We learned all about green tea from Ayaka today, who comes from one of the best tea regions in Japan, Shizuoka. We know know the difference between usual green tea and "matcha," or the powdered green tea which is drunk in Japanese tea ceremonies. This was an excellent example of a presentation using power point and video, but with plenty of speaking. It's sad that this will be Ayaka's last presentation, but I look forward to hearing presentations from all the new students. Especially Rawan's, which is tomorrow. She's had six weeks to come up with some great ideas, so I think it will be really special!
Today we covered two more Focus points (4 and 5). We learned how to take a positive sentence like this:
I'll go there only if you go with me.
and change it to sentences like these:
I won't go there if you won't go with me.
I won't go there unless you go with me.
We also learned that if we use "unless," there could be two meanings:
I wouldn't have gone there if you hadn't gone with me.
I wouldn't have gone there unless you went with me.
The second sentence can mean that you went with me so I went there; it can also mean that I didn't go there, but I would have gone only if you had gone with me.
So study page 290 carefully!
We also did Focus 5 on page 292. We learned that "even though" and "even if" can mean the similar things in some cases. For present and future situations, we can say.
Even though he doesn't love her, she loves him.
Even if he doesn't love her, she loves him.
"Even though" is more based in fact. "Even if" shows that something is unclear or hasn't happened yet. So in the above sentences, the first shows that we are sure he doesn't love her. In the second, we are not so sure.
For habitual situations, we use "even if." For example,
Even if it's cold, he doesn't wear a jacket.
If we wrote "Even though," it would mean that today it is cold, but despite that, he doesn't wear a jacket.
We also learned that the difference between "Even + Subject" and "Even if/though + subject."
Even + Subject means that the subject is used as an example to show an unusual situation.
Even a child can do it. (Usually, children don't have so much knowledge or ability, but "it" is really easy.)
Even Superman has a vulnerability. (Superman is famous for being strong, but he does have a weak point.)
Even though/if shows an unusual or extreme situation.
Even if he gives me a million dollars, I won't help him.
Even though she did what they asked, they wouldn't return her money.
For homework, we'll do Exercise 8 and 9 on page 291. Please do Exercise 9 on a piece of paper to hand in.
Also, please do Exercise 10 on page 293.
Also, I gave you an intriguing article by the famous writer Pico Iyer. Here it is in full, so if you want to read it on the train and can't find your copy, be my guest! Be ready to discuss it tomorrow.
Are We Coming Apart or Together?
If you like things that are new and different,
our globalizing world is
a dream. Plenty of folks, though, want things to
stay the same.
It is a truth all but universally acknowledged
that the more internationalism there is in the world, the more nationalism
there will be. The more multinational companies, multicultural beings and
planetary networks are crossing and transcending borders, the more other forces
will, as if in response, fashion new divisions and aggravate old ones. Human
nature abhors a vacuum, and it is only natural, when people find themselves in
a desert, without boundaries,
that they will try to assuage their
vulnerability by settling into a community. Thus fewer and fewer wars take
place these days across borders, and more and more take place within them.
Many Americans, rejoicing in an unprecedented
period of economic success and celebrating the new horizons opened up by our
latest technologies, are likely to embrace the future as a dashing (if unknown)
stranger who's appeared at our door to whisk us into a strange new world. Those
who travel, though, are more likely to see rising tribalism, widening divisions
and all the fissures that propel ever more of the world into what looks like
anarchy. Fully 97% of the population growth that will bring our numbers up to 9
billion by the year 2050 will take place in developing countries, where
conditions are scarcely better than they were a hundred years ago. In many
cases, in fact, history seems to be moving backward (in modern Zimbabwe, to
take but one example, the average life expectancy has dwindled from 70 to 38 in
recent years because of rains). To travel today is to see a planet that looks
more and more like a too typical downtown on a global scale: a small huddle of
shiny high-rises reaching toward a multinational
heaven, surrounded on every side by a wasteland
of the poor, living in
a state of almost biblical desperation.
When people speak of a "digital
divide," they are, in effect, putting into 21st century technological
terms what is an age-old cultural problem: that all the globalism in the world
does not erase (and may in fact intensify) the differences between us. Corporate
bodies stress connectedness, borderless economies, all the wired communities
that make up our worldwide webs; those in Chechnya, Kosovo or Rwanda remind us
of much older forces. And even as America exports its dotcom optimism around
the world, many other countries export their primal animosities to America. Get
in a cab near the Capitol, say, or the World Trade Center and ask the wrong
question, and you are likely to hear a tirade against the Amhara or the
Tigreans, Indians or Pakistanis. If all the world's a global village, that
means that the ancestral divisions of every place can play out in every other.
And the very use of that comforting word village tends to distract us from the
fact that much of the world is coming to resemble a global city (with all the
gang warfare, fragmentation and generalized estrangement that those centers of
affluence promote). When the past century began,13% of humans lived in cities;
by the time it ended, roughly 50% did.
The hope, in the face of these counterclockwise
movements, is that we can be bound by what unites us, which we have ever more
occasion to see; that the stirring visions of Thomas Paine or Martin Luther
King Jr. have more resonance than ever, now that an American can meet a Chinese
counterpart-in Shanghai or San Francisco (or many places in between)-and see
how much they have in common. What Emerson called the Over-soul reminds us that
we are joined not only by our habits and our urges and our fears but also by
our dreams and that best part of us that intuits an identity larger than you or
I. Look up, wherever you are, and you can see what we have in common; look
down-or inside-and you can see something universal. It is only when you look
around that you note divisions.
The fresher and more particular hope of the
moment is that as more and
more of us cross borders, we can step out of,
and beyond, the old categories. Every time a Palestinian man, say, marries a
Singhalese woman (and such unions are growing more common by the day) and
produces a half Palestinian, half Singhalese child (living in Paris or London,
no doubt), an Israeli or a Tamil is deprived of a tribal enemy. Even the
Palestinian or Singhalese grandparents may be eased out of longtime prejudices.
Mongrelism-the human equivalent of World Music and "fusion
culture"-is the brightest child of fragmentation.
Yet the danger we face is that of celebrating
too soon a global unity that only covers much deeper divisions. Much of the
world is linked, more than ever before, by common surfaces: people on every
continent may be watching Michael Jordan advertising Nike shoes on CNN. But
beneath the surface, inevitably, traditional differences remain. George Bernard
Shaw declared generations ago that England and America were two countries
divided by a common language. Now the world often resembles 200 countries
divided by a common frame of cultural reference. The number of countries on the
planet, in the 20th century, has more than tripled.
Beyond that, multinationals and machines tell us
that we're all plugged
into the same global circuit, without
considering very much what takes
place off-screen. China and India, to cite the
two giants that comprise
1 in every 3 of the world's people, have
recently begun to embrace the
opportunities of the global marketplace and the
conveniences of e-reality (and, of course, it is often engineers of Chinese and
Indian origin who have made these new wonders possible). Yet for all that
connectedness on an individual level, the Chinese government remains as
reluctant as ever to play by the rules of the rest of the world, and Indian
leaders make nuclear gestures as if Dr. Strangelove had just landed in Delhi.
And as some of us are able to fly across continents for business or pleasure,
others are propelled out of their homelands by poverty and necessity and war,
in record numbers: the number of refugees in the world has gone up 1,000% since
1970.
It seems a safe bet, as we move toward the year
2025, that governments
will become no more idealistic than they have
ever been-they will always represent a community of interests. And corporations
cannot afford to stress conscience or sacrifice before profit. It therefore
falls to the individual, on her own initiative, to look beyond the divisions of
her parents' time and find a common ground with strangers to apply the
all-purpose adjective "global" to "identity" and
"loyalty." Never before in history have so many people, whether in
Manhattan or in Tuva, been surrounded by so much that is alien (in customs,
languages and neighborhoods). How we orient ourselves
in the midst of all this foreignness and in the
absence of the old certainties will determine how much our nations are
disunited and how much we are bound by what Augustine called "things loved
in common."
Pico Iyer, a TIME contributor, is the author
most recently of The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for
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