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Task 1

THE UNIVERSITY AS AN ORGANIZATION

Elements of University Management

The modern university of today may be considered to have undergone an institutional evolution. In comparison to the academic establishment of yesteryear, the contemporary university must counterbalance its academic interests with financial responsibility and political obligations. This entails the formation of a highly systematic organizational structure that no longer functions under the premises of merely a growing institution. A university now must additionally be managed as a so-called enterprising agency. This requires the instalment and involvement of an administrative structure. Often democratically governed, a university’s administration resolves, manages and supervises various ongoing institutional activities. This often includes both relevant on and off campus endeavours. To begin, the activities themselves shall be broken down and explained. Then, exactly how these activities are managed by an administration shall be more directly introduced.

University Activities: Theory and Reality

A university involves a great deal of operative activities on a day-to-day basis. On the theoretical level, such activities are split into three progressive segments: input, process, and output. The first segment is the input, which refers to the resource(s) and supplies necessary to instigate a particular activity. Such resources entail anything from funding to on-campus equipment logistics (capital plant) to attaining a minimum student enrolment.

The next segment is the process itself, or means by which an activity may be conducted and maintained on a consistent basis towards the overall goal. The process may exist as a new course, a symposium, or extracurricular activity being conducted, or commencing the employment of a new work-study international graduate student in the campus library, installing a new computer lab in the student career centre, opening a new campus restaurant for vegetarians, or instigating a better transit system for off campus students. All these activities require some or several kinds of input in which to maintain the consistency to endure a perpetual process.

The last segment is the output, which pertains to the resulting outcomes of the input-supported process. Some outputs are successful on a small scale, but may require further processing. Some outputs may be considered the finale of a process whether a success or not. Usually, most successful outputs serve as a justifiable means to repeat the entire segmented process. A graduation ceremony, publishing a thesis, hosting an exchange program, or holding a book donation drive are all examples of campus activities that follow this segmented theory. It is stated that the best outcomes involve a certain level of self-sustainability. This means that the process, should it be repeated, will not require any additional or outside input. Instead, the final output has (in addition to attaining its overall goal) produced enough of its own inputs to recycle into another round of process.

This theory is commonly put into practice in multiple ways within every university. But it is shaped accordingly to curricula standards, the overlying mission, commitment priorities, and capital plant capability. How university systems parallel each other is the means by which the theory is converted into practice. This refers to the decision makers, or administration of an institution. Whatever the case, processes and activities draw upon and expend resources. This requires an administration to make rational decisions about which resources to use, how much of them may be used at a time, for how long, and for which activities.

A University’s Administration System

As already mentioned, a university is generally operated as a democratic institution. This means that decisions are made not by a single authority from within a rigid administrative hierarchy. Rather, a university’s administration is established and broken down into various legislative branches much like an egalitarian government or business. For example, at the University of Cambridge, there is the Chancellor and the Vice Chancellor, who handle official public relations as representatives of the university. There are also Pro-Vice-Chancellors who are in charge of various areas such as planning and resources, personnel, research, education, and others. Additionally, there is the Registrar, which handles academics, estate building, finance, health and safety, management information services, legal services, and others.

There is also a Regent House and a Senate, which includes all department heads, amongst other individuals including students who discuss and vote on university matters much like a government or business would.

The key word is equality, or more so equilibrium amongst all those involved in, employed by, and dependent upon the institution. This converges two main aspects: (1) that a systematic governing body may exist, (2) while at the same time allowing for equal opportunity in the decision-making process. This means that at any one time a decision may be made that involves several players, such as students, parents, faculty, other institutional workers, grant donors, ministry or department of education representatives, cooperating institutions, etc. The theoretical definitions given to this democratic operative are “bounded rationality” and “boundaryless cooperation.”

All in all, a decision must be properly weighed in terms of who it affects, whether it falls within the university’s capabilities, whether it coincides with the university’s mission and other priorities, whether it serves a specific purpose, will the results have political significance affecting the university’s reputation and image, and will the consequences be a means to a positive and productive ends. Often such aspects are interdependent, meaning they are intertwined, related, and often affect and serve one another.

How much influence one player may yield depends upon their own degree of authority within the institution and their proportion of involvement in the activity itself. In a simplified example, the dean or chancellor of a university may have the most authority in a university, meaning that his decision carries the most influence above all others. But, the students of a university may have equal amount of influence if the activity they are planning directly affects and involves them. The students are under the dean’s authority, but without the students the dean has no university to manage. At the same time, there may be additional interest groups involved such as the Department of Education representative, the Parent Teacher Association (PTA), or local Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) supplying funding or additional logistics. Due to their significant input value, these parties will also carry a certain level of influence over both the dean and the students.

Assume that the same group of students are planning a “Take Back the Night” rally, which carries political significance symbolizing women’s rights. This directly affects the students, as they are the potential participants. But it also involves capital plant, as there must be some space and technical equipment provided for the demonstration. It also reflects an unalienable constitutional right of freedom of speech. This carries political consequence affecting the university’s reputation and image should permission to hold the rally not be permitted. However, it can also affect the university’s reputation and image should the peaceful march turn into a campus riot and be reported by the media to the surrounding city area.

Suppose the rally is being sponsored by local businesses and staffed by volunteers that include students’ parents and local NGOs that support women’s rights. At the same time, the march is planned to take place at night and the university alone does not have enough security personnel to control and protect a large crowd of over 1,000 students. It would seem that the university would need to ask for additional outside assistance, such as from the local police department. The university dean, amongst other decision-making parties involved including the students representing the activity, must discuss these pros and cons to reach a final decision based upon rational and compromise.

From here, the complexity of a university’s activities and its administrative duties may begin to be understood. The discussion now turns to what inputs a university may utilize as inputs and to what avail. In terms of processes, concentration is designated to its most fundamental and orthodox practice of academic programs and research. Consideration is also given to the resulting outputs of such processes in terms of consequences and their affects on university image and reputation.

University Inputs and Management

Resource inputs may take several forms. Essentially a resource may be considered “a useful or valuable possession or quality of a country, organization or person.” The most common inputs in terms of a university are money and equipment, though personnel may also be included.

What may be considered representative of input constants are equipment and personnel. The equipment, meaning capital plant, is the basis of a university. Indeed, in order to harbour and manage personnel, moreover to establish itself and grow, a university must retain even a basic level of capital plant. This includes even online correspondence courses, which allow one to earn a degree at home. These types of universities must invest and retain some level of resources in order to accommodate students. For example, they may maintain an online library, audio or video correspondence package downloads, teacher-to-student chat rooms, and official degrees or certificates upon graduation or course completion.

University personnel are the heart of an institution. Upper-administrative workers, tenured professors, and some specialized capital plant management are the originators of a university’s mission, image, and reputation. They are the means by which a university may be managed and promoted, publish and instigate original research, provide academic knowledge and experience, and arrange for capital plant recourses to be utilized and maintained. Secondary personnel, meaning non-fixed or continuous individuals of the university, are also of relevance to mention here. These include university students (full- and part-time), assistant or non-tenured professors, and temporary or part-time administrative or maintenance workers. Although their involvement or affiliation with the university is of interim, their contribution to the maintenance and growth of the institution as a whole is deemed significant. This is particularly applicable in the case of students for their provisions of experience, academic, and financial inputs to the university.

Another case of a temporary but necessary input advocating a university’s success is funding. Universities attain funds from multiple sources, whether indirectly (such as from students via tuition payments), or direct payment to the university itself. The most common funding sources are derived from government-sponsored programs and from outside endowments (NGOs, alumni, public and private corporations, local businesses, etc.). A university’s administration is often under acute budgetary constraints as to how it may distribute its funds. Government-sponsored programs are often the main source of financial supplement to an institution. Some examples are student loans, contracted work-study fellowships, military education agreements, competitive scholarships, research grants for a specific governmental department/ministry, civil service advancements, scholarships for minorities, subcontracted tuition waivers for departmental graduate student assistantships.

When a university is granted, donated, or supplied with a fund, the administration must first consider whether the funds are available to distribute generally, or are under certain restriction. General distribution funds are considered the most convenient, since they may be applied in any way the administration itself deems fit. For example, if a university wishes to host the city’s annual botanical garden exhibition, it may without any other outside consideration. Restricted funding is just as important, but limits the terms under which the funds may be distributed. Here, there are certain interest groups involved that may predetermine how the funding may be used. So, the university may wish to host the same exhibition, but because of the restricted funding, it may only be allowed to utilize its donation to display tulips and orchids.

Hence, a university may choose to mix its general and restricted funding, or attain funding from more than one donor that has different restrictions. Again, a self-sustaining project is the most efficient. However, in terms of instigation or in the case where a project cannot produce its own funding surplus, attaining funds from various sources is one of the most essential inputs to university engagements. Therefore, funding must be attained and re-attained on a constant basis in accordance with some timeline. This may be yearly, quarterly, semester-to-semester, or otherwise. The following paragraphs discuss to what avail funding may be managed, distributed, and later re-attained. This draws attention to funding management on the theoretical level, with a follow-up case study. Keep an open mind to other case studies to follow in subsequent units!

The Distribution of Funds: Theory of Processes

An administration essentially has four options towards which funding may be distributed. The first is to secure a minimal amount of inputs so as to ensure that the university may persevere on a regular basis. The second option for funding distribution is an investment into the supervision of the present infrastructure of the university in which to observe and record potential and suggested improvements. The third option is to improve the university’s infrastructure so as to expand the university’s programs or campus. This includes a subsequent and probable increase in a university’s complexity and efficiency. The fourth and last option refers to the matter of to which processes funding should be distributed based upon precedence. Over time, certain processes within a university may be promoted, downplayed, or replaced by others. It depends on which processes are considered of high or low priority in accordance with a university’s mission, evolving image, changing interest groups, and budgetary constraints.

A general overview of this theoretical approach reveals that a university may distribute funding into its present state to ensure its maintenance and attain feedback (first and second options). It may also simultaneously utilize funds in which to promote and build on its future (third and fourth options). Before proceeding on to the next paragraphs, see if you can brainstorm on specific ways that a university might draw on as sources for funding.

Task 2

Kidney transplantation could be made more efficient by simply cooling the body of a deceased organ donor by just 2°C from normal body temperature, according to the findings of a new study.

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, revealed that inducing a mild state of hypothermia in deceased organ donors reduced the likelihood of delayed graft function - whereby dialysis is required within 7 days of transplantation - in patients receiving kidney transplants by 38%.

At present, around 40% of kidney transplant recipients are reported to experience delayed graft function, which is linked with both increased medical costs and reduced long-term organ function.

"This is a free intervention that can be done at any hospital in the world, and tens of thousands of patients worldwide can benefit from it," states lead author Dr. Claus Niemann, professor of anesthesia and surgery at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF).

Dr. Niemann believes their findings could have a major impact on global health and provide significant cost savings in the US through shorter hospital stays, less dialysis and potentially reducing the need for expensive interventions.

"In addition, it may allow us to consider organs we may otherwise reject, especially at the extremes of age, which would result in more patients benefiting from kidney transplantation," he adds. "This is of critical importance given we have a complete mismatch of transplant need and organ supply in the United States."

At present, an estimated 101,144 patients are awaiting kidney transplants, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Targeted temperature management, also referred to as therapeutic hypothermia, is already used in the treatment of patients with stroke, asphyxia and certain types of cardiac arrest to preserve the function of the nervous system.

The researchers state that the effect of therapeutic hypothermia on protecting kidney function in transplantation has been uncertain, yet some studies have suggested that mild-to-moderate hypothermia could preserve renal function to some extent.

However, current transplantation protocols stipulate that the bodies of organ donors should be at normal body temperature, often leading to the bodies being actively warmed to ensure this.

Method could increase the number of kidneys available for transplantation

Dr. Niemann and colleagues conducted a randomized controlled trial involving a total of 370 organ donors. Of these, 190 were assigned to a group kept at normal body temperature and 180 were assigned to a hypothermia group, the bodies kept at around 2°C lower than the body temperature group.

A total of 572 patients received kidney transplants from the donors in the study - 287 from donors in the body temperature group and 285 from donors in the hypothermia group.

The researchers found that delayed graft function developed in 112 (39%) of patients receiving transplants from the body temperature group, compared with only 79 (28%) of patients receiving transplants from the hypothermia group.

As the intervention was demonstrated to be so successful, an independent data and safety monitoring board recommended an early end to the trial.

In particular, kidneys donated from older donors or donors with health issues that may have compromised their acceptance - also referred to as extended criteria donors - benefited from therapeutic hypothermia.

"From these findings, potentially more organs could be available for transplantation since we can push the limits with these 'marginal donors,'" explains Dr. Niemann. "This is critical because the number of available deceased organ donors has been stagnant, but the demand has dramatically increased. In the United States alone, about 101,000 patients wait for kidney transplantation."

In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Ina Jochmans and Dr. Christopher Watson identify some limitations of the study, noting that it does not provide any information on the potential longer-term effects on graft survival or what the effects on other organs are.

However, they state that the study's results will be welcomed, "not least of all because they have shown that, in this era of high-technology medicine and targeted drug therapy, it is still possible to identify a simple, cheap intervention that can have dramatic therapeutic effects."

Earlier this month, Medical News Today reported on a mouse study that found the body's "immune memory" of a rejected transplant may not be a permanent state, suggesting that subsequent transplants can be successful.

The first human head transplant: 'it will be a success'

It may sound like something from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but the possibility of the world's first human head transplant is very real. In December 2017, Italian neuroscientist Dr. Sergio Canavero plans to perform the procedure alongside a team of Chinese surgeons, led by Dr. Xiaoping Ren - who to date, has performed around 1,000 head transplants on mice.

The procedure - named HEAVEN-GEMINI - will take around 150 surgeons and nurses approximately 36 hours to complete and will cost around $11 million.

Dr. Canavero, of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group (TANG) in Italy, first announced his proposal for the HEAVEN-GEMINI project back in July 2013.

Unsurprisingly, his proposal has been met with much criticism, with some scientists branding Dr. Canavero as "nuts."

However, Dr. Canavero is not the first surgeon to delve into the world of head transplants. In 1970, the late American neurosurgeon Dr. Robert White was the first to transplant a monkey's head onto another monkey's body.

While the recipient monkey had the ability to see, hear, taste and smell following the procedure, lack of sufficient technology meant the animal's spinal cord nerves were not properly fused to its head, leaving it paralyzed. In addition, the animal's immune system rejected the donor head, causing it to die 9 days later.

While Dr. Canavero admits that spinal cord fusion (SCF) and the possibility of head rejection are still key challenges for the HEAVEN-GEMINI project, he claims that recent animal studies indicate they can be overcome.

"The greatest technical hurdle to such endeavor is of course the reconnection of the donor's and recipient's spinal cords. It is my contention that the technology only now exists for such linkage," he said in a paper published in Surgical Neurology International.

Even if the procedure itself is feasible - as Dr. Canavero believes - some questions remain: what would be the benefits of a head transplant? And is the body able to fully recover from such a traumatic event? Medical News Today spoke to Dr. Canavero to get some answers.

Removing a healthy head from a 'body without hope'

"We're going to remove one head under deep hypothermia and reinstall it on a new body. Of course, we are talking about a head with a perfectly healthy brain, but with an alien body - so a body without hope," Dr. Canavero told MNT.

Both the recipient's head and donor body will be put into hypothermia mode for around 45 minutes in order to limit any neurological damage that may occur from oxygen deprivation.

The head will be removed from the donor body using an "ultra-sharp blade" in order to minimize spinal cord damage - a process the Italian surgeon says is key for successful SCF.

Then comes the trickiest part: attaching the recipient's head to the donor body, which involves the complex SCF process. In his original paper, Dr. Canavero explained that the chemicals polyethylene glycol or chitosan will be utilized to encourage the fusion, before the muscles and blood supply are sutured.

Linguistics Science: Structure of Linguistics

The science of Linguistics has taken a new form in recent times. It is the scientific study of human language. This science has several subfields of study such as language form and language meaning as well as language in context. Linguistics is an in-depth study of language in accordance with human behaviour. It studies and examines language from the psychological and socio-cultural aspects of human behaviour. There are characteristics of a language which are unique and some which are universal and this aspect is also studied in linguistics.

The structure of linguistics covers the morphology and syntax of languages, phonology which is the study of sounds and semantics which is the study of meanings. A student of Linguistics is also expected to study the history of languages and their relation to each other as well as the cultural place of language in human behaviour. On the other hand, phonetics, which is the sounds of speech, is considered a separate field from linguistics, though they are closely related.

Linguistics is defined as the study of the structure and development of languages. It includes a comparative analysis of modern languages with ancient parent languages. It also traces the origin and evolution of words.

Subjects such as morphology, semantics, phonology, accent, grammar and literature are all part of linguistic science. This subject studies words and their structural characteristics. Obscure languages, both ancient and modern are identified and classified according to their family and origin. Through the study of linguistics one can also decipher and reconstruct ancient languages from archaeological remains of ancient civilizations.

Linguistic sciences also develop improved methods in translation with modern technology and they prepare a description of sounds, forms and vocabulary of the language. Teaching and translation methods are improved by preparing descriptions of comparative languages and aptitude tests for language learning and proficiency are prepared. Through the science of linguistics, language teaching materials such as dictionaries, lexicons and handbooks are prepared.

Linguistics can be studied from different points of view. Some of these tiers into which language has been divided are as follows:

  • Sociolinguistics

  • Language acquisition

  • Linguistic theory

  • Contrastive linguistics

  • Language and the brain

  • Language change

The nature of the human language can be explained through the history of linguistics and its various theories. These theories are categorized according to historical eras. The period before the 19th.century was known as the age of non-theoretical studies. The 19th century was known as the period of historical linguistics. The first half of the 20th century was devoted to structuralism and the second half to generative grammar.

General linguistics is about concepts of the language while descriptive linguistics is about describing and investigating languages. Models of language competence are developed through theoretical linguistics. On the other hand, applied linguistics deals with the practical aspect of language teaching and the uses to which linguistics can be put.

Language continuously evolves and is adapted to the needs of the people at each time. Language is the most complex system of communication and a study of linguistics science can help a student appreciate the cross-cultural variation of languages.

 

Task 3

 

Machine Translation

At the end of the 1950s, researchers in the United States, Russia, and Western Europe were confident that high-quality machine translation (MT) of scientific and technical documents would be possible within a very few years. After the promise had remained unrealized for a decade, the National Academy of Sciences of the United States published the much cited but little read report of its Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee. The ALPAC Report recommended that the resources that were being expended on MT as a solution to immediate practical problems should be redirected towards more fundamental questions of language processing that would have to be answered before any translation machine could be built. The number of laboratories working in the field was sharply reduced all over the world, and few of them were able to obtain funding for more long-range research programs in what then came to be known as computational linguistics.

There was a resurgence of interest in machine translation in the 1980s and, although the approaches adopted differed little from those of the 1960s, many of the efforts, notably in Japan, were rapidly deemed successful. This seems to have had less to do with advances in linguistics and software technology or with the greater size and speed of computers than with a better appreciation of special situations where ingenuity might make a limited success of rudimentary MT. The most conspicuous example was the METEO system, developed at the University of Montreal, which has long provided the French translations of the weather reports used by airlines, shipping companies, and others. Some manufacturers of machinery have found it possible to translate maintenance manuals used within their organizations (not by their customers) largely automatically by having the technical writers use only certain words and only in carefully prescribed ways.

Why Machine Translation Is Hard

Many factors contribute to the difficulty of machine translation, including words with multiple meanings, sentences with multiple grammatical structures, uncertainty about what a pronoun refers to, and other problems of grammar. But two common misunderstandings make translation seem altogether simpler than it is. First, translation is not primarily a linguistic operation, and second, translation is not an operation that preserves meaning.

There is a famous old example that makes the first point well. Consider the sentence:

The police refused the students a permit because they feared violence.

Suppose that it is to be translated into a language like French in which the word for 'police' is feminine. Presumably the pronoun that translates 'they' will also have to be feminine. Now replace the word 'feared' with 'advocated'. Now, suddenly, it seems that 'they' refers to the students and not to the police and, if the word for students is masculine, it will therefore require a different translation. The knowledge required to reach these conclusions has nothing linguistic about it. It has to do with everyday facts about students, police, violence, and the kinds of relationships we have seen these things enter into.

The second point is, of course, closely related. Consider the following question, stated in French: Ou voulez-vous que je me mette? It means literally, "Where do you want me to put myself?" but it is a very natural translation for a whole family of English questions of the form "Where do you want me to sit/stand/sign my name/park/tie up my boat?" In most situations, the English "Where do you want me?" would be acceptable, but it is natural and routine to add or delete information in order to produce a fluent translation. Sometimes it cannot be avoided because there are languages like French in which pronouns must show number and gender, Japanese where pronouns are often omitted altogether, Russian where there are no articles, Chinese where nouns do not differentiate singular and plural nor verbs present and past, and German where flexibility of the word order can leave uncertainties about what is the subject and what is the object.

The Structure of Machine Translation Systems

While there have been many variants, most MT systems, and certainly those that have found practical application, have parts that can be named for the chapters in a linguistic text book. They have lexical, morphological, syntactic, and possibly semantic components, one for each of the two languages, for treating basic words, complex words, sentences and meanings. Each feeds into the next until a very abstract representation of the sentence is produced by the last one in the chain.

There is also a 'transfer' component, the only one that is specialized for a particular pair of languages, which converts the most abstract source representation that can be achieved into a corresponding abstract target representation. The target sentence is produced from this essentially by reversing the analysis process. Some systems make use of a so-called 'interlingua' or intermediate language, in which case the transfer stage is divided into two steps, one translating a source sentence into the interlingua and the other translating the result of this into an abstract representation in the target language.

Does the Language I Speak Influence the Way I Think?

Is it true that the language I speak shapes my thoughts?

People have been asking this question for hundreds of years. Linguists have been paying special attention to it since the 1940's, when a linguist named Benjamin Lee Whorf studied Hopi, a Native American language spoken in northeastern Arizona. Based on his studies, Whorf claimed that speakers of Hopi and speakers of English see the world differently because of differences in their language.

What we have learned is that the answer to this question is complicated. To some extent, it's a chicken-and-egg question: Are you unable to think about things you don't have words for, or do you lack words for them because you don't think about them? Part of the problem is that there is more involved than just language and thought; there is also culture. Your culture—the traditions, lifestyle, habits, and so on that you pick up from the people you live and interact with—shapes the way you think, and also shapes the way you talk.

There's a language called Guugu Yimithirr (spoken in North Queensland, Australia) that doesn't have words like left and right or front and back. Its speakers always describe locations and directions using the Guugu Yimithirr words for north, south, east, and west. So, they would never say that a boy is standing in front of a house; instead, they'd say he is standing (for example) east of the house. They would also, no doubt, think of the boy as standing east of the house, while a speaker of English would think of him as standing in front of the house. Has our language affected our way of thinking? Or has a difference in cultural habits affected both our thoughts and our language? Most likely, the culture, the thought habits, and the language have all grown up together.

The problem isn't restricted to individual words, either. In English, the form of the verb in a sentence tells whether it describes a past or present event (Mary walks vs. Mary walked). Hopi doesn't require that; instead, the forms of its verbs tell how the speaker came to know the information, so you would use different forms for first-hand knowledge (like I'm hungry) and generally known information (like the sky is blue). Of course, English speakers may choose to include such information (as in, I hear Mary passed the test), but it's not required. Whorf believed that because of this difference, Hopi speakers and English speakers think about events differently, with Hopi speakers focusing more on the source of the information and English speakers focusing more on the time of the event.

Objects are treated differently by the syntax of different languages as well. In English, some nouns (like bean) are 'countable' and can be made plural (beans), while others are 'mass' and can't be made plural (you can have two cups of rice but not two rices). Other languages, like Japanese, don't make this distinction; instead, classifiers like cupof are used for all nouns. Researchers are studying whether this property of the language makes English speakers more aware of the distinction between substances and individual objects.

Here's one more example. Whorf said that because English treats time as being broken up into chunks that can be counted—three days, four minutes, half an hour—English speakers tend to treat time as a group of objects—seconds, minutes, hours—instead of as a smooth unbroken stream. This, he said, makes us think that time is 'stuff' that can be saved, wasted, or lost. The Hopi, he said, don't talk about time in those terms, and so they think about it differently; for them it is a continuous cycle. But this doesn't necessarily mean that our language has forced a certain view of time on us; it could also be that our view of time is reflected in our language, or that the way we deal with time in our culture is reflected in both our language and our thoughts. It seems likely that language, thought, and culture form three strands of a braid, with each one affecting the others.

But people think in language, right?

Much of the time, yes. But not always. You can easily conjure up mental images and sensations that would be hard to describe in words. You can think about the sound of a symphony, the shape of a pear, or the smell of garlic bread. None of these thoughts require language.

So it's possible to think about something even if I don't have a word for it?

Yes. Take colors, for example. There are an infinite number of different colors, and they don't all have their own names. If you have a can of red paint and slowly add blue to it, drop by drop, it will very slowly change to a reddish purple, then purple, then bluish purple. Each drop will change the color very slightly, but there is no one moment when it will stop being red and become purple. The color spectrum is continuous. Our language, however, isn't continuous. Our language makes us break the color spectrum up into 'red', 'purple', and so on.

The Dani of New Guinea have only two basic color terms in their language, one for 'dark' colors (including blue and green) and one for 'light' colors (including yellow and red). Their language breaks up the color spectrum differently from ours. But that doesn't mean they can't see the difference between yellow and red; studies have shown that they can see different colors just as English speakers can.

In Russian, there are two different words for light blue and dark blue. Does this mean that Russian speakers think of these as 'different' colors, while having one word (blue) causes English speakers to think of them as the same? Maybe. Do you think of red and pink as different colors? If so, you may be under the influence of your language; after all, pink is really just light red.

So our language doesn't force us to see only what it gives us words for, but it can affect how we put things into groups. One of the jobs of a child learning language is to figure out which things are called by the same word. After learning that the family's St. Bernard is a dog, the child may see a cow and say dog, thinking that the two things count as the same. Or the child may not realize that the neighbor's chihuahua also counts as a dog. The child has to learn what range of objects is covered by the worddog. We learn to group things that are similar and give them the same label, but what counts as being similar enough to fall under a single label may vary from language to language.

In other words, the influence of language isn't so much on what we can think about, or even what we do think about, but rather on how we break up reality into categories and label them. And in this, our language and our thoughts are probably both greatly influenced by our culture.

But what about all those Eskimo words for snow?

You may have heard it said that Eskimos have dozens (or even hundreds!) of words for snow. People often use this claim to show that the way we view the world and the way we talk about it are closely related. But it's simply not true that Eskimos have an extraordinary number of words for snow. First of all, there isn't just one Eskimo language; the people we refer to as 'Eskimos' speak a variety of languages in the Inuit and Yupik language families. And even if we pick a single dialect of a single language, we won't find much evidence that it has more words for snow than English does. For one thing, there's the question of what counts as a word: In English, we can combine words to get compound forms like snowball and snowflake, and we can add what are called 'inflectional' endings to get snowed and snowing. The Eskimo languages have far more word-forming processes than English does, so a single 'root' word (like snow) could be the basis for hundreds of related words. It hardly seems fair to count each one of these separately. If you only count the roots, you'll find that these languages aren't that different from English. After all, English has lots of words for snow; we've got snow, sleet, slush, frost, blizzard, avalanche, drift, powder, and flurry, and if you're an avid skier, you probably know even more.

So learning a different language won't change the way I think?

Task 4

Falling Oil Prices - Winners and Losers

For the first time in four years, the price of oil has been decreasing steadily.  At the moment, it is down to $60 to $80 per barrel after years of prices above $100. And there are no signs of prices going up in the near future.

One of the reasons for the fall of oil prices is that there is more than enough oil on the world markets.  Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer has tried to stabilize the prices by producing less oil but other OPEC members have reacted by producing more oil.

Another reason for the cut in oil prices is that the United States has been producing more and more energy from fracking. The oil that is trapped in the rocks of the western US can be extracted at a cheaper price. This means that the US can produce more oil itself and does not have to import oil from foreign markets.

The decrease in oil prices is expected to help the world’s economyEspecially in Europe, the downward movement of oil price is expected to be good for the economy.  China and Japan should also profit from falling oil prices, as they must import almost all of their oil. In most cases low oil prices means lower inflation and people spending more money on goods. Cheap oil prices may also influence the travel market as airline fuel costs should drop.

Some oil exporting countries are the big losers of this downward slide in oil prices. Most of them, for example Venezuela, need higher oil prices to pay for government programs and secure the economy. Russia also needs income from oil and gas. The two natural resources bring the country 70% of its income.  In addition to the falling value of the rouble, the Russian currency, the country also misses over 2 billion dollars of income per year.

On the other side, falling energy prices will not affect Middle Eastern countries that much. The oil producing states of the Gulf region have enough money to withstand lower oil prices for some time.

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Task 1

Договор № 6 на поставку товаров на экспорт

г.____________ «___»___________20___г.

__________ (указывается наименование объединения, предприятия, организации), именуемое в дальнейшем «Продавец», в лице ____________, действующего на основании Устава и _________ (указывается наименование внешнеэкономической организации), именуемая в дальнейшем «Покупатель», в лице ___________________, действующего на основании Устава заключили настоящий договор о нижеследующем:

1. Продавец обязуется поставить, а Покупатель принять и оплатить товары: ________ (указывается наименование товаров, их количество, номенклатура или ассортимент, комплектность)

2. Поставка производится в следующие сроки: ________ (указать сроки: поквартально, ежемесячно равными партиями, равными партиями ежедекадно, ежесуточно, по согласованным графикам и др.)

3. Качество товаров должно соответствовать:__________ (указываются номера, индексы, даты утверждения и органы, их утвердившие: международных стандартов, национальных стандартов, технических условий; описываются образцы (эталоны), порядок их представления и хранения; специальные технические условия, установленные для товаров, экспортируемых в районы с тропическим и влажным климатом) Дополнительные требования к качеству поставляемой продукции:_______

Соответствие качества товара условиям договора и заключенного с иностранным покупателем контракта должно подтверждаться сертификатом или другим документом, выдаваемым изготовителем или другой организацией по установленной форме.

Продавец обязан поставить сверх запасных частей и принадлежностей, обеспечивающих использование товаров в пределах гарантийных сроков также ____________ (указывается номенклатура и количество запасных частей и принадлежностей, необходимых для обеспечения использования товаров в послегарантийный период).

Продавец несет ответственность за качество товаров в пределах гарантийных сроков, исчисляемых с момента проследования товаров через государственную границу РФ (указывается иной момент начала исчисления гарантийного срока).

Гарантийные сроки составляют ______________________________.

4. Продавец не позднее _______ рабочих дней после отгрузки товара для экспорта направляет Покупателю документы: __________________ (указывается перечень документов).

Расчеты между сторонами за товары производятся по ценам: _______ (указывается наименование, дата утверждения и орган, утвердивший обязательный для сторон документ о цене, либо цена, определенная сторонами самостоятельно).

Порядок расчетов: ___________. Отчисления в пользу Покупателя составляют: __________(указывается определенный в установленном порядке размер отчислений).

5. Поставка товаров Продавцом производится в установленные договором сроки, в соответствии с уведомлениями о необходимости производить отгрузку, полученными от Покупателя, содержащими все данные, необходимые для отгрузки. Досрочная поставка допускается только с согласия Покупателя.

Сдача товара Продавцом Покупателю будет производиться _______ (указывается пункт сдачи товара, способы и условия его транспортировки).Продавец извещает Покупателя о готовности товара к отгрузке в следующем порядке: ____

6. Тара и упаковка должны соответствовать: _____ (указываются стандарты, технические условия, другая техническая документация; указываются конкретные требования к таре, упаковке). Дополнительные требования к таре и упаковке: ____________________

Товар должен маркироваться ________ (на прикрепляемой бирке, иной способ маркировки).

Продавец использует следующие способы транспортировки и обес-печения сохранности товаров: ____________ (контейнеры, средства па-кетирования, иные способы).

7. _____ (указываются отгрузочные реквизиты, если известны при заключении договора).

8. Техническая и товаросопроводительная документация включает: _____________ (указываются соответствующие виды документации, предусмотренные действующим законодательством; по доверенности сторон с учетом требований иностранного покупателя и другие подтверждающие надлежащее качество товара) и должна оформляться и рассылаться __________ (указывается порядок оформления и рассылки документации).

Техническая и товаросопроводительная документация составляется ______ (на русском языке, на ______ языке).

Предприятие обязано до начала отгрузки товаров обеспечить за свой счет издание проспектов, инструкций по применению, эксплуатации и ремонту машин, оборудования и приборов, а также каталогов запасных частей к ним.

Проспекты, инструкции и каталоги составляются на _____ (русском, русском и ____ языках).

9. Настоящий договор действует в течение ______ (5 лет, года, иной период действия с момента его заключения)

10. Прочие условия: ________________________________________

11. Взаимоотношения сторон в части, не предусмотренной настоящим договором, регулируются Основными условиями регулирования договорных отношений при осуществлении экспортно-импортных операций.

12. К договору прилагаются: _____ (приводится перечень приложений).

13. Юридические адреса и реквизиты сторон:

Продавец:

Покупатель:

14. Подписи сторон: