Upper-intermediate

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.

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.

Crowdfunding campaigns have been getting more and more popular in recent years. 

They can be great for small groups of people starting a new business, or smaller companies raising money for new products.

A popular crowdfunding website is Kickstarter. You can find all kinds of interesting products and services—who knows, maybe you could discover the next big thing! If you'd like to find something more unusual, I recommend the “Food & Craft” section.

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.

Nature Magazine is one of the world’s most important international weekly scientific journals. According to its website, it publishes “peer-reviewed research in all fields of science and technology on the basis of its originality, importance, interdisciplinary interest, timeliness, accessibility, elegance and surprising conclusions.”

The first issue was published in 1869. Since then, the magazine has changed quite a bit. Have a look at the graph below and discuss with your teacher how the content has evolved over the past 150 years.

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.

According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR), common wisdom says that CEOs attend elite MBA programs, land high-powered jobs right out of school at prestigious firms, and climb the ladder straight to the top while carefully avoiding risky moves.

However, HBR conducted a 10-year study in which they assembled a dataset of more than 17,000 C-suite executive assessments to analyze who gets to the top and how. They discovered a striking finding: sprinters—those who rise quickly—accelerate to the top by making bold, at times risky, career moves.

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.

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.

Do you have any regrets for things you did or didn't do? Listen to 70 people from 5 to 75 years old talk about their regrets. Do you share any of them?

English is a modern lingua franca. It is a leading language in so many areas: from global affairs and science to entertainment. One of the reasons for that lies in the colonial history of the British Crown in the 17th century, when the British Empire became the biggest empire in history. With colonialism, trade relations boomed, following the progress in science, industrial manufacturing and literature. However, there were many other competing languages, such as French, Spanish and German.

People’s diets have varied considerably around the world, and have often been dictated by geography, the types of crops that the land can sustain and animals that dominate the ecosystem. However, with advances in technology and globalization, billions of people can now eat all sorts of fruits and vegetables out of season, as well as exotic, imported meats.

Take a look at the two maps below and discuss what you see with your teacher.

The UK agreement

A new free trade agreement with the UK allows New Zealand to remove export tariffs during the next 15 years. This deal promises a GDP boost of up to $1 billion.

On top of the economic elements, the agreement includes conditions for the environment, tackling climate change and creating equity in economic advancement. According to New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, it is the country’s “first bilateral trade agreement to include a specific article on climate change”. 

Floating solar farms, also known as "floatovoltaics," are an efficient way to collect solar energy. They have a number of advantages over land-based systems:

According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR), it is possible to be a business leader and still have a personal life with careful planning, but most people wouldn’t know this if they look at some of the most successful CEOs out there. Tesla CEO Elon Musk rarely sleeps or sees his kids and had a public meltdown, and Apple’s Tim Cook is on email before the sun rises.

European football (soccer) has a history of racism. Recently, there has been a rise in racist comments from fans against players of color. Many football clubs are taking action against it. There are even projects involving computer- and A.I.-assisted technology to pinpoint racist fans.

For a long time, we believed that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens (modern humans) were two separate species. With the advent of DNA sequencing, however, it was discovered that Sapiens interbred with Neanderthals as they migrated from Africa 60,000 years ago. Another previously unknown hominid species, known as Denisovans, was also discovered at that time, and it interbred with Sapiens and Neanderthals, too.

The war in Ukraine has had a vast impact on the whole world. In addition to the humanitarian catastrophe, it has also caused increased rates of inflation all over the globe. 

This rise is mostly linked to increases in food, energy prices and disrupted supply chains. The impact is affecting the poorest countries the most. 

Look at the graph below describing the projected inflation rates for several countries, and discuss it with your teacher.

A deadly 6.1-magnitude earthquake hit Afghanistan on June 22. So far, more than 1000 people have been reported dead, and at least another 1500 have been injured. This is a humanitarian disaster that requires aid.

Watch this video clip of fantasy writer Ursula LeGuin's acceptance speech of the 2014 U.S. National Book Award. Be prepared to summarize and discuss the points she makes about writers and the contemporary world.