns a greater proportion of the world.

2. Spain produces less wind power than China because Spain owned a smaller proportion of the world.

3. The United States produced the most wind power in the world from 2008 to 2009.

4. Perhaps because it is physically larger than Spain, Germany produces more wind power.

Africa Cup of Nations

1. There are more African football players in France than in Germany.

2. There are more Africans in England than in Germany.

3. 24 players playing in the African Cup of Nations are from England.

4. Domestic leagues provide significantly more players for the African Cup of Nations than other leagues.

5. There are 345 footballers playing at the African Cup of Nations.

Graduate Diploma Reading & Writing : Spring Term 2011

It's been too long since I've posted anything meaningful to this blog, so here's a quick summary of what we've covered this week in my Graduate Diploma Reading & Writing class. I have uploaded powerpoint files from session one, two, and three to my brand new Windows Live Skydrive if you're interested in downloading and viewing them (please let me know if the links don't work).

After some work on describing data and a needs analysis exercise in our first session of the week, we reviewed important aspects of vocabulary like word form, collocation, and pattern grammar (class handout here) in the context of a "model" essay. There was an analysis of complex sentence from the essay, and this reading activity as homework, before analysing fact and opinion in the essay and looking at the difference between strong and weak evidence.

A selection of videos from TED.com

The great jaffa cake debate

The issue (or spectre?) of VAT was raised in class today, and we had a little discussion about which kinds of products should and shouldn't be exempt from sales tax. The magazine Which? has this neat little summary of the issue. If you are interested in following up the question of whether or not a jaffa cake is a luxury or a necessity, you can read this BBC blog post (or here for a more of a foodie angle). Before today I wasn't aware that the heart of the problem for McVities was that only chocolate-coated biscuits are considered a luxury...

Prescribed Reading...

...not just recommended this week. Please please please read ONE of the following texts for your reading diary entry:

A. Database created to stop academic plagiarism

B. Men At Work stole Down Under riff from Guides

C. Persaud suspended from practice for three months over plagiarism

Academic Keywords

Since one of my lovely graduate diploma students confessed to being a crossword addict, I thought I'd play with some software called Hot Potatoes to create a crossword made up of words and definitions from page 179 of The Study Skills Handbook : Third Edition by Stella Cottrell.

You can try the crossword out here or on Moodle under the heading "self-study materials". Let me know what you think...

Another week, another set of reading links

A hectic week means that it's Wednesday night and I've only just leafed through last weekend's papers. Here are some links to articles you might find interesting, courtesy of the Guardian, Observer, and New York Times.

Handcuffed, a midwife is led into court. Her crime? Championing home births.

Japan goes from Dynamic to Disheartened

Lara Stone and Georgia Jagger make gap teeth the new face of fashion

Mama Grizzlies lead the Republican hunt for America's angry voters

No country for poor people?

Polls show a nation split as French protest spreads

More suggested reading

I've picked a few stories from the Guardian and New Scientist which might be of interest. From The Guardian:

The big story in economics this week relates to the spending cuts currently being introduced by the Chancellor, George Osborne. You can read about his programme here, and some hostile reaction to it here. Across the Channel in France there are reports of Panic-buying at Petrol Pumps, and much further afield in Mexico, a 20-year-old student has been given a surprisingly high-status job.

Meanwhile, in the New Scientist, this story about company logos and neuroscience might be interesting. There are also stories about how technology can aid research, and how nature can hamper technology designed to save it.

Recording and Learning Vocabulary

Some important considerations when recording and learning new vocabulary:

1. Is it useful? Consider field and register - the Academic Word List Highlighter may help you here.

2. What does it mean? A good dictionary will help you. Try Cambridge's free online dictionaries. There's no problem with using translation to understand basic meaning, but you will still need to consider all the other points here.

3. How can you remember it? This article by Scott Thornbury may be useful.

4. What type of word is it? (adjective, verb, noun, adverb - context and a dictionary will help. If it's a noun, is it countable or uncountable, singular of plural?).

5. How can you use it? Look at the context in which you found it, think about collocation (search The Oxford Collocations Dictionary for help) , and the patterns that it may be used in. Cambridge's free online dictionaries list possible patterns of use under each definition.

6. Does it belong to a FAMILY of words? Finding the word "unilaterally", for example, can open your eyes to "lateral" and "unilateral".

7. Is there anything IRREGULAR about this word / phrase? What do you need to remember about it? Is it a noun with an irregular plural form (e.g. children, people), is it an intransitive verb (if you don't know what "intransitive" mean, check the glossary of the Internet Grammar of English).

8. Can you pronounce it? Again, a good dictionary will give you a phonemic transcription of a word's pronunciation, and online dictionary sites like Cambridge's have sound clips of how to pronounce each word (with British and American variations provided).

Graduate Diploma : Suggested Reading Resources

The Economist and Financial Times websites are good sources of texts for students to use for reading diaries. Articles you might find interesting from the Economist website right now are:

• The Dark Side of Light - on obesity
• A Growing Appetite - on the ambitions of a food company in China
• From Hoarding to Hiring - on how countries can generate employment
• Google's Robocars - on a plan to develop computer-driven vehicles

Reading lists from the university module directory are also a good indicator of the types of texts students need to deal with in their postgraduate studies.

Compared vs Comparing

In class today we discussed the possible differences between COMPARED and COMPARING, and we came up with the following distinction:

ACTIVE
- Comparing China with the UK, Cheng and YeHui drew up a long list of differences.
- Comparing the shoes in his huge collection, Alexandre spent two hours deciding what to wear.
- Tengiz walked through campus happily singing Kazakh folk songs.

PASSIVE
- Compared to London, Colchester is small.
- Compared to Mark, Sultan is intelligent, charming, and handsome.
- Compared to his childhood ambition of becoming a cosmonaut, Azer’s goal of being elected president of Azerbaijan seems quite reasonable.
- Compared to Hitler, my father was not strict.
- Tengiz walked through campus, followed by an angry crowd of students.

If you fancy trying Google Fight by yourself, you can follow this link. Alternatively, for more serious language exploration, have a look at this website devoted to the Academic Word List.

New Graduate Diploma Group

Today was the first EAP reading & writing session with Graduate Diploma Economics and History students (except without the History student). The following 9 sentences summarise what we found out about each other. Are they all logical?

1. According to Azer, Tengiz is the best at maths in this room because he spent more time as an undergraduate studying maths.

2. Azer claims that he speaks the most languages in this room: four.

3. Chen believes that the strongest ‘man’ in this room might be Mark, because he is the tallest and heaviest person present.

4. After reading each student’s writing from week one, Mark concluded that Azer is the most ambitious individual on the Graduate Diploma course. He came to this conclusion because Azer’s childhood dream was to become a cosmonaut.

5. After interviewing each member of the group, Juelma concluded that the most romantic is Chen, because he likes listening to romantic songs every day, and often watches romantic films.

6. Juelma also claims that the best cook in the room is Azer because he likes cooking every day.

7. Tengiz claims that the most adventurous person in the group is Chen, because he has visited more countries than his classmates / peers.

8. According to Tengiz, the most creative person in the group is Azer. Tengiz came to this conclusion because Azer likes to experiment when cooking.

9. Mark believes that Juelma is the fittest person in the group, because she has never smoked a cigarette.

We also discussed some pattern grammar and collocations issues, including the possible differences between a strong man and a strong woman. Opinions on this are welcome...

Sound familiar?

A little exercise in exploring ideas about intellectual property...is this stealing?

The Chiffons in 1963:



George Harrison in 1970:



Read about the subsequent legal battle here.

There's been no legal dispute, however, been T-Rex, seen here in 1971:

...and "derivative" Oasis, who released this in 1994:

Is there enough of a similarity between this song, written in 1932:

and this 1983 hit:

to justify this?

The Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP)

A very interesting project involving Upper-Level (A scoring) undergraduate student papers at the University of Michigan has produced this corpus of texts, which looks like to be a very nice teaching & learning resource indeed...