Intermediate

There's an insightful story that's used to explain lateral thinking, or thinking "outside the box". It goes like this:

A truck driver tried to pass under a low bridge, but the truck was too tall and got stuck. Traffic piled up behind it, and soon emergency workers, engineers, firefighters, and other truck drivers gathered to try to help.

Each one thought of possible solutions based on their own field of expertise. Mechanics thought of dismantling the truck piece by piece. Engineers thought of chipping away at the bridge. But none of the solutions were feasible. Then a boy who knew nothing of mechanics or engineering came along...

How would you solve the problem? Pitch a potential solution. Then your teacher will tell you the rest of the story and how the problem was eventually solved.

Bessie Williamson (1910-1982) was a woman in a man's industry. She ran a whisky distillery in Scotland at a time when women weren't managers in any business, let alone the whisky business. But Williamson worked her way up from a typist to the owner and CEO of the Laphroaig [lah-FROYG] distillery, becoming a well-respected boss and highly successful manager. She brought Laphroaig distillery through difficult times during WWII and began a far-reaching modernization process before retiring.

Williamson was known in the business as the "Islay Labour Exchange" because she found a job for almost everyone who needed one. And if workers didn't have a pension plan, she kept them on well past the usual age of retirement. Her employees were always first in her mind, even in the hard times.

Adecco, a Japanese company providing human resource services, conducted a national survey asking 900 elementary and junior high school boys and girls what job they wanted to do when they grew up. Many children showed an interest in jobs that involve digital technology, which is no surprise since they have been surrounded by the technology since birth.

The detailed results of the survey are shown below.
 

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elementary [adjective] /el-uh-MEN-tuh-ree/—simple or early stages of studying

The Amsterdam company Respyre has developed concrete and plaster that support the growth of moss. These materials can be used for new construction, as well as on existing buildings. The moss then acts as a respiration system for the city. It takes in water and CO2 from the air and releases oxygen.

Moss has other benefits, too. Watch this short video to find out more.

The city of Lowell, Massachusetts, was famous for its textile mills during the Industrial Revolution. In the 1830s, around 8,000 women worked at the mills. The working conditions were terrible. The air inside the mills was full of dust. Women worked 13 or 14 hours a day for very low pay.

In 1834, the mill owners decided to pay the women even less. The women were angry and joined together to fight the owners. They went on strike (refused to go to work) until they got their wages back. But the owners wouldn’t agree, and the women had to go back to work. 

Onomatopeia is a fancy way to describe words that sound like what they mean. For instance, in English, bees "buzz" and cats "meow". Words for animal sounds are almost always built on how the animals actually sound to listeners. But that can be different in different languages. Since each language has its own set of sounds to work with, they hear animals based on those sounds.

For example, a rooster's crow is translated as:

• "Cockadoodle doo!" in English;
• "Kikiriki!" in Spanish; and
• "Kok-e-kok-ko!" in Japanese.

This video shows people from all over the world saying animal sounds in their language. How would you write the sounds the animals make in your language?

Indonesia has over 17,000 islands. If you ever go there, you will see how different some of the major islands are. For example, Bali is the only island where most of the people are Hindu. It attracts a very large number of tourists. It is known around the world as a great place for a holiday.

However, Sulawesi, an island to the north of Bali, has very few tourists. Here, most people are Christian. There is very little made for tourists on the island. Makassar, the main city, has only one hotel. You will also have to take public transportation to get around.

Most Indonesians live on Java and are Muslim. It’s the only island with a train network. That's a good thing because you have to cross large distances to visit World Heritage sites such as the Borobudur temple and Mount Bromo.

National Geographic answers the question: what is forest bathing? The term emerged in Japan in the 1980s as a physiological and psychological exercise called shinrin-yoku. It can mean “forest bathing” or “taking in the forest atmosphere”. The purpose was to offer an ecological antidote to tech-boom burnout and to inspire residents to reconnect with the country’s forests.

The Japanese quickly embraced this form of ecotherapy. In the 1990s, researchers began studying the physiological benefits of forest bathing, providing the science to support the idea that time spent surrounded by nature is good for us. The concept at the heart of shinrin-yoku is not new. Many cultures around the world have long recognized the importance of the natural world to human health.

People throw away more than 80 billion pairs of chopsticks every year. Most of them have only been used once, like the cheap wooden ones you get in restaurants. All of those chopsticks end up in landfills. In China, environmental activists have documented rates of over 100 acres of deforestation every day to keep up with demand.

One start-up has decided to tackle this problem by using discarded chopsticks as a construction material. ChopValue, based in Vancouver, Canada, collects about 350,000 used chopstics every week, just from the Vancouver area. They then use the chopsticks to make things for the home and office, like bookshelves, cutting boards, coasters, and even desks. Founder Felix Böck explains,