Speaking

Imagine that you are preparing a project with your friend. You have found some material for the presentation and you want to read this text to your friend. You have 1,5 minutes to read the text silently, then be ready to read it out aloud. You will not have more than 1,5 minutes to read it.

The BBC reports that 38,000 people died in the quake, 60,000 were injured and 3.3 million are homeless. At least another 1,400 more people died in another district. Pakistan says the quake will cost it $5 billion in infrastructure losses.

The area that has been devastated has been huge. Bad weather such as heavy rains and winds have hampered relief operation. As a result, the total number of deaths is feared to double as an equal number of people die from cold and hunger in the aftermath as winter approaches. While a number of countries have donated to the relief operations, the amounts being raised for urgent aid dwarfs the amounts that will be needed in rebuilding.

Imagine that you are preparing a project with your friend. You have found some interesting material for the presentation and you want to read this text to your friend. You have 1.5 minutes to read the text silently, then be ready to read it out aloud. You will not have more than 1.5 minutes to read it.

Saving money is one of those tasks that's so much easier said than done — everyone knows it's smart to save money in the long run, but many of us still have difficulty doing it. There's more to saving than simply spending less money, although this alone can be challenging. Smart money-savers also need to consider how to spend the money they do have as well as how to maximize their income.

One of the possible steps is to keep record of your expenses. If you don't keep track of your expenses, you may find that it's difficult to stick to your goals. Keeping a running tally of how much you've spent on various types of expenses each month can help you identify "problem" areas and adjust your spending habits to fit your budget. However, keeping track of your expenses can require a serious attention to detail. While everyone should keep track of major expenses like housing and debt repayment, the amount of attention you devote to minor expenses generally increases with the seriousness of your financial situations.

Imagine that you are preparing a project with your friend. You have found some interesting material about a self-taught cook for the presentation and you want to read this text to your friend. You have 1,5 minutes to read the text silently, then be ready to read it out loud. You will not have more than 1,5 minutes to read it.

Cooking is actually quite easy to do, it just requires practice. You get to know your equipment, you get to know your ingredients, you get to know techniques. You could go to school where they tell you all the things you would otherwise learn eventually on your own, or you could just learn them on your own. Very easy.

I started cooking for myself when I left college. Got my first cookbook and went at it. Almost 25 years later I absolutely love to cook and can cook pretty much anything without a recipe, or just using the recipe as a rough guide if I’m not familiar with the dish. I’ve traveled the world and enjoy making foods I ate overseas at home. My friends and family think I’m some kind of superchef but my power is nothing more than cooking at least 10 meals per week, every week, for 25 years. I’ve eaten at many fancy restaurants and thought “how did they do that?” and then come home and done research and tried to do it myself. I actually took one class, an afternoon at the Culinary Institute of America called “Cooking Like a Restaurant Chef.” (You know what the secret is? Taking your time to do all the right preparation. That’s pretty much it. Otherwise I am entirely self-taught.

Imagine that you are preparing a project with your friend. You have found some interesting material for the presentation and you want to read this text to your friend. You have 1.5 minutes to read the text silently, then be ready to read it out aloud. You will not have more than 1.5 minutes to read it.

1)How many nostrils do you have? Four. Two you can see, two you can’t. This discovery came from observing how fish breathe. Fish get their oxygen from water. Most of them have two pairs of nostrils, a forward-facing set for letting water in and a pair of «exhaust pipes» for letting it out again. The question is, if humans evolved from fishes, where did the other pair of nostrils go. The answer is that they migrated back inside the head to become internal. To do this they somehow had to work their way back through the teeth.

Similar gaps between the teeth can also be seen at an early stage of the human birth. When they fail to join up, the result is a cleft palate. So one ancient fish explains two ancient human mysteries. The most recent research on noses, incidentally, shows that we use each of our two external nostrils to detect different smells.

Imagine that you are preparing a project with your friend. You have found some interesting material for the presentation and you want to read this text to your friend. You have 1.5 minutes to read the text silently, then be ready to read it out aloud. You will not have more than 1.5 minutes to read it.

Antarctica is the driest place on Earth. Parts of the continent have seen no rain for two million years. A desert is technically defined as a place that receives less than 10 inches of rain a year. The Sahara gets just 1 inch of rain a year.

As well as the driest place on Earth, Antarctica can also claim to be the wettest and the windiest. Seventy per cent of the world’s fresh water is found there in the form of ice, and its wind speeds are the fastest ever recorded. The unique conditions in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica are caused by so-called katabatic winds. These occur when cold, dense air is pulled downhill simply by the force of gravity. Though Antarctica is a desert, these completely dry parts of it are called, somewhat ironically, oases. They are so similar to conditions on Mars that NASA used them to test the Viking mission.

Imagine that you are preparing a project with your friend. You have found some interesting material for the presentation and you want to read this text to your friend. You have 1,5 minutes to read the text silently, then be ready to read it out aloud. You will not have more than 1,5 to read it.

Judged by the huge strides that people all over the world have made in overcoming poverty and want, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that little of economic consequence happened before the last three centuries. Before that, most of the world not only took poverty for granted, but also assumed that little could be done about it. Even the most optimistic early writers could not imagine that more than a few percent of the population would ever be well off; they thought that the best we could do for the masses would be to minimize their suffering on Earth. Growth, if it could have been measured, was probably not 3 percent a year but, at the most, only a percent or 2 per decade. Increases in the size of population were typically accompanied by declines in the average income. Yet the last few centuries have seen us banish starvation and famine from a large part of the Earth. In the most successful countries, the average citizen now enjoys a material standard of living that would have made the greatest king of two hundred years ago turn green with envy.