Upper-intermediate

It is difficult for people living in safe countries to imagine refugees' problems. Jonas Poher Rasmussenis decided to use animation to show the difficulties of this group of people. His documentary, Flee, became a successful example of using animation to tell a true story.

The film, which has received several nominations and awards, tells the story of Amin Nawabi (the name was changed). When he was a child, his family had to run away from Afghanistan to Russia. Later on, he becomes a successful academic in Denmark. However, his life continues to be difficult because he is a refugee, and gay.

Usually, people don’t think of animations as documentaries. But it can be a powerful tool to raise important social issues. Animations can do what movies can not: show realism and abstraction. They can display realistic images of war and make it less traumatic at the same time.

Benjamin Hubert, founder of the design company LAYER, believes that design should be for the people, not for galleries. LAYER’s vision is to solve everyday problems in the best way possible. For example, a client approached them about a new wheelchair. This was a company with no relationship to design—they just needed a better wheelchair. According to Hubert, “clients approach us because they want a functional and affordable product that’s also beautiful.” 

Hubert founded the LAYER start-up in 2010 after working for a large agency for a few years. He recommends to all founders of start-up companies that they work for someone else first. That way you learn about all the aspects of a business.

According to Vox, there's very little scientific evidence to suggest our perception of time changes as we age. However, people consistently report that the past felt longer.

There are a few different ways to study how we perceive time. Scientists can look at time estimation, for instance: people’s ability to estimate how long an activity took to complete. They can also look at time awareness: the feeling that time "flies" when we are having fun, but then slows to a crawl when we do something boring. Finally, there's time perspective: the sense of a past, present, and future as constructed by our memories.

The Atlantic reports that though success isn’t a conventional medical addiction, it has addictive properties for many people. Praise stimulates the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is connected to addictive behaviors. Success addiction is known to have a negative effect on human relationships. People choose to travel for business on anniversaries, and they miss their children’s important milestones while working long hours. Some even decide to focus on their careers and forgo marriage.

Many scholars, such as the psychologist Barbara Killinger, have found that people are willing to overwork to keep getting "hits" of success at the expense of their well-being. They shelve a much-needed rest from work and time with family and friends until after a project, or a promotion, but that day never arrives.

Well-known entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg were in their early twenties when they launched their highly successful companies. The Harvard Business Review (HBR) explores whether these famous cases reflect a general pattern.

The HBR team analyzed the age of all business founders in the United States in recent years and found that the average age of entrepreneurs at the time they founded their companies is 42. In software startups, the average age is 40, and younger founders are common. However, young people are less common in other industries such as oil and gas or biotechnology, where the average age is closer to 47.

HBR discovered that among the top 0.1% of startups based on growth in their first five years, the founders started their companies when they were, on average, 45 years old. Evidence points to entrepreneurial performance rising sharply with age before starting to drop in the late fifties.

According to The New York Times, research shows that close friendships are necessary for optimal health and well-being. A key to close friendship is intimacy, and a big part of intimacy is being able to be fully yourself and be understood by others.

If close friendships really are vital to people’s well-being, one might assume we would be able to make them easily. However, it turns out that the opposite may be true: close friendships are important to people because they are so difficult to form.

According to John Cacioppo, a social neuroscientist, humans evolved a natural bias against easily making friends because, in the past, avoiding an enemy was more important than making a friend. If a person mistook a friend for a foe, then that would not endanger their survival, but mistaking a foe for a friend could lead to death.

The standard measure of economic performance, the gross domestic product (GDP), measures the value of goods and services produced within a country over a given period. However, the GDP doesn’t measure social factors like income inequality, domestic violence, drug addiction, or the impact of today’s actions on future generations. It also ignores sustainability and environmental destruction. It’s a very short-term view of market factors without respect to what’s happening on the social and environmental levels. As a result, the GDP gave us no warning of the impending global financial crisis in 2008.

But we continued to base our economic predictions on that metric. And it began to show economies recovering and growing—so everything’s going well again, right? But what if we factor in social and environmental realities?

Atlas Obscura, a publication about travel and culture, notes that a pub has always been more than just a place that sells beer for the British. The pub has brought communities together for centuries, and the tavern tradition of spending the evening with your peers continues to this day. Few know, however, that pubs became popular following the plague known as the Black Death of the 14th century.

The Black Death killed nearly half of England's population after it reached the British Isles in 1348. By the 1370s, it had caused a critical labor shortage. Eventually, this proved a boon for the peasantry of England, who could demand higher wages for their work and achieve higher standards of living. As a result, households selling or giving away leftover ale were replaced by more commercialized, permanent establishments set up by the best brewers and offering better food.

The Conversation, a publication that promotes academic debate, posits that not only do many people across advanced economies have no idea that the world is becoming a much better place, but they actually think the opposite. This is no wonder, when the news focuses on reporting catastrophes, terrorist attacks, wars and famines. These subjects simply make for more exciting coverage than stories about how more than 300,000 people a day get access to electricity and clean water for the first time.

The Conversation states that globalization has helped lift hundreds of millions of people above the global poverty line.

Take a look at the three graphs below and discuss their meaning with your teacher.